Beautiful City builds Billboard-tax-for-Art Momentum

Over the past few years, there's been a growing anti-billboard movement in Toronto. And one of the more interesting subgroups to come out of this is an initiative to use a new tax on billboards to fund public art and art education. The initiative comes up for City Hall approval very soon, November 30 and December 1, and the site BeautifulCity.ca is asking folks to sign a related petition, as well as call their councillors before the vote.

While I'm actually a fan of good, creative advertising and the work it gives creative people (what was the Sistine Chapel, after all, but one massive ad for the church?) the fact is that a lot of billboard ads are crappy, and that we need more money for art, especially art education and underserved communities. (Beautiful City also says that it could generate a 50%/$11 million increase in funding for city artists and arts institutions.) So I urge you to give the petition a look, as well as the related video below.

Beautifulcity.ca Town Hall - 1st Cut from BeautifulCity.ca on Vimeo.

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Wonder Women: Q&A with Janet Werner in today's National Post

Montreal's Janet Werner makes paintings of women that I find really interesting. Often, for me, they contain tension around ideas of female experience, conflicts between idealized appearance and lived reality. Today's National Post ran my brief Q&A with Werner on where she feels the work comes from. Here's an excerpt:

Q I wanted to talk about the strong sense of tension in your paintings. Where does that come from?

A In some of my paintings, a little bunny or bear or Dalton figurine can be isolated against a kind of cosmic, empty space. And I sometimes situate the women in these really artificial paint-by-number landscapes. So I was giving a talk about this show, trying to address the sense of dislocation that's produced, and someone said, "Oh, so it's about innocence and loss." And I was like, "Yeah." I sort of circle around that without naming it, quite often.

Q What kinds of innocence and loss are you talking about?

A Well, I guess it would be fairy-tale fantasy ideals. These are, after all, idealized figures in idealized landscapes. All of us get our ideals set up differently, but in the case of girls, it's often princess-y dreams that are developed. The reality is that those dreams don't materialize. Still, the imaginings that are so alive when we're younger remain in play as adults. And I think that's what a lot of advertising and fashion images are addressing -- often in pretty complex ways, actually.

Werner's paintings are on view at the Art Gallery of Windsor in a solo show through to January 31, with new work debuting at Parisian Laundry in March.

(Image of Werner's Bambi 2005-6 from Parisian Laundry)

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Out Today: Review of Google Earth in NOW

It's been said (and debated) that 400 million people have used Google Earth. This week in NOW, I review two of those users--John van der Woude and Eryn Foster--who have made art using the application for Gallery 44. Here's an excerpt:

John van der Woude’s prints make up the more successful body of work here. Using satellite images gleaned from Google Earth, van der Woude stitches together some incredible aerial views of the world’s busiest airports.

These slick, glossy, detailed images, while fun to look at for a long time, also provide many conceptual points of departure: How does the lightness of global, go-anywhere mobility get played out and bound up at ground level? Who can really fathom the dense intersections of individual stories and trajectories that happen in these places, let alone design for them?

Image of one of John van der Woude's works from NOW

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Two Takes (and some Muzaks) on the Economics of Art

So... almost as scary as this "Money" scene from Cabaret is the long-fraught relationship between money and the arts. Of late in Canada, most of this frightfulness has had to do with a lack of money, particularly in BC but also in other realms. I just wanted to point out two recent responses of note:

1) Tinygrants
Tinygrants is "an experiment in microfunding in the arts" led by Toronto curator and blogger Marissa Neave. What Neave wants to do is provide grants of $300 max to fund "creative interventions," which she seems open to defining flexibly. If you're looking to get some tinycash, the deadline is this Sunday, November 22. And if you're looking to give some tinycash to this project--something a few generous folks have committed--Neave wrote she was still seeking $250 at last tally. While I confess some skepticism about the long-term feasibility of the project, I admire Neave's gumption and optimism. Worth a look.

2) Mary Jo Hughes @ the Mark
Mary Jo Hughes is chief curator for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and in a recent op-ed for the Mark, Hughes provides some firsthand perspective on the impacts of falling arts funding. Though the consequences of government cuts and falling endowment revenues has been covered in many newspapers in the past few months, it's rare to see a curator go public in this way. As she notes, endowment revenues at the AGGV, once considered guaranteed income, have dropped to zero. The results are a 20% staff cutback, and, as she puts it, "Things fall through the cracks, deadlines are missed, exhibitions stay up longer, perks for members are reduced, and fewer programs are on offer." Again, this is nothing new to those who have been watching closely, but unusual for a head staffer to broadcast. Also worth a read for its recap on the BC arts cuts, which turned $48 million to $3 million in just one year! Wild. In a bad way.

Good thing the best things in life are still free... like more bad Youtube:







Also worth viewing on this theme: Bills, Bills, Bills by Destiny's Child and Gimme some money by Spinal Tap, which has the very awesome lyric "Your face is okay/But your purse is too tight/I'm looking for pound notes, loose change, bad cheques, anything/Give me some money." Maybe a museums development person could steal that one sometime?

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Must-See: An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube

I just spent 55 minutes of my life watching this video, and if you haven't done it already, I strongly recommend you do that too. It shows a presentation called "An anthropological introduction to Youtube" by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. Wesch made the presentation to the US Library of Congress in June 2008, which might make it seem dated in internet terms. But really, there are some amazing insights (and incredible video montages) here. (The Numa Numa history is alone worth the (free) price of admission.)

I think this video also holds some jumping off points of particular interest to the art world, for example:

1) Is is possible that Youtube, with its self-reflexive, intimate-yet-distant nature, brings some of the dynamics of artmaking to the general internet-accessing public? After all, as Jerry Saltz famously has said, artists are like cats, always putting objects between themselves and their humans. I wondered watching this if Youtube provides the same freedom/set of conditions to a wider population.

2) There has been a lot of interest in the art world of late in re-enactment, and a lot of tiresome conference sessions that have revolved around the question of "Why are so many young artists interested in re-enactment?" There are many possible reasons in my estimation, but I think the contextualization of YouTube re-enactment that Wesch builds provides great insight into one possible answer -- that people re-enact in order to express that which is important or entertaining to them, and to become part of a wider community. If such re-enactments are instinctive in the mediasphere, why not in the artsphere?

Overall, a very worthwhile viewing experience -- fleshes out in words and reason what Margaux Williamson's Dance Dance Revolutions video circled around in a more oblique way.

FYI this video was called to my attention by Twitter user @Prof_K linking to the blog for We Are Social

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Confessions of a Blantantly Belated Review Reader

Reader, I have a confession. Though I often write reviews and wish people to read them in advance of heading out to the galleries, truth is that I often find reviews most interesting after I've experienced the show/movie/book/album myself.

That is, I often don't read a review, or at least seek one out, or at least really really read them thoroughly until I've experienced the thing being reviewed. I love reading reviews as a form of mental conversation, of getting all the angles, of comparing and contrasting to one's own point of view, or honing same.

Case in point: This weekend I went to see the film A Serious Man. Now I had read some reviews in advance (these were hard to avoid, in fact, given the film's premiere at TIFF earlier this fall). But only after seeing the movie, being perplexed by it, and chatting about it with my partner did I go home and load up Rotten Tomatoes, where, as I'm sure you know, reviews from media across North America, from writers both big and small, are compiled for most major-release films. (Wouldn't it be great if the art world had something like this? At least for Venice and other shows seen and reviewed as widely as a single major-release movie?)

Via the roster Rotten Tomatoes had compiled for A Serious Man, I think I read about seven to ten reviews of the film--some positive, some negative. It was great to read some of these pointed opinions and know exactly what aspects they were referring to in the film as they asserted them. Whether I agreed with the reviewer or not, their review invariably made a lot more sense to me--and provided more that was at stake for me--because I had seen the film myself.

I guess what this post has ended up being, really, is a little rumination on the function of reviews, which tend to break down like this:

1) Service to the reader A -- primary -- "Why, IMHO, this book/show/movie/album is worth your time and money, or not."

2) Service to the reader B -- primary -- "If you can't get to this thing yourself, here's the broad strokes of what it's all about, IMHO."

3) Service to the reader C -- typically regarded as tertiary, but for me (and likely others) often primary -- "Hey, if you actually did experience this thing yourself, here's a foil/back-pat for your thoughts on the matter."

Of course, there is at least one other important function of reviews in most media contexts, which would be 4) Service to the publisher -- "Some editorial to accompany related advertising." But that's another post/total fact of writing for any media outlet.

Okay, one more "of course"--some critics are just damn fun to read no matter what they're writing about. So sometimes reviews are there just to give a good writer something to dance around, or, in terms of service to the reader, to give good writing.

Overall, I am very happy to live in the age of the interwebs when so many reviews can be accessed online from different critics, at least for some arts genres. It makes being a blatantly belated review reader a hella lot more fun.

Image from A Serious Man from the fansite Coenesque

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On Liking what you Like when you Like it: Or, why Art needs a dose of Literature sometimes

The longer I write journalistic art criticism, the more apparent it becomes to me that our response to art is often be highly temporal and situational—that is, we like what we like when we like it. Responses to, engagement with and affection for a given artwork are highly subject to change over time.

I mention this in part because I see this truth acknowledged a lot more often in literary circles than in more visually artistic ones. In particular, I found this passage from Michael Chabon helpful. It's excerpted from an essay where he describes being in his early 20s and how he started writing his novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh:

I went back out to my room and shambled irritably back and forth from the door that led to the hot tub to the door that went upstairs, mapping out the confines of my skull like the bear at the Pittsburgh Zoo. And my eye lighted on a relic of my stepfather's time at Boston University: The Great Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby had been the favorite novel of one of those aforementioned friends whom I had decided that, for reasons of emotional grandeur and self-poignance, I was doomed never to meet up with again in this vale of tears. At his urging I had read it a couple of years earlier, without incident or effect. Now I had the sudden intuition that if I read it again, right now, this minute, something important might result: it might change my life. Or maybe there would be something in it that I could steal.

I lay on the bed, opened the book's cracked paper cover—it was an old Scribner trade paperback, the edition whose cover looked like it might have been one of old Ralph's wood shop projects—and this time The Great Gatsby read me. The mythographic cast of my mind in that era, the ideas of friendship and self-invention and problematic women, the sense, invoked so thrillingly in the book's closing paragraphs, that the small, at times tawdry love-sex-and-violence story of a few people could rehearse the entire history of the United States of America from its founding vision to the Black Sox scandal—The Great Gatsby did what every necessary piece of fiction does as you pass through that fruitful phase of your writing life: it made me want to do something just like it.

In a less wordy, less poetic vein on the topic of changing assessments of books, art and other things, op-ed columnist Rex Murphy is quoted in today's Globe as saying "[I have] long since parted with the delusion that my opinions, because they are mine, are less hostage to fallibility or walk nearer with truth than those of many others."

I don't know if these types of expressions on the changeability of judgment and artistic experience are more common in the writing world because one can always--or at least often--revisit books and text in a way we cannot revisit individual pieces of art.

In any case, this truth is something I'm glad to see acknowledged, and one I'm going to try and remember--even as I hammer out my own critical opinions, positive and negative, as well as I can at a given time.

Image from Bookdaddy

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