Personism

Links: Big Cash for Arty Ladies, Art of Security + Tap is Back!

• Art Fag City » Biore Announces $20,000 grant to go to Top Female Emerging Artist
  I suppose you’ll just have to get past the fact that Biore titles their new grant program for women artists the “Uncover Discover Program“, as they’re offering $20,000 and a trip to New York to the winners in each category film, fashion, music, an
  (tags: art women nyc grants competitions)
• Art Imitates Life, as Well as the Living, Fooling Many Along the Way - New York Times
  Mr. Rechler found and bought another security guard...he made two embellishments: “Putting him in a glass-enclosed booth was my artistic license,” he said. “That and giving him a badge with Art on it. I labeled it and named it at the same time.”
  (tags: art funny random)
• ABC News: Upscale Restaurants Shun Bottled Water
  Tap is back, baby! It's about fucking time, for so many reasons.
  (tags: water environment restaurants)

Alice Wells Thesis Show!

Untitled> by Alice Wells

Ms. Alice Wells, keeper of the Hey, Hot Shot! blog is a talented photographer in her own right. She's finishing up at the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her thesis show is tomorrow night. If you're in Chicago tomorrow night please go to the reception, or check out the show before it closes on April 13th:

Opening Reception: Saturday March 31, 7–10PM
Exhibition Dates: April 1–13, 2007

Gallery 2 and Project Space
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
847 West Jackson, Chicago, IL 60607

Not in Chicago? She's also, at long last, launched her website. No more Flickr for her!

Congrats to you Alice, we can't wait to have you back here in NYC.

Links: Maps, Illustrations + More Missing Bees

• NYC Subway Historical Maps
  God I love the internet. And NYC. And the subway system. And maps. This page is heaven. (Via Raul Gutierrez, aka Heading East)
  (tags: design nyc history maps)
• BibliOdyssey
  I'm having one of these moments where I'm kind of spazzing out over how much cool stuff there is to look at online. Sites like this are why I am an insomniac.
  (tags: art design history illustration books)
• Missing bees create a buzz | Chicago Tribune
  In an inconspicuous office suite here—the home of Bee Alert Technology Inc.—scientists are feverishly working to solve an entomological mystery: What happened to tens of thousands of honeybee colonies in at least 24 states?
  (tags: bees agriculture environment)

Mid-Century Ship Interiors

More of these in a Mid-Century Ship Interiors photo set on Flickr.

This is the sort of thing I love discovering, or being pointed to, on Flickr.

(via Coudal.)

House On Fire

MacLean, Virginia, 1978 by Joel Sternfeld

Sometimes when a certain image, or photographer or idea is sticking in my head it's suddenly everywhere. I've had the Joel Sternfeld photo above on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and in fact I referred to it over on the Hey, Hot Shot! blog just a little while ago.

Turn's out that a print of McLean, Virgina is being sold in the upcoming 27 Exceptional Photographs auction @ Phillips de Pury. (Thanks to MAO for that tip.) The estimated price is $30,000 - $50,000. Using recent contemporary photo auctions as a barometer, I wouldn't be surprised if it went for double that. You could say that the market is on fire (yuk yuk) in spite of what some people might be saying.

For the time being, the closest I'm going to get to owning any thing of Sternfeld's is by buying a copy of American Prospects. And to be honest I'm pretty happy with my burgeoning collection of work by emerging photographers - as I've said elsewhere, it doesn't need to be expensive to be good, and besides, who knows what work will be breaking records at auctions ten years from now?

Links: Museum Tags, Photo @ The High, a NY Story

• One Picture, 1,000 Tags - New York Times
  Folksonomies, Art and Museums
  (tags: art tags museums)
• An Expanding Museum Capitalizes on Photography - New York Times
  The museum hired... Julian Cox, from the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he had been an associate curator. “It is fair to say that my arrival coincided with a desire to give photography greater presence in the High’s program,” Mr. Cox said.
  (tags: photography collecting art museums)
• unrelatednews - phone jacked
  Only in NY, kids: Keith's local chinese joint seemed to be off their game the past few times he ordered. Turns out the place had closed down and another restaurant jacked their number and has been taking the old place's orders.
  (tags: random funny nyc)

What Makes a Great Photo (according to Digg users)

Standing out in a crowd by Flickr user Angelrays

The people have spoken. As mentioned yesterday, Jörg's What Makes a Great Photo? post has been generating a lot of buzz. Once it was Kottke'd, it wasn't long before made its appearance on the community bookmarking site Digg.

Raul Gutierrez sent me the link to Digg item. The comments make for some very interesting reading. There's a lot along the lines of this:

bizzare.. and stupid.. these
photos are lame, and not at all impressive.

dive in and randomly explore flickr, you'll find dozens of photos that are better than
any of these!

The photo above is the first one that popped up for me on Flickr's Interestingness page. On the Flickr page it says:"There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing." Basically, it's an algorithm built on various forms of Flickr popularity. If you browse by Interestingness on Flickr you'll see a lot of nature photography, macros and super-contrasty HDR stuff.

There is also this:

I wasn't impressed by any of those images and the only kind of interesting one was Sally Mann's. I love macro nature photography because it's a window into a tiny, colorful and often alien world that you probably wouldn't otherwise notice. To me, that's what makes a great photo. Some chick lying on the floor, looking like a rank amateur on PornoTube doesn't say "art" or "great photo" to me; the closest I get to a message from it is, "Oh, for God's sake, girl, swallow!" Maybe my art sensor is broken.

There are positive replies as well (which has to be the case since it received more than 400 Diggs), but what fascinates me is the us vs. them conversation that often erupts with regard to photography. I'm not personally interested in macros, or nature photography in general or HDR photos and sometimes that leads to people accusing me of artworld snobbery. (Which I find pretty amusing, I hafta say.)

Slightly tangential, but I think germane: I am fully immersed in the world of fine art contemporary color photography - I love it, I love the community that's grown up around it, I'm an advocate, a booster, a champion. I'm often surprised however, by this: Collectively it seems that we have such a short memory regards what consititutes fine art photo - until very recently most color photography was considered schlocky. The idea that the "only b&w photography can be fine art photography" is not part of some long distant past.

There's a much broader conversation around all of this, but I have some work to do... I'll be back with more thoughts soon.

Related: Alec Soth: On the Forums

A Matter of Art + Semantics

From Museums and the Web, via NEWSgrist
Here's a fascinating, and slightly amusing story about museums' efforts to engage the public to annotate their collections via social tagging. NEWSgrist posts extensive excerpts of the full article from the New York Times, One Picture, 1,000 Tags. This is my favorite snippet:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

Geekery: Google Alerts, Domain Names + Missing Bees

Dinner of Honey by Adrienne de Boer* As you might know from reading my bio, this whole gallery thing is a second (and rather unexpected) career for me. I worked in the internet business for a long time - I was working at some ridiculous start-up doing cd-rom development when the tech dude started talking about this whole "World Wide Web" thing. That didn't last, so I went on to work with my high school pal Omar Wasow. In 1996 we were the first people to animate a New Yorker cartoon - we set the butterfly in flight right under Eustace Tilley's monocle. (Tina Brown was charmed!) All this is to say: there's a history to my tech obsessions. I can't write code, and I barely know how to use Photoshop, but I have been fascinated by how the internet enables communication and information distribution for a long time now. This means that I obsess over my stats (I recommend Mint, it rocks), read a million blogs and have a bunch of domain names (I have thirty-something last I checked.) I'm also a relatively early adopter of new technologies, but I tend to hang back and let my more hardcore geek friends suss things out beforehand. According to Mint, my current top searches, in order are: Personism Missing Bees Jen Bekman Women Speakers Ms. Jen Alec Soth W Magazine Jen Beckman [ed note: Grrr!] How to Draw a Bunny It all basically makes sense, except for the "missing bees" query being number two! People are really hot for information about the missing bees, and for whatever reason, my del.icio.us links to related stories make a good showing in the search results. I understand the interest - I have a Google Alert delivering me a digest of missing bee related links at the end of every day. I am nuts about the Google Alerts. I have more alerts than domain names, which is fine because they're free. I have the obvious ego-surfing related ones: "Jen Bekman" and "Jen Beckman" (since people so often get my last name's spelling wrong) "Hey Hot Shot" and "Personism". I also have several set up for artists that I work with, and a few of friends who I enjoy stalking keeping track of online. Lately I've taken to broadening my queries a bit, there's the aforementioned "missing bees" one and also I get a digest of Eliot Spitzer related news. I'm trying to figure out what to do with one of my favorite domains, imafuckingsteamroller.com, and am hoping to get some inspiration from daily doses of the steamroller himself. I usually go nuts with the domain names when I'm trying to come up with a name for something. I'm good at the naming thing, it's practically my best party trick. Friends regularly IM me for advice on coming up with titles for things. I founded and named mediabistro's design blog Unbeige. An IM conversation with Noah Kalina caused the name of his latest project to evolve from "Pictures of Noah K with Celebrities" to everyday/celebrity. I've had several late night conversations with Alice Wells trying to help her come up with a title for the book that is her thesis project. (I'm not sure if she went with my suggestion yet or not, but I hope so!) My naming is not always successful. opinionomatic.com seemed like a great idea at the time, but since I can never spell right the first pass myself it's an unlikely candidate for any web destination. I am still a little in love with "predux.com" a meaningless word, but since the domain name space is so crowded it's mere six letters have a certain appeal. None of my friends like it though - they always wrinkle their noses in disdain. I keep hoping that some drug company is going to want to buy it from me for zillions of dollars one day, because wouldn't that be a good pharmaceutical name? A while ago I registered "sychophant.com" and was bouncing in my seat with joy until I realized that I'd misspelled it. I still haven't quite gotten over the sting from that yet - I am a stickler for spelling and aside from that it's a URL that I could've put to good use. As an alternative, I could build something at one of my other two favorite holdings: alittlefuckedup.com and lazythinking.com. * Adrienne De Boer is about to graduate from SVA and is planning to move to Minneapolis shortly thereafter. As her mentor, and a fan of her work, I'm trying to connect her with some good people there. Not hard too hard what with all the minneagraphers I know, but drop me a line if you want to join the welcome wagon.

Getting Dirty With Google Books

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, available from City Lights Books

I had my first experience with Google Books tonight. I was searching for the text of a poem to email to a friend. All I had in my head were the first two lines: "Is it dirty / does it look dirty". That string plus "O'Hara" was enough to get me on track. I got the text I wanted, but I'm never really sure that people who repost poems have the line breaks and punctuation right. With poetry that stuff matters a whole lot, so I was pleased to find links to the Google-cataloged version of the book Lunch Poems, where the poem originally appeared.

It's an entirely different experience to read the poems from the scanned book pages rather than looking at reproduced text on some random web site. This might be specific for me to this volume since I own it, carry it around and have read the poems in it a million and one times, but it made me realize all over again just how different it is to read from a book rather than a page on the web. It seems like an obvious statement, but the brevity of the poem really highlighted the differences to me - such a contained experience, a few short lines. It felt better read through Google books than it did with the intermediary of whichever stray nerd like me decided to repost an O'Hara poem.

In case you were wondering, I'll post the poem below, but better yet - go buy the book. It's a good one.

POEM

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that's what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that's what you think of in the city
you don't refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that's what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a thought that's soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don't refuse to breathe do you