Category Archives: Art & Development

Citizenship, Meta-Practice

More on the Power of “No”

Artists, where is your line? How do you know you’ve crossed it? Are you prepared to do what’s necessary after you’ve crossed your line?

Artist Steve Lambert pledges to give away any prize money received from a right-wing, anti-civil rights family whose fortunes are made in pyramid schemes and the military industrial complex.

So today I pledged, if I win I will not keep any of the money. I will hand over all my award money to the LGBT Fund of Grand Rapids. I will also volunteer to come back to Grand Rapids with the Center for Artistic Activism to work with LGBT to fight for equality.

The reason I became an artist is because I believe it helps create free human beings. It can show us other ways of looking at the world, other ways the world can be. It makes us more empathetic, more understanding, and more open. It helps us grow. I think the money behind ArtPrize is working against, what I see as, the spirit of art itself.

http://visitsteve.com/news/no-thanks-artprize/

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The Making of The Eve Of... Self-initiated Residency and Exhibition, a timeline flow chart after Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Christine Wong Yap, The Making of The Eve Of… Self-initiated Residency and Exhibition, 2014. A timeline flow chart after Alfred H. Barr, Jr. [PDF]

Produced for the Open City/Art City panel, SOS ARTISTS: Strategies of Survival, curated and moderated by Christian L. Frock, and held at YBCA on October 4, 2014.

Meta-Practice, The Eve Of...

The Making of The Eve Of… Self-initiated Residency and Exhibition, a timeline flow chart

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Art Competition Odds

art competition odds: 2015 Djerassi Artist Resident Program

The Djerassi Resident Artist Program received over 800 applications for 80 residency spots in 2015.

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Recipients comprise about 1:10, or 10% of applicants.

See past Djerassi odds: 2014, 2013.

See all Art Competition Odds.

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Meta-Practice

“…these hack crowdsourcing campaigns that certain agencies are selling to [companies]. There are lots of folks doing very cool things with user-generated content, but to ask professionals to compete against each other for potential ‘exposure’ is completely different. It’s demeaning…”

—Dan Casaro, as quoted by David Griner, “Meet the Hero Designer Who Publicly Shamed Showtime for Asking Him to Work for Free,” Adweek, August 19, 2014

Showtime holding a spec design contest to promote a Mayweather fight!? Please. What nerve! They’re raking it in hand over fist by overcharging fight fans for over-hyped, disappointing pay-per-view events. I’d love to see a contest where they’re obliged to use the most voted-upon entry, and only terrible art is submitted. Cheers to Dan Casaro, speaking up for designers everywhere.

(Via CLF)

Telling mega-media corporations: NO SPEC!

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Art Competition Odds

Art Competition Odds: Climate March Design Contest

Avaaz.org received over 400 applicants’ submissions for its Climate March Design Contest. They announced two winning submissions and 18 finalists.

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Winning artists and finalists comprise about 1:20, or 5% of applicants.

Winning artists comprise about 1:200, or 0.5% of applicants.

See all Art Competition Odds.

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Art Competition Odds

Art Competition Odds: 2014 Art Moves Billboard Art Festival

The 2014 Art Moves Billboard Art Festival received 566 applications for ten exhibition spots, and one cash prize.

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Selected artists comprise about 1:56, or 1.7% of applicants.

The cash prize winner comprised 1:566, or 0.17% of applicants.

See all Art Competition Odds.

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Meta-Practice, The Eve Of...

The Lecturers: Cybele Lyle

Just listened to A Conversation, a great series of three short videos by Bay Area-based artist Cybele Lyle. It’s part of The Lecturers, a project by SF/PR artist Pablo Guardiola. As I’m delving into full-time studio work in my residency, hearing Lyle’s thoughts about how artists influence other unconsciously through their studio activities, and verbally beyond the studio walls, was compelling, and made me think of the various communities of studio neighbors I’ve had.

The videos are a nice project. If the name suggests a video recording of an artist’s lecture, from a single camera on a tripod in the back of an auditorium, fear not. It’s produced as a video, with a voiceover and source material and references. None of that off-the-cuff, heh-heh, should-have-been-edited-yet-unedited footage. Recommended.

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Meta-Practice

“‘It’s very common for small business owners and artists to avoid expressly writing the terms of their agreement down, because they don’t want to think about their partnerships ending on bad terms,’ [intellectual property attorney Emily Danchuk of the Copyright Collaborative] says. This leads them to tiptoe around the terms of the agreement that they find onerous, ugly, tedious, or otherwise painful.

But ironing out these details is incredibly important, as the case of Hoefler & Frere-Jones amply proves. Danchuk says such agreements help put parties on the same page, making it less likely that an agreement will be breached in the future.”

—John Brownlee, “4 Lessons Designers Could Learn From The Hoefler & Frere-Jones Split,” Fast Company Design, February 10, 2014

Get It In Writing

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