//Craft...?

"...When the art world turns its gaze on traditional craft materials, as is the case with Rebecca Warren's or Grayson Peny's ceramics, the sense is that it's not only OK but necessary fir a contemporary artist to be amateurish." (Adamson, When Craft Gets Sloppy, Page 1)

This isn't just a trend in the art world. It's hip to be grungy, to have a hangover, to wear second hand, to be a bit on the wild side – rough is the new clean, they might say. "Calculated sloppiness" can be just as valuable to the art world as precision art, and in some cases, more a necessary for a given message. Although there is a classic division between fine art and craft, the the two differ very little in commentary – take printmaking for example: a concept is represented in a bizarre, unconventional way but made into a refined-looking, clean (perhaps) final piece. On the other hand, the same concept might be discussed by a more visceral means, one rooted deeper in process than product – craft. To begin breaking down the potentially harmful barrier between art and craft, we mustn't describe construction quality absolutely, but relatively.

"The DIY movement, currently at the height of fashion, is an obvious expression of this open-source culture, and the crafters' emphasis on community and gratification often results in a casual attitude to technique. This permissiveness has deeply penetrated art-school culture, fascinatingly blurring the line between hobbyism and professional endeavor." (Adamson, When Craft Gets Sloppy, Page 2)

Suppose every grade schooler were to be taught Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator in their entirety and told to create a graphic design portfolio. Of what benefit would this be to the aspiring marine biologist? The farmer? The fireman? Little, if none! The suppose the same group is given a lump of clay and told that whatever they have made by next class will be fired and preserved as their creation. Formal training is not necessary for a child to be able to produce meaningful art. In fact, quite the opposite is true – those that go without any sort of institutional education for a career in art are frequently those who generate the most revolutionary and catchy styles. As mentioned above, this misconception is also lost in its apparent confinement to the art world when it really extends much farther, even into Silicon Valley, where some of the geniuses haven't even earned their college degrees yet.

"'What is Art?' every generation asks. 'What is Craft?' 'Is one better than the other?'" (Jensen, Investing in the Object, Page 1)

Above all other possible responses to this fundamental question is that no kind of art is 'better' than another. Each form has its trivialities, and it is left to the tuned eye of the viewer to decide what is and what is not good art within each field. One cannot say that  one of Beethoven's symphonies is a better artistic achievement than Monet's Water Lillies. Perhaps that Beethoven's work is a better representation of a composer's full spectrum of ability than The Rolling Stones, but even so, we cross boundaries between genres, which in itself is a dangerous comparison, as each genre draws from different talent groups and approaches to composition. Without trying to define either art or craft, it is still possible to offer reasons for nondiscrimination.

"I think of my own work as conceptual but not inaccessible. It's intuitive. There's an entry point, which is often the craft of it. That's my trick." (Jensen, Investing in the Object, Page 2)

Perhaps if more artists thought this way we would have a more comprehensive sketch of where we stand in our creative evolution as a society. Until more artists start creating for the masses and allowing their message to be discovered, there will be entire sections of art that have cut themselves off from the rest and from free interpretation. Jensen brings up an important (I dare not say correct) point here by saying that it is a trick to obscure but not make completely invisible the purpose of an artwork. Intuitive art is easily some of the most pleasant to view, as it rarely demands effort to appreciate and enjoy, and is never far from a sophisticated deduction about its deeper cause.

//The Curated

"What drives the expansion of this self-reflexive anxiety? By its nature, and as O'Neill's endlessly recursive Russian doll of curatorial-artistic repositioning suggests, it is not the preserve of professional or institutional curators as such, but has become a sort of critical reflex among those artists and curators for whom the traditional division of artist and curator appears suspect." (Charlesworth,Curating Doubt, Page 1)

Before making any headway on the ultimately good message of this particular sentence, one must wade through a swamp of unnecessary words and convoluted grammatical nuances. Whew. The analogy to nesting Russian dolls was especially vivid, both in a "self-reflexive" manner (as a representation of the writer's endless sentences and ridiculous flowery clarification) and as a critique of Paul O'Neill's equally obtuse comment, quoted by Charlesworth. Curators this, curators that, Charlesworth needs to get his head out of the gutter and realize that there is actually much less between the artist and the viewer than he might want to think. Whoever discovers the art, whoever is knowledgeable about the art, and whoever assumes the cost of acquiring art matter not to whoever may view the art. Perhaps there is a fantastic tale about the collection, but it has no place, nor does the role of a curator in the average viewer's experience. They will take in information as they will, and to have an order imposed on their thinking is a downfall of free interpretation.

"In each of these situations ["crowd-curating" or semi-randomness], the word curating is used to describe actions taken by members of the public who would not normally self-define as curators." (Kasprzak, For What and For Whom? Page 1)

It is no mystery why companies who listen to feedback from their customers do so well. Vigorous and exhaustive evaluation must be done before a decision is reached, and for that inquiry, there is no better group to study than the public. More and more projects are being turned into community-wide collaborative efforts, whether it be sustainable urban farming or a small piece of open source software. Not only does Kasprzak suggest with this one statement that members of a much greater expanse contribute to the curation of artwork, but that we all establish our own collections and constantly curate that evolving library of information. She goes on to point out that bloggers (like us!) even amass a collection of images and words from all corners of the bizarre art landscape. Putting a small piece of your own opinion into a showing of collected artworks can yield a far better representation of the available total than leaving it to just the "curators."

"I asked people real questions about their lives, their work, their histories, their favorite foods, etc. Sometimes this was perceived as invasive, but i tried to be very sensitive." (Fletcher, Towards a Tender Society of Thoughtful Questions and Answers, Page 1)

So few people realize the value in forging profound discussions with their frequent or infrequent company. With the sheer volume of useless "unformation" we might call it that is available on the internet about our friends, we begin to see what real interactions are simply missed as a result. I could hop on FaceBook and be alerted that it's Joe Plumber's birthday on Wednesday, but would I know from that what his most important experience was as a child, or when his first internal realizations of existence occurred? Of course not, unless he wanted to broadcast that personal information for the world to see. The author makes a good point in that the questions they asked could very well have been made to sound prying, but the reality is that we have just grown unaccustomed to these traditionally rich inquiries.

Cass Elliot - Make Your Own Kind Of Music

//The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

"The entire room, from floor to ceiling, was filled with heaps of different types of garbage. But this wasn't a disgusting, stinking junkyard like the one in our yard or in the large bins near the gates of our building, but rather a gigantic warehouse of the most varied things, arranged in a special, one might say carefully maintained, order." (page 34)

Vivid images of my dad's home workplace came shooting through my mind after internalizing this thought. Despite having kept every scrap of paper and knick-knack since childhood, he has it organized in the most meaningful way imaginable and can recover an article at the drop of a hat. His memory has not failed him, nor are his reasons particularly sentimental – he just holds on to things for fear of needing them down the line to back up an obscure piece of knowledge lost otherwise to time. The main difference between my father and the character we know only by "the plumber" is that he still works and lives amongst his endless memorandum. For comfort, perhaps, or maybe because it is a natural product of never having moved residences upon establishing himself in a career. Regardless, what he retains is just as reflexive as the plumber's of the sum total of his being and contribution to the world.

"...going up to the large bundles of old boots, tin cans and similar junk hanging on long ropes attached to a nail which was driven deep into the wall, he could already guess what might be written on the white square tied to the end of each of these things." (Page 34)

Although I often refrain from symbolic interpretations of the elements in fiction, this passage struck me as a blatant representation of a plot or story – the expression "at the end of my rope" ties an inanimate object to an unexplainable phenomenon in nature so as to make the entire concept more manageable. From birth (the beginning of the rope) to death (the end), memorabilia are attached marking special events in the saga of the represented individual. Despite the pieces being insignificant out of context, it is clear that each represents much more. To the outsider, though, the story told through garbage might be just that – the plumber's narrative, though, aids those who wish to explore his narrative.

//On Photography

"Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret." (Page 59)

An abstract of the thought presented in the context of Walter Benjamin's "A Short History of Photography" (1931), this statement summarizes the wonderful field of photography. Unlike any other art form, capturing an instantaneous perspective of an environment is both a treat and an additional triviality. Composing a shot is only half the battle, as photography is always a time-based art. One slice of a lengthy shoot, sometimes as short as 1/250th of a second is the key to a successful photo – if the shutter is open too long, not at the right time, or focus isn't dead on, the opportunity is lost. However, should the stars align to produce the desired image, the detail in both time and space is an inexhaustible amount of information for exploration afterwards. Having taken and stitched together several 360° panoramas recently, I have found more pleasure in discovering their hidden personalities and oddities than in actually capturing the image. In the same way, portraits reveal a great deal about one's expression between their intended pose – a trace of a grimace may surface, or a longing in the eyes, or perhaps even irritation with the demands of the photographer. Nothing can hide from a camera.

"The amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure than the hunter who comes back with quantities of game of no use to anyone but the dealer." (Page 63)

Nope. Since when is investigation and trial and error a scar on the face of art? The opinion Benjamin presents as fact is, to say the least, narrow-minded. There is no better way to become familiar with a medium than to experiment, and often capturing or producing a plethora of images is key to finding a technique or style that fits especially well within that medium. After acquiring a digital single lens reflex camera, I've put over 30,000 actuations on the shutter and have yet to nail down my shooting preferences. Perhaps this is a result of a constantly evolving idea of an attractive image, or even something as natural as the changing seasons demanding different approaches to lighting, color and subject matter. No matter, claiming that quantity sacrifices worth is absolutely the antithesis of photography. Unless you are Annie Leibowitz, of course.

Santogold - Say A-Ha! (TEPR Remix)

//Beauty Knows No Pain

"Just as there is no longer a clear distinction between the original and the copy, the difference between art and culture has also become highly nebulous." (Page 41)

In a previous post, //Frame That Spam, I described a "cloud" artform that was derived entirely from the collective data of humanity. It was shocking to see this same ideology present itself in a piece written several years prior was, if nothing else, a potential inspiration for artists of the 21st century to start operating in similar ways to the programmers or the architects.

"What is particularly – and literally – pathetic about this, since I have just referred to it as a pathos-infused, humanist aesthetics, is the fact that it no longer sees art's pursuit of transcendence in dialectical tension with the quest for knowledge, understanding, and the improvement of our contemporary condition." (Page 43)

This statement, I feel, is a massively pessimistic view of the transformation of art, possibly even more degrading, ultimately, than the concept it aims to prove. Instead of attempting to define beauty as an accessible form or message, the author seems to be reserving the interpretation to an elite and exclusive educated group who can more adequately or perhaps even with a pompous idea of correctness in beauty. The reality of this circumstance is such that art becomes inaccessible to the masses, the group that, more often than not, has a better idea of culture's definition of beauty.

"Another level of the problematic comes into view when we consider that we have no reached and age in which it is possible to synthetically produce flawless harmony, perfection, and wholeness." (Page 40)

Again, the author seems to be fending off an advance in art in favor of returning to a style defined and embraced centuries ago. When a culture (or world as a whole) has a revelation in the definition of beauty in art, it seems as though it would be the people's duty to embrace it and celebrate originality. Much of the cutting edge design and art does separate itself from traditional concepts, but simultaneously ushers in a universally appealing age of expression.


Simian Mobile Disco - Sleep Deprivation (12" Version)

//National Llama Association

Art Appropriation assignment, 2009.

The Whitest Boy Alive - Courage

//Frame That Spam

Although not essentially derived from another original art, I found a WIRED article from March, 2007 to be a fantastic visually cited cohesion of art.

The article, Frame that Spam! highlighted several artists that created works of art derived entirely from external sources. Their process universally involved some sort of algorithm to categorize and crunch data from various people, programs, natural phenomenon, trends and even junk.

Pictured above is an example of a piece created when a search term was supplied to a special algorithm that "meandered" through the internet and mapped out its journey on a canvas. Other pieces include architectural structures created from the massive amounts of spam email circulating on the internet. Another represents WiFi signal strength in a certain area by bolder and lighter circles at the end of a radial plot.

Although we may find it difficult to classify as "appropriated" art, it undisputedly reflects the art of humanity or an homage to nature's current status.

Make your own! With the "Friend Wheel" application on FaceBook, you can create your own artistic representation of your friends' interconnectedness.

The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Soulwax Remix)