Thursday, March 29, 2007

Art: The (Art) World According to Edward Goldman

Edward Goldman has a radio show in LA about Art. We need an Edward Goldman in Austin.
NY Times article: The (Art) World According to Edward Goldman

Excerpt:
"For nearly 20 years, he has been dispensing his art criticism in five-minute weekly segments called ''Art Talk'' on the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. That soapbox, expanded through podcasts and the Web, has helped make him a voice of authority in his adopted city.
It also makes him a Pied Piper of art, attracting participants to his classes, which he has taught four times before, and wrangling clients to his art consultancy, which includes individual and corporate collectors. Mr. Goldman doesn't just love art. He loves to talk about it. He punctuates his talks with the wisdom his participants came to hear."

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Art: Let Museums Leave Room for the Troublemakers

A very good essay by Holland Cotter in the NY Times criticizing the state of museums and the art market in the US: Let Museums Leave Room for the Troublemakers

Excerpts:
"A similar trick of illusion surrounds the vaunted populism of museums. Every American city, to be a proper city, now needs to have its own jewel-box art museum. Any existing museum anywhere needs to be expanded expensively. Thanks to all this stretching, art and its institutions have, we are told, grown increasingly democratic, more accessible to all.
In fact, the more successful a museum grows, the more elitist it tends to become. Social distinctions based on money and patronage can assume the intricate gradings of court protocol. At street level, admission prices climb, reinforcing existing socioeconomic barriers. Programming grows more cautious. If you're laying out $20, you want to see ''the best'' art, which often means art that adheres to conventional versions of beauty, authority, ''genius'' (white and male) set in a reassuringly familiar context.
....
Give the art world a break. It can't help being a miniature version of the culture that made it. What can it do about that?
One thing it can do -- that museums can do -- is clear an alternative space in that culture, a zone of moral inquiry, intellectual contrariness, crazy beauty. In this space, artists can simultaneously hold a magnifying glass up to something called ''America'' and also train a telescope on it: probe its innards and view it from afar, see it as others see it. From these perspectives, they might come up with models of a cosmopolitan, leveled-out society for a country in solidarity with the world, in contrast to the provincial, hierarchical, self-isolating one that exists today."

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Art: Bread & Roses

An article from the Guardian - How we can connect head and heart by Helena Kennedy, chair Arts & Business in the U.K. Excerpt:
"In an essay in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes spoke of his hopes for a future of wealth creation where he predicted that "those people who can keep alive and cultivate the art of life and do not sell themselves for the means of life will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes." Keynes recognised the importance of work life balance ahead of his time. Pulling the two sources of our national wellbeing together, the science of economics and the arts of life - bread and roses - is the real challenge of the age. It is vital that we widen art's embrace."

Technology: Top website redesign priorities

A good article from Jakob Neilsen on improving website usability for ROI. I like the focus on basic improvements like better writing and better product photos. I am tired of sites that are poorly done. Excerpt:
"Interface design is about making money for the company. Execution and workmanship are what you need, not fashion and advanced features. Do the basics, and do them well."

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Books: Interview with Dana Gioia

Naghmeh and I went to hear Dana Gioia speak at the HRC (one of the premier literary archives in the US). It was enjoyable and inspiring.
Here are some excerpts from a Statesman interview. He talked about some of these topics in his lecture.

On poetry:
"Poetry is a way of speaking, but it's also a way of listening — and it comes from the same rootstalk as music and song and theater. It's the kind of listening we don't do every day. You might ask, "Well, why do we need to do that?" And I'd say because it's important to have your humanity awakened, and enhanced, and developed, and refined. The trouble and toil we go through in everyday life tends to make us much more withdrawn into our psyches."

On arts and society
"A third trend is that a lot of our institutions — especially academic ones — have lost their ability to reach and speak to society. We have these tremendous subcultures in the arts, but almost no public figures emerging from them, the way Leonard Bernstein or Robert Frost once became part of the public conversation with the United States. Both brought ideas into society, but both brought people to the arts. We're not creating an audience commensurate with our institutions, not affecting society in a way commensurate with the talent that exists in the art world. The arts suffer. The society suffers. And I think youth suffers most because they don't have the power of the arts to fully realize their human potential."

On reading:
"Every group of Americans reads less, and less well than they did 20 years ago. That has terrible personal, social, cultural and civic consequences. Since people read less, they read less well. And since they read less well, they do less well in their academic study, which means they do less well in the job market. . . Reading awakens something to people's humanity. I worry that we're going into an America that's increasingly fragmented, isolated, commercialized, inert. "

On art and emotion:
"Art, especially literature, is one of the ways that cultures have traditionally recognized that you train emotions — you read plays and poems and novels. They allow you to rehearse powerful emotions and see their various consequences. So I think when you take those things out, when you replace novels and theater with video games, you're trading an emotional complexity for a simple adrenaline rush."

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Design: Readymechs


Readymechs look like so much fun! Thanks to Andrew Taylor's Artful Manager blog post for this discovery.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Design: Book cover blog


I love well designed book covers. Here is a book cover blog. Coolio!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Books: The debate about poetry

A good post on the Poetry Foundation website: What to do about Poetry that is a response to a New Yorker article: The Moneyed Muse - What can $200 million do for poetry?
The debate between popularity and elitism continues.