Monthly Archives: January 2009

Arts Marketing: Want a bailout of the arts? Dont make the ask in an Armani suit

When the big three automotive CEOs flew separate private jets to Washington, DC to plead for public funds, I remember thinking to myself that I was thankful that I was a publicist and marketing director for a non-profit arts organization. The type of arrogance it takes to fly corporate jets to ask for billions of dollars in public aid surely could only be found in the private sector.

However, recently there has been a dust up about executive compensation in the non-profit arts sector, particularly because as the economy tightens, more and more arts organizations are pleading their case with stakeholders, some going as far as Mr. Kaiser in asking for a government bailout of the arts. Although I have tremendous respect for Mr. Kaiser, I am convinced that perhaps he isnt the best emissary for the non-profit arts–how does it look for a non-profit arts administrator who makes more than $1 million a year in salary to be the champion of the suffering arts scene?

via Arts Marketing: Want a bailout of the arts? Dont make the ask in an Armani suit.

Dear LA Gallerists: Please Reduce Art Driving

{The map for what could have been my 50-mile, Saturday evening gallery commute.}

Note: Credit for this idea goes to both my friend I.R. and Gustav Metzger’s project, Reduce Art Flights.

This past Saturday, I was confronted with a relatively typical Saturday night—driving all over the Southland for gallery openings. Interesting shows on my radar included Cirrus Gallery, the Luckman Gallery at CSULA, Outpost For Contemporary Art and a variety of shows at Bergamot Station. According to google maps, round trip would be just over 50 miles. But with all these shows happening at approximately the same time, I just gave up and went to one show.

Of course, galleries keep more hours than just openings but often, the incentive to go to openings (besides the talking, socializing and people watching) is to catch a bunch of shows at once. Opening nights in LA’s gallery scene are increasingly fractured—seems like there are openings in Chinatown every weekend and even the Culver City row can’t coordinate anything.

It might be better for business to stagger these events but in my opinion, openings should be coordinated both in areas where galleries are concentrated but across the city as well. One destination per night/weekend would help the environment by reducing art driving and could result in larger turnouts for the galleries and support for their artists. Most of us do not buy anything, but we sure are talking about it, critiquing it, and of course, blogging. In that sense, it’s important to get a crowd.

So, if you are reading this dear gallerists, please find a way to coordinate your openings. Start an email list, a google group, something, and get your shit together, because we want to go to your openings.
Go to Eco Art Blog

Emma Thompson on free market economics and the environment

Actor Emma Thompson discussing the proposed third runway at Heathrow:

“They say they’re doing it because there’s a demand. There might be a
demand for child prostitution, but that doesn’t make it moral! The
demand for more cars and planes is immoral.”

Hat tip Robert Butler @ The Ashden Directory.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog

Chicago’s Columbia College Hosts Challenging Environmental Art Show : TreeHugger

 

 

 

Challenging visions of sustainability, or rather the lack of it, are currently on show at the A+D Gallery at Columbia College in Chicago. Part environmental art exhibition, part cutting edge design show, works include photos by Edward Burtynsky contrasting with melting wax lamps (pictured above) by young German designers. The multimedia approach taken by the show’s curators broadens the debate about consumption patterns and industrial production and pollution. Click over for more images…

 

via Chicago’s Columbia College Hosts Challenging Environmental Art Show : TreeHugger.

The catalogue that changed the whole earth

 In the beginning, Stewart Brand  created the Whole Earth Catalog. And the earth was without the web, google or blogging (which the Whole Earth Catalog is credited with inspiring). Steve Jobs described it as “an amazing publication… one of the bibles of my generation…  It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions“. And now that modestly titled journal, which drew together the passions, insights and enthusiasms of experts and amateurs from 1968 ­to 1972 and beyond is finally available online for free: http://www.wholeearth.com/about.php


Whole Earth Catalog was premised on a notion of social progress that Brand and others believed would happen through engaged individuals working in decentralized networks to build their own environments. (There is more to it than that, but this is a blog). And the catalog provided ‘access to the tools’ to make this possible, and enough evidence of people transforming their own lives that it generated a great self-belief in its readers.  For many of their increasingly huge 1970s readership, it was their first introduction to sustainable technology and alternative energy. This was counterculture that has become mainstream.


 


For those at Whole Earth Catalog, technological innovation was the route to a better future via shared knowledge and a profound commitment to ecology. In the 2009 online version, you can flick through the magazines and scroll through the cover art of that and related publications, which range from the dynamic cartoons of Robert Crumb  to photographs of the earth from space . In fact, Nasa’s now-famous images were only a rumor until Brand successfully petitioned for it to become public in 1966, led by his belief that it would be a social good for humans to see the earth as one whole. 


That so many fascinating resources of the past are available online today is a true gift. The delight of historical material (by which I mean anything that is more than 30 years old ­- harsh I know, but where do you draw the line?) is that you can re-examine the context of the then-new ideas and sense the energy of the vision. I’m not advocating nostalgia.  What is exciting about the past is what it tells us about now and the future. Without being able to imagine past events in context and recognise why people chose to do what they did, it is not possible to understand the role of individual human agency in social change, which is what is needed to generate visions of the future. 


I am aware that this is obvious to many, but I feel it needs to be explicitly restated within the arts and other areas at the moment. A self-inhibiting short-term thinking has become the fashion,  which is characterised by a faux-cool cynicism, trimmed with reactionary views that are passed off as thoughtful criticism but that belie a fatalistic lack of faith in human potenial. (I’ll spare you more idiosyncratic metaphors). What is great about people like Stewart Brand is that they generate substantial change in the world – and the excellent thing about human potential is that all people can be great ­- whenever they realise it and actively choose to be so. 




Since Whole Earth Catalog, Brand et al have moved and changed with the times and continue to stay several steps ahead in their thinking. Now that people have a good conception of the whole earth, his current collaborative project, The Long Now , sets out to transform peoples understanding of time ­so that we can think more ecologically. Titled by Brian Eno, The Long Now ranges from 8000bc to 12000ad (the logic being that ‘now’ refers to days: yesterday, today and tomorrow and ‘nowadays’ refers to decades: the last decade, this decade and next decade). Ecology is a fascinating for many reasons and it demands complex, holistic, joined-up ways of thinking about the relationships of living things to each other and their environment. And the arts are very well suited to engaging with this complex, exploratory form of enquiry into what it is to be human. Whole Earth Catalog and The Long Now are trail blazers in what is possible.


 


The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, Fall 1968. Whole Earth Catalog 30th Anniversary Edition, 1998

 


Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog

Public art and public space

… if you were listening to Radio 4 this morning you would have heard a very brief snatch of RSA Arts & Ecology’s Michaela Crimmin respectfully disagreeing with the plan to use the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Squarefor a memorial to World War Two hero Sir Keith Park. The RSA were instrumental in turning the Fourth Plinth into a unique public contemporary art space.

Listen here.

Photo: Alison Lapper Pregnant by Mark Quinn taken by my old friend Daveybot.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog

The Stage / News / Children’s arts venue becomes first wind-powered theatre in UK

A children’s arts venue in south-west London has become the first theatre in the UK to be powered solely by wind.

The Colour House Children’s Theatre, based within the Grade II-listed Merton Abbey Mills, has had a new wind turbine installed which will completely cut its electricity bill, saving the venue up to £10,000 every year.

The turbine, which will supply the site with renewable, environmentally-friendly power, has been sponsored by Green Energy UK, in partnership with the owner of the building, Office Estate Ltd – meaning that its installation has not cost the theatre itself any money.

via The Stage / News / Children’s arts venue becomes first wind-powered theatre in UK.