Musuem of Bad Art

Finally! Here is a fantastic and rather good looking site on bad art! The Museum of Bad Art, or MOBA has the tagline: “Art too bad to be ignored” and it is about time that the internet had something like this going on.

My hope is that at some point in the future – there might be some sort of forum that collects the bad art produced by otherwise “good” artists. Holzer’s most recent show at the MCA comes to mind when I think about a group of work that has various select pieces that just don’t work. Here:

 

 

 

 

Nobody can be on all the time, right? At some point, I plan on contributing a few images I have been collecting. I find that restaurant art and some murals are the best sources of terrible artistic efforts. More bad art to come…

 

Roundup on Net Art (v. 1.0)

Beginning to search for website that embrace the arts on the web.

The Whitney has a terrific site: New Media – NetArt – via the Whitney
http://artport.whitney.org/

Calder Show at the Whitney

 

v.1.0. AD ART

The Ad Art collective is a fringe gathering of sorts that has worked to upload images of art that will essentially cover all banner ads.

The first exposure I had to this burgeoning world of ad art was when I came across an article in Bad at Sport. They were extolling the efforts of Paddy Johnson and linked to work where he had assembled (so-called curating) a group of advert-as-art artworks from various digital artists on the Add Art webpage. Further inspection led me to the realization that this is not an isolated initiative, there are other projects with very similar objective.

If the mission is the death of advertising, then Steve Lambert is a sort of art-internet-vigilante.  This project is being developed for the OpenLab at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center – here.

 

Homage to Dennis Oppenheim

A 2008 recreation of Oppenheim’s 1973 piece – Whirlpool / Eye of the Storm … at the 2008 Chicago Air & Water Show.

 

Best Travel Movies

Recently, one of my favorite Chicago area journals, StopSmiling, had featured a post on the “3 Indispensable Expat Films” and the list, short as it is, was a fair compilation of oldies/goodies. This got me thinking about the wide angle view. What about the best films, across the board, for wanderlust?

I had high hopes for making this list, but I have revised those plans in light of the shifty nature of the task at hand. After all, where lists may have a way of simplifying things, travel is quite a broad category. Does this simply mean that the characters in the film have moved from one place to another, or does it need be a tourist vs. traveler distinction sort of flick?

For the time being, I am happy with the lack of parameters and delighted to have the satisfaction of compiling such a list.

…And the first round picks are (to disregard order for now) :

• The Passenger (1975, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

• The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Dir. Wes Anderson)

• North by Northwest (1959, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

• Lost in Translation (2004, Dir. Sophia Coppola)

• Princess Mononoke (1997, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

• Alice in Wonderland (1951)

So, there you have it – and (arguably) with the exception of the one, this is a list of my favorite “fixes” for wanderlust.  The few I managed to pull together here are more or less best categorized as a travel movie.

 

Tales of a Freelancer

I was recently discussing with a friend the problems I have been having with my in-between jobbery. I mentioned that while the gigs might pay well, they were few and far between. To this, he says, “well, that happens to be pretty much the definition of freelancing.” And so there you have it – I have entered the world of freelancing.

Two weeks ago, I was working with the Smart Museum for their contemporary show from China, Displacement. Thanks to new regulations on Chinese art, something like 30% of the works were tied up in customs. This meant less art installation and more (so much more) painting. The exhibit should be super progressive and mostly video installations. My inner A/V came out and I fidgeted with the mounts for five 42″ flat screens. The Smart, like any university museum worth its weight in alumnis, was a real gem. Take a look: http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/

This past week, I found myself at the scene shop for the Steppenwolf Theater – of all places. I was fair warned that the workshop was in an “unsavory” part of town – and was not let down by this description in the slightest. Put it this way, I will think long and hard before I take a job that is west of Western again. This happened to be quite the ways away west of Western and was more like just east of Cicero. Yikes. I was let on as overhire for the production of August: Osage County and was charged with finalizing the props for play’s shipment to the London National Theater. The website for the Broadway version is pretty action packed: http://www.augustonbroadway.com/

Here is a peek at the upstairs storage – more pics to soon follow….

A peek at the props: rows and rows of fake/real things

 

Portland May ’08

While I am on this thing, I might as well go ahead an put a few picos from my travels this past spring. I must say, these are only a few of the quirky sights to be seen in Stumptown.

Treehouse in a gallery! And yes, those are the Olsen Twin on the back wall...

A few notables from Portland. These group of picos were taken with my new big girl camera. I had to ween myself off the disposable ones at some point. I would insert some comment with the word green at this point but it pretty much goes without saying…

Proud E'ry body!

The best of my photos came out of the trek through downtown Portland. I had been warned about the natives being of a very particular stock and I was not disappointed.

Complete with inflatable aliens in the backseat

Here is one of my first stabs at a photo with an art-injected idea in mind.