Shooting Wide Open

We intend to establish a self-feed­ing platform that grows with the number of participants and can lead to var­ious me­dia, such as cat­a­logues, posters or exhi­bi­tions.

Goodness.

I discovered The Most Expensive through Dan Abbé’s piece in American Photo. TME is a publishing venture structured so that anyone can upload an image to the site, with the stipulation that each successive user pays $1 more to upload the next photo. When 300 photos have been uploaded (and $45,150 collected), the project closes and a book/catalogue is printed.

And the next project opens.

Pay to play scam or interesting photobook experiment? The answers is… sinking feeling in my stomach.

Supposedly, time is moey:
money will buy you time
assuming you have money

to spend, as well as time
to wait while your money
grows. However, time

spent waiting can be like money misspent – it’s often time
wasted, even if money

is made, a kind of time
not worth spending, so money
isn’t necessarily time.

Maybe time is money
if you make with your time
something else that makes money,

though most of the time
it’s not your money,
you’ve made with your time.

And money isn’t even money,
necessarily, in a time
like this, when money

loses value and time
is misspent losing money.
And time isn’t even time,

necessarily, if it’s lost money
on which you’re wasting time,
nor is money really money

if it’s wasted on wasted time.
Still, sometimes, time is money,
but only if you have money and time.

- Craig Morgan Teicher

The Present Group is offering an affordable web hosting plan that uses part of the proceeds to fund an art grant. Out of the annual cost of $84, $24 (~28%) goes into the grant fund.

The hosting is just an portion of what the organization does though. Its main venture is an art subscription service which delivers 3 artworks per year for $150. Artists can propose a work and the organization will fund the doing of it, and distribute the produced edition to subscribers. Editions are reportedly under 100 at the moment. The work looks fairly design-oriented and clean, if that’s your thing.

A juicier periodical is The Thing Quarterly, a Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan project where creatives must make an everyday object and incorporate text into the piece. It weighs in at $200 for 4 quarterly pieces, the next set of which will be by MacFadden & Thorpe, Dave Eggers, Shannon Ebner and Mike Mills.

In a Times write-up, Fluxus, the gran-daddy of much of modern intermedia and performance art, is referenced as an influence. Apt. The Thing is the modern take on object multiples, and here’s to hoping that they can be more flux than Fluxus in terms of mass production (well as “mass” as editioned art ever is) with the help of the internet. They run into the same problem as Fluxus though – you simply cannot make very low priced intricate, nice-looking art objects for the masses. Not then and not at the moment. The best you can do is a version of the more simple object multiples.

Hopefully that changes soon. Tell me if this is meant to be looked at in a museum or opened and played with as intended? Some of them are games for goodness sake!

Tommy Becker makes videos grouped into “albums” and pairs them with phrases such as “Pulling Down The Sky to Give You The Sun,” which is actually as descriptive as it is clever. I think that one is his strongest video, as the others overuse the Mac robo-voice in combination with not the best lyrics set to music.

I found Tommy’s work through what looks to be a brand new site called Art Micro Patronage, a site partly funded by a 2010 Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. The concept is centered on monthly web shows curated by independent curators who propose shows which then collect funding from viewers who donate to specific artists or works. Once you’ve contributed (possibly as little as $.50) you have access to the works you funded indefinitely.

There’s this perspective: End Online Panhandling. But I think any time someone says there’s too much of something on the internet, what they’re really complaining about is that the proper filters haven’t been invented yet. Personally, I like this model since you can contribute what you can afford to artists who may not get anything otherwise. It beats seeing a bunch of video stills because artists don’t want to give their work away for free. It’s affordable enough that I don’t mind paying for work that I can see elsewhere on the net.

As they say, “Donorship, Not Ownership.”

What is economic growth for, anyway? It’s for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying and enriching and not for anything except cherishing the rest of their lives?

As we grow wealthier as a society, we also devote ever more money and time listening to music, attending performances, reading books, watching film and TV. Somebody has to make this stuff, and I’m certain its full value is not captured in the economists’ growth stats… I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

- Why we subsidise arts majors

I saw this everywhere. There are so many things wrong with both articles.

First off, can we really ignore the Gursky Phenomenon? The dream of superstar art wealth is a dangling carrot that certainly lures some students to art. Of course the number of people who make it to that level is a very very tiny percentage of those who try, but it doesn’t stop people from trying, just as many people try to be actors despite a very low pay-off for the average actor.

Andreas Gursky

Though I agree with it for the most part, the Economist article eventually sinks to the same level as the Tabarrock piece it criticizes. Tabarrok evaluates on the criteria of contribution to economic growth and the Economist author (oh use bylines already!) evaluates on the criteria of personal fulfillment. But both miss the glaring point that we shouldn’t evaluate any field on either of those criteria alone. (Read on for more on that point.)

Tabarrock is wrong. Though the arts may not contribute a huge percentage of total GDP, subsidies for the arts are similarly tiny. Compared to the level of energy (average $16 billion* per year from 2002-08) or agricultural subsidies ($15 billion in 2010), the arts do not make a dent. Created in 1965, to date the NEA has given $4bn worth of grants. That’s on average $87m/yr. That’s about half a percent of the farm subsidy. Considering that the arts do generate tens of billions, that’s not a bad investment. And yet, we live in a culture where the first things you get when you google “arts subsidies” are calls to eliminate them. (At least there are people across the pond who believe that the arts are affordable and profitable!) Who’s really subsidizing artists anyway? I’d hardly call a loan you have to pay back with interest a subsidy. After graduation, day jobs (yours or your partner’s) and commercial gigs subsidize artists.

The Economist is also wrong. Some lab work is indeed mindnumbing and unfulfilling in and of itself, but so is spotting dust spots off film scans or cleaning paintbrushes.Yet it’s work we do to accomplish our higher level goal of discovering new scientific knowledge or making art. Studying the stars or the genome is just as exciting and inspiring of an occupation for some, and it is strange that the author can’t see why it might move someone to tears to contemplate impossible mathematical puzzles or the scale of the universe. Some artists certainly seem impressed enough by those concepts to reference them in their works! To dismiss practical jobs as the equivalent of lab gruntwork is to set up a straw man.

 
Graduation numbers don’t tell you much

These numbers do not tell us anything about how many artists persist in the field but simply the number who graduate with an arts degree. We can’t draw any real conclusions from that given the following questions:

Did these arts grad focus on arts alone or also double-major in something else that may be “practical”?

Is an arts degree a statement of intent to pursue art as a career specifically? If it’s true that everyone knows that engineering pays better, everyone also knows that having a degree period pays better (see Is College Worth It?). What percentage of arts grads choose art as part of a plan to study liberal arts and pursue office work? This may irrelevant if we’re talking about what people desire to study, regardless of what they intend to do with what they learn. But in that case, we should be looking at the number of undergraduates who choose to study art in college beyond a class or two, not who graduates with an arts degree.

But. BUT!

 
Back up: bad data alert!

That aside, there is something that feels wrong about the piece of data we are all basing these arguments on. The graph in the Tabarrok article doesn’t seem right at all to me, so I dug around on my own. Look at the Tabarrok graph:

Now look at this chart from the National Center For Education Studies from 2010-11:

Obviously students ARE choosing and have always chosen the field that pays, which is business, which is by far is the most popular field, and in fact the field that has grown much more than other fields in the last 10 or so years. Students do very much have dollar signs in their eyes.

Also notice that there is an entry for engineering. Despite mentioning engineering repeatedly, Tabarrock uses a graph that lists only chemical engineering, a small segment of the entire field. From our charts, we can see that on its own, engineering fields attract as many students and produce as many graduates as the arts, and if you add that to the CS numbers, there are, very roughly, 50% more tech grads than art grads. All in all, that chart is a very selective subset of the whole picture.

However, it is surprising to me that the number of computer science and engineering degrees have not grown exponentially in popularity given the huge growth of the tech sector, but the low numbers may simply be explained by the unavoidable fact that there are some areas of the tech world where people who have learned on their own can get a decently paying job by simply demonstrating technical competence without never needing to either begin or complete an actual degree. I’d be interested in any data that shows us the proportion of tech workers who have degrees vs not.

Then there’s the likely possibility that our perceptions are skewed. There are other sectors that tech is just far more visible and tangible to us as consumers than other fields which may actually contribute more to GDP.

 
And why shouldn’t artists choose money?

I’d be remiss to suggest that monetary motivation is the only reason artists decide to pursue the careers we do (obviously that is not the case if we simply look around the blogosphere), but if it is, is that so bad? What irks me about the article is that doesn’t address what we should do about low pay in the arts as a problem in and of itself. It comes close to saying we should be proud of being poor, that not being able to make a living is somehow a badge of how committed we are to our work. That’s just rationalization. We could be paid a living wage for our work AND be fulfilled by it.

What use is a manifesto about choosing fulfillment over money when you have to take a second non-arts job to subsidize your art? As a recent grad trying to patch three or four different things together to make a living or develop leads for making a living, that we can enter college in pursuit of something other than the means to make a better living is great, but to leave it at that without taking the opportunity to address the sad finances of most artists upon graduation is to avoid the reality that artists need money to survive.

As someone tweeted, “money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys film.”

PhotoQ interviewed 9 photographers about the future of the business of photography in the age of decreasing prices and the digital boom, and put together a feature on Vimeo called Facing the Future.

“People will always want stories. People will always want storytellers. And today people want visual storytellers more than ever.” – Ed Kashi

“Frankly, if things hadn’t've changed, then I would’ve been worried, because there’s only so long you can live and do the same thing over and over again. What I find is that the last few years have given us freedom.” – Donald Weber

The interview with Peter Van Agtmael, is also excellent.

Anyone want a job in San Francisco as a public arts curator working for the city? (PDF) It sounds like there’s more working on the public art aspect of building projects than a curator position, but sounds interesting anyway… at least if you have a knack for diplomacy. From what I hear, it involves a fair bit of dealing with contractors, architects and artists to find acceptable solutions for all since sometimes contractors and architects are dismissive of the 2% requirement and want to put one giant costly piece of art in the lobby or plaza instead of integrating works into the design. Could be an exciting challenge:

JOB ANNOUNCEMENT: PUBLIC ART PROJECT MANAGER

Position Description

Filing Deadline: Oct. 15, 2010
Salary: $57,876 – $70,356 with full benefits

The Public Art Program was established in 1969, one of the first municipal percent-for art programs in the United States. San Francisco’s Art Enrichment Ordinance mandates that 2% of the construction costs of city-owned buildings, parks, transportation projects, above-ground structures and substantial building renovations be allocated for the acquisition of artwork.

The Public Art Project Manager (Curator II), under the supervision of the Public Art Program Director, provides all essential functions required to plan and implement both permanent and temporary assigned public projects. The Project Manager oversees approximately 15 to 20 public art project simultaneously at various stages of development, working with a wide-range of city departments, project architects, engineers, general contractors, and community representatives, in addition to artists and their subcontractors.

Minimum Qualifications

Basic familiarity with:
1. Public art history, policies, guidelines and practices.
2. Contracting, procurement and budgeting processes.
3. Art fabrication and installation techniques, materials and processes.
4. Contemporary art

Bachelor’s Degree required from an accredited four year college or university with course work in any of the following: Art, Fine Arts, Art History and Arts Administration. Course work in Public Policy or Business Administration is desirable.

Minimum of two years’ verifiable experience managing public art projects with a variety of budgets from inception through project completion.

Familiarity with some or all of the following computer programs: Word, Excel, Filemaker, Power Point, Photoshop.

Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm (Corbin Hiar)

“We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year,” AOL’s media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Many of the jobs will be added to its hyper-local venture, Patch, while the majority of AOL’s freelancers will work for the company’s content farms. These two areas into which AOL is ambitiously expanding are the fastest growing sectors of the journalism market.

This week, Hiar tackles the content farms. Ironically, they use a CC photo from Flickr (of an HDR-ed tractor – how relevant) to illustrate the story, which focuses on the experiences of freelancers who work for places like eHow:

She began working for Demand in 2008, a year after graduating with honors from a prestigious journalism program. It was simply a way for her to make some easy money. In addition to working as a barista and freelance journalist, she wrote two or three posts a week for Demand on “anything that I could remotely punch out quickly.”

The articles she wrote — all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list — included How to Wear a Sweater Vest” and How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed,” even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog.

“I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” she said. “I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’”

Next week, the hyper-local coverage trend, which might more directly relate to the state of photojournalism. Although… content farm : stock photography?

(Thanks, Fo!)

Picture Black Friday

If you haven’t heard about Picture Black Friday yet, it’s a collab between John Saponara, TMC and Conscientious. Any photographer who wants to can take pictures on or about Black Friday and submit them. A selection will appear on the site, but I wish we could see most of the submissions. It sounds like an interesting collective activity (the photography!).

I’m still not sure what I want to do yet, especially since I am the world’s worst morning person, but here’s a news piece in the Times I came across while looking:

The [National Retail Federation] said retailers were performing dress rehearsals with their employees. Some stores plan to serve drinks to shoppers, or offer entertainment while they are in line, to maintain calm.

Last year, frenzied shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., trampled Jdimytai Damour, a store worker who died soon afterward. To prevent any repeat, Wal-Mart has sharply changed how it intends to manage the crowds. That new plan, developed by experts who have wrangled throngs at events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, will affect how customers approach and enter the stores, shop, check out and exit.

The most significant change at Wal-Mart is that the majority of its discount stores (as opposed to its Supercenters) will open Thanksgiving morning at 6 a.m. and stay open through Friday evening. In another new twist, shoppers will not have to sprint toward a pile of flat-screen televisions. Rather, customers will be able to enter the store at any time and line up at merchandise displays. When the products go on sale Friday at 5 a.m., workers will supervise the lines.

While doing my usual web rounds, I ran into a couple of individual net fundraising ventures.

Seen on La Pura Vida: Hamburger Eyes photo collective published their latest issue with funding from Kickstarter, a fundraising site that currently invite-only, though you can contact the staff and make a pitch to get your project up there. You set a $ goal to meet and people pledge however much they want, but aren’t charged unless the goal is met by the deadline you set. You can, however, encourage them to pledge more by offering various perks at certain donation levels (“give $15 and get a copy of the CD when it’s done!”). Amazon seems to be handling the money changing, but unfortunately it only works in the US now. So far it is free, aside from Amazon credit card processing fees.

For something that isn’t invite-only: I was reading about a recent copyright fiasco in the design world which may be worth a read in its own right (“the immediate lesson to be learned is that in today’s Web 2.0 world, with its instant internet echo chamber, mob mentality can be a very dangerous thing” – see 1, 2) on An Art Producer’s Perspective and came across Fundable, another site for individual fundraising. It isn’t quite as smoothly designed as Kickstarter, but all you have to do is sign up to start a collection. However, Fundable takes 10% if the goal is met and allows you to request a 2 day extension if you’ve met 90-99% of your goal by the deadline. You can also lower goal to as low as $100 if progress isn’t what you expected and you still want to collect, which seems a bit shady to me, but it doesn’t seem to be limited to the US since it is done through PayPal, which converts to dollars.

All in all, it seems the projects on Kickstarter might be more legit, though at the end of the day it seems up to pledger to decide about validity.

I was also checking out Triple Base Gallery, which is set to co-curate the Art in Storefronts entries, and saw this:

Friday, August 21, 8pm-dawn

David Horvitz will organize a walk through the streets of San Francisco from dusk on the 21st of August to the dawn of the 22nd. Everyone will meet in front of Triple Base Gallery around the time of sunset, to depart at 8pm.

After taking a look at his website, I’m not sure what to expect. Unfortunately I can’t make it, but what do you know, Horvitz has been doing his own version of pledges and goals.

Lastly, and a little differernt, there was of course, Ctein’s search for 100 true fans.