Think you’re addicted to checking email, blogs, and social media status updates? This month’s Working World, a Los Angeles based publication that covers employment trends and advice, discusses how routine digital multitasking that can sap motivation, problem-solving abilities, and happiness–and thankfully how to escape that trap to get the most out of the Net without getting caught up in it. Read on.
(Update: Here’s a neat little video of Art in the Streets exhibit experience that stars Mark Osborne, author of of the animated film Kung Fu Panda. Enjoy!…and if you haven’t caught the exhibit yet and want to, remember that it closes in just a few days, on Monday, August 8. -CCM 8/2/11)
For as long as there have been blank spaces, people have been writing on them—as far back as 32,000 years ago, in fact. Since then cave walls and rock formations have become buildings, subway cars, and sidewalks, but the need to express and leave one’s mark continues, particularly in urban areas. The question is: Is street art “art” or is it illegal graffiti?
According to The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, it’s both. (But if you ask the LAPD who arrested the infamous French street artist “Invader” for tagging the exhibit building itself and another nearby building in Little Tokyo, they’d probably say otherwise.)
Showing at The Geffen Contemporary now through August 8, 2011, is a collection of paintings, mixed-media sculpture, and interactive installations by 50 contemporary global artists who attempt to capture the spirit of the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo. Special emphasis is given to the emergence of “cholo” graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture born in Los Angeles.
Of more popular note are two exhibit areas featuring several pieces from the street art genre’s largest commercial successes to date: Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Those unfamiliar with street art may know the incognito “contrarian commentarian” known as Banksy from this year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which he directed and starred in, albeit sitting in the shadows. Fairey is best known for his “Obey” posters and stylized Obama “Hope” campaign poster, and has work showing in several prominent museums, including the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Modern Art (NY).
As with its other larger exhibits, The Geffen Contemporary rarely disappoints. Art in the Streets showcases quite a bit of variety from room to room, and the crowd is as mixed as the pieces shown. Yet, this exhibit is unique in that it is controversial, spawning a variety of questions whose answers differ depending on whom you ask: Is street art “art”? Is there a difference between graffiti and other forms of street art? Does street art belong in galleries? Does it become an acceptable art form if it can be monetized? Does the exhibit send a wrong message to teens and young adults that It’s OK to vandalize property? Does it encourage gang activity? Is it an acceptable democratic medium of dissent in an era of widespread feelings of political and economic impotence?
No matter how you answer those questions, there is a palpable contradiction between street art’s reflection of life in poorer urban areas and the commercialization of those messages in The Geffen Contemporary’s gallery spaces for the enjoyment of an art-buying crowd who may have never experienced that lifestyle firsthand. Two particular installations in this exhibit are re-creations of life-size ghetto buildings and alleys that very clearly expose this disagreement: When scenes of poverty are brought inside a gallery, it somehow attempts to elevate them to “art,” despite the fact that gallery patrons could find live replicas a few miles south of the exhibit.
Nonetheless, Art in the Streets is an interesting exhibit worth checking out. Perhaps 32,000 years from now, pieces like these will serve as anthropologic descriptors of urban life in this age.
Art in the Streets
@The Geffen Contemporary
152 North Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
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If the medium is the message, then the microscope is modern art. On display now through July 6, 2011, at the California Science Center are the top 20 winning images—blown up to sizes the unaided human eye can appreciate—of the 2010 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The annual juried contest selects the most vibrant, elaborate, and detailed photographs of plants, insects, and scientific and industrial chemicals that are taken through a microscope.
It’s a small showing, but perhaps apropos. With today’s granular focus on everything from behavioral analytics and consumer technology to quantum physics and nanotechnology, the photomicrographic exhibit scheduled to show in 13 more science centers across 11 states supports the notion that unexpected good things can come from very small packages.
This year’s number one slot was awarded to Jonas King from Vanderbilt University for his photomicrograph of a mosquito heart captured at 100x. Among other notable favorites are Yanping Wang’s extreme close-up of crystallized soy sauce at 16x, Ralf Wagner’s polarized shot of recrystalized divaricatic acid from lichen snapped at 10x, and Gerd Guenther’s soap film caught at 150x that rivals the late-era Wassily Kandinsky piece “Several Circles.”
The full display of 2010′s top 20 winners plus many more eye-catching honorable mentions can be found on Nikon’s Small World site. Past number one winners dating back to 1974 when cameras weren’t yet digital can be found here.
Aspiring photomicrographers—professionals and hobbyists from all disciplines are welcome—can enter the 2011 Small World competition through April 30. For the first time since its inception 37 years ago, the contest now also accepts video of both scientific and industrial material photomicrography for a Small World in Motion sub-competition that will be judged separately from traditional still-shot submissions to include both aesthetic design and educational depiction of science and art.
The naked eye might not perceive mosquito hearts, trout larva, and wasp eyes as the stuff of fine art, but when brought in closer it seems that nature’s beauty can be found in the microscopic eye of the beholder, where science and art meet.
2010 Nikon Small World Photomicrography
The first thing that will knock you off your feet is the smell of drying oil paint from works fresh off the easel. Next, you’ll notice the diversity of paintings and sculpture crafted in impressionistic, realistic, and contemporary styles. Then a story will emerge that lets you in on a big secret: the Old West was much more than cowboys and Indians. Sure, the Old West was populated with dust-covered white guys in handkerchiefs on horses heading westward, but there were also Chinese and Mexicans pioneers, and many majestic animals that were very much at home on the range west of the Mississippi.
The Masters of the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale, known simply as the “Masters,” is an annual juried art exhibit now showing through March 20, 2011, at the Museum of the American West at the Autry National Center (located in Griffith Park just across from the Los Angeles Zoo) that showcases the best in multicultural Western art from 75 of today’s top fine artists.
Now in its 14th year, the Masters opening night reception on February 5 brought in a whopping $3.2 million. Out of the top five pieces entered into a silent bid, the highest price paid was $900,100 for Howard Terpning’s Among the Spirits of the Long-Ago People,$171,300 for Morgan Weistling’s Where Stories Were Told, and $171,000 for Mian Situ’s Point Alones Fishing Village, Monterey, California, 1875.
Five new artists were included in this year’s exhibition, and aspiring artists for next year’s 2012 Masters of the American West exhibit can apply up until March 15, 2011.
Those who can’t make it out to the exhibition can also check out some of the featured pieces here. Although, I highly suggest taking one hour out of your day to tread through the Old West through the very skilled hands of today’s best artists in the genre.
Museum of the American West
What do you get when you cross three former Microsoft programmers, $5 million, a 60’ x 42” oiled strip of floor, and a fully staffed camera crew? Bowling Hall of Famer Pete Weber doing his signature crotch chop and 90 minutes well spent.
Last night I had the pleasure of watching A League of Ordinary Gentlemen (2004), an entertaining documentary about the evolution, demise, and attempted resurrection of the Professional Bowling Association (PBA) and its league of 1970s bad boys that once elevated bowling to prime-time sports.
Here in the post-Millennium, however, there’s a new business model in town. Knocking down pins has become something of a Nintendo Wii living room sport while real-life bowling lanes—with the exception of the niche hot-spots like Lucky Strike Lanes—collect dust and become known only through 1990s bowling movie lore like The Big Lebowski and Kingpin. Any attempt to transport the barely breathing traditional blue collar sport back into televised—or Net-watched—mainstream glory will take a lot of investment, a lot less partying, and more focus on the sport than the players. But can they handle it? Only former PBA CEO Steve Miller (also a former Nike Director and Detroit Lions player) knows for sure.
Even beyond the business-and-player tug-of-war, the rise, fall, and subsequent crawl-back of professional bowling offers the unexpected: Life lessons told through player personalities. Tales of talent without compromise, living on fumes of past glory, balancing family life with the quest to win, and how living humbly yet staying strong and balanced may just yet win the race every time make for a great documentary.
Check out the trailer. And then put down that Wii Sports remote and go throw a real strike—if you think you can handle it. Yeeawww! (That’s the sound of a Weber chop.)
Long before IKEA began pumping out clean yet mass-produced democratic design, Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman were devising the use of new techniques and materials that brought unique and stylized functional design into affordable reach. The Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), a small gallery-like museum located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row across from the La Brea Tar Pits, just opened “A Marriage of Craft and Design: The Work of Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman” on January 23, 2011, which features the sequential, lifelong contributions of a design power couple now in their 80s who are credited in part with ushering California Modern (a.k.a. Mid-Century Modern) style into the mainstream.
Taking functional cues from the influx of Swedish design principles of simplicity and the Bauhaus movement, the Ackerman’s California Modern design sense was also infused with Jerome’s well-studied spatial and color principles and Evelyn’s practice of elevating everyday beauty and Biblical symbols to art through myriad techniques and media. Numerous usable art forms are showcased: handmade pottery sets and vases, glass mosaics, hand-carved wooden door pieces, wall hangings, jewelry, hardware, and home accents.
The quaint but eclectic show is a condensed version of the Ackerman’s 50-year catalog that spent the last 10 months showing at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, and runs at CAFAM through May 8, 2011. Additional pieces created by Jerome and Evelyn are also part of the permanent exhibits at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Oakland Museum. Select parts of CAFAM’s exhibit will be showcased a few doors down at LACMA beginning October 2, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the temporary exhibit “California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.”
Unlike aesthetic pieces meant to be adored only visually, folk art—art that has function as well as style—has the power to inspire a return to that creative place within to make our own forms of usable art. An hour spent with many of the Ackerman’s contributions to stylish yet affordable design may have you running to the art supplies store instead of the department store when your living or office space needs a refresh.
A Marriage of Craft and Design: The Work of Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman
This past weekend, I found myself at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and was blown away by how the aquarium integrates both technology and environmental sustainability messaging seamlessly throughout its exhibits and presentations. Even more pleasing was seeing how families participated with the interactive exhibits which illustrated how pollution and climate change affect sea biology, and ultimately us, with as much rapt interest as watching the more popular live sea animal exhibits.
Not that the sea otters, penguins, seahorses, and schools of fish and sharks in the huge kelp tank aren’t truly mesmerizing, especially during live feeding sessions, but there’s something inspiring about being able to quantify environmental damage from specific habits built into everyday modern living and learn very simple, easy-to-understand steps that can be taken by people of all ages to mitigate it.
From the mock kitchen that educates visitors on how specific food and appliance choices can help the ocean to an interactive seafood “restaurant” that helps people choose the best menu items and illustrates the cost of seafood beyond what a menu states, a trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium really drives home this simple point: Small changes in our habits can make a huge difference in our ecosystem.
If you’re interested . . .
In last week’s New Yorker, staff writer and author Malcolm Gladwell states in “Small Change” that social media platforms render true social movements obsolete. He asserts that social media creates weak ties that dissolve easily offline, and inherent in this structure is a lack of hierarchy and relative equality on social media platforms which don’t allow for a leader to emerge.
I liked his premise, but there’s a glaring explanation that begs a revision: There is, in fact, a hierarchy online, and it’s a hierarchy of one: The self. Every user online is a legend in his or her own mind; though certainly some operate in this imaginary realm more than others. And therein lays the seeds for why social media platforms are incongruent with offline activism on the kind of Civil Rights scale that Gladwell points out: Not everybody can lead but everybody wants to be the star.
Aggrandizing self-documentation not only kills social movements before they get off the ground, but it also creates weak ties in real-life relationships. Ultimately, the temporary shot of illusory self-esteem provided by daily participation in self-promotion clouds our judgment and leads us to overestimate the value of social media platforms in our lives as well as the value we give others.
So, What is The Value of Social Media?
Social media’s value depends on whom you ask. Businesses make money from user participation, while users power the system and make it valuable for businesses. Users rarely reap large financial benefits from participating. So what is the value that social media platforms provide to everyday users?
For many, social media provides an entertaining escape from daily life. It’s interactive television that’s always on—in the morning, at work, at night. It can also be a looky-loo window through which to peer in on our peers and those from a past long gone. On the surface, it seems like a place to express and share ideas, but in reality, most status updates are used as opportunities to narcissistically self-brand, even when containing worthy information. Everyone wants to be perceived as the smartest, funniest, most informed, and most in-the-know and on-and-the-go—for themselves. It seems that in social media platforms all we want is to be entertained and admired.
Social movements, on the other hand, have much loftier goals based on equality, not self-differentiating branding to keep an ego afloat and justify personal lifestyle decisions. Powerful movements are united around a common, one-for-all causes and require the kind of participation which rises above digital banter and argumentation involving only select, exclusive groups who de-friend at the mere hint of a challenge to ego and authority. True social movements require participatory audiences of many who share the same goals and are willing to shelve their own egos, often times at the risk of ridicule, scorn, and maybe even physical altercations and violence. From what I’ve seen online, mere disagreement in denominational theory alone can keep activism confined within daily comment flame wars.
Because of the inherent nature of self-promotion in social media participation, we’re also experiencing increasing transaction costs; meaning every single profile, whether personal or business, must up the ante with every post to stand out among sea of other profiles. Business people call it “soliciting engagement”; off the business grid it means that we’re all seeking more and more of an enjoyable reward-based experience when we use social media. While there’s nothing wrong with seeking short-term value in our activities, we should consider our longer term priorities in what we consider valuable in the context of the kind of world we want to live in. Thanks to the Internet and mobile devices that give us what we want in a few clicks and taps, our value-reward system is shortened to immediacy. If it isn’t immediate, it’s hard to see the value in it.
True social change is hard-won and takes time. It requires the diligent pursuit of multiple long-term goals that current social media platforms just can’t provide, given the way that we use them. It requires a much larger transaction cost than reading feeds and commenting. It requires waiting for rewards for decades, not minutes. It requires real-life self-sacrifice and as Gladwell points out, a hierarchy headed by one leader. Most of all, it requires shelving self-promotion as the primary underlying motivator for social discourse online in order to care about something bigger than ourselves that benefits more than just ourselves or select group of our closest friends.
Perhaps the very first social movement to be pursued is the revolution of the social media platforms themselves and how we use them.
This morning I watched another public Facebook skirmish that left a wake of digital dead-to-me excommunicates and me wondering whether we’ve already reached some kind of Orwellian “groupthink” dystopia straight out of 1984. It began with a difference of opinion between two people but soon ignited into a de-friending campaign that resembled old-style Civil War fighting—two polar camps lined up; firing back as fast as possible, trying to pick off as many who were on the other side of the argument. All in all, seven “friends” were de-friended by the original poster, and the victors kept on ranting for a few more minutes, prideful of having “won” the argument by strong-arming it out of their regular newsfeeds with a combination of badly argued morality and flat-out bullying.
The weird thing is, this type of flame-n-fickle de-friending has happening a lot lately, and has involved some people I would have never suspected were so assertive. And it’s more than just the bravery of being behind a screen. In line with the adage, “You are what you eat,” I believe that being served only content that we “like” in our newsfeeds is unintentionally changing our behavior toward one another. As a result, we only want to see opinions that we like as well.
On the surface, similarities can be very comforting. They are bridges between people that can spark and maintain platonic, professional, and romantic relationships. Similarities can function as ice-breakers to get to know others. Online they create a sense of community acceptance. Yet taken to the extreme, too much similarity breeds intolerance of others.
While it hasn’t happened to me yet, I’ve watched several social media contacts de-friend others for voicing a difference of opinion on the most mundane of topics, even when communicated with tact and respect, and that’s unfortunate. When news outlets became conglomerates and moved online, many journalist publications and watchdog organizations were concerned that a lack of plurality of information and opinions would weaken democracy by under-educating our citizenry. And yet now with the widespread availability of information online, those very fears are realized by different means and have even more far-reaching implications in how we treat each other socially.
Ultra-segmented content for individual users based on “likes” creates fickle audiences of one who only tolerate information, opinions, friends, acquaintances, and strangers which deviate only slightly from their own attitudes and behaviors. While we’re all being wowed by technology, I think we’ve lost sight of the function of Darwinian natural selection: Without diversity, there can be no evolution—no progress. Diversity’s not only good for natural selection; it’s good for people in how we relate to one another online—and more importantly, offline. That’s why mutual respect for differences in opinion, attitudes, and beliefs must be protected at all costs.
“Give the people what they want online and the dollars will follow” is a great strategy for business but can be bad for people. It has the power to create “with-us or against-us” enemies from friends, and promote distance between people rather than bring them together, which was one of social media’s original stated intentions.
I think it’s time we scale back the likes and start being more tolerant of others’ opinions that we may not agree with. And I sincerely hope you don’t de-friend me for that.
