‘Everybody’s a photographer‘ is just about as big a mistake as ‘everybody’s an artist‘. I am sympathetic towards the thought, but it’s just all wrong, dude. Photography is hard. It’s difficult to get a good shot with an intruiging subject, exciting composition… or just something that worth looking at. But since everyone is capable of the act of pushing the shutter button everybody’s able to make a registration of an image through a lens. And if the end result sucks… Let’s call it art.

Well… let’s not call it art. Let’s call it ‘crap’. Which is what it is, most of the time. With the rise of the digital camera, photography courses have been flooded and one amateur photography exhibition after the other has been organised. Flickr was worth millions when it was bought by Yahoo and why? Because everyone is a photographer.

I’ve just been leafing through the photography special of Juxtapoz, which is always a beacon of good taste in a world that’s becoming increasingly amateur-image-crazy, but in a lot of cases… I just don’t see it. Could it be that the photographer that managed to get his image up in a gallery and published in this magazine is way better at his/her PR than his/her photography work? I’d imagine so. Fortunately there are also a lot of gems to be discovered. Beautiful heart stopping images that made me gasp for air when I looked at them. My faith in photography as a mature art-form has been restored. With this posting, a couple of wonderful examples. Please click on images for links to the photographer’s websites.

Credit: all pictures published in the Juxtapoz photo-issue 2008 and taken from the Juxtapoz website. Photocredits top to bottom: Aaron Hobson, Patrick Smith, Alex Prager and Graham French (click on photos for their websites).

Beautifully painted, utterly uneasy, often disturbing works. I have declared before that I am a great admirer of the work of Kendrick Mar. There are many other artists that try the same trick: “I’ll paint a beheaded teddy bear and make my parents worry about my emotional state.” More often than not: this only leads for very immature and shallow works (granted: it does usually make me wonder about the emotional state of the maker…) Not so for the works of Luke Chueh (pronounced Luke ‘Chu’). This wonderful artist manages to paint sceneries that have all the aforementioned qualities, but add that extra layer that separates the men from the traumatised boys.

Over the last couple of years Luke Chueh’s become a very popular artist. His works are very accessible to look at, without seeming to want to be pleasing. Chueh says his work is ‘character driven’ which helps in this age where you can stick a Disney or Looney Tune sticker on just about anything imaginable; we’re used to this sort of iconography. (Much like those cartoons; Chueh’s characters make for very good toys indeed.) However, in contrast to the overly commercial happy cartoon animals, Chueh’s work seems to carry a message (even though his paintings are enjoyable without seeing it).Take his work ‘reach‘ for example, where an obese bunny can’t bend over to pick up a carrot. This can easily be seen as a comment on our consumption society and fat-addiction.

Unlike a lot of paintings depicting ocean sceneries and mountain views, this sort of work is generally very personal, even though in this case I would not go so far as to label it: unprocessed childhood trauma. Chueh’s work is clever, wonderfully executed but personally I prefer the work of artists like Kendrick Mar that use a lot of the same iconography. Chueh graduated from the California Polytechnic State Uni with a BS in graphic design. Since he had a hard time finding employment after employment (any companies that turned him down should feel very stupid indeed) he resorted to painting stuff to keep busy. That background is still very visible in his work. They’re not so much paintings as they are painted designs on a painted background. Which is not criticizing his work by any means, but merely my personal preference.

Should the non-US readers of this site/blog want to see some of the works of Luke Chueh in real-life, as I can imagine, he has working relations with galleries all over that states from NYC, to Detroit to LA. Have a look at his site for some cool works and info on expositions.

I, for one, am a pleased person. I’m not sure if you have noticed it yourself, but we are currently living in a figurative era. Paintings depict something. The abstract painter is, on the average, persona non grata for the time being. Of course, as always, there is a big difference between the large, international galleries in the cosmopolitan centers of the world and the smaller galleries in the faraway rural towns where the well meaning, moderately talented, paint dripper can still find clientèle. And there are still a couple of abstract painters that are simply good enough as an artist to still cut it, but over the whole: figuration is king. And I, for one, am absolutely thrilled.

Obviously, not all figurative painting is good. I have seen more less-than-mediocre paintings of cows, flowers, Tuscany hills and ocean sunsets than I can handle but still. If those painters would have been guilty of abstract paintings, matters would have been much worse. Three types of abstract painting I find particularly annoying and why they are so enormously outdated:

1. Paintings about painting
Marshall McLuhan may have said (in one of the most mis- and over-quoted phrases in history) that ‘the medium is the message’, over the whole I’d still say that the medium carries the message. Obviously, this whole thing about investigating ‘the medium of paint’ and ‘interactions between painting and audience’ is a phase we had to go through, after all; knowledge is power (another over-quoted phrase). All the research into to painting as a medium that needs to be done, will be conducted by the people at Talens and their competitors. Artists may move on to different pastures.

2. Painting your personal inner-life
Granted: most artist are selfish narcissists and believe that their deepest emotions and feelings are important and unique enough to be shared with the world. However, the more talented artists have discovered that they can take their art a bit further than by merely splattering a visualisation of their inner-life on a canvas (or chopping it out of a piece of lumber). It also gives people who don’t give a toss about your difficult childhood or pains of existence something nice to look at while you engage in your public self-help therapy. So it’s just a nice thing to do.

3. Painting the soul of things
Artists that make abstract works because they aim to paint the souls of their subjects should hand over their brush and go hug a tree somewhere. Furthermore: painting the soul of an onion is very, very rude towards the onion.

I know, there is still a lot more abstract painting going on out there, a lot which I have no appreciation for whatsoever either. But especially these three have lost their conceptual basis as well. There just not worth doing anymore since it has all been done many, many times.

Figurative painting
Actually, this posting has not said much about why figurative painting is good and a lot about why (most) abstract paintings suck. I apologise. A painter communicates in a visual way and should use a language that the audience is used to. If a writer wants to get a message across, he/she doesn’t write in a made-up language (except for certain poets, but that kind of poetry has been sufficiently dealt with, sort of like abstract painting). Creating a scene in which your public can recognize something to make them perceive the world in a different manner, that’s what I consider a work of art.

Finally…
About this unkind post. Should I have hurt your feelings, please feel free to make a sad painting. Should I have merely annoyed you and you feel I am a completely stuck up son of a something… you might be right. Feel free to leave a comment. I’ll approve it.

Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)

Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).

Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.

Start the application by clicking here.

I read on a website that the quote “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” is by the actor/comedian Steve Martin. I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought that it was Lenny Kravitz who had said it, even though in my memory it was a critique towards journalists and ‘talking’ was replaced by ‘writing’. Perhaps it’s because the two are so much alike.

Anyway: that quote jumped to mind when I wrote down the following “trying to defining what is art is like oral sex.” In the sense that it does not seem to have any practical purpose at first sight, but it gives masses of people intense feelings of joy and fulfilment.

It does not seem to be very usefull to discuss whether or not something is ‘art’. Some people would even argue that ‘art’ is a very personal notion; it’s impossible to find objective criteria by which you can determine whether or not something is art, so why bother thinking about it? Those people are just too practical (As well as so called’ conflict avoiders’). Arguments about ‘what is art and what isn’t’ can be inspiring, energizing and fun. So, us CultBlenders have decided to develop the ultimate art-test. If a creative work passes the test the work will forever be considered art, if it doesn’t, we hope the maker had a lot of fun with his hobby. Yes, It’s rude. Yes, it’s arrogant. No, it’s not impossible.

We’ll keep you posted on the development of our ‘art-judgement widget’ whether you like it or not. Untill that time, if you wish to knwo whether or not something is art… you’ll just have to visit cultblender.org and we’ll tell you.

I know for a fact that a lot of artlovers out there are mostly interested in art featuring women (as the Guerilla Girls pointed out: 83% of all nudes in the Met feature women, whereas only 3% of all artists featured in the Met actually are women). Looking at the tags and search queries people use to get to my blog clearly points that out. The popularity of the picture with my post about the work of Eric Bailey, which is still one of the most popular posts I’ve written is also a clear indication in that direction.

BLK/MRKT gallery in Los Angeles always seems to showcase artists that I, and this is truly a matter of personal opinion, think are more or less brilliant and quite inspiring (at the same time, I must admit I have never actually physically been there yet… they say their coffee is great). A recent virtual wander about on their website revealed to me the magnificent works of Canadian artist Ben Tour.

We are very familiar with the use of the female figure in art. Porn did not only help the VHS system be victorious, but the (ab)use of the nude female body has made a good living for many painters, sculptors and other artists. They figured out a long time ago that sex sells. But the female nude is no longer synonymous with ’sex’. Works by South African artist Marlene Dumas are often so confrontational and graphic that her works are uncomfortable to even look at. Her works make clear, even more than a photograph could, how women can be exploited and degraded in this oversexed world. The audience feels even more embarrassed by watching her works than they would be when they had rented a piece of ‘adult entertainment’. Another artists that has been on top of the artistic food chain for quite a while is Lucian Freud. Freud also paints nudes. And, of course, also female nudes. Just as with Dumas’ works, his nudes aren’t meant to sexually arouse and they don’t.

Ben Tour’s work is very different from both artists mentioned. His works breathe that ’streetart’ atmosphere, and the way he incorporates letters and numbers give his works the feeling of even deeper lying mythical meaning. The serie that touched me most was his blue wash series. Tour has painted several women with crayon and ink that are both beautiful and tragic. It’s uneasy to look at them. And you just know that pretty girls aren’t supposed to look like that. that;s not the image Hollywood has taught us. Pretty girls have fun. But Ben Tour will have none of that. you just hope that the artists comforted them after he took their misery and poured it out on paper.

Ben Tour’s repertoire goes a lot further than these ‘tragic sirenes’. All his works seem to have a sort of lightness in colors, you feel you can see right through them. For me this also meant that I actually looked into his works. The way he chooses his subjects and compositions make that his works look both very contemporary (like I said: streetart feel) as well as timeless. You can’t date his works. But then , that only helps to see his works as instant classics.

A quite nice read, the Ben Tour interview on fecalface.com.

And a movieclip by WalrusTV featuring some of Ben Tour’s works, can be found here.

Not so long ago I wrote about the poor copywriting quality of spam. I had some ideas about saving and organising all this spam and then using it as raw material for some, digital, artworks. there are, obviously, two very different ways to approach this. You could either use the texts ‘in context’; present the words as spam and see what the audience has to say about spam and the other way around. Or take the words out of context and use the words like Lego. Building blocks that may take on a completely different meaning when place in a different context. The well from which all you building blocks would have sprung would be spam and thus limit your artistic vocabulary. But isn’t it so that in limitations you may recognize the master? Does spam in a different context get a different meaning? yes. Does that make good art? Not necessarily.

Whether presenting words out of context and calling that art has much artistic value is open for debate. Anyway, as was to be expected, spamart is ‘hot’. Dutch artist Loek Grootjans has been collecting and organising the spam he receives (he specifically asked his provider to remove his spamfilter specifically for this purpose) for years. He expects that in about ten years, hew ill have built a unique archive of spam. This, I doubt, since many other people artists around the world will have had the same idea (search engine ‘collecting spam’, there you go) . Whether or not his spam-archive will make art-history will probably depend on how he uses it for building other artworks.

Four examples of how spam is currently being used to create art. Going from ’spam merely provides the building blocks for completely different artworks’ to ‘the nature of spam is at the core of the artwork’.

1. The works of Romanian programmer and artist Alex Dragulescu. Alex wrote an algorythm which he feeds with spamtext. His program than uses these texts as input to create three dimensional images of plantlike structures. He has also built 3 dimensional sculptures based on spam texts.

2. A site where they experiment with ‘recycling spam’ is appropriately called spamrecycling.com. You can make use of spamtexts you have received and turn that into movable objects. However, it’s a shame that there is no added value because of using spam as building blocks there. Dragulescu’s works seem to improve in meaning when you know how the sculptures were created with spam.

3. A better (at least I think so) example of how you can use spamtexts to create art I found on the Flickr page of English illustrator Linzie Hunter. Her works create lovely tension between the sugar coated and pastel coloured typography and the wasteful dollar-driven spam where the texts come from. Never before did we want spam to intrude our personal lives.

4. Let’s return to Grootjans. Merely saving and archiving spam is not all he does. One of the artworks he created using spam is part of the Utopia exhibition I wrote about in my previous post. Grootjans’ minigolf course is a traditional one, but with an addition. All over the course there are little signs that have spamtexts on them. It can be quite difficult to concentrate when someone is shouting stuff about your ‘Johnson’ at you. This work illustrates how spam effects our everyday lives, sucking up energy and time. How annoying it is. So spam is used as spam.

I think good, interesting, provocative and inspiring art is possible on all the above levels (hey, there are even artists that make great paintings about ‘paint’…) it just depends on what you do with it. Perhaps, after this post you might not hit the delete button so quickly anymore. Try and appreciate that someone sent you a little piece of art.

How can you materialize a concept like ‘time’? In previous posts I have often written about the function of art. In interviews with artists I always ask about their motivation and about a message they would like to send to the world, as a person and as an artist. It’s a personal thing, I like artists that have something to say. Artists that want something more than just an aesthetic quality. But other than sending out a message to the world, art can also be very useful in helping us understand the world around us. Let me explain by warping you to another subject by jumping through a wormhole at hyperspeed.

Stephen Hawking is a very, very intelligent man. Some would argue he might even be the greatest mind alive, but I am not in any position to make a comment on that. But besides ‘knowing a lot’ he is also capable of translating it in a way that even normal mortal souls like myself can understand a bit about stuff like ’string theory’, ‘dark matter’ or ‘the expansion of the universe’. Even though this is all very ‘beta science’, all research takes place at a very abstract level. First you have to accept that there is much more going on around than that which we can observe ourselves. You have to accept that our eyes may be very complex, but what they can actually see is very limited indeed. However, we are all very used to the idea that dogs can smell more than we can, rabbits hear more, eagles see more, et cetera. But all this takes place in the safe three dimensions we know.

A very basic step you have to take to be able to appreciate the things that Stephen Hawking writes about is realise that ‘time’ is a fourth dimension we live our lives in. A lot of scientist think it is very probable that there are no less than eleven different dimensions (according to the so called M-theory which forms the basis for all five string theories). All dimensions other than the four we know -and love- are ‘curled up’. And this is the point where you lose me. A curled up fifth, sixth or even seventh dimension? A concept like that is just so far away from everyday life it’s no surprise that mankind came up with religion to explain ‘existence’. I’d like to take a step through a negative energy field in the universe which is needed for theoretical time travel, so we get back to the point where I mentioned how art can explain the world around us.

In 2002 I visited the contemporary art museum MuHKA in Antwerp. When I visited, there was an exhibition of Japanese born artist Suchan Kinoshita. There are some events in your life that you will carry with you all your life and for me, this was one of them. One of the things that had greatest impact on me was her installation ‘Hok 1′. It’s basically just a wooden box in which, on a table there are a couple of glass sculptures in which different coloured oils were running down at their own pace. If you just see the picture it probably doesn’t even look like something special at all. But art, like life, is not something you can experience by just looking at the pictures. The whole presentation of her work, starting with the way she had redesigned the entrance of the museum, prepared the visitor for the experiences she had designed. The most impressive one, for me, was ‘Hok 1′. It made me actually feel time. The different speeds at which the oils were running down in the different shaped glass canisters presented a strong visual representation of something that you are almost never aware of. For a moment I could feel myself moving through that fourth dimension, which was a very weird experience. It was a fraction of a second, but, especially in a posting like this one, I have to say that it could also have lasted an eternity… depending on the observer.

Hok 1 has had a great influence on my life, it has me rethink choices I had made about my professional career and personal ambitions. But it has also helped me in understanding what Stephen Hawking and all his colleagues are talking about. Suchan Kinoshita’s art has helped me understand the concept of time.

Art advances science, but science also advances art. Science continually provides the artist with new possibilities to create. In my previous posting I wrote about ‘art in 50 years‘, in which I made some vague predictions about ways in which art could develop. There was, perhaps, nothing very spectacular there, with the possible minor exception of the creation of interactive 3D worlds. I must admit, however, that I forgot to mention another area that art and artists are already exploring now. This field may eventually grow out to become a large new segment of the artworld, even though it worries me just thinking about it; it is the field of genetic engineering.

Ofcourse, there are the fairly safe ‘genetic arts projects’ like the ones by the company Genarts, which uses genetic algorithms to create visual effects that you can even fool around with for yourself in a demo version. What concerns me are ‘art’projects like creating a fluorescent green rabbit (like the bunny Alba) or pigeons that produce purple, erm, ‘crap’. The people repsonsible for these projects probably failed to see the scientific value of their work and subsequently filed it as ‘visual art’. It can nonetheless be argued that the artistic value of their work is very close to ‘zero’ as well.

A fluorescent bunny may be in poor taste, and show little respect for the little creature, it is a quite harmless experiment. In about 50 years time, genetic modification will probabaly be a piece of cake. At least for medical scientists. It may very well become possible to use living cells as building blocks with which we can create limbs, organs and other complicated living tissue (big steps are made by using -believe it or not- adapted inkjet printers with which living tissue is actually printed). As with all knowledge, it can be used for both good and evil. Lose an arm in a car crash We’ll just make you a new one? Need a harttransplant? Give us your creditcard details and we’ll bubblejet you a new heart. But what might happen if the technology isn’t well protected?

If gen-tech becomes available for artists, who are not concerned with ethical matters like doctors, we may see the birth of all sorts of new living creatures (not necisarilly creatures that have any form of awareness, but creatures built with ‘living’ tissue). And probably not just animal-like figures. Someone will eventually create something like a ‘living’ house, car or vacuum cleaner and call it art. Undoubtedly the artist will say its intended purpose is public debate (’what does it mean to be alive’), or social awareness (’this is what medical science today is capable of’).

I may not agree with such a development, and I don’t, but I do really think that it is something that will happen. Artists always seek the boundaries of the moral and what is acceptable and when found, they will cross the boundaries. In many cases, that is what makes them ‘artists’. So, without advocating it, I think I have to same ‘bio-art’ as a future development for the artistic world. The new breed of curators may have studied biology.

This morning I watched a DVD made by the German broadcaster ZDF; the future in 50 years time. Although it didn’t go into the matters quite deep enough (in my humble, geeky opinion) it was a very enjoyable pastime. And I cannot deny the fact that I learned a thing or two, and was inspired by one or two others. So, no bad. One thing that does sort of annoy me about those recreational and educational films, is the need for a storyline that really gets in the way of the stuff you’re actually interested in. The storyline is usually bad, the acting is actually appalling. (For those of you that have seen ‘What the bleep do we know‘, you will know what I mean. Interesting science; horrible acting, stories, SFX et cetera).

But it’s not my intention to write a documentary review here. The central thought of the DVD ‘the world in 50 years’ go me to thinking about the question what art would be like in 50 years time. A couple of posts ago I argued that painting will undoubtedly still be around, for obvious reasons and I would imagine so will music, theatre and other forms of live performances. I would expect that recorded music will by then serve as advertising for bands that you might want to go see live. You may download 3D images of sculptures and perhaps various forms of advertising will make the new Hollywood blockbuster available to you for free. Cinemas may struggle when home-cinema sets increasingly get better and allow you to download Rocky 214 in a couple of seconds time with the click of a button.

All that is about survival of the current artforms. The emergence of new media will probably also give rise to new forms of art, that we may not even dare imagine right now. 30 years ago; who would have imagined any digital art, let alone ‘internet art‘. Or 150 years ago I do not think that someone that predicted photography as an artform would have been taken seriously (catching an image on a plate? Are you mental??). One new technology that is sure to lead to new works of art, perhaps even a whole new category of art, is the possibility of creating 3D worlds that you can actually emerge in. And by that, I do not mean that you would have to put on special glasses or something. You just walk into a gallery (or not even that) and a 3D environment would be projected around you that you can interact with. I guess it is also quite safe to assume that the new artists of the future will at this moment be educated to become game designers. They have an understanding of interaction and the technical knowledge to build their visions.

Technology will surely play an increasingly important role in the world of art, as in all other aspects of life. And art wil play an important role in advancing art as well, pushing scientists forward by thinking up new dreams and creating new visions. To boldly go where no one has gone before… and beyond…