Recently in Aesthetics Category

Two of my least favourite things come together-

"Thomas Kinkade's apparent attempt to establish broad intellectual property rights "over a style and manner of painting and image-crafting""

http://theartlawblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/copyright-in-painting-style.html

If God exists and He is the cause of truth, beauty and goodness then His death would remove those qualities from human experience.

If God does not exist then truth, beauty and goodness cannot be caused by him and so their existence in the human experience cannot be dependent on His existence.

These are crayon sketches of two possible positions regarding the relationship of virtue to the existence of God.

In a post on the painter Francis Bacon at OpenDemocracy the author confuses these two positions. Specifically they confuse the preconditions of the former with the consequences of the latter.

They find the exemplification of this mummers' atheism in the painting of Francis Bacon. Bacon cannot be touched by the grace of God for a very good reason that they neglect to mention for some reason. Despite this, Bacon treats both sacred and profane subjects equally in his art. This is an a-theistic art (rather than an anti-theistic art) but it is not a design for life for atheists or the only possible experience of a Godless universe, even for Bacon.

Marie Antoinette

Somebody has to be holding the parcel when the music stops. Their coronation can be useful for closing any messy chapters in the (art) history books. A career awaits, the messy and unprofessional lived experience of actually doing something needs tidying up for professional presentation.

Charlie McCarthy

The gentrification of the social graph's captured aesthetics. The managerialist pastoral of relationism applied to reclaiming the messy emergence and sociality of Web 2.0. The Foxy-Whiskered Gentleman playing at being Jemima Puddleduck.

Nelson Muntz

Pointing and laughing at YouTube videos is one thing. Pointing and laughing at the history of art computing is the same thing. This is what semiotics does in as much as it does anything. It contributes to the cultural heat death of corporate information culture. 

"Like That" is back in the art section of the site. Make sure you have Jave enabled and take a look!

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=322

Marc invited two team members of the GOTO10 collective, Heather Corcoran and Aymeric Mansoux to discuss about pure:dyne on the Netbehaviour.org list.

The discussion took place between October 16th - 23rd Oct 08. An interview and an open discussion was joined by other list members of Netbehaviour.

This is an excellent insight into an art computing project.

I've now switched to pure:dyne based on this discussion.

"Getting Real" is 37 Signals' book of advice for developing internet software more quickly, more easily, and more successfully. As with "Getting Things Done", this may not at first sound particularly relevant for making art. But Getting Real's approach to projects is a very dynamic and creative one, and even if not all of its details are appropriate for art making (or for every artist), there's lots of good ideas if you take the time to map them onto art practice.

To pick a few section headings...

I always try to solve my own problems in art, I can never get enthusiastic about art for an external agenda. I usually pick a fight when making art, many of my series of works are ironizations of worldviews I disagree with or of artists whose work I dislike. I try to get at least one piece in a series finished as soon as possible to keep up my morale. I give samples away for free with images of work available on the website and as postcards and other physical items available from me in person. And I always try to give series of works memorable names.

Just read "art" for "software" and "studio" for "organization" and much of it makes sense, or is at least thought provoking. The chapters on "Staffing", "Code", "Interface Design" and "Words" won't be relevant. Do surprise me in the comments, though... ;-) .

Damien Hirst's diamond skull "For The Love Of God", 2007, is owned fractionally by Hirst, his dealer and an anonymous investment group. As the monetary value of the work rises and falls, the value of the fraction of it owned by each investor in the work will rise and fall with it. Their values have proportion and relations.

It's possible to imagine short selling, leveraging and other financial abstractions and transformations being applied to this value. The fact of their application might affect the monetary value of the work. And the monetary value of the work is in no small way part of the work aesthetically. The economics of the work reach into its aesthetics.

Ashley Bickerton's "Le Art (Composition with Logos 2)", 1987, is covered with a number of corporate logos. The recognizability and relevance of the logos is part of the aesthetics of the work. The work will change as the fortunes of the companies or their logos vary.

With both Hirst's work and Bickerton's there is still a physical artwork as the ground for the financial figures of the aesthetics of the piece. As with relational art, a more thorough dematerialization of the artwork (a greater primacy for its gross ideological rather than aesthetic principles) might require a greater physicality. Rather than a work of pure economic figures, the ground of a flea market (or its haute couture equivalent, an auction house) might be required.

There are many Web 2,0 sites that allow you to organize projects using Wikis, checklists of to-do items, calendars and other systems. These can be of use to artists.

37 Signals are the leaders in this area but their work is not Free Software so I recommend Joyent's Connector and Wikidot instead, or even better software installed on your own server.

Two posts from 37 Signals's blog illusttrate how to use Web 2.0 productivity services to help organize art practice.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1226-how-to-manage-long-breaks-in-your-software-side-projects

Use a todo/checklist service to remind you of ideas you have yet to try or tasks that you need to complete for a project. Then when you return to the project after an interruption you can quickly remind yourself of what needs doing.

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/08/backpack-helps.html

Use a wiki-style service to gather research materials such as images, references and notes for a project.

Although these examples are for software develoment and an academic research respectively it is easy to see how their lessons can be used to help organize art porjects.

The book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen describes an over-arching system for organizing work and life. It has two ideas that I think artists can use without adopting the system wholesale.

The first is to organize the working materials for projects into their own, physical, folders. Then when you need to return to the project you just get the folder and you immediately have all the materials you need to hand. Substitute "area of the studio", "rack", "drawer" or "portfolio" to taste. You don't need separate sketchbooks, and the system allows for an unsorted folder and other ways for ideas to mix and percolate.

The second is to break tasks down into quickly achievable "next actions", ideally achievable in 20 minutes or less each. So rather than "make 20 paintings for the show", "mark up the next canvas" or "sketch the cat". Yes, much of the value of art is long periods of visual contemplation or creative "flow". But you need to get there, and worrying about the big picture is less constructive than building up to that state slowly but surely.

There may be more in Getting Things Done of interest to individual artists, and its system is applicable to admin and other non-art work as well. It's well worth a read.

Open Art History is a proposed project to gather and distribute reproductions of artworks and art historical documents. Art is a form of knowledge, and art history is a way of presenting that knowledge. Access to high quality reproductions of images of art and to literature & data concerning art history is of great value to artists, critics, art historians, art theorists and educators.

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenArtHistory

The initial aim of the project is to identify standards for data and image formats for projects.

The pilot project for Open Art History will be Open Hogarth. This is due to the availability and comparative ease of reproduction of Hogarth's work, its social and historical relevance, its art historical importance, and its popularity with the general public. Hogarth's literary nature is also a link to the Open Literature project, and his place in the history of the copyright of art makes him an interesting subject for a Free Knowledge project.

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenHogarth

http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/openhogarth/

The initial aim of the project is to find sources for high-quality digital photographs or scans of Hogarth etchings online.

If you have any comments or suggestions then please post to the okf-discuss list, join in the OKF IRC meeting on Wednesday, and/or add material to the OKF Wiki.