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Are popsicles the new cupcake?

After a very tight race with the highest participation rate yet, the winner of this year’s Subscriber’s Choice Voting is Nava Lubelski!  Congratulations and thanks to all. Nava Lubelski was born and raised in NYC and is living currently in Asheville, NC. Her work explores the contradictions between the impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend. She scrambles expressions of aggression with masochistic patience and sublimation and she plays with the feminine through the graphic form of the “stain” and lace inlays. Lubelski’s work has been shown at the Museum of Arts & Design, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Queens Museum of Art, and in galleries worldwide.  She was a featured artist in the book Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, 2008 and she has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

A baby hears his mothers voice for the first time after ear surgery, and a cop makes a new friend.

Michael Zheng interviews his fellow classmates 5 years after their MFA.  He looks to find out what has changed for them, how they make a living, how they view art and the artworld.

But here we layer up and watch fog tsunamis take over the earth in slow motion.  It’s sortof awesome.

Working off of their success with PARK(ing) Days, Rebar has designed some modular units to easily add pedestrian space to the sidewalk/streetspace.

New Langton Arts’ Archive for Sale: A Sacrificial Act by Tercerunquinto (a collaborative group), 2008

Thinking about new models of funding and new ways that the art world could work is not new.  But recently, whether because the economic climate has forced us to rethink our methods, or simply because it’s time in some larger cycle, there has been not only a birth of new models of funding art projects, but also a lot of writing and energy about it.

Part of this effort is simply to understand what is happening now and in the past. The Art Spaces Archive Project is a non-profit initiative to help preserve, present, and protect the archival heritage of living and defunct for- and not-for-profit spaces of the “alternative” or “avant-garde” movement of the 1950s to the present throughout the United States. The California Cultural Data Project is an online data reporting system that was created to produce a variety of reports designed to help increase management capacity, identify strengths and challenges and inform decision-making for California’s Cultural Institutions.

But the other part is writing about and archiving what is being borne out now.  This is a list of some of the writing I’ve come across in the past month that works towards an understanding of how the funding mechanisms are changing in the art world, envisions how it could be, and starts to catalog the new efforts and models that are emerging today.

How Things Work by Aimee Le Duc, Art Practical Part 1, Part 2, Part 2 cont. Le Duc investigates the trajectory of more established art spaces in SF, their success or failure, and follows up with a look at new spaces/organizations are utilizing hybrid models of funding and programming.

A Catalog of Strategies, Proximity Magazine #7, Summer 2010 The Catalog is a special annotated directory of inspirational groups, organizations, projects, and individuals from around the world. With over 350 entries the directory features the best practices and celebrated failures of interventionist art practitioners.

Survival Strategies for the Arts, John Killacky on Blue Avocado, 2009 Though aimed at non-profits, the thinking behind these strategies applies to everyone.  John Killacky, artist and arts funder, not only knows that we need the arts now more than ever, but gives us ten survival strategies for arts organizations and one for audience members — and reminds us that all of us are audience members.

Project Space Survival Strategies:  a research project by the artist Elysa Lozano for Autonomous Organization, produced in collaboration with Invisible Venue.  I found this idea especially striking: “The motivations behind these initiatives are inextricably linked to the manner of funding them. What constitutes an acceptable way to get funding is as much a question of the integrity of the intention as it is a question of survival.”

Art Infrastructure, cmagazine 103, Autumn 2009 A bunch of articles discussing exhibition strategies and platforms that provide alternative models for how art is exhibited and experienced by its viewers.  If we take the idea from Lozano (above,) then these alternative models would inevitably be thinking of new funding models as well.

Something different with tattoos.. Conceptual tattoos, Brush stroke tattoos.   Very nice

It’s big.  Use this map to compare it to lands we know and love.

Google is hosting new web fonts for everyone.  Way to make the internet look better!  Now we don’t have to choose from those 5 old options anymore.

In her comment in her response to Long Day’s Journey: 8 Hours With Artist Marina Abramovic, starzshine taps into the value of art.

Try as I may I was unable to get him to understand the sadness I felt when looking into the depth of a Rothko, but it kept comming back to the Abramovic performance. He would go to the window… look, and then comment again on how pointless the whole thing was. Over, and over. I finally had to say, “I don’t care how you feel about it. The point is that you feel something. You keep looking, you keep talking about it. Isn’t that what art is about? To convey an emotion, to make you participate in an experience?” He didn’t know. All I could do was shake my head.

A really wonderful account and review of the experience of standing in line for “The Artist is Present”

Edward Winkleman ponders the question of whether a MFA is really necessary.

FYI this roundup is totally unfair to people working in video or performance.  The opening show is much too chaotic, crowded, and loud to experience those things. Jen Susman Jack Leamy Emily Dippo made viewers that correlate with walks around the city “to encourage wonder while experiencing the city” Kim Cook made water bottle backpacks and drawings of their (impractical) usage Ashley Harris

Thinking about money and how it can work in the art world is on a lot of people’s minds these days.  Elysa Lozano, an artist working as “Autonomous Organization”, has created a compendium of project spaces around the world, all talking about how and why they started and how their funding works. From her statement:

The motivations behind these initiatives are inextricably linked to the manner of funding them. What constitutes an acceptable way to get funding is as much a question of the integrity of the intention as it is a question of survival… It is also my hope that by publishing the anecdotes and experiences of the people who run these spaces that the creative ideas and strategies will become a resource to anyone currently running an independent project or thinking of starting one up.

Project Space Survival Strategies was produced in collaboration with Invisible Venue.  The project is ongoing, and accepts contributions from anyone running project spaces.  You can find the survey here.

I’m aware that this is a bit old, but I just watched this interview with Steve Lambert for Prix Ars Electronica and really loved how he spoke about the idea of a new form of activism.  There is something stale about the march and this paper in it’s positive message as opposed to a march’s (usually) negative message feels different and good. Steve Lambert on The New York Times Special Edition from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

Once a year, we produce a Subscriber’s Choice Edition.  We narrow down the proposals to five and allow our subscribers and the past year of artists and critics to vote.  I think we have a really strong group of proposals this year. Check them out here.

The finalists are:

• j.morrison
• Nava Lubelski
• Christine Wong Yap
• Skye Gilkerson
• Matthew Rana

I don’t normally post anything clothes/fashion related, but this website is an interesting model that I’ve never seen before.  Too bad they’re in the UK!

Pretty awesome.

This is exciting.  City Car Share is teaming up with Spride to develop a system that allows individual car owners to add their cars to the city car share fleet in their unused hours.  This is good in so many ways.  Non car owners get access to many more cars and locations, car owners get paid to help them with the costs of owning a car, yet have control over when they need the car, and life is better for everyone when less cars are owned.  (except car dealers).   People without cars are much more likely to take public transportation, even when the commute is longer and save greenhouse gases like crazy.  Case in point: I am writing this on the Dumbarton Express during my two hour commute to Palo Alto. Yet before this can go into effect, the law has to change so that insurance companies can allow this to happen.  Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento has introduced a bill (AB 1871) that would amend state car insurance laws to allow personal vehicles to be used in car-sharing programs. Currently, auto insurers prohibit individual policyholders from renting out their personal vehicles.  Read more about this here or view the bill here. If you want this to happen, contact your legislators and let them know what you think: Assembly Senate Or sign this petition!