"Fallen Blossoms" by Cai Guo-Qiang

Yesterday afternoon, I took a walk down to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to see Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder explosion drawing, "Fallen Blossom," which took place at sunset. It was pretty impressive. In case you're unfamiliar with the artist, he's world renowned for his gunpowder drawings and firework displays. He had a retrospective at the Guggenheim New York last year and he was responsible for the fireworks at the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Beijing.

Louise Bourgeois

Cell (Choisy)
pink marble, metal, glass
120 1/2 x 67 x 95 inches
1990-1993

I wish I had a better image than the one above. Note the guillotine blade suspended. Anyhow, I recently went to the Guggenheim to check out the Louise Bourgeois retrospective and this stopped me for quite a while. Click the link and navigate around the site to find better images. I don't know where to go with this post so I suppose that's all.

Free Rice

Challenge your knowledge of famous paintings. For each painting you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.

Free Rice! You can also quiz yourself on other subjects.

Image: Rice Bowl, 2008 by Justin Clayton

Salvador Dali, Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney

The MoMA has an exhibition on view, Dali: Painting and Film, which is more entertaining than you'd expect.

I've never really been that taken by Dali's paintings although I can most certainly appreciate surrealist ideas and work. The causes for my disinterest in his paintings are unknown. The possibilities for this include overexposure, general distaste in the way the paintings look or the one of the very things his work is lauded for: striking visualization of dreams. The images and motifs in his paintings don't reflect anything I've ever seen in my dreams and perhaps that creates an automatic disconnect in me as a viewer. The opposite rings true for me with his film work. Let's not turn this into the analysis of my dreams, though.

Vanguard Films outsourced work to Dali to assist in the creation of the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound". Hitchcock felt that dreams on film had pretty much just been portrayed by blurriness. He wanted Dali to bust that shit up:


Dali thought Walt Disney was a "great" surrealist. Here's a little bit from a Dali/Disney collaboration that never finished, "Destino". Disney animators completed the project in 2003. I can't tell if what I find online is part of the original or later-completed work. Here's a clip, nonetheless:

NEA - "New Artists in the Workforce Study"

In June the NEA released a study from 1990-2005 looking at artists' demographic and employment patterns. I haven't read the entire 180 page document but the brief 'executive summary' linked below is fascinating.

From the press release:

“Artists now play a huge but mostly unrecognized role in the new American economy of the 21st century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This report shows how important American artists are to both our nation’s cultural vitality and economic prosperity of our communities.”

Numbering almost two million, artists are one of the largest classes of workers in the nation, only slightly smaller than the U.S. military’s active-duty and reserve personnel (2.2 million)...artists earn an aggregate income of approximately $70 billion annually.

Among the key findings:

Demographic trends

• Between 1970 and 1990, the number of artists more than doubled, from 737,000 to 1.7 million – a much larger percentage gain than for the labor force as a whole. Between 1990 and 2005, the growth of artists slowed to a 16 percent rate, about the same as for the overall labor force.
• Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations. Men outnumber women in architecture, announcing, music, production, and photography. Women outnumber men in the fields of dance, design, and writing.
• Like the larger labor force, the artist population is becoming more diverse. The proportion of Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian artists grew from about nine percent of artists in 1990 to almost 15 percent by 2005.

Geographic distribution

• Opportunities for artistic employment are greater in metropolitan areas. More than one-fifth of all U.S. artists live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, and Boston. Half of all artists live in 30 metropolitan areas.
• Unique regional concentrations emerge. New Mexico has the highest share of fine artists, Vermont has the highest proportion of writers, and Tennessee, the highest proportion of musicians.

Employment and income

• Artists are entrepreneurial – 3.5 times more likely to be self-employed.
• Artists are underemployed – one-third of artists work for only part of the year.
• Artists generally earn less than workers with similar education levels. The median income from all sources in 2005 was $34,800 for artists, higher than the $30,100 median for the total labor force, and lower than the $43,200 for all professionals.

Education level

• Artists are more educated. Artists are twice as likely to have a college degree as other U.S. workers.
• The share of degree-holding artists rose between 1990 and 2005.
• Among artist occupations with the highest educational attainment levels are architects, writers, and producers.

FULL REPORT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

7.25, No Camera, Zidane & This Other Life

The past 3 days, I've watched a 5-minute, 16-second clip from the sports documentary/art piece "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait" over 20 times. What I saw dazzled me. But what I heard has
inspired me. The song playing throughout is "7.25" by Mogwai. I've spent 99 cents to buy this song off of iTunes (a rarity since I still prefer buying cd's but I couldn't wait) and if I've watched the clip over 20 times, I've listened to the song over 100. Despite not having seen the entire film, I've been motivated to make a highly-selective, minimally-invasive, photographic pseudo-documentary of my everyday. For obvious reasons, I can't say whether this project will be in the same vein as "Zidane" or not, but all I know is that I don't own a digital camera. I'm going to have to borrow, buy or steal one.

I waited for a car to come pick me up to drive me home for few minutes after work tonight (12:15 am, or 50 minutes ago). I was just looking at cars and buses coming down Lexington Avenue. All I wanted to do was take out my camera phone and snap away. I didn't think about how original the images were going to be, or the poor quality they were going to be presented in, I just wanted to record those images. That feeling was truth. That temporary absence of restrictive feelings and abundant questioning made me understand just how much self-doubt we all live in. Arguably, some live more socially constrained lives than others but we all exist within these boundaries. Different situations, different masks. I don't care if they're self-imposed or not.

I thought of what my life looks like in the morning now that I live alone and nobody can see me. Or what my walk to the subway must look like. What do I focus on? What breaks that focus every now and then? Maybe my friends want to see what my apartment looks like when I don't know they're coming over. Who cares? This project will answer just a few of these questions and maybe more will come about because of this. I'm not promising unfettered access into my life. I'm not an artist. I'm certainly not a photographer. I just want to see what a few days look like to me.

This could be interesting or it could be a load of self-absorbed garbage.

There are times when I really don't know who I am.

I promise a funny post will be coming soon.