A photographic imagination

If we want to measure the arts, we'll need new metrics
The Artful Manager

The challenge is in applying existing metrics (dollars, headcounts, activity, test scores) to such complex and hazy goals (truth, beauty, pleasure, wisdom). To this task I humbly submit the following metrics, already spinning around the world for other purposes.

* hedon
a single unit of pleasure, already used in ethical mathematics (don't ask, I don't know)
* milliHelen
the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship
* warhol
a unit of fame or hype lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Some useful multiples from the Wikipedia include:
o kilowarhol -- famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric "nine day wonder."
o megawarhol -- famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years. The type of person your parents talk about all the time, but of whom you've never heard from anyone else.

If we really hunker down, we could suggest a USRDA for each of the above (U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). And each cultural production could publicly post the detailed value of its contents: ''Tonight's performance of Romeo and Juliet contains 250 hedons, 950 milliHelens, and 14.9 megawarhols.''

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A dying breed..(paid) movie critics
Orlando Sentinel Communications

The movie-obsessed have migrated to the Internet, where ethics can lead to co-opted opinions, phony "buzz" and bought-and-paid-for exposure. Are these honest opinions, are have the studios finally gotten their fondest wish, turning reviewing into just part of their PR machine?

And career-wise, the fickle nature of the Net means that sites come in and out of style. How can you build a living out of that, unless you live in your mom's basement? The ones drawing traffic and turning profits today will be old news and off your "favorites" list faster than you can say "Whatever happened to Borat?" or "Ain't it what news?"

Ironically enough, posted to Sentinal Movies Blog.

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Street life
Adam Gopnick, The New Yokrer

We see New York, and sometimes, as Henry James asked us to, we “do it”—explore and conquer it—but what we see when we see it is so far unlike what we experience when we’re doing it that the difference itself can become a subject for art. The city sneaks up on us in pictures, and we are startled to see what it looks like even when what it looks like is just us, doing what we really do. We respond to truthful depictions of New York with the same surprise that we feel when we hear a recording of our own voice.

Slideshow from The New Yorker

To be honest, I am not impressed with the photos. The language of the article surpasses the visual work as something that is interesting and worth pondering. I has the same feeling when I saw Alec Soth's work. If mediocore can get this much attention I have a shot.

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Amid Shadows of War, a Cultural Decadence
NY Times

Regardless of style, the Verists were not objective. They were prejudiced and bitter, and more interested in peeling away surfaces than in depicting them. The main question seems to have been: How many ways can the truth be twisted and be made truer still? Nearly every artist has a different answer, and often more than one.

Same could be said of political blogs these days.

However closer to home, this twisting of truth particularly in the manipulation of the photographs I work on, toying with the veracity of the documentary nature they arrive with is one of the more fufulling aspects of the process. How far can the image go in losing specificity and turn into something different and revealing something other than what was orignally captured. In these contradictions you can find a truth. Prejudiced and bitter, hmm, only before my first coffee.

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Insights into the clash of art in a networked world.
from ArtInfo

Quotes from Chuck Close & Francesco Clemente at the Global Creative Leadership Summit for

Chuck Close:

“artists are notoriously poor organizers; we normally don’t join groups, and when we do, it’s a disaster. We work alone in our studios. The stand-in for an organization for us is the [artistic] community: We send what we produce into the world and that’s how we exchange ideas with other artists.”

“I try to remove anxiety,” he said “It’s almost like raking gravel in a Zen monastery—when I commit to a painting, I know it’s a four-month project, and I tell myself, today I’m going to do what I did yesterday and tomorrow I’m going to do what I did today. ... You have to back yourself into a corner where you are asking questions that no one else has asked, so no one else but you has the answers. That forces you to be more creative.”

“a contrarian attitude is key to rising to the top. If money is your end [goal], you’ll make all the wrong decisions; you’re doomed to failure.”

Close continued that if money had been his aim, “I wouldn’t have painted a nine-foot painting of someone else; I would have painted CEOs or college presidents, at a size that fits over the couch. If I’d done anything [career-wise] that made ‘good sense,’ I wouldn’t be sitting here.” The irony, Close concluded, “I don’t care about money and [that’s why] I’ve made a whole hell of a lot of it.”

“Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up;”

“The trouble with living in New York City is that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.”

Francesco Clemente

“If I have to be honest, I have to bring bad news,” Clemente said. “The bad news is that I believe that an artist is an artist because he chooses not to tamper with reality; he chooses not to better reality. The creative mind comes at a price, so ultimately, an artist makes an ethical choice—he deals not so much with the world of ideas, but with the world of forms. And the world of forms does does not make deals.

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Only Disconnect
Places on the edge of language that the world can't strip away
by Jerry Saltz

Despite what's happening in the outside world, in our studios or in front of artworks we experience moments of genuine stillness, intensity, and meaningfulness—places on the edge of language that the world can't strip away. These aren't just imaginary flights of fancy or retreats into aestheticism. In this imperfect realm we experience the undeniable, elemental truth that sometimes, just by making or looking at art, we might discern the full range of human possibilities.

There is no doubt that amongst all the networked connections and endless inputs of information, that I find an outpost from "my" mind in that time spent alone creating the image. A very basic impulse staisfied. How about you?

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When worlds collide

From Publishing 2.0

The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.

At the end of the day, whenever anybody uploads or posts something to the web, it’s just a form of publishing. What’s radical about the new digital reality is that I can publish anything that I made — and I can publish anything that anybody else made.

Basic common sense tells you that if I were to take all of the content from another blog, publish it here, and then run ads against it, that would be wrong. Much of the tangled web we now face results from the euphemistic obfuscation of terms like “user-generated content.” If we call it what it is — for example, people streaming music from their MySpace pages while MySpace runs ads on those pages — then we can have a clear debate about the right and wrong of it.

In a great tradiion, MySpace and You Tube is the home of appropriation art. In that sense we have contemporary and modern traditions that as Wiikipedia says of Duchamp: "Duchamp's "creativity" as an artist lies in the gesture of selecting the urinal as an art piece and displaying it in an artistic context." So MySpace and You Tube "artists", if they can prove the transformative nature the "long tail" on the appropriated work on their page they can sit at ease. .

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From Clickz

The photo-sharing site integrates video-sharing functionality, and releases plans for Project Spotlight, where it will foster independent video.

Just as I suggested herefor Yahoo!...

The 'Peanut Butter Manifesto'

I am a pretty involved user of Flickr. Why doesn't Yahoo! direct Flickr to throw the video upoad switch and move the game to their court when it comes to user contributed video. Flickr has a community aeshetic for a genre of photography mostly banal and snapshot oriented. There are still enough digital image makes to move Yahoo to the head of the pack.

Why isn't Flickr doing this for Yahoo?

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Last year I ran and lost for a position on the School Leadership committee at my daughter's school here in NY. My campaign focused on bringing in a media literacy program. Wish I had this in hand for the campaign!

From DIY Media WeblogHosted by USC Annenberg Center

Henry Jenkins has posted on his blog about the paper he and his colleagues have written for the MacArthur Foundation, about participatory culture and media literacy. I have followed Jenkins' lead in my attempts to learn how to link DIY media skills with civic engagement, and agree that this is about more than just entertainment -- it's about an entire approach to culture, which Jenkins calls "participatory culture."

We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

Play -- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking -- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition -- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.

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Over ten years ago when Lionel Martinez and I were trawlng FactSheet 5 for material for our local show Zine TV, it was already clear the most edgy and provactive material was being produced not in NY or SF but in all places in between where there was an all night Kinkos.

As a matter of record, self publsining did not begin with blogs. Micro niche publishing did not begin with blogs. What blogs came to the table with was push button software like the Brownie camera, a way of keeping score with counters for links and page views, instant feedback and Ad sesne dollars.

Urban Scrawl
From the NY Times

BY Megan O'rourke

Does Downtown still exist — and does it matter? The quick answer to the first question is no. “Up Is Up” drives home the argument that it wasn’t just rising rents but AIDS that brought this period to a definitive end. The age of outrageous play was replaced by an age of sex ed and condo conversions. The media may proclaim Red Hook or Bushwick the new Bohemia, but these neighborhoods simply don’t have the seedy charge of the East Village in the 1970s and ’80s — and contemporary hipster style, intellectual and sartorial, hardly has the same anti-authoritarian bristle. As little kids in New York in the 1980s, my brother and I were scared (I blush to remember) of punks’ metallic studs and mohawks; it’s hard to imagine first graders being terrified of a hipster in a trucker cap and expensive jeans. Today, the city is so expensive that the real Bohemians are dispersed among disparate, far-flung neighborhoods.

But maybe that’s not so tragic. After all, the third factor in the disappearance of Downtown is the Internet. In an era when real estate is costly but virtual space is cheap, the community that once could be found only on Astor Place exists online. Today, there are plenty of magazines and Web sites continuing the do-it-yourself tradition of Downtown. But they’re largely in the yonder regions of America, where outfits like Spork (out of Tucson) and Forklift, Ohio (out of Cincinnati), to name just two I like, are publishing irreverent work that swipes at the mainstream. In the afterword to “Up Is Up,” Dennis Cooper declares “I wanted to make it as a writer, and I thought I had to be in New York for that to happen.” But many writers no longer feel that way. If there is to be a new Downtown, it is probably taking shape in a city like Portland, Ore., out among the fresh pine trees, and those of us in New York can visit it online.

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Hindsight, foresight, microblindness

Marketing In The Era Of Overwhelming Choice

If too much choice is a problem for consumers, it is a catastrophe for marketers. Why? Because consumers have adopted a very useful coping strategy for the tyranny of too much: they ignore most of what they see. When overloaded with choice, they buy brands they know and trust, or they don't buy at all.

So how can business leaders address the needs of choice-stressed consumers?

Companies must take responsibility for making decisions on behalf of their customers, something we call strategic clarity.

Less choice creates more value in the tyranny of too much.

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