If you start seeing a lot of blue underlined tags around town, you might be witnessing a new “art form” that combines ol’ skool tagging with wireless tech. Grafedia is a project of King Geek John Geraci at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. His creation lets you combine online images with real world tags for a new kind of “aerosol art” exprerience.

“Hold on, I don’t get it,” you say. Okay, here’s how its explained on the Grafedia website “Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content – images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere – on walls, in the streets, or on sidewalks.” (Sounds like an encouragement to tag to me. RP)

“Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, (Okay, that sounds a lot more legal. RP) on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it (hmm?). Viewers “click” on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + “@grafedia.net” to get the content behind the link.” Eat you heart out Barry McGee my cellphone is my spray can.

Links:

Wired News: It’s Not Graffiti, It’s Grafedia

Did you ever wonder who had the bright idea to take artists into businesses, schools, and other organizations? I mean, shouldn’t artists stick to studios, galleries and coffeeshops? These days it seems everyone is doing the artist residency thing. But, back in the 60’s and 70’s taking an artist anywhere (let alone to work) was probably considered a crazy idea.

The Artist Placement Group (APG) emerged in London in the 1960s in order to go where no artist had gone before. The APG pioneered the concept of art in the social context and sought to address the marginalization of artists by taking them into corporations and organizations. The APG would negotiate to place artists within industry and British government departments. The artists would be paid a salary and become involved in the business of the host organization. These placements resulted in a variety of artists’ reports, films, photographs, interviews, poetry and art installations. The group also played an important role in the history of conceptual art. British Journalist, Peter Beaumont, has described the APG as “one of the most radical social experiments of the 1960s.” The Tate Modern has acquired the records of APG and is celebrating with an online symposium and a website tracing the history of this pioneering group. So, now you know someone to blame the next time an artist comes up with a crazy idea for a residency and you find yourself spending months doing “Who knows what” at some strange location far from your comfy cubicle in your shiny-new art center.

I’ve been hearing the term “Fascist” bandied about quite a bit lately. But, I had not connected the “F” word to the growing debate about urban public spaces. Columnist Jay Walljasper doesn’t seem to have the same problem. In his latest column on the Project for Public Spaces website, he let’s it rip on control-freak urban pedestrian crowd control schemes. Linking the desire to control pedestrians at the expense of cars to fascistic tendencies, Waljasper asserts that, “It’s high time that we stand up to planners and politicians who don’t yet understand that it’s pedestrians that bring life to a community, and it’s cars who suck all the life out.” Right on, Jay! More power to the walking people!

More links:

Know a Fascist when you see one: Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

Birth of a Movement? Gathering in Seattle claims to have kicked off the “Great Places movement”

From Paper Magazine:

“Long before he was making immensely disturbing movies like “Kids” and “Bully,” Larry Clark was taking immensely disturbing pictures of the underbelly of Tulsa and outcast teens. Hundreds of these photos, along with videos and other Clark-ian ephemera, are up now in a retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York.”

Dennis Nyback, a New York film curator, was in San Francisco this week to screen a touring program he calls “The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss.”

Seuss’ little-known WWII era military training and propaganda cartoons were shown at Oddball Film+Video, an archival space in the Mission District. Also the home of the nonprofit San Francisco Media Archive, a hidden-away outfit that houses roughly 50,000 films.

These war time cartoons of then Col. Giesel feature racy content and racist comments and reveal a different side to this beloved author who championed liberal causes throughout his life.

In Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, James B. Twitchell argues that church, college, and museum have lately become “just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one more story you tell and are told.” No longer serving as “gatekeepers” to the worlds of spirituality, art, and higher learning, these institutions, Twitchell says, have collectively become mere “ticket- takers” peddling an experience of uplift and status-conferring affiliation, while individually laboring to project a distinctive brand “fiction.”

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0510/050309_arts_twitchell.php

Is there a Better Case for the Arts?

A Public Conversation, March 7-11, 2005

Is There A Better Case To Be Made For The Arts?

This week (March 7-11), ArtsJournal presents a group blog discussion titled: “Is there a better case to be made for the arts?”, the blog is inspired by a new RAND study “Gifts of the Muse” which looks at arts advocacy and participation. Bloggers include: Bill Ivey, Midori, Robert L. Lynch, Glenn Lowry, Ben Cameron, Andrew Taylor, Joli Jensen, Jim Kelly, Adrian Ellis, and Phil Kennicott.

http://www.artsjournal.com/muse/

RAND REPORT SPARKS CONTROVERSY

“Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts,” a new Rand study, proposes that “advocates become less fixated on what the arts can do for business growth and kids’ math and reading scores, and stress intangibles such as enchantment, enlightenment and community-building,” according to Mike Boehm in the L.A. Times (2/16/05). “Trumpeting the most quantifiable and utilitarian benefits doesn’t address the biggest long-term challenge facing arts organizations: cultivating an arts-savvy public that wants what museums and performing groups offer.” Told you so, says cultural critic Arlene Goldbard (her blog, 2/17/05). “Leaning so hard on art’s secondary effects implied that the argument from its primary purposes had been definitively lost, and this inadvertently lent aid and comfort to the opposition.”

http://www.freenewmexican.com/artsfeatures/10595.html

http://arlenegoldbard.com/blog/archives/archive-022005.shtml

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