Shooting Wide Open

I finally got around to watching PressPausePlay. It deals mostly about music and film, but you can see how it really applies to all media.

First off, this Shirky quote is right on. Why would we ever urge anyone to pass up the chance to actively create to be passive consumers? If we discourage and rant against Joe Public recording his album or trying to become a photographer, we deny the inevitable. If we encourage it, we’ll eventually reap the benefits of raising a new generation who understands the challenges and rewards of creation. It may not happen tomorrow, but just watch; we’ll see it in ten, fifteen years if not sooner.

The anti-democratization argument makes me angry. People who make that argument miss the point that with new technology, if and only if you in fact make something the world wants, then you can immediately be heard. In the past, even if you had something the world wanted, it’s difficult to be heard. The gate keeper was the middle man who held the reins to the large broadcast and distribution systems (ie record companies). Now, the gatekeeper is simply the quality of your work. Yes, there is still a chance that you will be drowned out in the mess of mediocrity, but personally I’d rather take my chances there than with the even slimmer chance that some A&R man might offer a record contract.

Even that aside, anyone who thinks that the world was less full of mediocrity before the digital age has never seen the book review pile at a national magazine or sorted through the mail at a radio station. Someone had to sort through all of those books and CDs, it just didn’t happen to be the end user. The difference now is that the previously hidden discards of editors and DJs are now visible to all of us.

But what of it? Mediocrity is a phase you go through before you become good at what you do. If each posted work is seen as an the end in and of itself, then it may not seem worthwhile, but seeing the piece as a stepping stone really clarifies the function of the publicized work to the author him/herself.

When we look back at the history of every other industry that got built in the 1920s and ’30s and say we wish we were there then because wouldn’t it have been cool? This is even bigger than that. And most people are ignoring it, saying, “there’s a recession, blah blah blah!” This is the best shot you’ve ever got.

- Seth Goldin

I know someone who writes sci-fi/mystery/pulp and self-published his own e-book a few years ago. Is he world famous? No. But seeing your work available to others is encouraging. It might even connect you to the one or two fans of your work that you would never have if you just kept it in a drawer along with 24 rejection letters. And it acts as a landmark that motivates you to do the next one, makes you think, “what am I going to do NEXT?” And that’s an important part of a learning process. What some people consider internet wankery actually encourages learning. Inevitably people who try one thing after another are going to end up more skilled than those who never try at all. In the end, the learning process that an amateur Flickr photographer goes through is the same process that Robert Adams or Amy Stein went through. The critics just fail to see the potential. I’d rather side with the enthusiastic amateurs on Flickr (or Instagram these days) than the naysayers.

If we as creatives can’t even see the value of cultivating creativity in others without judgment, we are too unsympathetic. And we wonder why arts funding is so sparse? Why “the masses” don’t care to support artists? The answer is right in front of our faces. It’s because to some degree we are in fact being a bit elitist. As long as the members of the established art community (and that includes critics) keep harping on the mess of mediocrity we’re all drowning in instead of seeing it for what it really is – an exposion in the urge to create among people who used to be passive consumers – we can’t expect anyone else to value art as we do.

The vast number of amateur photographs on the internet is art photography’s best lifeline for the future. Contrary to what the 1% of the art world would have you think (and let’s admit it, there is a divide in the art world between the 1% and the 99% that is just as, if not more pronounced than that in the rest of the world), the “real” collectors who buy prints for four figures are not the future of art photography, nor are white box galleries. The supposedly mediocre photographers pasting their pictures all over the internet? They are our best bet for a future generation of people who are actually literate in art photography. Because a certain percentage of them will become interested in visual art and our best bet at establishing a better business model for the future is to encourage them to develop literacy in visual art.

Without this literacy, we are going to continue to have consumers who’d rather plunk down $4000 on a flat screen TV rather than $600 on a comparable sized print. Until we convince the majority of people to appreciate art, no one will spend on art in the way they spend on music or movies. People spend on those things for the thing itself but also because a well known song or film is a cultural entry point. They know they will be able to discuss this with many other people – friends and new acquaintances alike. When was the last time you approached a perfect stranger and asked them what art they’re into? Yet we do this with music all of the time. Because people see the role that music plays in their life.

When society as a whole recognizes visual art as something that’s a part of everyday life as opposed to some incomprehensive museum language or fuel for high dollar value auction sales, there will be a far larger market for original visual art by a variety of established and emerging artists as opposed to mass produced prints of Old Masters and Impressionists on the one hand and extravagant spending on limited editions (how anti-photograph can you get?) by obscenely rich people. But we’re clearly not there yet. I think we’re going through a rough transitional phase. The best way to speed this up is to encourage the creative impulses of everyone who picks up a camera or a brush or any tool.

When people see for themselves how challenging and rewarding art making is, they will see the point of funding it. As long as they think it’s a mysterious process undertaken by a bunch of eccentrics or dead white guys, they will see no point in funding it. We have to show people how art fits into everyday life and what should be SO OBVIOUS to us is that the digital photography boom is a great start. As for all the complainers? They can’t see a good thing when it drops in their lap!

Does it really offend people so much if the learning curve is public? I have a theory that “genius” or “talent” is just the term we apply when the results seem better than what we’d expect for the perceived amount of effort expended. Maybe there are some true geniuses out there, but I’d bet my money on time and effort in most cases. If we really saw how much time certain “geniuses” allotted to their work, would we still think of them as geniuses? Or just workaholics?

Seeing how the sausage is made kills the (admittedly enjoyable) illusion that the work springs from some magical place and that these creators are special. Frankly, I think creatives tend to encourage this sort of thinking or at least refrain from discouraging it because let’s face it, who doesn’t want to consider their abilities to be extraordinary? But I’d argue that in destroying that illusion we gain something a lot more valuable – a roadmap for those who come after.

The 20th century was a great time to be a media company because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity. If you were making a TV show, it didn’t have to be better than all TV shows out ever made. It only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time, which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty. Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the US public for free. Tens of millions of users for doing something that wasn’t too terrible.

- Clay Shirky

This quote was pulled from the talk I linked to at the beginning and it hints at what’s really going on when users distractedly consume media while, say, checking email or surfing the web. What is really happening is that the media is not engaging enough to hold someone’s full attention. It does not move them. I have never met anyone who was so distractable that they were simply incapable of being stopped in their tracks by something truly striking. What those sort of arguments really indicate is the fact that we’re more literate consumers of media because we consume so much more of it now than a decade or two ago. This means the bar is set higher. I’ve seen more, so I expect better. Not just any piece will suffice. It has to be better than the rest. How is this a bad thing?

People have trouble accepting change. This is what all these debates about the pros and cons of the digital revolution boil down to. Most people’s ideal worlds are likely the world they grew up in during their 20s and early 30s. I’ll try my damndest not to, but maybe I’ll end up making those conservative arguments in my 40s too. So it goes. The wheel keeps on aturnin’.

Maybe I’m sensitive to this issue because I’d consider myself one of those Flickr upstarts. Photography was not a tradition handed down by family. It wasn’t something ever taught to me in early schooling. The only reason I found it was because of the net and the only reason I continued was because of the affordability of gear and the structure of frequent sharing on Flickr. But other people’s interest in my photographs was simply accidental, and it didn’t mean much aside from making me think critically about my photos. The act of putting it out there made me take my own interest seriously because I could see each successive photo next to each other and could see my progression. And I was terrible. I mean really terrible. If you’d seen my photos in the beginning, there was no difference between them and every other snapshot taken by anyone. You wouldn’t've thought I had any “talent” or that I could’ve ever become an art student.

But that’s what you do. You’re terrible but you keep at it (maybe because you don’t know that you’re terrible yet!), and one day you’re no longer terrible. It’s where virtually everyone starts and we’d be idiots to criticize people because they are earlier rather than later in the process. We can discuss the merits of each set of photos but we need to realize that is a measure of someone’s personal development as opposed to some meta metric of the health of an entire medium.

At any rate, what does it matter to the average Flickr or Instagram user what the critics think? They are simply posting photos to share with their network. It doesn’t matter what other people think of where you are in that process as long as you keep moving forward. Heck, it doesn’t matter what they think even if you don’t want to move forward!

It’s true that most people will use the net to share frivolous things, but I just want to point out that I joined an online community and eventually decided to change my entire life through its influence. Wading through some lolcats and 15 year olds covering Beyoncé or William Eggleston is a very, very insignificant price to pay.

Whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently?

Both saw change coming. Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, recalls writing a report in 1979 detailing, fairly accurately, how different parts of the market would switch from film to digital, starting with government reconnaissance, then professional photography and finally the mass market, all by 2010. He was only a few years out.

Both firms realised that digital photography itself would not be very profitable. “Wise businesspeople concluded that it was best not to hurry to switch from making 70 cents on the dollar on film to maybe five cents at most in digital,” says Mr Matteson. But both firms had to adapt; Kodak was slower.

…Kodak sold cheap cameras and relied on customers buying lots of expensive film. (Just as Gillette makes money on the blades, not the razors.) That model obviously does not work with digital cameras. Still, Kodak did eventually build a hefty business out of digital cameras—but it lasted only a few years before camera phones scuppered it.

Kodak also failed to read emerging markets correctly. It hoped that the new Chinese middle class would buy lots of film. They did for a short while, but then decided that digital cameras were cooler. Many leap-frogged from no camera straight to a digital one.

- The Last Kodak Moment

 
THE BANKRUPTCY

The article talks about the different corporate environments at the two companies as well as Kodak’s failure to diversify contributed to its eventual sinking, but at heart the problem seems to be simply that the company failed to realize what it was that consumers were really buying.

Most consumers are not after a high quality camera – they are after the shareable moment. Even when we all had physical photo albums the point was to show it to people and share memories, and that is an act that has moved online. That Kodak thought it could be a powerhouse in digital printing indicates how out of touch they are with what people want to use their technology for.

 
THE HUM OF A THOUSAND CHATTING MONKEYS

I came across a couple of rants (ironically online) about the pointless noise of social media and when I saw this analysis of Kodak and Fuji, I realized that Kodak fell into the same trap people fall into when they complain about how the internet has increased the proliferation of absolutely useless crap and mindless exhibitionism.

What these people don’t realize is that a tweet about the morning coffee is not really significant for its content. It’s the act that is the key – people are reaching out for a social connection, and as long as humans have this urge, social media will thrive. And it will thrive in shortform. Shorter attention spans may have something tangential to do with the rise of Twitter, but I suspect the real reason is that most people want short bursts of interaction that mimic conversation, not primarily one-sided broadcasts.

Before Web 2.0, the technology was not truly capable of enabling short real-time interactions that can be simultaneous targeted toward specific organizations and individuals yet public and therefore injected with the exciting potential of hearing a strange new voice from the back of the room. We wouldn’t make as many horror films as we do if we didn’t enjoy the buzz of this scary surprise factor. Now that tech has caught up, we are sowing our conversational oats everywhere, just like we’ve always wanted in our caveman hearts.

To focus on the content of individual messages is to miss the real draw and usefulness of Twitter: the ability to see in one place what the masses are thinking and chatting about, and that has been something we’ve been deeply interested since the beginning of it all because, lt’s face it, we are all motivated to eavesdrop on what other people are saying about us and figuring out where we stand in the social hierarchy. (Full disclosure: I favor evolutionary explanations.)

 
THE GIANT EAR

That the iPhone has been a boon to the mobile web is almost poetic. What you believe to be your LCD screen has a secret identity as a giant ear. What Apple has done is to put pretty packaging around what is quite possibly the most impressive eavesdropping device we’ve ever invented. (Can you believe you also hold that thing up to your ear? It’s like a conspiracy or something.) When you think about it that way, can you really blame people for becoming device-zombies? We like gossip a lot more than we like brains, I tell ya.

That Twitter doesn’t really have any competition gives it a viability that Livejournal or Moveable Type or WordPress never really had – every conversation is searchable in one place rather than over the entire scattered net. Google’s good, but not that good. And, given that each message is only 140 characters, searching Twitter feels more like overhearing conversations than doing research, which is what searching the longform net resembles. Not that there’s anything wrong with research, but let’s not kid ourselves. The existence of this post indicates which way I swing, but I can’t deny that on any given night, the number of people who prefer to sit in a cafe or bar and chat vastly outnumbers the number who sit down to hear hour-long talks.

Now, I suppose the number of people who sit in front of their TVs in fact outnumbers either of those, but then again TV production values exceed those of your average lecture or conversation (hat can we do to ensure that conversational production values will skyrocket in the next decade?) and your average working human will prefer relaxed passivity to many things in his end of day stressed out, sleep-deprived state. But that’s neither here nor there.

 
THE APOCALYPSE – NO, THANK YOU

The world will not end because everyone sees what your neighbor’s kid did last night on Facebook. We are not getting stupider because we’re tweeting up a storm even if our brains are changing. As far as I can see, the world still runs despite our Twitter fixation. (Ask me again in ten years.) And, generally, the best thing to do before complaining about anything other than the complainers is to ask yourself if the train has reached its last stop. Is this the endpoint technology? (The answer is always no.) Is this situation unchangeable? (Um, never, no, how could that be?)

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and what have you – all these things are simply a nutrient-poor substitutes for normal social ingestions. We still miss Ingredient X – the eye to eye and skin to skin contact, but we’re such social creatures that even a recluse like me will trade Ingredient X for the possibility of making contact with someone out of my pre-web broadcast range. This is how we’re wired. We like social bonding and we’ll try almost anything to get more of it.

If you haven’t seen this interview, block out an hour and a half to see it now. I transcribed (and lightly edited) a great deal of it, because it was great (not the least because Chase Jarvis references one of my favorite Errol Morris films, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Originally I was just going to pull a few short quotes, but as you’ll see, that’s damn near impossible!

 
On the Fear of Changing His Life

He talks about his process, and the ideas behind his projects. Many viewers seem to be curious about his transition from lawyer to photographer in middle age, so he elaborates a great deal on overcoming his fear of changing his life.

My whole legal career – when I look back on it now, it was a decade where I was just afraid of life. I was afraid of taking the risk of living. People seem to be interested in how I got out of the legal profession, but I’m interested in why did I go in there in the first place. And when I really look at that, it was really just because I was afraid…

I was living with this big fear, and that was my fear of failing if I took the risk of being a full time photographer. I had this whole scenario of what would happen. In retrospect, it was sad, but it felt real at the time.

My scenario was: If I leave my legal job, I won’t be successful as a photographer. I won’t make any money, I’ll run out of money, I’ll get behind on my condo payments to the point where maybe six months later it would get foreclosed on. I didn’t have any close friends or supporters at the time. I was living a false life, I was filled with shame. I wouldn’t be able to share with my friends: I’m failing, I’m crashing, I’m burning, can you help me. I anticipated that I wouldn’t be able to do that; I had to put on a facade – “everything’s fine, I’m doing great” – when actually I’d be running out of money, I’d get my condo foreclosed on, and sometime during that I would turn to alcohol and drugs to medicate myself and I would become a homeless drug addict. I gave myself about a 50/50 chance of having that scenario happen to me.

I sat in that law office and I thought that my fear of failing was the biggest fear I could think of, and it was like this giant wall, this brick wall, in front of me. There was no way over it, there was no way under it, there was no way around it.

With the help of a good therapist – he helped me see that there’s a way bigger fear out there and that’s the fear of not living my life. It’s a different fear, it’s not a fear that stops me, it’s a fear that motivates me. The fear of not living, the fear of becoming old and filled with regret, and realizing that I didn’t take the risk of living – that was like a giant cowboy boot kicking my ass over the wall. There wasn’t any great act of courage, I was motivated by fear.

It took me until I was almost 40 to take the risk of living my life. And I see all these young people now, people in their 20s, thinking it – “how do you know?” Well, I say just look in your heart and you probably already know, don’t you?

I don’t believe in conquering fear. To me, what courage is is when you’re scared and you acknowledge that you’re scared, and you do the thing anyway. As someone who’s leaving a safe job and going into the unknown could crash and burn in a thousand ways, there’s naturally going to be fear and anxiety that come with living that kind of life. It never goes away for me. It’s always there. That’s one of the feelings you have to bear if you’re a person who’s fully living.

Chase Jarvis: Hold that top of mind – the desire to live the kind of life you want. If you don’t pay attention to that, it recedes, it goes away. I’m not always proud of the things that I’ve made, but making it makes me remember that I’m doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

On Inspiration

Running the Numbers accomplishes the feat of dealing with a real life issue in a very visually engaging and new way, but he hits on something key about working on real life issues through visual art: “One of the things that constantly frustrates me about my Running the Numbers series is all they really are are signposts that point in the direction of comprehending these issues. It’s a little bit better than reading the number.”

This seems to be an inevitable pitfall of making visuals that don’t hit people over the head with tragedy and human suffering – you risk failing to find the hook that gets people’s attention in the first place, or the hook is a cerebral rather than emotional one.

But it is clear that we can no longer only tell individual stories since our problems now occur on a scale that is too large for us to understand on the individual level. Jordan explains how he learned to conceive of the size of our waste flow, and how he was accidentally inspired to begin working in a way that is more engaged with contemporary problems:

I love color, in a naive way maybe, because it wasn’t really engaged in the real world. I looked at the work of artists like Andreas Gursky and Richard Misrach, whose work is not only gorgeous from a formal standpoint, but they’re also engaged in the contemporary world in a really powerful way, and I just craved that, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. I didn’t want to let go of the beauty and go take ugly pictures of contemporary issues.

So it happened by happenstance that I found a giant pile of garbage in the port of Seattle, and I photographed it with my 8×10. I made a print of this huge pile of garbage and all I was interested in at the time was the color. I was looking for a particular kind of unexpected color and I found it in this pile of garbage. It was other people who came over and looked at this print on my wall who said, “I love the colors, but what I see is a macabre portrait of America. There’s something cutting edge about making gorgeous photographs about our waste.” And that’s when the lightbulb went off – I finally made a relevant photograph.

I started dropping into this issue of our waste. I discovered this vast body of literature out there that talks about it in these massive statistics. One of the things I discovered was that when we read this statistics about our mass culture, and our mind just doesn’t have the ability to comprehend it. As a photographer out taking pictures, I’m trying to comprehend it myself. I try to stand in front of these giant piles of garbage and behold the scale of our waste. I’m thinking, “Man, I’ve never seen so much garbage!”

And then a massive front-loader comes in and picks up the entire pile and dumps it on a ship, and in comes another front-loader and dumps the same size pile again.

I realize that I’m not looking at the scale of our consumption at all, I’m seeing one drop in a river. And that’s all I can ever see as a photographer. There was a while there where I was craving to go anywhere to stand in front of the Mt. Everest of our waste. And of course there is no such place. These vast cultural issues are spread out over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of locations, where there isn’t one place you can go to have a sensory experience of them.

 
On Midway and the Marriage of Beauty and Tragedy

His work has begun to deal with consequences of our resource use instead of the material itself (a series like Midway for example), and there he zooms back in to the human scale.

But it’s difficult to visualize concrete consequences of our consumption or war-waging habits on the scale that he manages to frame the statistics attached to them. It’s interesting that when it comes to the consequences, we still resort to the story of individual people or creatures or communities. Yet this is a very effective balance – we can essentially say, “look how vast this issue is! Everyone is affected. But you will bear the consequences; here is how each person will feel the effects of everyone’s actions.”

In talking about his current project, the Midway film, he articulates this idea and talks about being a first-time filmmaker:

I became interested in the Pacific Garbage patch, and learned that it’s not something you can photograph. Plastic is under water, it’s broken down into tiny pieces spread out over thousands of miles of ocean. There’s not like a floating island of trash and behold with our senses, feel the shock of it and then go do something about. It’s an invisible issue, like some of the others.

My goal is to make this global issue personal.

When I first came back with the images, I put them out on the internet and I thought the series would bomb. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in seeing dead birds filled with plastic. And it actually went more viral than any work I’d done previously. It reached a huge global audience, and the overwhelming response that I got was hopelessness and despair. I was in Australia and I was presenting work to a group at a girl’s school and I said what are people feeling after seeing this work? And some people said they were feeling sad, and some people said they were feeling angry. At the end, their teacher stood up and said, “I get that you want us to feel these feelings but there’s a feeling that I’m having that is much deeper and more uncomfortable than any of those and it is I feel overwhelmed and panicked.”

I realized that I had stumbled on really powerful medicine with this work and that I had put it out there in a way that is incomplete. I went to Terry Tempest Williams, whose work I revered for years, having read her books about how she’s gone through grief and come out the other side. She said, “if you want to get to hope, you’ve got to go all the way through. You’ve got to go back there and go deeper into the process.” And it turned into this multi-year thing, and during that process is when I connected with the ecstatic beauty of life, the miracle of life on this island as well.

I realized I need to make a film. Talk about jumping off a cliff. I know nothing about filmmaking. I’m a first time film director learning which button to press on the camera and out there trying to make a film. But as you said the way to be successful is to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing. I have a brilliant team of cinematographers and a sound guy and some good mentors who are long time directors and we’re out there trying to make a film that’s going to try to attempt to bring together the horror and the tragedy and grief – all the uncomfortable feelings that come with witnessing a tragedy – bring it together with the ecstatic miracle and beauty of the world we live in and combine them in a way that we can’t tell them apart any more.

I started out thinking I’m going to make a documentary film and so we’re going to go out there and we’re going to say, “Here we are on Midway Island and here’s this terrible tragedy.” But then I thought, wait a second, there are lots of films out there where the director respects the audience’s ability to hold a really complex plot that you don’t really understand until the end of the film. I can bring the viewers’ intelligence in and collaborate with them and bring hard things like grief and beauty together and trust that they’re going to be able to handle it.

I don’t want my work to be a downer. I bear the pain of standing over dead baby birds in Midway, not because I want to blame anybody, but because I love our world. I believe in our ability to change and the world is worth taking better care of… If we could remember how much we love what we’ve been given, then seems like some of these problems wouldn’t be so hard to face and do something about.

 
On Knowledge vs Action

So how do we get people to act? He also draws a line between art and activism, claiming that art is how we feel things, activism a blunt instrument for action:

I know that looking at that kind of stuff can be traumatizing. It’s easy to drop into a place of hopelessness and despair. I believe we all have to grow our hearts big enough and expand our minds big enough to be able to face the realities of the times we live in. If the only information we have to try to relate to it is incomprehensible charts and graphs that we can’t feel anything about, then it’s no wonder we’re disconnected from these things and it’s no wonder we’re not acting with more passion and resolve.

There’s a gap there, where we all know about the issue, but we aren’t acting. If you jump from knowing about the issue to acting, that’s what activists are all about. The way I get you to act is if I wag my finger hard enough and tell you you’re bad enough, finally you’re gonna act. But we’re jumping over something that to me is the crucial piece of the puzzle, and that is feeling something. Really facing the issues of the times we live in requires us to bear some very uncomfortable feelings, starting with anxiety and grief.

I have a hierarchy of them in my mind. Anxiety is the very surface one and if you can’t hold anxiety, then you never even get to any of the other ones. You just have to get out and live in denial. But if you can hold anxiety, then you can get to the next one down, which is anger. And where’s our anger now, as a culture? And underneath anger is rage, and finally at the bottom is this vast ocean of grief. My wish as an artist is that we as a culture could get to our grief. In community. Because when you face these issues alone, then you can go down the hopelessness/despair path.

But as soon as you share those feelings in community, then something happens. There’s a transformation that happens.

I want to live in that place of feeling. If people see my work and feel something, I have no advice, or suggestions or judgments about what they should do next. It’s not for me to tell you whether you should go do this or that. But maybe if we could all feel a bit more deeply in our culture right now, then collectively we can begin to make some conscious decisions that we aren’t making.

And I thought this was a good piece of advice to end on:

I have a tendency to figure it out in advance. I want to sit on the couch, dream up the world’s greatest piece of art that’s going to blow everybody’s mind and then just go make it, but it never actually happens that way. It’s more like, as a photographer, I just follow around behind my camera. I was clueless at the time about the meaning of the work and where it would lead me. The one piece of advice I give to people who are making the leap is don’t try to figure it out in advance. You have to make the leap.

I’m glad to have made the leap, even if things are uncertain and stressful. As Chris Jordan says, it is a motivating rather than incapacitating fear. My better self realizes I do have a lot to be thankful for and not much to complain about, complain as I might at times. The future looks very good if do we some work to carve out a future where art is accessible, affordable and made by all. Here’s to hoping we get to see it.

Have a good T-giving weekend, everyone!

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.”

Arturo Soto

There are probably more than 10,000 articles about how unwise and un-blog-attractive it is to apologize for not posting frequently enough to your blog. (“Don’t keep hamsters if you can’t remember to feed them”?) It is the blog version of saying, “I’ve really let myself go.” Supposing that I have, it seems that I should never openly admit it.

Cruising a discussion forum the other day, I stumbled onto a debate about the gender biases inherent in the phrase “let yourself go.” Apparently the implications of this insult are much worse when leveled at women than men (read: objectification, body image issues and other similarly nasty words). Well, I think, this is why you should never openly admit it.

And then, “inelegantly and without my consent,” as Miranda July puts it, a blur of artist statements flashed before my eyes. Actually, just one, but it’s a doozy. Arturo Soto’s Blind Views is about “the blinding normalcy of the present,” not to mention the “specificity of the photographic trace.” Perhaps a fitting irony: the text is literally unreadable, at least on my screen. Whoa! I think. He’s really let himself go!

We don’t need anyone to really point out the cellulite and the cottage cheese and all the grisly details of how someone has visibly let themselves go. It’s pretty clear when we see it, as much as I hate to admit it. And despite all our attempts to pinpoint the exact fine line between well-versed theoretical gymnastics and nonsensical artspeak, we don’t need anyone to point out artspeak. Don’t you know it when you read it? There’s a warning bell indicating something gone awry that’s apparent from first glance, before any deeper analysis even happens.

Arturo Soto

The problem isn’t necessarily the use of jargon. Maybe it is very necessary to speak as Barthes did in certain contexts. The problem also isn’t the absence of meaning. I do in fact have a good sense of what Soto means, because his work is good and his other statements clear and concise. But the thing is, I can’t be sure. That’s what’s missing. A certain flavor of certainty. It’s not a problem with the sentiments behind the word – rather, it’s the failure of those words to communicate with any sort of assured clarity. He has let himself go because this is sloppy communication, this is talking around something rather than speaking to it.

Would the statement be different if the words “race,” “class,” “advertisements,” “small town” were included? These are the things I believe he is referring to, but I can’t really say one way or the other. What I hear is, “these photos have cultural significance.” But all photos do. Color in this one for us! Or, alternatively, leave the obvious unstated.

(If you must know, I have stolen this example from Utata. Sorry Arturo, nothing personal. I really do like your work and, in fact, your other statements. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time?)

~

Stowe understood how influential narrative could be, and with ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, “Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author’s views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme.” (“The Persuader“)

Visual art is old as anything, older than writing. Unless you see pictorial art as a stand-in for writing before we invented the word. In which case, my suspicion is that there is less of a dividing line between art and documentation, fiction and non-fiction, than we make it out to be.

Art is either a recognizable rendering of the flower in the field, recorded for our primal sensory pleasure or to evoke significant memories, or it is an explanation of the significance of such an object to our personal experience. When you can no longer recognize the flower at all (or at least when it ceases to be the primary subject), the effect of art enters a more gut-reaction, subliminal level on which user-oriented design or perhaps consumer-herding works. At that point, you may need the explanation, an explicit explanation.

For those more versed in the canon of a particular form, it may be easy to stay in the realm of social context relevant to personal experience, but for the unenlightened, a guiding hand is needed. Kittens, babies and sunsets are popular for a reason. We have collectively encountered kittens, babies and sunsets for a very long time. We have extensive experience with kittens, babies and sunsets, and our brains know precisely what to do with them. Modern art is a different story. As much as I’d like to claim it, we have not had experience with Stephen Shore (nor light bulbs, for that matter) since the beginning of time, though that may very well be a characteristic of the best of all possible worlds.

>
Sean Dreilinger‘s random baby vs Stephen Shore‘s light bulbs. Winner is…?

This is my explanation of why modern art annoys some people. “My kid could paint that” actually unpacks into: “My kid has no understanding of adult human life and therefore he paints meaningless abstractions / photographs random street corners that bear no relation to my life as an adult human.” Which is another way of saying, “I don’t understand what I, as an adult human, am supposed to take away from this. What does this have to do with my life? What do I learn from this?”

A lot of the murk of bad statements could be precipitated out with an infusion of teacherliness. If we (I!) wrote statements with a nod to the layman, we find a larger audience. It’s not about the lowest common denominator, it is simply acknowledging the fact that more people have had exposure to babies than to Stephen Shore. If you must stand in the inner circle, with Shore and Co., then do it, but do it clearly, without haziness (not to be confused with ambiguity). There is no shame in phrasing things in a way that everyone can understand.

In fact, if can you explain Stephen Shore in a way that babies can understand, I’m pretty sure you’re a genius. Or that at least there’s a teacher’s chair out there eagerly anticipating your sweet ass.

This is what Hans Rosling says of global development in the documentary I linked to earlier. I want to dig a little deeper into this issue.

I’d say that most of the photo world has done a fairly terrible job of making this point. All the images of development are somehow read as “look at all this massive expansion and urbanization and how factory life is terrible.” But where is the visual representation of people in developing countries as equals rather than Those Who Suffer. There’s a lot of activist talk about how terrible it is that people live in poverty all over the world, yet when a solution more broad than individual donations is employed (ie development), the reaction is still often that these countries are doing terrible things to the environment, that they want more than they should have.

This attitudes remind me of Robert Lyons’ talk at PhotoAlliance about Intimate Enemy, his work in Rwanda. He framed the project as a attempt to get past our tendency to view those who do what we consider immoral things as an entirely different type of creature. In other words, he was trying to say there is no such thing as The Other and that ultimately, on average we are all the same in terms of what we’re capable of. By believing that it takes a special type of monster to perform certain atrocious acts, we mentally cast the perpetrators in the same light as the perpetrators would cast their victims – they are a different type of person, a type not as worthy as us and therefore killable.

One woman in the audience because incensed at these assertions and repeatedly demanded to know what the ratio of genocidiers and victims was in the body of work. Who is this that we’re looking at? Is it a Bad Guy or a Good Guy? Why isn’t this work titled Sympathy for the Devil? How can you make such beautiful, sympathetic portraits of heinous people? The same complaints that we hear over and over again about photography cast as art when the subject matter involves suffering, poverty or devastation.

What is really going on here? Why is an aesthetically pleasing photo of a terrible thing so inflammatory? I’ve written a bit about this before, but Lyons’ angle adds an important point. By showing abject suffering directly, by showing corpses and devastated cities, we are distancing ourselves from the victims. You look out the window, you don’t see corpses or devastation, therefore it must be happening someplace else. Whether we empathize with the victims or not, we know on some level that it is not us. We are saying, “those poor people.”

Which is of course not a bad thing to say. I understand where the woman in the audience is coming from. She is anti-genocide, which is not a bad thing to be, but she missed the point. She still considers genocide something that could only be performed by a certain type of depraved person. But as with many things, until it happens to you, you can’t imagine that it could ever happen to you, or to the place you call home. You can’t imagine in fact that you could be the person doing it.

And that’s what’s wrong with a lot of photojournalism on global development. Even if you sympathize with the people across the world, that is not the same as actually imagining yourself in their shoes, living their lives. So it’s very easy to make judgments about “them” out of the context of which you are a part.

The argument for Lyons’ way of treating the subject as opposed to Nachtwey’s is that there is less distance in Lyons’ work. He tries exactly to bridge that gap of imagination and place the genocidiers as equals, shooting them in the same way that you might want to shoot your closest friends and family. If we stop thinking of the problems of the developing world as someone else’s problems, we might come to a better solution. After all, we would never argue that whole swaths of the US population should not be allowed to have a car. Somehow we take it for granted that of course, in such a forward thinking and civilized place, everyone should have a right to pursue what they want. Yet somehow this thinking doesn’t get applied to people in developing nations.

Rosling’s washing machine talk appeals to me because it casts the resource issues raised by development in the light of a communal sharing problem rather than a who gets what problem. Maybe we should think collectively about how we can produce and allocate energy for a certain standard of living across the board rather than just arresting development. That involves a certain amount of lowering energy use here as well as raising use there. In other words, it really is a problem of how we can share equitably, which it seems we are still not very good at. It’s always a bit difficult to look long and hard at what you can give up yourself. I am guilty, aren’t we all, isn’t that the point.

One final caveat. The Lyons approach works to eliminate The Other in a Western context because it is targeted toward a specific audience. Would it have the same effect in another context? I’m not talking specifically about his work, but more broadly about what we perceive to be effective or dignified and empathetic documentary work. I think it is wise to be very clear about who your audience is. I’m not sure what a farmer in Southeast Asia would say about Robert Lyons’ portfolio. I can only guess at the Western reading.

In honor of practicing in public, there are a few thoughts on self-deployed taste shield interspersed with a few photos acquired somewhere in the vicinity of Los Banos. The photos and text are held together by tenuous bonds, but then again, this blog itself is held together by a tenuous framework.

Enjoying imperfection

Some Kind of Monster

I saw this on American Suburb X (via Ocular Octopus):

I am myself in favor of practising in public. There are, of course, those people who say, ‘But the public is not interested in watching people practice. It wants the finished thing or nothing.’ My answer is that if one does not practice in public in reality, then in nine cases out of then the world will never see the finished product of one’s work. Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world, but I have seen too many things that were a hundred percent perfect that were spiritually dead, and then things that have been seemingly incomplete that have life and vitality, which I prefer by for to the other so-called perfect thing.

It is one thing to think about a piece of work as a scientific or objective entity that will stand up a hundred years hence, and another to think of a living quality of the person doing the thing and of his development.

Exactly! Especially the last part. I’ve been thinking about the distinction between the bad critic and the good critic. The bad (or perhaps more accurately, absolutist) critic is interested in judging the work and only the work. In other words, is it “good”? The good critic, who may look more like a mentor or teacher, takes into account the artist’s future potential and the personal or social context of the work. The judgment is relative. Is this person in the midst of a not yet fruitful process? What is the background for the work?

For most of my life I’ve thought like a bad critic, but after I started getting serious about photography, I found myself feeling inspired by aspects of other people’s work. Taking the student mindset makes everything you see a potential learning exercise. Instead of seeing a project and being, I confess, a bit jealous, I could now extract the aspects I was drawn to and understand its function in the work as a whole. This makes it much easier to be at peace with other people’s and your own work – certain things only work in context and what works for others will not work for you. The world’s big enough anyway that whatever you do, chances are someone will like it. A lot.

What I’m learning through music and photography is that while finding work that you like is enjoyable, there is something to be said for trying to understand why you like or dislike a work, whatever your ultimate conclusion.

Confronting corniness

Cornfield

That excerpt immediately made me think of Why We Like Bad Photography. I’m so glad Joerg mentioned the 33 1/3 Celine Dion book. It’s a great book that speaks directly to the distinction between absolute and relative judgments.

The author tries to do something that most people never do: he tries to understand music that he hates. I don’t mean he listened to it a few times. He went to concerts, talked to fans and realized that other people simply had a different emotional or psychological use for the music. They approached it from a different mindset and had different expectations than he had. Sometimes judging other people’s tastes by your own standards is a vain and pointless waste of time if you don’t try to understand a bit of where they are coming from.

This I think, must be the more important function of artist statements: not to explain what the work is necessarily but to explain how we should approach it, if that makes sense. I am finally starting to understand what a statement should be. Frequently I fall into the mistake of giving too rational of an explanation for precisely what the work is rather than just setting the tone for looking. People seem to expect a much more rational explanation for visuals, especially realistic visuals, than they do for abstractions and sound. The best thing to do may be to avoid scratching that itch and stick to setting a tone. Maybe they will be dissatisfied on an intellectual level, but if you’re goal isn’t really to deliver an intellectual message, there’s nothing wrong with that.

A personal angle

Left Behind

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with KZSU. The eye-popping strangeness of some of the fare has been in the past soured a bit by the vehemence of a very few DJs’ stances against certain genres of popular music. There’s a certain evangelical message of “Your music sucks, listen to ours!” What they fail to realize or just don’t care about is the lack of reciprocation in this statement, which belies an interest more in judgment than any sort of learning.

To the station’s credit there are more mentor types than there are bad critics, but hearing some of the more personal judgments killed any desire I have to talk to anyone there about music, since my own taste is a bit mainstream. Maybe I’d just be shamed and ridiculed. That’s the problem with bad criticism; it’s not just the work that’s panned but it sets a tone for a certain type of interaction. I think this is why people are so hesitant to write somewhat negative reviews of shows and photobooks online, where there is a lack of social and tonal cues. No one wants to be the person that stifles further open discussion, especially since what’s stifled isn’t just discussion about the work itself but also discussion about the personal function of that art in people’s lives. Which is a damn shame, because that is the real heart of why any of us listen to music or look at art at all.

That said, giving pop a chance and playing pop on a non-commercial station with an educational mission are two different things – one is protecting yourself and the other is protecting the integrity of the air sound. I can understand the latter, but I can’t understand the former. I try to tell some of them about this book, but let me tell you, it is a difficult thing to convince a freeform college radio DJ to read a book about Celine Dion, even if it’s not really about Celine Dion. It must be the title: Let’s Talk About Love. Talk about losing street cred if you’re seen with it.

Which is the essence of the argument in the Celine Dion book: we never really make purely aesthetic judgments. A lot of our decisions about what we like are tied to our idea of ourselves. We choose music as a badge of identity and much of our dislike for something has as much to do with what we’re afraid it’d say about us as the inherent musical qualities. This works for photography also, despite the fact that documentary-oriented photography is more ostensibly about the external world.

One of our more fuzzy-eared and experiment-prone DJs played a terribly uncharacteristic track and I felt mildly annoyed. Only later did I realize – no, actually, I was also slightly pleased, partly because of the surprise factor. That delayed reaction took me a good while to parse. It’s a song that sits pretty solidly in some intersection of cheesy love song and pompous sensitivity, but now I think my initial reaction was hinged on my own discomfort. I don’t think it’s the music that’s repulsive; it’s the idea that anyone could project such an attitude with a straight face, that I might project this attitude if I play this music and other people would think I am serious about it.

That sums up how I feel about a lot of commercial photography. Admittedly there’s a lot I can learn from commercial work and I’m loathe to do it because of this knee-jerk discomfort. Ah, put that on the list for 2011.

Resistance is futile

Zebra mussels

But isn’t it a bit fun to listen to “bad” music in a perverse way? Somewhere in there is the process by which eye-scaldingly terrible work turns into amusing kitsch. How can I work myself into a mental posture that makes appreciating this thing effectively possible? It’s so overdone, how can a person take it seriously?

I’ve concluded that the best thing to do is to let it get into you a little; it has its own logic that you’d never understand by resisting. The fear I think is that it’ll somehow corrupt your fortress of taste or change you into some horribly deformed Beast of Tastelessness, but really, c’mon now, it’s just a song, or a photograph, or a genre flick. Nothing happens. It passes through you like the wind and you gain a level of visceral understanding that has nothing to do with whether you would produce such things or defend them intellectually.

I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s always some work that I just hate initially; stuff that makes me want to throw things. Sometimes I can’t help myself – I have to pan it. But you know what? An added perk to being a good critic rather than a bad one: people will probably like you better.

(BTW, also see: Get Off The Internet and Just Make Good Photographs (Or The Other Options).)

The auction house where Maloof bought the negs

Blake has conducted a Q&A with John Maloof, Vivian Maier’s archivist, so to speak. He sums up the arc of Maier’s work:

I have good reason to believe she began taking pictures in about 1949. Negatives from this year and even a year later have a beginner look to them. They are either over or under-exposed, out of focus, clumsy compositions, etc. But by the time she came back to New York from France in 1951, she had a good sense of her own interests and curiosities as a photographer. From 1951 to the mid-1970′s, her work was solid with no noticeable learning curve from what I can tell.

She switches to color in the mid 70′s, uses a 35mm camera. Her work becomes more abstract in some respects, but also very literal in others. Her abstract work often involves found objects either on the curb, in a garbage can or a similar setting. Some are quite good but there are so many that just leaving me scratching my head as to what she was trying to get across with the picture. The literal work is usually angled towards political, racial, or religious views. She seemed to be a liberal and of no known religious beliefs and so she would document graffiti, newspaper headlines, and racist slogans on park benches, for example.

And on something that’s been speculated about here and there – his curatorial touch:

Joel [Meyerowitz] cautioned me early on not to slant the work in ways to reflect other photographers such as Arbus or other influences. If I were to post all of only work that resembled, for example Institute of Design photographers, then, although it would still be good work, it would look like derivative work from photographers such as Calahan or Siskin or Ishimoto.

Near the end of the interview Maloof mentions that he anticipates problems with institutional housing of Maier’s work. This is really interesting in terms of the concerns about critical reception and institutional acceptance that were discussed in a previous post. How Maloof handles the preservation of these negatives is going to set a precedent for how art photography can be presented to the public without institutional support. Of course, organizations like the Chicago Cultural Center are still involved, but no one’s really waiting for MOMA and the like’s seal of approval as far as I’m concerned.

Blake on the other hand seems to think that such a thing is key to truly widespread recognition of her work. I can see his point, but I see this moment as more of an emblem of the rise of the web. That something like this could’ve happened without mass media and institutional promotion would be nigh unimaginable before these last ten years. Even though MOMA rejected the body of work, if a Maier show came to Rayko or Pier 24, I think there’s enough online recognition of the work in photo circles that many many people here would make the trek to see it. A lot of this stems from the interesting provence of the negatives, but frankly I don’t see that as detracting in any way from the quality of her work. No more than any star artist’s larger than life personality does anyhow.

Take a look at the post for more juicy details, including how exactly Maloof came to own all of the negs and what condition the undeveloped rolls of film are in. Good stuff.

If you want to personally support the project, you can make a Kickstarter pledge toward the documentary film they are planning and reap some rewards (a download of the film, a DVD, the Powerhouse book…). I have to admit it is the first time I’ve backed a project on Kickstarter; I’m really looking forward to seeing how all this pans out. They have reached their goal, so the film will be made, but hey, there are still 61 days left to go – why stop there? The more the merrier, kiddies!

A couple of months ago I peeked in on the public demo portion of a Tech x Journalism iPad app developing workshop given by Hacks/Hackers. While most of the apps were useful in a way that didn’t really push the envelope that much, one that wasn’t so realized stuck with me the most. It’s called Ephemera – the idea is to insert user generated visual info into Google Maps.

The idea is specifically centered around ephemera like menus and event posters that have some sort of nostalgia value or are quaint to look at, but to me the broader idea is more interesting. How can we organize and make searchable not just ephemera but photos of locations in a way that is easy to search on the time dimension? Don’t you wish you could go to Google Maps and enable some sort of historical search that would tell you whether your dry cleaners used to be an independent arts space?

Maybe I’m assuming this is more appealing than it actually is, but I think it would be very powerful to search visually by time as well as space. It’d certainly be useful to some extent in researching cultural topics, serving as a sort of window into spatially overwritten history. It’s not applicable to the far past, but I wish it was – I was researching the John Day fossil beds before my Yellowstone trip and wanted to focus on the period of time from 20 to 14 million years ago. It was surprisingly hard to narrow down results in any meaningful way. (Too bad the Google search parameters don’t allow you to enter millions of years… What websites were the apatosaurs community reading?)

With something like this though, execution is key; I don’t think we can just lay Flickr over Maps and leave the viewer to sort through thousands of photos per address. Wiki time indexed database of photos?

William Eggleston

If you want to see the Peaches photo, go to Pier 24 immediately! (The American contemporary room is a color lover’s paradise! Soth’s green chair photo that I’d blogged earlier was there!) Although, they said that the next show, which includes some of the Fischer collection to contribute to SFMOMA’s introduction show, will contain all of Eggleston’s Guide. Shows will usually last half a year, but this first one was curtailed to make sure that their Fischer show coincided with MOMA’s.

I went to Free First Tuesdays at MOMA and the photo galleries at 49 Geary that same day for comparison. The jury’s still out on whether Pilara’s collection spans the breadth that MOMA’s does, though his collection sure seems complete – there were whole roomfuls of Winogrand’s Animals, Friedlander’s TV screens and Larry Clark’s Teen Lust, as well as an Arbus portfolio and all of Sugimoto’s portraits of waxen Henry VIII and his six wives.

Muybridge + Klett!

That said, the stuff in the Fischer Collection intro show at MOMA was incredible. (I’ll have to go again, especially since the New Topographics show is coming to town this weekend.) I loved the Calder room – it’s great that they put the mobiles in an area that is a passageway, so that air currents of moving people stirred the pieces. I’ve seen collections of mobiles in enclosed spaces and it just isn’t the same. Though this time the brightly lit area made enjoying shadows impossible. Still, it was fun, I think for the same reason that it’s pleasant to lie under a tree and watch the leaves flutter.

And. The scale and color of the Ellsworth Kellys and Anselm Kiefers were invigorating in a way that made the relative darkness of the warehouse at Pier 24 seem a bit funereal. Still, considering that they only have one full-time and one part-time employee, and charge no admission, it’s very impressive. After the tour ended, I found myself virtually skipping toward the rooms I liked.

Both these places let me with a bittersweet feeling as a side effect of too much exposure to $$$$. You can work at your aesthetic language and photograph for 20 years, but in the end, the people who end up bringing your work to the public in an affordable, appealing way are the super rich guys. It’s great that the money goes toward these sort of things, but you wonder if there will ever be anything that rivals affluent patronage and donations from men looking to preserve their embossed eternal names.

At least there are no prices attached, as in the galleries. It’s so strange to see them next to the work. You know that the thing on the wall is not aimed at you. Strange that a place that shows artists’ work is so implicitly not for artists. Maybe that’s just my cynical side. I’ve been reading books on the art world and there are dollar signs everywhere. It’s a bit disheartening that so much effort is spent talking about the money and business rather than the artwork. But I suppose that’s what sells books.

Still, it’s really strange to see Barry McGee’s work in a corner of Fraenkel. Am I wrong?