ArtSake

An handful of past MCC fellows/finalists recently got some nice (and free) publicity: Globe art critic Cate McQuaid had very good things to say about Sally Moore’s (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07) exhibition Edge and Jane Marsching (Photography Finalist ‘03), Deb Todd Wheeler (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘03), and Tanit Sakakini’s exhibition Figment’s Imagination.

Greg Cook pointed out this Chicago Tribune story of a local artist abroad. Boston’s Bren Bataclan spent October in the City of the Big Shoulders to trade paintings for the pledge that the recipient will “smile at strangers more often.” (The Trib, clearly an anti-smile establishment, punished him by calling him “Bret.”)

Speaking of giving away your work for free, literary agent Nathan Bransford asks: does it pay?

And does it pay for a city in revival to offer artist space for free? Fall River is about to test the theory. Artists can apply to take over empty storefronts, rent-free (they do pay utilities), in return for staying open to the public at designated times. The Herald News has the story.

As we approach election day, CultureGrrl makes a heartfelt plea to the next administration: end this long national nightmare and revive of National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships for all disciplines!

Speaking of NEA, it’s rolling out a new program to support new plays, and the first group of selections and finalists have been announced. Congrats to Massachusetts artists Lydia Diamond and Anne Gottlieb - both created works named as finalists.

The literary blog The Millions probes how a settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers could pave the way for major changes in book publishing. Most notably, out-of-print or impossible-to-find literature could be made available in digital versions or through print-on-demand technology.

Anyone out there know a William Young, formerly (and maybe still?) of Winchester? Authorities are trying to find him: they’ve found the George Benjamin Luks painting somebody pinched from him 37 years ago!

At HubArts, Joel Brown explores how an abandoned state mental hospital in Danvers has inspired hyperbolically creepy pastels by a Massachusetts artist.

Artists in the Berkshires can pick up marketing and business strategies in small business seminar for artists in Pittsfield.

Image: Jane Marsching, MCCALL GLACIER (2006), large-scale lightjet print. Jane’s digital prints are exhibited in Figment’s Imagination at Miller Block Gallery, through December 12.

If only the walls could talk.  Well apparently they will at the Worcester Art Museum starting this Thursday.

The provocative artist-activist collaborative THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) are at it again. Working in the longstanding tradition of agitprop artists, they have created a new work called Actions Speak. Upon receiveing their comission, THINK AGAIN rolled up their collective sleeves and completed a 67′ long mural at the Worcester Art Museum(WAM) as part of the Wall at WAM series. Action Speaks is the 7th project in the WAM series.

Debuting the week before the presidential election, THINK AGAIN’s Actions Speak aims to promote dialogue between art and public response as well as between global reality and local action. The project combines text, photography, drawing, etching, sculpture, and digital design. And apparently it is also the first Wall at WAM project to utilize both the museum’s interior wall and exterior façade (where a projection will be on view after dark during public evening hours on the 3rd Thursday of each month).

Image:  Wall at Worcester Art Museum: “Actions Speak, detail” by THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) 2008, inkjet on paper, 17 x 67 feet. (FY99 MCC Photography Fellows)

Photo Credits: Images courtesy of The Worcester Art Museum

Make your voices typed
There’s a great discussion underway in the comments section of our post about Martha Mason and the end of Snappy Dance Theater, ranging from tributes to Snappy to the future of Boston’s dance scene to the virtues of dance as an art form. Check it out and join in.

Leslie K. Brown invites you to guess that photographic image.

Mirror up to Nature wants you to send in your pictures of theatre artists at work.

A Minnesota playwright asks for your definition of success as an artist.

West Coast literary agent Nathan Bransford wants writers to share the worst writing advice you’ve ever received.

Reports from the field
At Best American Poetry, Eleanor Goodman shares her experiences at the Simmons College Chinese Poetry Festival, starting here and continuing here.

At the local indie film blog Kino-Eye, David Tames offers a perceptive, two-part response to the DIY Days Boston conference: part 1 and part 2. The conference was designed to help filmmakers finds ways “to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences.”

A tech reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has high praise for Act/React at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was curated by Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield and features Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07).

Do stuff
Film-makers and -appreciators in Central and Western Mass. have two upcoming festivals to hit: the Williamstown Film Festival October 17-26, and the Northampton Film Festival October 24-26.

This month in the Berkshires, a consortium of excellent arts groups presents two events in the Tricks of the Trade professional development series for individual artists. Events offer advice on selling handmade work online (October 14 in North Adams) and pricing artwork (October 15 in Pittsfield). Series flyer.

Big tubs of Gatorade poured on the heads of (i.e. congratulations to):
Massachusetts playwright Kirsten Greenidge, recently named a 2008 Time Warner Storytelling Fellow by the Sundance Institute. The fellowship “provides substantial support over four years to help fund the development and celebration of independent artists across the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film and Theatre Programs,” according to a press release quoted on the Filmmaker Magazine blog.

Massachusetts novelist Sue Miller, this year’s winner of the Kate Chopin Award, according to the Word Up blog from the Phoenix.

Americans for the Arts, who actually did what the debate moderators have yet to do: ask about the presidential candidates’ positions on the arts.

A parting question
In an ideas piece, Marjorie Garber asks: should universities become the ultimate patrons of the arts?

Art today is often collaborative, costly, and ambitious. Whether for an installation, a film, a theater or dance production, or some combination of these, art requires large and flexible spaces, and large and flexible budgets. There is more need than ever for connections, global and local, and for expensive, delicate, and complicated tools and equipment…

… Universities would create open spaces for art-making, with natural light, high ceilings, flexible flooring (for dance and other performance activities), and acoustic sophistication, furnished with state-of-the-art technology, staffed by skilled technicians, and providing spaces for encounters and improvisation across art practices. With augmented funding and a new vision of art’s centrality, universities might set up endowed centers that bring together international practitioners, begin directing major donations toward art centers, and recruit major working artists and give them a home during the prime of their careers.

Read the full piece.

Image: Still from String Beings. Premiered at the Virginia Wimberly Theater, June 2007. Image by MIT scientist and New Media artist, Jonathan Bachrach. Photo by Allison Evans.

How does our work as artists relate to our national identity? Or should it, even? At Gasp!, Laura Axelrod explores the artist’s role in a troubled country.

(The) main question has to do with how we, as Americans perceive ourselves and how we, as artists see our country. It is larger than how we perceive our audience. It incorporates how we approach them. Do we declare war on them to “wake them up?” Do we comfort them and validate their status? Do we see ourselves as parasites, living off the scraps of mainstream society? Or have we quit on America entirely, turned our nose up and looked to other countries for “real culture?”

These are important questions that artists and writers must ask themselves. How we see each other, individually and as a whole, will determine our role in seeing this country through its troubles. Perhaps our work can even play a role in healing it.

Speaking of troubled countries… even though it appears tonight’s presidential debate WILL happen after all, LA Times art critic Christopher Knight doubts arts and culture will be among the topics presidentially debated (but feels they should be).

Martha Mason, Artistic Director of the late, great Snappy Dance Theater (recently featured on ArtSake here), seeks to spark a conversation about funding for small performing arts companies, at Geoff Edgers’ The Exhibitionist.

At the Best American Poetry blog, Julia Cohen gives an eyewitness account of a recent reading by Caroline Knox (Poetry Fellow ‘96, ‘06) at NYC’s infamous KGB Bar.

Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr tips his hat to departing MFA Head of Film and Video Bo Smith.

Image: Sandy Litchfield, DOWNPOUR (2005), oil, acrylic, ink on canvas, 42 in. x 48 in.

Sick of opinion polls and market research questionnaires? Well so were the artists Komar and Melamid, and a few years back they turned their annoyance into a humorous art project. They queried hundreds of people in different countries to discover what the best painting would look like, compiled the data, and then created paintings based on the information they collected. Conversely, they also polled people to discover what the worst painting would look like. Sometimes democracy is ug-a-lee.

In this poll-free, no spin blog, we want to remind you that it’s a good thing to exercise your universally recognized freedoms and liberties on November 4th and vote for the presidential candidate of your choice.  If you are not registered to vote, go here to learn how. If you think you’ll need an absentee ballot or need to get one for someone you know, go here. Presidential elections can be won or lost by a few hundred votes (for instance, Florida in 2000 was won by a margin of 537) so remember fellow citizens, every vote does count no matter whose candidacy you endorse.

A quick trip into the wayback machine reminds us that it wasn’t until the 15th amendment was ratified in 1870 that the right of citizens (meaning men) of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It took The 19th Amendment in 1920 to give women the right to vote. 

Go here for more general voting information in Massachusetts.

Down on the Cape you’ll find the Cotuit Center for the Arts has a call to artists to participate in an exhibition called The Art Vote 2008.

And if you’re interested in public policy (as it relates specifically to being an artist), you should check out the second annual Artists Under the Dome event takes place this coming November 13th at the state house in Boston.

Image of United States by Komar & Melamid

 While Wall St. takes a nose dive, the pockets of British artist Damian Hirst have just been filled with newly minted greenbacks thanks to record shattering sales of his work at Sotheby’s.

He has been sued on copyright infringement. He has a reputation of being a piranha that rips off others original ideas and exploits them to his own financial advantage. Some see his work of animals submerged in vitrines of formaldehyde with revulsion, sadness and evidence of a lack of creativity. To others, Hirst is considered a prolific and influential artist with extraordinary business acumen reshaping the way in which art is created and sold. No matter what your opinion of him, and there is plenty to go around, there’s no doubting that the Brit bad boy has a 127 million dollar smile. His gamble to bypass the traditional gallery system and sell his work directly via the auction house has paid off. I for one though will keep my beloved dog far, far away from his studio and its gallons of carcinogenic embalming fluids.

And speaking of large sums of money, the Museum of Fine Arts is reported to have met its 500 million dollar fundraising goal.

At the blog of the venerable literary journal Ploughshares, 2006 Poetry Fellow Simeon Berry calls our attention to, in his own droll and idiosyncratic way, a spirited discussion within the online poetry community about one poet’s disastrous experience with a poetry contest.

So you want to build yourself a super-duper artist’s website, and you want to do it free, gratis, and for nothin’? Over at the Technology in the Arts blog, Brad Stephenson wants to help you. Because as he puts it, “You’re cheap, and I love you.”

Art critic Sebastian Smee, recent emigre from The Australian to the Boston Globe, shares his first impressions on first impressions (oh, and on Massachusetts art museums).

Perhaps instead of Artist Fellowships, we should award Olympic medals in the arts.

MacDowell Colony doesn’t oppose Divine Mercy. But the isolated artists retreat (which has welcomed many Massachusetts artists over the years) would prefer the new church not be built quite so close to MacDowell’s, you know, isolation.

Where do the presidential candidates stand on the arts? Here, a couple of bloggers offer opinions on the arts policies of Obama and McCain. You can also investigate on your own at ArtsVote, a program of Americans for the Arts Action Fund. The site links to current and former presidential candidates’ arts policies, including Clinton, Richardson, and Huckabee (Did you know Mike Huckabee is a big supporter of arts and music in education, calling them “Weapons of Mass Instruction?”).

Disclaimer (spoken in robot voice): No candidate or opinion of same candidate being advocated for by ArtSake blog. Just sharing Internet data. Affirmative. End transmission.

Image: Sarah Slavick, TRANSMIT (2005), oil on wood, 36 in. X 36 in.

Art critic Sebastian Smee had a warm review of Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts, in Friday’s Boston Globe. The show is curated by state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg and runs at the National Heritage Museum through February 8, 2009.

From the review:

The show begins… with a dazzling costume from Boston’s Caribbean Carnival made by Tamara Shillingford. The festival, held at the end of August, is rooted in Mardi Gras and, according to band leader Errol A. Phillip, the kind of celebrations that took place “when slavery was abolished. You’re giving praise for freedom.”
…
In a similar vein - but emerging from a completely different tradition - the show includes three tin men made by retired sheet-metal workers William Walsh, Glenn Walker, Daniel Hardy, and Richard Clarke. Tin men appear in another local festival with deep roots, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and they are traditionally a way for metal workers to advertise the products of their trade, recruit apprentices, and display union pride. The three here were made especially for this show. “We are the only trade that takes a flat metal stock from the mill and rolls it, forms it and fabricates it,” says Walsh.
…
(The exhibit is) one part of a much bigger project, which includes Holtzberg’s great catalog essay (it explains the stories behind the various objects in some depth) and, beyond both the show and the catalog, a great deal of valuable documentation, which can only help in the attempt to keep these traditions alive and the effects of too much TV at bay.

Read the full review.

Image: Tin Men, Metalwork, occupational tradition (2007), Sheet Metal Workers International Assn., Boston, Massachusetts, Copper, galvanized iron, stainless steel, 63 3/4 x 28 3/4 x 17 in. each. Courtesy of Sheet Metal Workers Local 17. Photography by Jason Dowdle.

It’s no revelation that print space for arts criticism has been steadily diminishing. (We wrote about how this affected the Boston dance community in one of our first posts.)

CRITICAL MASS, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has been sounding the alarm about shrinking book sections in newspapers, recently reporting on scale-backs in book reviews at the Newark Star-Ledger, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times.

One bright spot may be the growth of online arts criticism. According to a Publisher’s Weekly story, the book page of NPR.org is increasing its reviews and adding more original, stand-alone content. Then there’s the bustling community of independent bloggers reviewing books - such as Bookdwarf, a book industry blog with punchy takes on current books, written by one of the buyers of Cambridge’s own Harvard Book Store.

Numerous other sites with locally-based contributors host arts criticism. The online arts magazine Big RED & Shiny has reviews of New England visual art shows in every issue. Greg Cook’s New England Journal of Aesthetic Research offers critiques and incisive analysis of the New England art scene. Charles Guiliano reviews a variety of media (often based in Western Mass) in Maverick Arts, and Edgar Allen Beem reviews art exhibitions throughout New England in Just Looking.

The Arts Fuse, a site founded by former WBUR arts critic and PRI’s World Books editor Bill Marx, makes a persuasive case for the Web as fertile grounds for arts criticism. The site features Marx’s theater reviews as well as writers covering dance, visual arts, music, and other media. As suggested by the Jonathan Swift quote in the site’s banner - “Use the point of your pen, not the feather.” - Arts Fuse’s criticism doesn’t dull its edges, favoring the probing and provocative over the nicey-nice.

Are there other sites devoted to New England arts criticism, not mentioned here? Feel free to leave a comment and round out the picture.

Image: Brian Corey’s “Reaction” (2007), Acrylic, Ink, on Wood, 8 in. x 8 in.