As public officials attacked his public sculpture because it was rusting, Artist Bradley Arthur suggests that the rust is part of the pieces’ status as living art, a common theme in works subjected to the elements. He’s a gregarious sort who loves discussing meaning and subtext and symbolism. He’s given to making lofty statements that can sound pretentious to people less aesthetically minded. At the Ybor City sculpture, he kneels to rub off a reddish smudge. ‘It’s like the piece is crying,’ he says wistfully.”
Tag: 01.04
A Creative Class That Underperforms?
Is Richard Florida’s “creative class” idea really a strategy that can help cities prosper? “According to one recent independent study of entrepreneurship in America, Florida’s most creative cities are no more likely to be powerful incubators of fast-growing businesses than those at the bottom of his rankings.”
Please Hand Cancel This Art
The Post Office is generally not considered a federal agency to be trifled with. But Chicago artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna just couldn’t resist, after reading about Doonesbury readers who had been trying to mail letters with fake stamps published in the famous comic strip attached, and frequently succeeding. Thompson began cranking out his own satirical stamps a decade ago, and his works have included such classics as a May Day stamp with a picture of an airline crash, and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a gun visible behind him. But the game turned serious two years ago, when Hernandez de Luna tried to use a stamp emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and a single word: “anthrax.”
Losing American Creativity
America is losing its creative and economic edge. “Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They’re doing it through a variety of means – from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States’ province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas.”
Time To Tone Up That Mental Muscle
“You say the brain isn’t really a muscle? Irrelevant. Recent studies indicate that it can bulk up: The hippocampus, a brain region responsible for thought and memory, produces new cells throughout a person’s life, and some neuroscientists believe other parts of the brain also regenerate. The trick to keeping those new neurons? Use ’em or lose ’em…”
Self Over Music
“Why do so many pianists these days insist on emphasizing their own personalities over that of the music they play? “Once a pianist, however technically gifted, forgets that he or she is the servant of the music, then any aspiration to greatness is in vain.”
Of Intellectual Property And Agribusiness Subsidies…hmnnn
Lawrence Lessig writes that intellectual property laws and agribusiness subsidies ought to be tied together. “Both the subsidy of agribusiness and the subsidy of local culture and science violate the principles of free trade by ignoring American intellectual property laws. Both violations are bad. But the two bads should be resolved together. Indeed, if anything, American subsidies should be ended first. The actual loss to US firms from piracy worldwide is not terribly high – if ‘actual loss’ means the amount Americans would get if the piracy ended.”
Why Humanities-Speak Is So Incomprehensible
A computer engineer goes to a humanities conferene to give a presentation and comes away baffled by the other speeches. “I think it’s human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I’m willing to forgive him. The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me – marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers – none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I’m constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. Contrast this situation with that of academia…”
A History Of Art Restoration
“Unlike other institutions—hospitals, universities, libraries—whose origins can boast roots dating back centuries, the museum is a “new” invention. Its growth and development, through the course of the nineteenth century, was conditioned by a mixture of local traditions, expediency, and idealism. Restoration remained a craft practiced by independent, secretive private entrepreneurs who were able to maintain a delicate balance between their private and public clientele.”
The Rise Of Raunchy Art
Sex sells. No surprise there. But nudity and sex have been incresingly making the scene in the contemporary art world. “With the Internet and cable TV making pornography widely available on an anytime-of-day basis, it was probably inevitable that artists would find their own ways to channel it into their work and that galleries would show the results. Consider the New York exhibition season just past, most notable not for nudity, which now sells tickets only on Broadway, but for the number of phalluses in plain view.”