Art Is Not A Luxury ~ Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate
Originally posted by putyourendtowar at Art Is Not A Luxury ~ Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate
Art is said to reflect our state of culture, social values and dreams historically to a given set of contexts. Anyone looking at art today would deem western culture and its precepts as hopelessly psychotic.
Stuckism ~ A Response to Archivism and Post-Modernism
The Stuckists est. 1999 (honorary, Charles Thomson)
http://www.stuckism.com/thomson/index.html
An open letter to Sir Nicholas Serota
As the opening of the new Bankside Tate nears, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, co-founders of the anti-Brit Art, pro-painting group, The Stuckists, critical of Sir Nicholas Serota's directorship of the existing Tate Gallery - which has included the £700,000 purchase of thirty-one basalt blocks (art by Joseph Beuys) - address some pertinent issues for consideration in his future purchasing and exhibitions policy.
Shock of the New, or Yawn at the Obvious? Any poor soul who comes to contemporary art looking for vision, truth or simply just a way ahead is going to be very, very disappointed. Post Modernism, our 'official avant-garde' is a cool, slick marketing machine where the cleverness and cynicism of an art which is about nothing but itself, eviscerates emotion, content and belief. Never before has a movement that proclaims itself to be leading the way trailed so far behind the wishes and concerns of the society to which it considers itself superior. Since the 1960's there has been a paradigm shift towards decentralisation, spirituality and a new respect for natural laws. Post Modernism's febrile introversion hasn't even noticed this taking place and instead continues to peddle glibness and irony in its vacuous attempt to appear dangerous and fashionable. People don't want out of town supermarkets, they don't want GM food and they don't want conceptual art. The idiocy of Post Modernism is its claim to be the apex of art history - whilst simultaneously denying the values that make art worth having in the first place. It purports to address significant issues but actually has no meaning or being beyond the convoluted dialogue it holds with itself. Art's value comes from the level of vision and insight possessed by the artist. This is an ever-deepening process. The priority of the Brit Artist, however, appears to be the maintenance of his or her media kudos in the art brat pack. This level of consciousness is reflected in the superficial, lazy and gimmicky nature of their work. The making of art informs much of its meaning. Art that isn't made or paid for by experience has no meaning. In 1915 the Dadaist joke was urgent and outrageous: as a statement of Post Modern irony it is dull beyond belief. If there is any innovation and vision in post-modernism, it is in the field of art marketing. God died in western art sometime during The First World War, and, although it was good fun knocking him off his high horse, watching the art brats of today kick him whilst he's down is somehow less amusing (especially whilst their dealers, like upmarket used-car salesmen, stand in the shadows, wearing their Gucci uniforms, clicking their calculators and whispering into their vulgar cell phones). The work these puppet masters promote we classify as 'car accident art'. For the only audience it attracts is one lured by morbid curiosity. The founders of Dadaism would deplore the conformism and lack of courage shown by these latter-day pretenders. You can't help feeling that Saatchi's insipid sensationalism would make Duchamp wish that he'd never ever exhibited his piss-pot in the first place and had become a water-colourist instead. The dreary objects and cliched assemblages of the latest 'art stars' litter the floors of our galleries competing to bore us with their profound obviousness. Meanwhile the critics perform ludicrous mental gymnastics in order to say something about things about which there is nothing to say because they are about nothing. It should be pointed out that an everyday object e.g. a bed, in its normal environment, i.e. a bedroom, must always remain only bed. Indeed it would still be only a bed even if it were displayed in a department store window or thrown into a canal. Furthermore we assert that the hapless bed would remain no less of - yet no more than - only a bed if it were suspended from the top of the Eiffel tower or somehow landed on the moon. It seems that the said bed ceases to be only a bed and somehow becomes art when placed in the 'contexualising' space of a gallery. We deduce that the credit for this stupendous metamorphosis should therefore be credited to the gallery owner. In today's art world it is the gallerist who performs the miraculous transformation of the mundane into a work of genius! Let us now consider what happens to such an object in this unfortunate situation, taking perhaps the 'artification' of a brick instead of a bed for the sake of variety. In its former life the brick had no meaning - only an existence and a potential function (most usefully as part of a wall). As it is now no longer merely a brick but a work of art, and as art by definition is an activity of meaning, some meaning must be found. A curator of interpretation appears on national television and pronounces the brick to be a symbol of the artist's disadvantaged upbringing in Birmingham. A leading critic could equally as well see it as a dialectic on feminism. A gallery visitor, in turn, might perceive it as a minimalist refinement of Carl André's famous rectangle. In actual fact, because the brick is 'about' nothing, it can be about any damn thing you like. This makes the special art object completely redundant, as the same imaginative process can be achieved just as easily by opening one's eyes in any environment and focusing on the first object in sight - the logical progression of art into life will have been fully realised and the need for art completely extinguished. Well done! This shows both the ridiculousness of a school which subscribes to these practices and the fallacy of continual 'progress' in a linear art history. Far from being the pinnacle of achievement, Brit Art is less industrious, thought-provoking and meaningful than the average display by a local amateur art society. Painting, with its translation of inner experience into accessible and recognisable images, has a depth of resonance and mystery that is as essential to the human psyche as food and water is to the human body. Pigment is integral to man's self-expression. The painting of pictures has endured since the Lascaux caves, it brings us to an immediate confrontation, recognition and emotional engagement with our potentials and limitations. It is only by daring to communicate with this honesty that we meet our true selves. A painting by Delacroix, a water colour from an adult education class or a child's drawing, will always identify themselves as art, even if found discarded in the street. We call this 'the ism of what things is'. Whatever its context a painting remains a painting. Similarly a dead shark remains just a lifeless fish, whatever its context. And no matter how much the gullible may pay for it today, Post Modernism is destined for the dustbin of history, whereas the making of pictures will always be central to humanity's knowledge and understanding of itself.
Billy Childish and Charles Thomson 26.2.2000
http://www.stuckism.com/serotaletter.html
For Sir Nicholas Serota's reply see here;
http://www.stuckism.com/serotareply.html
Sir Nicholas replied promptly and with the following (signed) statement:
Thank you for your open letter dated 6 March. You will not be surprised to learn that I have no comment to make on your letter, or your manifesto 'Remodernism'.
... to which Charles Thomson commented:
"We were actually very surprised, as we thought that a director of a national art gallery would have plenty of comments to make and lots of ideas on art - we were addressing fundamental issues and values in the material sent to him. He needs to make a better response to the viewpoint we expressed as it probably represents what 99% of the population thinks - namely that conceptual art is severely deficient artistically and painting is the true means of art. He is after all employed with public money in order to run a gallery for the public. Yet he acts as if he has no accountability to anyone apart from himself and a like-minded elite."
Pipe smoker by Billy Childish
"A lot of the stuff this year would be suitable for a Channel 4 documentary. There is no need for this to be in the Tate gallery when television does exactly the same thing." ~ Stuckist quote on BBC web site
Is the Tate Stuck? ~ Is Serota Dead in the Water?
http://www.counterpunch.org/thomson01142006.html
Turner Prize 2004
http://www.stuckism.com/Tate/Tate04.html
Chris Ofili Turner Prize winner at the Tate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili
Promising Adversaries ~ Drew Ernst & Jesse Reno
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2006/12/art-space-talk-drew-ernst.html
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2006/12/art-space-talk-jesse-reno.html
Welcome to the Museum of Bad Art ~ Long Live Dumbass!
For instance, David Hockney is Bad Art: What does a reasonable facsimile of a bareass human liver in a swimming pool, say about today's England?
Art In Liverpool
http://www.artinliverpool.com/blog/blogarch/2007/09/artwork_of_the_day_david_hockn.php
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
The Photographer and His Daughter, 2005. Oil on canvas, 56 x 76 in., Courtesy of the artist. ©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. (That's about as anal as it gets, folks!)
http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/hockney/index.aspx
More Bad Art ~ From MOBA the people who brought you Crayons
Lucy In the Field With Flowers ~ Portrait of the Queen Mum?
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
Art Is Not A Luxury ~ American Graffiti
In Paris, Art is Not a Luxury But a Way of Life
Artists on the street in Montmartre, a neighborhood in Paris, France. Photo by Gretchen Hannes
From the street artists atop Montmartre to the numerous ateliers and galleries in the Marais district, the city brims with living artists. Walking through the Louvre I saw numerous artists with pencil and paper in hand, sketching the great masterpieces. Along the river Seine artists were aplenty, taking in the magnificent vistas of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. And around every corner, there were places to be found where famous artists once trekked. Meandering through cobblestone streets, I happened upon the buildings where Gauguin was born, Van Gogh lived and Picasso painted (the Bateau Lavoir, where he created "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.") One afternoon, I travelled to the village of Giverny to see Monet's home and gardens, which have been beautifully maintained. Each step I took, I felt like I was in one of his paintings--the waterlilies and Japanese bridges jumped out in technicolor before my eyes. Here in the U.S., the same can be said for a growing number of Americans who value art as an intrinsic part of their daily lives. Cities across the country are home to artist communities, galleries and museums. But we still have a way to go, especially as government funding for the arts continues to drop and arts education in public schools is at an all-time low. As an industry that places art at the center, we must work together to ensure the U.S. remains a place where both new and established artists can continue to flourish. And, I suppose, that goes double for Canada? Instead of spending a fortune getting rid of it, why don't we just give it marks out of 10? ~ Germaine Greer
In Paris, Art is Not a Luxury But a Way of Life
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HMU/is_7_28/ai_76549901
A Paris Story: One Student's Experiences Abroad
http://www.dogstreetjournal.com/story/3436
Oklahoma City Museum of Art debuts " Paris 1900 "
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Oklahoma_City_Museum_of_Art_Paris_1900.html
Art In Everyday Life ~ Art as Life, What's Happening?
.
Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, define an art form in which an action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life. Thanks to a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, MOCA has invited Los Angeles-area art schools, academic institutions, arts organizations, museums, and artist-run spaces to reinvent a diverse selection of Kaprow’s Happenings. “What is a Happening? A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.” ~ Allan Kaprow
http://www.moca.org/kaprow/
http://www.moca.org/kaprow/index.php/2008/02/14/what-is-a-happening/
The Art Life ~ Life Mimics Art, Art Mimics Life
It is often said that art mimics life. In reality, rather than mimicking life, art interprets and translates our history, molding it into something tangible and timeless. Art articulates and captures that which the written word cannot grasp. Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw's Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice.
PIEQF is part earthwork, part machine, part performance, part social experiment...
http://www.artlife.blogspot.com/
Art Mimics Life
http://monovita.org/article/200706/id/36
Metacreation ~ and Technocracy
A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life's promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation. Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. "Breeders" use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist's creative agency. "Cybernatures" form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in "Hardware," adapting Rodney Brooks's "bottom-up" robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The "Abstract Machines" of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.
Metacreation Artificial Life Mitchell Whitelaw
http://www.amazon.com/Metacreation-Artificial-Life-Mitchell-Whitelaw/dp/0262232340
Modernism and Postmodernism
Postmodernism is hard to define. Many opinions differ about whether it is a period, a set of styles, or a broader set of politics and ideologies. The term has described fashions throughout the years as well as media driven political campaigns in the 1990s. Modernism seems easier to pinpoint. The term "modern" means present or contemporary. In the art world the term expresses the self-consciousness of something that relates itself to the past. Increased technology advances and urban development helped modernity. Modernism and Postmodernism overlap. There is no precise moment of transition between the two. Postmodern art often does parodies or reproductions while Postmodern architecture steps out of the box to think of eye catching designs that may not even serve as functional.
Postmodernism and Pop Culture
http://co220.blogspot.com/2007/10/chapter-7-postmodernism-and-pop-culture.html
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL POST-STUCKIST MANIFESTO
As Set Down By Rick Visser, The Second Son Of Donald Visser, In The Late Evening Hours Of The Twenty-Second Day of October, In The Solitude of The Studio of the Cave Horse, In The Year 2007 C.E., The Year Of The Pig.
THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF POST-STUCKISM
Inspiration ~ "When we wake up in the morning we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it."
Discipline ~ "Artists just go into their studios everyday and shut the door and remain there."
Perseverance ~ "Defeated, you will rise to your feet as is said of Dry Bones."
Solitude ~"One must go absolutely alone with not one thought about others intruding because then one would be off in relative thinking."
Relaxation ~ "Usually when they come out they go to a park or somewhere they will not meet anyone."
"If you cannot see you must withdraw yourself till you see what your next action will be. Do not imitate others or seek advice anywhere except from your own mind. The newest trend and the art scene are unnecessary distractions for a serious artist. When I see myself in the work I will know that that is the work I am supposed to do...A contentment with oneself that is success. Do not stop short of real contentment. You may as well never have been born if you remain discontented."
The End of Stuckism and the Post-Stuckist Manifesto
http://artrift.blog-city.com/the_end_of_stuckism_and_the_poststuckist_manifesto.htm
Punk Victorian
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/stuckists/
Sticking It to British Art
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/jul/stuckism/010716.stuckism.html
Art Wars ~ Who Will Survive?
Whether at Lascaux 17,000 years ago or in Western Arnhem Land 50,000 years ago, art began on a wall. If the sandblasters had been around in either place, we would have lost a precious inheritance. Several times i've seen walls which have been repeatedly tagged end up covered in a full size mural. It's very rare the mural is then tagged over. Why this hasn't this been taken as the standard approach (paint over rather than remove).
What should we do about graffiti?
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/09/what_should_we_do_about_graffiti.html
BLOGS (N. PL.) (FROM "WEB LOGS"): online journals housed on a web site whose content ranges from accounts of the authors' personal lives to celebrity gossip to electoral politics.
Blogging is not a Luxury ~ Blogging While Black
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21301/
.
Art is said to reflect our state of culture, social values and dreams historically to a given set of contexts. Anyone looking at art today would deem western culture and its precepts as hopelessly psychotic.
Click to viewStuckism ~ A Response to Archivism and Post-Modernism
The Stuckists est. 1999 (honorary, Charles Thomson)
http://www.stuckism.com/thomson/index.html
An open letter to Sir Nicholas Serota
As the opening of the new Bankside Tate nears, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, co-founders of the anti-Brit Art, pro-painting group, The Stuckists, critical of Sir Nicholas Serota's directorship of the existing Tate Gallery - which has included the £700,000 purchase of thirty-one basalt blocks (art by Joseph Beuys) - address some pertinent issues for consideration in his future purchasing and exhibitions policy.
Shock of the New, or Yawn at the Obvious? Any poor soul who comes to contemporary art looking for vision, truth or simply just a way ahead is going to be very, very disappointed. Post Modernism, our 'official avant-garde' is a cool, slick marketing machine where the cleverness and cynicism of an art which is about nothing but itself, eviscerates emotion, content and belief. Never before has a movement that proclaims itself to be leading the way trailed so far behind the wishes and concerns of the society to which it considers itself superior. Since the 1960's there has been a paradigm shift towards decentralisation, spirituality and a new respect for natural laws. Post Modernism's febrile introversion hasn't even noticed this taking place and instead continues to peddle glibness and irony in its vacuous attempt to appear dangerous and fashionable. People don't want out of town supermarkets, they don't want GM food and they don't want conceptual art. The idiocy of Post Modernism is its claim to be the apex of art history - whilst simultaneously denying the values that make art worth having in the first place. It purports to address significant issues but actually has no meaning or being beyond the convoluted dialogue it holds with itself. Art's value comes from the level of vision and insight possessed by the artist. This is an ever-deepening process. The priority of the Brit Artist, however, appears to be the maintenance of his or her media kudos in the art brat pack. This level of consciousness is reflected in the superficial, lazy and gimmicky nature of their work. The making of art informs much of its meaning. Art that isn't made or paid for by experience has no meaning. In 1915 the Dadaist joke was urgent and outrageous: as a statement of Post Modern irony it is dull beyond belief. If there is any innovation and vision in post-modernism, it is in the field of art marketing. God died in western art sometime during The First World War, and, although it was good fun knocking him off his high horse, watching the art brats of today kick him whilst he's down is somehow less amusing (especially whilst their dealers, like upmarket used-car salesmen, stand in the shadows, wearing their Gucci uniforms, clicking their calculators and whispering into their vulgar cell phones). The work these puppet masters promote we classify as 'car accident art'. For the only audience it attracts is one lured by morbid curiosity. The founders of Dadaism would deplore the conformism and lack of courage shown by these latter-day pretenders. You can't help feeling that Saatchi's insipid sensationalism would make Duchamp wish that he'd never ever exhibited his piss-pot in the first place and had become a water-colourist instead. The dreary objects and cliched assemblages of the latest 'art stars' litter the floors of our galleries competing to bore us with their profound obviousness. Meanwhile the critics perform ludicrous mental gymnastics in order to say something about things about which there is nothing to say because they are about nothing. It should be pointed out that an everyday object e.g. a bed, in its normal environment, i.e. a bedroom, must always remain only bed. Indeed it would still be only a bed even if it were displayed in a department store window or thrown into a canal. Furthermore we assert that the hapless bed would remain no less of - yet no more than - only a bed if it were suspended from the top of the Eiffel tower or somehow landed on the moon. It seems that the said bed ceases to be only a bed and somehow becomes art when placed in the 'contexualising' space of a gallery. We deduce that the credit for this stupendous metamorphosis should therefore be credited to the gallery owner. In today's art world it is the gallerist who performs the miraculous transformation of the mundane into a work of genius! Let us now consider what happens to such an object in this unfortunate situation, taking perhaps the 'artification' of a brick instead of a bed for the sake of variety. In its former life the brick had no meaning - only an existence and a potential function (most usefully as part of a wall). As it is now no longer merely a brick but a work of art, and as art by definition is an activity of meaning, some meaning must be found. A curator of interpretation appears on national television and pronounces the brick to be a symbol of the artist's disadvantaged upbringing in Birmingham. A leading critic could equally as well see it as a dialectic on feminism. A gallery visitor, in turn, might perceive it as a minimalist refinement of Carl André's famous rectangle. In actual fact, because the brick is 'about' nothing, it can be about any damn thing you like. This makes the special art object completely redundant, as the same imaginative process can be achieved just as easily by opening one's eyes in any environment and focusing on the first object in sight - the logical progression of art into life will have been fully realised and the need for art completely extinguished. Well done! This shows both the ridiculousness of a school which subscribes to these practices and the fallacy of continual 'progress' in a linear art history. Far from being the pinnacle of achievement, Brit Art is less industrious, thought-provoking and meaningful than the average display by a local amateur art society. Painting, with its translation of inner experience into accessible and recognisable images, has a depth of resonance and mystery that is as essential to the human psyche as food and water is to the human body. Pigment is integral to man's self-expression. The painting of pictures has endured since the Lascaux caves, it brings us to an immediate confrontation, recognition and emotional engagement with our potentials and limitations. It is only by daring to communicate with this honesty that we meet our true selves. A painting by Delacroix, a water colour from an adult education class or a child's drawing, will always identify themselves as art, even if found discarded in the street. We call this 'the ism of what things is'. Whatever its context a painting remains a painting. Similarly a dead shark remains just a lifeless fish, whatever its context. And no matter how much the gullible may pay for it today, Post Modernism is destined for the dustbin of history, whereas the making of pictures will always be central to humanity's knowledge and understanding of itself.
Billy Childish and Charles Thomson 26.2.2000
http://www.stuckism.com/serotaletter.html
For Sir Nicholas Serota's reply see here;
http://www.stuckism.com/serotareply.html
Sir Nicholas replied promptly and with the following (signed) statement:
Thank you for your open letter dated 6 March. You will not be surprised to learn that I have no comment to make on your letter, or your manifesto 'Remodernism'.
... to which Charles Thomson commented:
"We were actually very surprised, as we thought that a director of a national art gallery would have plenty of comments to make and lots of ideas on art - we were addressing fundamental issues and values in the material sent to him. He needs to make a better response to the viewpoint we expressed as it probably represents what 99% of the population thinks - namely that conceptual art is severely deficient artistically and painting is the true means of art. He is after all employed with public money in order to run a gallery for the public. Yet he acts as if he has no accountability to anyone apart from himself and a like-minded elite."
Pipe smoker by Billy Childish
"A lot of the stuff this year would be suitable for a Channel 4 documentary. There is no need for this to be in the Tate gallery when television does exactly the same thing." ~ Stuckist quote on BBC web site
Is the Tate Stuck? ~ Is Serota Dead in the Water?
http://www.counterpunch.org/thomson01142006.html
Turner Prize 2004
http://www.stuckism.com/Tate/Tate04.html
Chris Ofili Turner Prize winner at the Tate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili
Promising Adversaries ~ Drew Ernst & Jesse Reno
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2006/12/art-space-talk-drew-ernst.html
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2006/12/art-space-talk-jesse-reno.html
Welcome to the Museum of Bad Art ~ Long Live Dumbass!
For instance, David Hockney is Bad Art: What does a reasonable facsimile of a bareass human liver in a swimming pool, say about today's England?
Art In Liverpool
http://www.artinliverpool.com/blog/blogarch/2007/09/artwork_of_the_day_david_hockn.php
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
The Photographer and His Daughter, 2005. Oil on canvas, 56 x 76 in., Courtesy of the artist. ©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. (That's about as anal as it gets, folks!)
http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/hockney/index.aspx
More Bad Art ~ From MOBA the people who brought you Crayons
Lucy In the Field With Flowers ~ Portrait of the Queen Mum?
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
Art Is Not A Luxury ~ American Graffiti
In Paris, Art is Not a Luxury But a Way of Life
Artists on the street in Montmartre, a neighborhood in Paris, France. Photo by Gretchen Hannes
From the street artists atop Montmartre to the numerous ateliers and galleries in the Marais district, the city brims with living artists. Walking through the Louvre I saw numerous artists with pencil and paper in hand, sketching the great masterpieces. Along the river Seine artists were aplenty, taking in the magnificent vistas of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. And around every corner, there were places to be found where famous artists once trekked. Meandering through cobblestone streets, I happened upon the buildings where Gauguin was born, Van Gogh lived and Picasso painted (the Bateau Lavoir, where he created "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.") One afternoon, I travelled to the village of Giverny to see Monet's home and gardens, which have been beautifully maintained. Each step I took, I felt like I was in one of his paintings--the waterlilies and Japanese bridges jumped out in technicolor before my eyes. Here in the U.S., the same can be said for a growing number of Americans who value art as an intrinsic part of their daily lives. Cities across the country are home to artist communities, galleries and museums. But we still have a way to go, especially as government funding for the arts continues to drop and arts education in public schools is at an all-time low. As an industry that places art at the center, we must work together to ensure the U.S. remains a place where both new and established artists can continue to flourish. And, I suppose, that goes double for Canada? Instead of spending a fortune getting rid of it, why don't we just give it marks out of 10? ~ Germaine Greer
In Paris, Art is Not a Luxury But a Way of Life
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HMU/is_7_28/ai_76549901
A Paris Story: One Student's Experiences Abroad
http://www.dogstreetjournal.com/story/3436
Oklahoma City Museum of Art debuts " Paris 1900 "
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Oklahoma_City_Museum_of_Art_Paris_1900.html
Art In Everyday Life ~ Art as Life, What's Happening?
.
Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, define an art form in which an action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life. Thanks to a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, MOCA has invited Los Angeles-area art schools, academic institutions, arts organizations, museums, and artist-run spaces to reinvent a diverse selection of Kaprow’s Happenings. “What is a Happening? A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.” ~ Allan Kaprow
http://www.moca.org/kaprow/
http://www.moca.org/kaprow/index.php/2008/02/14/what-is-a-happening/
The Art Life ~ Life Mimics Art, Art Mimics Life
It is often said that art mimics life. In reality, rather than mimicking life, art interprets and translates our history, molding it into something tangible and timeless. Art articulates and captures that which the written word cannot grasp. Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw's Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice.
PIEQF is part earthwork, part machine, part performance, part social experiment...
http://www.artlife.blogspot.com/
Art Mimics Life
http://monovita.org/article/200706/id/36
Metacreation ~ and Technocracy
A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life's promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation. Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. "Breeders" use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist's creative agency. "Cybernatures" form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in "Hardware," adapting Rodney Brooks's "bottom-up" robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The "Abstract Machines" of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.
Metacreation Artificial Life Mitchell Whitelaw
http://www.amazon.com/Metacreation-Artificial-Life-Mitchell-Whitelaw/dp/0262232340
Modernism and Postmodernism
Postmodernism is hard to define. Many opinions differ about whether it is a period, a set of styles, or a broader set of politics and ideologies. The term has described fashions throughout the years as well as media driven political campaigns in the 1990s. Modernism seems easier to pinpoint. The term "modern" means present or contemporary. In the art world the term expresses the self-consciousness of something that relates itself to the past. Increased technology advances and urban development helped modernity. Modernism and Postmodernism overlap. There is no precise moment of transition between the two. Postmodern art often does parodies or reproductions while Postmodern architecture steps out of the box to think of eye catching designs that may not even serve as functional.
Postmodernism and Pop Culture
http://co220.blogspot.com/2007/10/chapter-7-postmodernism-and-pop-culture.html
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL POST-STUCKIST MANIFESTO
As Set Down By Rick Visser, The Second Son Of Donald Visser, In The Late Evening Hours Of The Twenty-Second Day of October, In The Solitude of The Studio of the Cave Horse, In The Year 2007 C.E., The Year Of The Pig.
THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF POST-STUCKISM
Inspiration ~ "When we wake up in the morning we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it."
Discipline ~ "Artists just go into their studios everyday and shut the door and remain there."
Perseverance ~ "Defeated, you will rise to your feet as is said of Dry Bones."
Solitude ~"One must go absolutely alone with not one thought about others intruding because then one would be off in relative thinking."
Relaxation ~ "Usually when they come out they go to a park or somewhere they will not meet anyone."
"If you cannot see you must withdraw yourself till you see what your next action will be. Do not imitate others or seek advice anywhere except from your own mind. The newest trend and the art scene are unnecessary distractions for a serious artist. When I see myself in the work I will know that that is the work I am supposed to do...A contentment with oneself that is success. Do not stop short of real contentment. You may as well never have been born if you remain discontented."
The End of Stuckism and the Post-Stuckist Manifesto
http://artrift.blog-city.com/the_end_of_stuckism_and_the_poststuckist_manifesto.htm
Punk Victorian
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/stuckists/
Sticking It to British Art
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/jul/stuckism/010716.stuckism.html
Art Wars ~ Who Will Survive?
Whether at Lascaux 17,000 years ago or in Western Arnhem Land 50,000 years ago, art began on a wall. If the sandblasters had been around in either place, we would have lost a precious inheritance. Several times i've seen walls which have been repeatedly tagged end up covered in a full size mural. It's very rare the mural is then tagged over. Why this hasn't this been taken as the standard approach (paint over rather than remove).
What should we do about graffiti?
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/09/what_should_we_do_about_graffiti.html
BLOGS (N. PL.) (FROM "WEB LOGS"): online journals housed on a web site whose content ranges from accounts of the authors' personal lives to celebrity gossip to electoral politics.
Blogging is not a Luxury ~ Blogging While Black
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21301/
.