NEWSgrist - where spin is art

STRIKE! Visual AIDS Spring Benefit

via Visual AIDS >blog:

STRIKE! Visual AIDS Spring Benefit

Visual AIDS Board of Directors & Co-Chairs
Galerie Lelong, Cassie Rosenthal, Jack Shainman, and Pavel Zoubok
Invite you to

strike!

.
Monday May 21 from 8-11pm

300 NEW YORK
Chelsea Piers, 23rd Street and West Side Hwy.

The 2nd Annual VAVA (Visual AIDS Vanguard Award) Ceremony honoring:
Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka
Nancy Spero
Inaugural Bill Olander Award:
Stephen Andrews

Mark your calendars for a night of bowling, dancing, art, cocktails, alley snacks and more fun than you can shake a pin at!

Silent Auction of artists' bowling pins by: 
Polly Apfelbaum, Barton Lidice Benes, Mark Bradford, Geoffrey Hendricks, Markus Linnenbrink, Whitfield Lovell, Tom Otterness, Barbara Takenaga, Mark Wagner and Lawrence Weiner.

Limited Edition Bowling Shirts designed by Jonathan Seliger

Music by:
DJ Little Jukka AKA Nayland Blake and DJ Cur8tr AKA Edwin Ramoran

Tickets:
$250 Individual
$500 Patron Individual (includes a limited edition bowling shirt)
VIP Patron Single Lanes $2,500 (up to 5 guests, includes limited edition bowling shirts)
VIP Patron Double Lanes $5,000 (up to 12 guests, includes limited edition bowling shirts)

Come spend a night on the lanes and show your support for Visual AIDS!

Founded in 1988 by arts professionals as a response to the effects of AIDS on the arts community and as a way of organizing artists, arts institutions, and arts audiences towards direct action, Visual AIDS has evolved into an arts organization with a two-pronged mission. 1) Through the Frank Moore Archive Project, the largest slide library of work by artists living with HIV and the estates of artists who have died of AIDS, Visual AIDS historicizes the contributions of visual artists with HIV while supporting their ability to continue making art and furthering their professional careers. 2) In collaboration with museums, galleries, artists, schools, and AIDS service and advocacy organizations, Visual AIDS produces exhibitions, publications, and events utilizing visual art to spread the message "AIDS IS NOT OVER."

www.visualAIDS.org

   

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Visual AIDS Board of Directors & Co-Chairs
Galerie Lelong, Cassie Rosenthal, Jack Shainman, and Pavel Zoubok
Invite you to

strike!

.
Monday May 21 from 8-11pm

300 NEW YORK
Chelsea Piers, 23rd Street and West Side Hwy.

The 2nd Annual VAVA (Visual AIDS Vanguard Award) Ceremony honoring:
Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka
Nancy Spero
Inaugural Bill Olander Award:
Stephen Andrews

Mark your calendars for a night of bowling, dancing, art, cocktails, alley snacks and more fun than you can shake a pin at!

Silent Auction of artists' bowling pins by: 
Polly Apfelbaum, Barton Lidice Benes, Mark Bradford, Geoffrey Hendricks, Markus Linnenbrink, Whitfield Lovell, Tom Otterness, Barbara Takenaga, Mark Wagner and Lawrence Weiner.

Limited Edition Bowling Shirts designed by Jonathan Seliger

Music by:
DJ Little Jukka AKA Nayland Blake and DJ Cur8tr AKA Edwin Ramoran

Tickets:
$250 Individual
$500 Patron Individual (includes a limited edition bowling shirt)
VIP Patron Single Lanes $2,500 (up to 5 guests, includes limited edition bowling shirts)
VIP Patron Double Lanes $5,000 (up to 12 guests, includes limited edition bowling shirts)

Come spend a night on the lanes and show your support for Visual AIDS!

Founded in 1988 by arts professionals as a response to the effects of AIDS on the arts community and as a way of organizing artists, arts institutions, and arts audiences towards direct action, Visual AIDS has evolved into an arts organization with a two-pronged mission. 1) Through the Frank Moore Archive Project, the largest slide library of work by artists living with HIV and the estates of artists who have died of AIDS, Visual AIDS historicizes the contributions of visual artists with HIV while supporting their ability to continue making art and furthering their professional careers. 2) In collaboration with museums, galleries, artists, schools, and AIDS service and advocacy organizations, Visual AIDS produces exhibitions, publications, and events utilizing visual art to spread the message "AIDS IS NOT OVER."

www.visualAIDS.org

Apple rips off Marclay? "Pirate" calls Foul!

 

Christian Marclay, Telephones
DVD, 7:33
Edition of 250
$1600.00

via MTAA-RR:

Apple rips off Marclay?

posted at 01:30 GMT by T.Whid in /news/twhid

    First, read this (and watch the videos)

This is the key paragraph:

[Marclay] says he looked into legal action but was assured by his lawyer "there's nothing I can do about it. They have the right to get inspired." Of course, in other cases, such obvious "inspiration" might be called copyright infringement. In this instance, however, Marclay's rights may be limited as his own film consisted of copyrighted works by other artists.

I like Apple. I like Marclay. What Apple did was sleazy.

[sleazy? newsgrist begs to differ on that one... this is what advertising does all the time: it remixes art. and why not?]

But does it strike anyone else as a tad hypocritical that Marclay's complaining about Apple 'stealing' his video when his video is made from 'stealing' other peoples copyrighted work? I don’t know how the hell he thinks he can sue. The idea of stringing a bunch of telephone hellos together isnt copyrightable and shouldn't be.

tipped off via Kottke…

   

Museums + folksonomies: bridging the semantic gap

via goldwaterlibrary.org:

via NYTimes:
One Picture, 1,000 Tags {excerpts}
By PAMELA LiCALZI O’CONNELL
Published: March 28, 2007

[...]

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site; some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands of works, there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one, "art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the picture." [read on...]

Support the Artist Deduction Bill

ROYMERSWAELE, Marinus van. Tax Collector, 1542. Wood, 103,7 x 120 cm.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Image source

via email (thanks Grace!):

Dear Friends,

The Artist Tax Deduction Bill is finally up for action. Please take the time to support this important bill as its passage will impact all individual artists. Go to the link below to send a message to your representatives and senators. Please forward this information to your mailing list!

Artist Deduction Bill Introduced in the House
03-19-2007: After announcing at the Congressional Arts Breakfast on Arts Advocacy Day that he would be the lead sponsor for the Artist Deduction Bill, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) introduced the bill on March 14, 2007, joined by Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN). Identical to a Senate bill introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT), the bill supports individual artists by allowing them to take a fair-market value tax deduction for tangible works they donate to nonprofit collecting and educational organizations, and it benefits the public by giving them access to more art.

Send a message to your members of Congress asking them to be a co-sponsor of this important bill, H.R. 1524 (House) and S. 548 (Senate). 

From Cubism to Camo

(Left: Now you see her ... a model wears a camouflage dress by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP)

Mission Invisible
Jonathan Jones
Thursday March 15, 2007
The Guardian

[...] Warhol's art of war is the climax to Camouflage, an exhibition that tells the story of how cubism inspired a new approach to military designs and uniforms in the 20th century. This revolution in European art just preceded the first world war: from 1909 onwards, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque took the European conventions of the picture apart, destroying perspective and turning appearances inside-out. Their paintings were nicknamed "cubist" and by 1914 cubism was notorious; its jagged, broken appearance seemed abstract at first glance, though was actually profoundly concerned with representation. When war broke out, this new art gave birth to a military invention that still shapes our visual culture today.

Traditional armies flaunted visibility. Banners fluttered, cavalries massed, infantry donned bright red coats. By the end of 1914, a conflict expected to be "over by Christmas" turned into a nightmare stalemate. This new war fought from trenches made soldiers want to vanish into the mud. One terror was aerial photography. How could artillery positions be concealed from cameras in the sky? Soldiers who had been artists before the war remembered seeing cubist paintings - and started to experiment with fragmented patterns on field guns and uniforms.

CRW Nevinson's 1917 painting A Tank shows an early British lozenge-shaped tank painted with a radical, modernist pattern in orange, green and black: it's impossible to miss the cubist look of such early camouflage. The Sphere magazine in 1918 tried to explain the origin of the new word "camouflage", tracing it to a 17th century French expression for a malevolent puff of smoke. At sea, Norman Wilkinson, a painter of traditional seascapes, led a group that decorated British dreadnoughts with diagonal, high-contrast "dazzle" patterns. Wilkinson and other British pioneers were no fans of the avant garde, but war made modernists of them. "We did that!" Picasso is supposed to have said when he saw a camouflaged gun.

The Imperial War Museum tells this story with artefacts that range from the sinister to the ridiculous [read on...]