Thursday, January 29, 2009

a little bit of interesting

yarnfiti ... that is, grafiti with yarn
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4305406/Knitters-turn-to-graffiti-artists-with-yarnbombing.html

art from the middle east
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4347102/Unveiled-New-art-from-the-Middle-East-at-the-Saatchi-Gallery.html

your house ... i may have already included this in a previous post but its still cool
http://www.spaceinvading.com/entry.php?project_id=Laser-cut_art_book200901061231290535

zombies?
http://nofearofthefuture.blogspot.com/2009/01/keep-austin-zombie-free.html

HOPE
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jdVzCRkO7f6e2MHJoSuhy0BDIasQD95NLRT80

nano landscapes
http://michaeloliveri.com/wp/?page_id=44&g2_itemId=5469

Vik Muniz
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vik_muniz_makes_art_with_wire_sugar.html

WOULD YOU PAY $3,000 FOR A PAINTING BY A TODDLER? THAT'S WHAT THEY'RE CHARGING IN MELBOURNE
Germaine Greer
Monday 26 January 2009
Melbourne gallery director Mark Jamieson was putting together a group show featuring work by two photographers, Nikka Kalashnikova and Julia Palenov, last October, when Kalashnikova suggested another artist called Aelita Andre for inclusion. She showed Jamieson Andre's work, and he readily agreed. The works were vivid abstracts, full of life, movement and dazzling colour. It was only when Jamieson was putting together his press pack to promote the show, which has just opened at Melbourne's Brunswick Street gallery, that he discovered that Aelita was Kalashnikova's baby daughter - then only 22 months old.
He had accepted the work as worth hanging, so there was nothing for it but to go ahead, and headline the paintings as by the youngest artist ever to show work in a commercial gallery. The strategy paid off. Seven of the 15 works, priced between $300 and 10 times that, were sold before the show opened. Newspapers ran pictures of the toddler at work, with paint in her hair, her eyebrows and all over her clothes. Strangely, the daubs with which the child was covered were all bright, clean colours. You could have rolled her across a canvas and come up with pretty decent paintings.
The newspapers brayed in chorus: "Is this the story of a child prodigy or a joke at the expense of the art world?" It was neither. In art, what you see is what you get. What buyers of the toddler's work got was a prettily painted canvas of a convenient size. The prepared canvas had been painted with a solid colour and laid on the floor. The child had then had her hand dipped in a pot of acrylic colour and been invited to make marks on the canvas, which she was only too happy to do. Acrylic dries fast. Kalashnikova must have moved in before the child could smear her work, and cleaned off her hand before dipping it into another pot of a different colour. Aelita may have been allowed to select her colour, but it makes no odds. If she had been simply presented with opened pots of every imaginable colour and invited to make her own selections, all the colours would have been smeared together in the pots and on the canvas and on Aelita - to produce the muddy, neutral tint that is the hallmark of unsupervised finger-painting. It would have been one of her parents who decided when the work was finished and removed the canvas to a safe place.
Aelita's parents were not averse to talking up the notion that their child was a prodigy. Her father, Michael Andre, said that as soon as she began drawing in her Montessori playgroup, he could see that her production was different from the other children's: "It immediately leapt out as a defined representation of something in an abstract form." He appeared not to notice that he had defined her work as a contradiction in terms. Aelita's mother said that she wanted Aelita's work to be shown so that it could be judged "on its merits". "I wanted to get it out there and get a separate opinion. Of course, every mother is proud of their child."
Robert Nelson, art critic for Melbourne newspaper The Age, first described the work as "credible abstractions". Once informed of the truth about the "artist", he chose to hedge: "If it is a child's work, it's not a child alone. We're happy to credit the child, but it begins with a parental concept." Parental concept in this case equals parental project. Parents buy the canvas; parents lay in the ground colour; parents supply the acrylics; parents supply the child; the child does what children do. What the child did was probably better than anything either of her parents could do, simply because she was a child.
There is no reason to believe that Aelita's hand-eye coordination was better than that of other children of her age, or that she had a vision of the finished work. Her painting succeeds because the marks she places on the canvas are beyond her control. A cross mother declared in an angry blog that Aelita's parents were interfering so much in their daughter's work that they were likely to stunt the development of her creativity. They were in fact using her as a randomly programmed automatic paintbrush.
These days all our children draw and paint; nearly all of them will draw and paint progressively worse as they grow up, because they lose their excitement and become anxious, mostly about representation but also about neatness and composition. As someone who taught art to schoolchildren, I am well aware that, to get the best work out of them, I had to snatch the work away while it still carried the energy of the initial idea, before over-working had squeezed the life out of it. In a famous film of Picasso at work, we can watch him carrying out a wonderful brush drawing on the other side of a sheet of transparent perspex set up in front of the camera. In a very few minutes, the drawing is as good as a drawing can be, but the master keeps on working for as long again, until the drawing is ruined. The more prodigious the talent, the more childlike it is - and the more it needs the facilitator.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/1/26/1232961778956/A-painting-by-the-artist--001.jpg

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