Tag Archives: art

17-5641 Emerald is the color of the year for 2013

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Get ready for a world of emerald in 2013:

Pantone…has named 17-5641 Emerald as the 2013 color of the year because it “continues to sparkle and fascinate,” said a rep in a statement.

More from Pantone on why emerald was chosen:

The 2012 Color of the Year, PANTONE 17-1463 Tangerine Tango, a spirited, reddish orange, provided the energy boost we needed to recharge and move forward. Emerald, a vivid, verdant green, enhances our sense of well-being further by inspiring insight, as well as promoting balance and harmony…

Most often associated with brilliant, precious gemstones, the perception of Emerald is sophisticated and luxurious. Since antiquity, this luminous, magnificent hue has been the color of beauty and new life in many cultures and religions. It’s also the color of growth, renewal and prosperity – no other color conveys regeneration more than green. For centuries, many countries have chosen green to represent healing and unity.

And if you were curious about how Pantone makes this year selection, here how Pantone describes the process:

The Color of the Year selection is a very thoughtful process. To arrive at the selection, Pantone quite literally combs the world looking for color influences. This can include the entertainment industry and films that are in production, traveling art collections, hot new artists, popular travel destinations and other socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from technology, availability of new textures and effects that impact color, and even upcoming sports events that capture worldwide attention.

It sounds like there is money to be made here.

It could be a fascinating study to see who follows this color of the year. Would the average consumer notice the new color of the year? In other words, could a consumer go through their closet or through their home decorations and date different objects to the color of the year? I’m going to have to pay some more attention to my own shopping and choices in the year to come…

I’m also intrigued to know if there is any continuity in colors between years. Here are the colors of the year since 2000:

  • PANTONE 17-1463 Tangerine Tango (2012)
  • PANTONE 18-2120 Honeysuckle (2011)
  • PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise (2010)
  • PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa (2009)
  • PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris (2008)
  • PANTONE 19-1557 Chili Pepper (2007)
  • PANTONE 13-1106 Sand Dollar (2006)
  • PANTONE 15-5217 Blue Turquoise (2005)
  • PANTONE 17-1456 Tigerlily (2004)
  • PANTONE 14-4811 Aqua Sky (2003)
  • PANTONE 19-1664 True Red (2002)
  • PANTONE 17-2031 Fuchsia Rose (2001)
  • PANTONE 15-4020 Cerulean (2000)

These seem to be mainly blue or bright colors. Is there a theme of vibrancy behind all of these colors?

Mapping Chicago by taking a photo at every major intersection

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Planner Neil Freeman found an interesting way to map Chicago: take a photo of every major intersection. A post on Atlantic Cities describes the map:

Freeman’s first project, called “Chicago mile by mile,” created an unconventional city map of the city based on 212 photos of strategic “mile” intersections. It was inspired by Chicago’s unique grid system, in which every eight blocks measures a full mile, and the city’s corresponding address system, which advances (for the most part) in increments of 800. If you begin at the zero-points of Madison and State streets and go west a mile, for example, you’ll reach the corner of Halsted Street at 800 W Madison Street.

“This arbitrary address system ends up defining what it means to live in Chicago,” he says. “These arbitrary systems that end up underlying our built environment of our daily life are really intriguing to me.”

On the webpage with the map, here is how Freeman describes the map:

 

Chicago mile by mile

Neil Freeman, 2002
213 color photographs
114 x 104 inches

These photographs maps Chicago’s uncomprimising street grid into 212 4″x6″ snapshots. The photographs document every intersection of mile streets, major roads on section lines. The entire city is traversed by this network of arterials. Photographs were taken in January 2002.

It would take a while to look at the thumbnails of all the photographs. However, I think doing so might start to reveal patterns. In other words, are the major intersection on the North Side more alike or different from major intersections on the South Side? Are there patterns across all intersections? I suspect there may be as these major intersections would tend to attract certain kinds of functions and organizations.

Extending this project in three possible ways could also add a lot of information. One way to expand this would be to start filling in more of the intersections between these major ones. A second way would be to track these intersections over time. If Freeman took all of these photographs again in 2012, how much would have changed? A third way would be to collect data on how people experience and visual these intersections and compare this to the photographs. How exactly do residents and visitors perceive these intersections?

The return of the floating McMansion critique in Miami

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I missed this the first time around in 2005 but it has returned to Miami: the “Inflatable Villa” continues to critique McMansions though it will no longer floating:

Seven years ago, Miami-based architect Luis Pons unveiled the “Fabulous Floating Inflatable Villa” at Art Basel 2005. Floating proudly offshore in Miami, the over-the-top, gargantuan inflated pavilion aimed to critique the McMansion culture of the day, arguing that the real estate bubble had caused Miamians to lose sight of detail and quality in the wake of blind excess and uninspired grandeur.

How things have changed in the real estate world in seven short years. Using the recession as inspiration, Pons will re-introduce The Inflatable Villa to Basel for the first time this year in a entirely new context.

“It’s the same piece, but the meaning has completely changed,” explained Pons. “It’s an analogy to represent the disparity between where we were in 2005 and where we are today.”

The structure will be placed in a vacant lot in the Design District, a site which was intended to be developed until the bursting real estate bubble of 2008 halted the project. The villa, only partially inflated, will be placed within rigid metal bar columns that were part of the original construction site, its fragility a tangible analogy to the rigid metal structure encasing it.

Perhaps it is less of a critique today and more of a triumphal return or a triumphal critique. To many, Pons was right in 2005; the McMansion simply couldn’t last, either financially or architecturally. Housing data in Miami would seem to support this changed perspective of the “Fabulous Floating Inflatable Villa.” Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows “privately owned housing starts” were up quite a bit in 2005 and reached a reached a low in 2009. Miami was also hit hard by foreclosures during the economic crisis and foreclosure rates have still been high in recent years:

The rate of foreclosures in the greater Miami area declined in August to 16.42 percent of outstanding mortgages from 18.14 a year earlier, according to CoreLogic. The foreclosure rate is the percentage of mortgages in some stage of the foreclosure process.

The data firm said the rate of mortgages with delinquencies of 90 days or more in the Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall area also fell in August to 22.89 percent from 25.45 percent a year earlier.

Despite the continuing downward trend, Miami’s foreclosure rate in August remained far higher than the national rate of 3.35 percent of outstanding mortgages, the firm said. The area’s mortgage-delinquency rate was also far higher than the national average of 6.76 percent in August, CoreLogic said.

I wonder if this suggests that while McMansion construction may be down in the United States compared to a peak 6-8 years ago, the market for art critiquing McMansions hasn’t yet peaked.

Using famous diagrams to explore the changes in urban planning

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The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association has put together a new exhibit that provides an overview of urban planning. See 10 of the diagrams and short descriptions here. Also, here is a quick overview of the exhibit:

The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.

“The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,” Grant says. “Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.”

Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie behind some of your favorite spots in your city. “Even if you don’t know the diagram,” Grant says, “you might know the places that the diagram inspired.” SPUR shared these images from the exhibition, which opened this week. If you happen to live in San Francisco, you can also visit the show in person at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery (654 Mission Street) through February (oh, and it’s free!).

Three things strike me when looking at these influential diagrams:

1. On one hand, these diagrams are very similar to maps. On the other hand, they involve a particular vision that can sometimes be hard to achieve with a two dimensional image. These diagrams provide particular perspectives but they go beyond just being maps because the creators (and perhaps some of the viewers) can see a bigger picture.

2. They indicate a more scientific or rational approach to putting together cities. Particularly in the last century, urban planning has become a professional field that involves theories along with specific training and methods. These diagrams involve a lot of straight lines, overhead views, and the idea that the proper placement of buildings, streets, and other features can lead to the right outcomes.

3. These diagrams are quite artistic. Do they qualify as art?

The “fantastical anthropology” of taking photographs of beach “tribes” in Spain

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One photographer has taken a unique approach to documenting life on Spain’s beaches:

Sitting there in the sand, mostly naked, with chairs, towels and belongings delineating territory, beach goers tend to form small fiefdoms with their friends and families. It’s a phenomenon that Spanish photographer Lucia Herrero has exploited in her excellent portrait series, appropriately titled, Tribes…

“It was like an anthropological revelation,” she says. “Suddenly it was like, ‘I have it!’”

For two summers, 2009 and 2010, Herrero traveled along the entire Spanish coast, both the Mediterranean and Atlantic, shooting hundreds of pictures of Spanish families that, combined, make up what she calls a sort of collective portrait of Western and Spanish middle class society…

Not only does Herrero view her work as an observation of human behavior, but she’s coined a term for her style: “Antropología Fantástica,” or fantastical anthropology.

Herroro says she purposely constructs a kind of fantasy world, or theatrical production, by shooting into the sun, creating a darker than normal backdrop, and then lighting the families in the portrait with a 1000 watt strobe, resulting in a surreally contrasted photo. Using a strobe to obtain this effect is nothing new, but it’s only a small part of Antropología Fantástica that allows Herrero to take a “banal situation and [elevate] it to a state of exception.” While arranging the shoot, for example, she says she likes to direct the families but never gives them direct instructions on how to pose. As a result the stances and groupings she captures are sort of arranged but also infused with a tinge of chaos.

How much would it take to make this a more traditional ethnographic project? The photos would certainly get people’s attention and then if this project also included observations, interviews, and background information, this could make a fascinating study.

I’ve written before about the idea of “performative social science.” I know the primary currency in American sociology today is statistics but I’ve continued to mull over the idea that such research findings or methodologies could find space for more artistic elements. Perhaps this is a continuation of my enjoyment in watching the music jam session at ASA 2012. At the least, putting our research findings into more “popular” venues, such as art, music, film, documentaries, and stories might help us reach an American culture that is not well-versed in how to read, understand, and care about social science.

Foodism as the newest part of high culture

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A commentator in the New York Times suggests “food [has] replaced art as high culture“:

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

Young men once headed to the Ivy League to acquire the patina of high culture that would allow them to move in the circles of power — or if they were to the manner born, to assert their place at the top of the social heap by flashing what they already knew. Now kids at elite schools are inducted, through campus farmlets, the local/organic/sustainable fare in dining halls and osmotic absorption via their classmates from Manhattan or the San Francisco Bay Area, into the ways of food. More and more of them also look to the expressive possibilities of careers in food: the cupcake shop, the pop-up restaurant, the high-end cookie business. Food, for young people now, is creativity, commerce, politics, health, almost religion…

Like art, food is also a genuine passion that people like to share with their friends. Many try their hands at it as amateurs — the weekend chef is what the Sunday painter used to be — while avowing their respect for the professionals and their veneration for the geniuses. It has developed, of late, an elaborate cultural apparatus that parallels the one that exists for art, a whole literature of criticism, journalism, appreciation, memoir and theoretical debate. It has its awards, its maestros, its televised performances. It has become a matter of local and national pride, while maintaining, as culture did in the old days, a sense of deference toward the European centers and traditions — enriched at a later stage, in both cases, by a globally minded eclecticism.

Just as aestheticism, the religion of art, inherited the position of Christianity among the progressive classes around the turn of the 20th century, so has foodism taken over from aestheticism around the turn of the 21st. Now we read the gospel according, not to Joyce or Proust, but to Michael Pollan and Alice Waters.

This is intriguing but I wonder if it is as pervasive as this commentator suggests. I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s ideas that certain cultural tastes became part of a habitus for different classes. Thus, something like food or art or music has to be part of a lifestyle and is often formally taught. For example, high culture as art and music (and perhaps film and more popular music these days – and we might throw in literary classics) is taught in many colleges. Do the same colleges formally teach about food in the same way? Do lower levels of school teach about food? Foodism might be present in many social circles and is increasingly so in the media but I wonder if it has reached the same level of formal training just yet.

Also, if foodism has really ascended to this level, what does this say about the current state of art?

Argument: George Lucas is the “greatest artist of our time”

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Camille Paglia explains why she believes George Lucas is “the greatest artist of our time”:

Who is the greatest artist of our time? Normally, we would look to literature and the fine arts to make that judgment. But Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media marked the end of an era. The supreme artists of the half century following Jackson Pollock were not painters but innovators who had embraced technology—such as the film director Ingmar Bergman and the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. During the decades bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, as the fine arts steadily shrank in visibility and importance, only one cultural figure had the pioneering boldness and world impact that we associate with the early masters of avant-garde modernism: George Lucas, an epic filmmaker who turned dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre.

The digital revolution was the latest phase in the rapid transformation of modern communications, a process that began with the invention of the camera and typewriter and the debut of mass-market newspapers and would produce the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, phonograph, radio, television, desktop computer, and Internet. Except for Futurists and Surrealists, the art world was initially hostile or indifferent to this massive surge in popular culture. Industrial design, however, rooted in De Stijl and the Bauhaus, embraced mechanization and grew in sophistication and influence until it has now eclipsed the fine arts.

No one has closed the gap between art and technology more successfully than George Lucas. In his epochal six-film Star Wars saga, he fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions. He constructed a vast, original, self-referential mythology like that of James Macpherson’s pseudo-Celtic Ossian poems, which swept Europe in the late 18th century, or the Angria and Gondal story cycle spun by the Brontë children in their isolation in the Yorkshire moors. Lucas was a digital visionary who prophesied and helped shape a host of advances, such as computer-generated imagery; computerized film editing, sound mixing, and virtual set design; high-definition cinematography; fiber-optic transmission of dailies; digital movie duplication and distribution; theater and home-entertainment stereo surround sound; and refinements in video-game graphics, interactivity, and music.

Read the entire interesting argument.

Four quick thoughts:

1. This broadens the common definition of artist. It acknowledges the shift away from “high art,” the sort of music, painting, and cultural works that are typically found in museums or respectful places to “popular art” like movies and music.

2. The argument doesn’t seem to be that Lucas is the best filmmaker or best storyteller. Rather, this is based more on his ability to draw together different cultural strands in a powerful way. Paglia argues he brought together art and technology, combined stories from the past and present, promoted the use and benefits of new technologies that were influential far beyond his own films.

3. Another way to think of a “great artist” is to try to project the legacy of artists. How will George Lucas be viewed in 50 or 100 years? Of course, this is hard to do. But, part of creating this legacy starts now as people review an artist’s career though it could change with future generations. I wonder: if technology is changing at a quicker pace, does this also mean the legacy of cultural creators will have a shorter cycle? For example, if movies as we know them today are relics in 50 years, will Lucas even matter?

4. How would George Lucas himself react to this? Who would he name as the “greatest artist” of today?

Seeing the social layers in the foreclosure crisis through a photography exhibit

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A new photography exhibit at the Argus Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan takes a unique look at the foreclosure crisis:

Sociology, economics, and ultimately, autobiography, are the featured artistic elements in Charles J. Mintz’s “Every Place (I have ever lived)” at the Argus I Building’s second-story museum.

Subtitled “The foreclosure crisis in twelve neighborhoods,” this Cleveland-based photographer’s mixed-media investigation into his personal history—as told through a dozen color foreclosed dwellings in the vicinities where he’s lived—is touching and telling in equal measures…

“Each work,” Mintz tells us in his gallery statement, “is a 4’ x 4’ sheet of raw plywood with two photographs that are printed on fabric. The ‘inside’ photograph is screwed in place. The top image has been made into a window shade that pulls down over the first…

“Maps on the side pieces show where you are in my personal journey. In addition, there are charts of both the changes in median family income between the time I lived there and now (based upon the 2000 census) and the changes in racial mix between then and now (based upon the 2010 census).”…

Even as the economic and sociological demographics do their part in Mintz’s story, he makes it clear that he believes race and financial position are ultimately relative to the journey. The story might have differed at another time, but from mid- to late-20th century, Mintz seeks to build a case that our American commonalities are more tightly bound than we might otherwise expect.

It is one thing to see the numbers about foreclosures, such as the fact that the foreclosure rate in Illinois is still rising, and another to look at how this affects communities and individuals within them. What sounds particularly interesting to me about this exhibit is that this isn’t just about one person. For example, in political debates and speeches, we tend to hear stories about individuals or families which are meant to put a “human face” on the larger issues. But, through connecting individuals, communities, and larger social forces, such as the artist Mintz explaining his personal experiences as embedded in communities as well as race and socioeconomic status, we can better view and understand the multiple levels of foreclosures and how different actions at each level might be needed.

Seeing pictures of a declining Detroit as part of the common story of social change

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While this collection of photos may qualify as “ruin porn,” a new exhibition put together a sociologist and photographer highlights the changes experienced in the city of Detroit:

Detroit was once the symbol of prosperity and economic development, but with the decline of the American auto industry, the Motor City has fallen into a great state of dilapidation.

The city has lost about a million of its residents (60% of its population) since the 1950s, and numerous factories, businesses and service buildings have been abandoned.

Two photography exhibitions at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. this fall explore the residential, commercial and industrial ruin of Detroit, Michigan.

Both “Detroit Is No Dry Bones” by sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara, who has been documenting the precipitous decline of Detroit for 25 years, and “Detroit Disassembled” by Andrew Moore, who is renowed fro his large-format photography, will be on display through February 18, 2013.

Why is the new TV show Revolution shooting fake scenes of Chicago having fallen into disrepair when it could be shooting in certain locations in Detroit?

Even though we have seen plenty of photos like this before, it sounds like the exhibition has a hopeful goal:

Of his work, Vergara states “My belief is that by creating a photographic record of Detroit, as it is taken over by nature and pulled down by gravity, people will come to appreciate how the city continues to survive and to give answers to those who come to observe it…The empty land, the art projects, the graffiti commentaries, and the ruins of the city’s industrial past make Motown an unforgettable city of the imagination and could provide the basis for a new Detroit.”

One way to get past the ruin part of the story would be to couch these photos of Detroit as part of the larger issue of social change. Cities can and do change quite drastically and photographs help us to record these changes. I think the reason Detroit gets a lot of attention because the decline narrative is not a common one in the United States. We tend to think of our cities and communities and growing places that continue to move forward. We like progress. There are also cities and places going the other direction, such as the documented changes in recent decades in the Sunbelt. Or the burgeoning cities of China and other developing countries. Overall, we could think about how people, leaders, and organizations react and respond to change which is often not easy whether it is cast in positive or negative terms.

Pictures of American child laborers in 1911 taken by a sociologist

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Business Insider has a gallery of 1911 photos of child laborers taken by a sociologist:

Lewis Hine was an American sociologist and photographer whose work was instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.

In 1908, Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, and over the next decade, he documented child labor in American industry to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice.

These photographs are a reminder that child labor was common not too long ago in American history. Indeed, the definition of childhood has changed quite a bit in the last century.

Here is some biographical information on Hine via Wikipedia who seems to be one of the early proponents of what we would call today public sociology and visual sociology:

Lewis Wickes Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1874. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium.[2] The classes traveled to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs), and eventually came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool to effectuate social change and reform…

In 1906, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation. Here Hine photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called the Pittsburgh Survey. In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor in American industry to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice.[5]

During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of “work portraits,” which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry. In 1930, Hine was commissioned to document the construction of The Empire State Building. Hine photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the iron and steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks the workers endured. In order to obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 feet above Fifth Avenue…

The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine’s photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Sounds like interesting work.