Marking Hiatus Until April 25th

View from my hotel room in New York this past weekend (facing Central Park) It is all a distant memory now....sigh.

Just a quick note that I am on a strictly imposed marking hiatus until mid-week, after which I will have all of my grading completed for the spring semester. I had a great trip to NYC and plan to blog about a few of the exhibitions I took in along with other cool encounters at the conference I participated in. For those of you who are finished, congratulations! For those of my colleagues still in the thick of it, hang in there-- we are almost there!

Weekly Twitter Round-Up

SFMOMA tweeted this "happy little reminder" over the holiday long weekend  brought to us by art legend Bob Ross. He makes all of us smile no?

Loooong weekend, we needed you-- oh did we ever. Spring has finally arrived in Vancouver and I was happy to enjoy precious time catching up with family and getting out to walk the seawall and sit on a few patios over the past several days. I also put the finishing touches on a conference paper I will be presenting later this week at the New School-- there are few places as amazing at this time of year as New York City, and I have a complete itinerary of exhibitions to check out, so stay tuned for blog posts in the coming weeks. As for the Twitterverse, it was buzzing with news of the passing of artist Thomas Kinkade. If you do not know who he is, I point you to two tweet links below. Let's just say he is controversial in the art history world, even as 1 in 20 Americans own one of his paintings. Many tweets also expressed sadness at the passing of legendary reporter Mike Wallace. I was a huge fan of his journalism and have included a link to his famous interview with Salvador Dali in the late 1950's. Enjoy.

Guerrilla Girl Talk: The Masked Art Radicals on Their New Research, The Art Market, And Occupy Wall Street

What's More Expensive Than College? Not Going to College

"Jerry Saltz on Thomas Kinkade, 1958-2012" 

The best piece written about the paintings, prints and commerce of the late Thomas Kinkade, dead at 54

Mike Wallace interviews Salvador Dali, 1958

weiweicam "retrospective"

Is student cheating driven by big income gaps? 

Saltz Sums Up the 60 Minutes Debate: "Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone."

Reporter Morley Safer speaking to influential art dealer Larry Gagosian in his piece exploring the continued boom in the contemporary art market. Image courtesy: galleristny.com

Contemporary art never fails to incite conversation-- and that is its strength. Case in point, last Sunday night's 60 Minutes segment by Morley Safer updating his infamous 1993 editorial "Yes, But Is It Art?". Safer's original piece has since become a kind of touchstone for how some people come to regard contemporary art-- as elitist, difficult, working by its own rules, and quite simply "not art." Since that time, the piece has even found a place in my lectures concerning the need to question and assess what assumptions people make about understanding art simply by looking at it, or "feeling" something in its presence. It also points out the gap in understanding about how critical and overarching the concept and understanding of a broader art history is to the production of much of today's most valued art. I was hoping that the updated segment would recognize and ponder these realities-- the past twenty years have proved that contemporary art, especially the conceptual, performative, and "difficult to understand" kind, is not going anywhere. Safer set the stage for his report at the most recent Art Basel Miami, an annual art exhibition where leading galleries from around the world come to exhibit and sell art works. Two minutes into the report, I knew it was going to be more of the same simple-minded approach. As you will see, the focus of concern is more on the market valuation of contemporary art instead of any consideration of its key features or points of intellectual value (if you cannot see video, see this link):



New York Magazine's senior art critic Jerry Saltz took very little time to respond to the 60 Minutes piece, crafting a  concise and to-the-point essay on what he correctly describes as the "facile screed" of Safer's reportage. That is not to say that I always agree with Saltz (he has become somewhat of a polarizing figure in the contemporary art world-- but for that, I do like him), but in this case he is spot on in his assessment of what lies at the heart of many individual's outright hostility towards contemporary art. It is worth here quoting him in full:

"The reason Safer isn't able to have what he calls "an aesthetic experience" with contemporary art is that he fears it. It’s too bad, because fear is a fantastic portal for such experiences. Fear tells you important things. Instead, Safer is fixated on art that only wants to be loved. Most art wants attention, but there are many ways of doing this — from being taken aback by Andy Warhol's clashing colors and sliding silk-screens to being stopped in your tracks by just a dash in a poem by Emily Dickinson. Art isn't something that only wants love. It’s also new forms of energy, skill, or beauty. It's the ugliness of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children. Often art is something we cross the street to avoid, something that makes us uncomfortable, that tells us things we don't want to know, that creates space for uncertainty. Safer goes to the most hellish place on Earth to look for "an aesthetic experience," then gets grumpy when he doesn't have one. It's clownish."

I really could not have put it better myself and I am considering quoting this passage in full when I encounter people who roll their eyes or pontificate about the nature of art in terms of its beauty or objecthood. It also shows just how out of touch mainstream media remains about the world of culture that lies beyond their immediate radar and understanding. Yes, the contemporary art market seems crazy to an outsider, but the same could be said about the Vancouver housing market. Some aspects of the economy are simply beyond our comprehension, but that has never seemed to bother a whole lot of people (interesting huh?). But what contemporary art does reveal is something that any first year art history student can tell you-- the meaning and value of art objects/events/performances is entirely contingent and not to be found in some essential quality of its form or aesthetics. Good art demands something more of us and may not always look and behave the way that we like. And maybe the hostility so many people feel about the mysterious mechanisms of the art market could be be projected onto the more abstracted features of the corporate world. Time better spent. Perhaps that could become more the catalyst for conversation than whether "my kid could do that."

Here is the original 1993 piece from 60 Minutes that inspired the recent piece by Morley Safer:

Weekly Twitter Round-Up

Artist Douglas Coupland tweeted a link to this picture writing "Possibly the cheesiest copyright violation in Canadian history...and the most clueless!"

“April is the cruelest month” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, and he sure wasn’t kidding. It seems that every student and faculty member I have encountered this past week (including myself I might add) has been lamenting the avalanche of deadlines, final projects, marking and exams that are on the horizon this month. It is the same each year, yet somehow the end of term always brings this feeling of surprise, like it arrived far too quickly or definitively than normal. In any case, the Twitterverse has been steady with lots of political discussion on both sides of the border. Springtime, as always, seems to bring renewed energy to a number of debates that go into a quiet hibernation over wintertime. Here are some favourite tweets to stir the passions:

Allan Kaprow's 1968 LP, "How To Make A Happening" (Something Else Press, 24'43") [MP3]:

A New Vision of the Public University, Michael Burawoy

Art in the Era of the Internet/ via @thetyee Part of PBS's series on how the web changes the way we share culture

But amidst all this dire news... the daffodils are in bloom. Cheerful. One step at a time... (course I almost fell over in the garden.)

Banksy has released a provocative advertising manifesto

The Hunger Games. Emory prof discusses how & why we enjoy the spectacle of violence

April Fool's Day: The museum is real but the paintings are not!

Focus on Tech: Organize To-Do Lists with Conqu

Conqu is available and syncs across across all major software platforms.

Earlier this year I wrote a series of blog posts describing some of the software I was incorporating into my daily routine (including Evernote, Prezi, and Pinterest) to move to a more "paperless" work flow. Now that I have had a few months to experiment, I am finding that the transition has been far less difficult than anticipated. Still, of all my paper habits, the toughest to adopt to a paperless mode has been my ever-present "To-Do" list. In the past, this list was established as part of my weekly agenda/journal. For years, I purchased a yearly agenda with a "week at a glance" format and I affixed those larger sized yellow lined post-it notes to create lists of tasks that had to be completed on a daily and weekly basis. Every few days I would move uncompleted tasks to a new post-it and keep a running track of the list by moving it between my paper agenda and a small notebook that I would carry between home and work. This routine, which I adopted in the final years of my undergraduate degree, had served me very well and I did not know if I would be able to adopt this habit in a paperless form.

Conqu essentially takes something like this and makes it manageable

After trying out a number of applications, I have finally found one outstanding program that has met all of my needs in the to-do list department-- enter Conqu. I first began using Conqu when I downloaded the free app to my tablet and began playing around with its very basic and easy-to-use features. What immediately set Conqu apart from other task organizers I have tried is its elegant design and very straight-forward and intuitive approach to how we actually construct, edit, and rearrange lists. As the demo video below explains, the program allows users to create tasks and then set various features such as due dates, priority status, and relation to other tasks in a few simple moves. You can also correlate tasks into larger projects and tag them into groups (i.e. I use blue tags for work tasks and green tags for personal tasks). There is also a feature that allows you to put ideas/tasks on the "Backburner" for future assignment. I love this feature for when an idea pops into my mind of something I have to get done but I do not yet know when to assign a timeline to it.

Once you have played around with Conqu for a while (it can be downloaded to Apple, Android, Blackberry and PC/Mac devices), you can purchase the option to sync your tasks across all of your devices. This was where I really saw the power of this program. For example, I can manage and tick-off to-do items while on the go say on my tablet and then know when I go to work or come home and open my computer, that change will immediately be reflected when I check the program. Used in connection with Google Calendar, Conqu allows me to keep an updated schedule and list of tasks wherever I go. Try it out and see for yourself, especially if you are like me and feel lost without your lists!

P.S. I do still carry one small Moleskine notebook with me for quick scribbles and brainstorms on the fly, but I am essentially organizing and syncing all of my daily activities/lists/notes via my phone, tablet, and home/office computers.