Sketching surroundings

(see full image)

Cheers

Natasha Tresadern-Hill

Sent via my orange coated shiny

TA homework

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"Yay my book arrived for my course. TA homework your going down! "

L'escalier à doubles révolutions

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"L'escalier à doubles révolutions which is a double helix staircase which I'm fascinated by! Possibly designed by Da Vinci #lotusontour "

more tea art, tho not by me

Tea Illustrations by Andrew Gorkovenko





Using nothing more than loose tea and extreme patience, artist Andrew Gorkovenko created beautiful landscape scenes for Triptea. Made specifically to be included on the tea company’s packaging – the scenes actually depict the origin of the tea contained within.









[link, via Colossal] http://www.foodiggity.com/tea-illustrations-by-andrew-gorkovenko/

lines on the teaspoon

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"Rather fascinated by the lines on the teaspoon from the coffee and tea"

ideas

keeping the ideas going

http://www.designsponge.com/2011/09/diy-project-salted-watercolor-artwork.html

Featured on world of wool gallery

pre disruption

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doodling

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"Doodling on my lists"

Lakers School Art X

just a little floor ensamble in the staff area

 mine the one with the little felt teapots

 teapotsd up top cups below, varied sizes

business cards on show too :)

spatter

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new sketch book

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"New sketch book when I want it"

Tea ideas

Felt tea sets in Perspex boxes scattered around the forest no explanation

Tea paintings of swallows and birds
of sculpture trail

Go round tea shops with business cards, expand website

Make prints up mounted

Olympic esk rings

#swanseaplinth tea explosions

#swanseaplinth lovely weather for a cuppa

tea plinth

a day a the tea side

bearing conversations

@tashuka's #swanseaplinth piece

Tea with friends

Cat n mouse

Lakers house team designs

close up of going green

beasty printer....

Tea in birthday mug from last year!

Tea for breakfast :)

Used Mugs at Show

and some lovely comments 

Degree Installation in use

Sketchbook teapot

Sketch book pages

Disruption edit

Installation at degree show

Improbable Connections- opportunity for future

The concept 

Improbable Connections is a community of collaborative and co-creative research initiatives aimed at innovation and social responsibility. It is based on the paradigms of open innovation and the principles of interrelated fields, disciplines and individuals.

It therefore relates the arts, philosophy, science, business and governance in search of new questions and answers that respond to the needs of all manner of organisations. The connections are supposedly improbable, but possible.

Improbable Connections fosters an environment that is able to promote transformation from the hybridisation of differences. Slow, deeper and more radical innovation backed by joint research and experimentation, as well as by values and people.

Fish + sword = swordfish, 'hibridise to innovate' postcard. The drawing shows that an unlikely connection between two incompatible elements (a fish and a sword) can lead to a result that adds value.
http://www.conexionesimprobables.es/pagina.php?m1=127&id_p=272&temp=_temp

Tea cups at degree show

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"Teacups at degree show "

New skill

Change position I premiere I k we there was a way and here it is :)

Progress on the show

> So she is really getting there now, this is an image from Saturday, I go the hooks up into shelf and got some of the mugs on. I have chosen to offset them for a more aesthetic look. The big hot water flasks with be going in shortly, and ye orange one will be for milk, just have to plan for the waste, and being the sugar pots in and I'll be nearly there.

Sorting the videos an carpet this week and hanging the photo collages if they are approved of, I sense they may be too big, but we will see.

Lots left to do in very little time eep

danto by sarah boxer

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06boxert.html 

August 6, 2000 Non-Art for Non-Art's Sake

Arthur Danto, art critic, never strays far from Arthur Danto, philosopher.

 At the Stable Gallery in New York he beheld Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, a pile of plywood boxes silk-screened to look like real cardboard Brillo boxes. Danto was dazzled. In a famous essay in The Journal of Philosophy titled ''The Artworld,'' Danto gave voice to his epiphany. He asked, ''Has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?'' Are all things ''latent artworks waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured, through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament?''

Danto's epiphany had a corollary: it is not up to the eye to decide that the facsimile Brillo boxes are art and the real Brillo boxes are not. ''It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible.'' To the eye, the two kinds of boxes, he suggested, are pretty much the same, or, as philosophers would say, indiscernible. Danto had found his grand obsession: ''Given two things that resemble one another to any chosen degree, but one of them a work of art and the other an ordinary object, what accounts for this difference in status?'' Why is a urinal that is exhibited by Marcel Duchamp or a pile of dirt exhibited by Robert Morris a work of art, when there are plenty of potties and piles of dirt that aren't art?

In his 1981 book, ''The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,'' Danto pondered the problem of indiscernibles some more and produced a thought experiment. Imagine a bunch of identical canvas squares painted red, each of which has a different meaning, history and name. One is a historical painting of the Red Sea. Another is ''Red Square,'' a punning Communist tribute painted in the manner of Malevich. A third is ''Red Tablecloth,'' by a sour disciple of Matisse. Another is a canvas primed red by Giorgione. They all look alike, but some are art and others are not.

In 1984, still under the sway of his obsession, Danto, the Johnsonian professor of philosophy emeritus at Columbia University, became the art critic for The Nation. ''The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World'' is his most recent collection of reviews and essays, covering the years 1993 to 1999.

Like him or not, Danto is the critic we deserve now, much as Clement Greenberg, the art critic for The Nation from 1941 to 1949, was the critic we deserved then. Greenberg, like Danto, had a grand obsession. He believed that paintings should be about their materials -- canvas and paint -- and he championed the artists he thought achieved it, starting with the Abstract Expressionists, who reveled in what Danto calls the ''viscous, fluid, gummy, dripping, unctuous, slathery, ropy, brushy, pasty, opaque and splattering'' stuff that is paint.

Danto is an ideal critic for those who do not revel in mere paint. He declares we have reached ''the end of art,'' a time when the line between art objects and ordinary objects is invisible. The ''post-historical'' era demands something other than eyes. What the world needs now are philosophers. In ''an age of pluralism in art,'' when anything might be a work of art (but not everything is), we need a pluralistic critic, willing to see anything as art.

But Danto is not really as free and easy as all that. Pure formal beauty does not move him. He cares only for art that reflects on itself, which he calls the ''postmodernist birthright.'' He thinks Andy Warhol is a genius and says that ''before Duchamp, no one knew what the real questions were.'' That is pretty tough stuff coming from a pluralist.

Still, he's unbeatable at what he does. There is no one like Danto for making sense of a wad of pink clay that looks like chewed bubble gum. There is no one else who can confidently say that Damien Hirst's dead lamb is better than his dead pig. There is no one else who would think to call Jasper Johns's flags reverse ready-mades -- works of art that are used as ordinary objects. There is no one who communicates the regressive appeal of Warhol's Jackies, Marilyns and Howdy Doodys the way he does. And who can deal better with the question of why a place like Las Vegas, with its false Manhattan and false Venice, needs real paintings by Degas, Cezanne, Manet and Warhol?

Danto adores postmodern pranks, but he reviews artists of all ages, artists on the cusp between modern and contemporary art (Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg), as well as modern artists (John Heartfield, Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Florine Stettheimer, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Richard Diebenkorn, Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock) and a few older ones (Vermeer, Tiepolo, Delacroix, Sofonisba Anguissola).

But how does a critic who thinks that eyes no longer matter look at art that was made when eyes did matter? He learns to look beyond the paint. Danto is a content hunter. In that he is quite old-fashioned -- not so much postmodern as premodern. He searches for the philosophical meaning in paintings the way children look for Waldos in a ''Where's Waldo?'' book.

This will frustrate those who believe in visual experience for its own sake, but for those who are more skeptical or simply less visual, Danto offers a kind of access to art that few other critics do.

His favorite method is to compare art and non-art. In an essay about Rothko, Danto looks for the meaning in a real Rothko painting by comparing it with ''a ready-made Rothko,'' a sunset he sees while flying 33,000 feet over Iceland -- a heavy purple at the bottom, separated from the upper band of light blue by a band of rose and orange.'' What distinguishes the ready-made Rothko from a real Rothko? There must be ''crucial differences that do not meet the eye.'' But ultimately Danto is disappointed. He decides that Rothko's paintings are all surface, just about beauty. One of them ''shows what materiality comes to when it does not evoke something deeper than itself.''

Danto is so blasé about what the eyes alone can see that he makes a few visual boo-boos. For example, he says that the paintings at the Rothko chapel in Houston ''were originally red -- indeed, red on red -- and hopeful rather than tragic,'' but have since turned black, inspiring dire interpretations. Actually, the paintings have always been dominated by gloomy black rectangles floating on a maroon ground. At another point, Danto says that Mondrian used diagonal lines in his late work when in fact he never used them in his abstract work at all, although he did paint on diamond-shaped canvases -- for decades. Well, no matter. If art is just embodied philosophy, do the features of the body really count?

Sometimes Danto's obsession with indiscernibles evolves into a more ordinary game: why is one thing different from another? Although he often appears distracted when dealing with just one artist, he never tires of pairs. What distinguishes nakedness from nudity, television from video, Warhol from James Coleman, Warhol from Rodchenko, Warhol from Robert Morris? Some comparisons are fruitful and others fizzle. An ambitious comparison between Picasso and Bertrand Russell yields only this: ''I cannot imagine what a portrait by Picasso of Bertrand Russell would look like.''

In the game of compare and contrast, the figures who are called into action time and again are Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cage, Bertrand Russell and Marcel Duchamp. And of course Warhol. Danto gives a grand description of Tiepolo's ''delicious drawing at the Morgan of a group of 17 (by my count) Punchinellos preparing a meal of gnocchi and parmesan cheese for a hungry Punchinello sitting disconsolately on his hat, looking as if dinner will never come.'' What does it remind Danto of? Warhol, of course! Tiepolo has multiplied the figure of Punchinello ''with the wit with which Warhol iterates 'Mona Lisas' in his 'Thirty Are Better Than One.' ''You have to admit, that comparison takes guts, or something indiscernible from it.

Danto's title, ''The Madonna of the Future,'' comes from a Henry James story about a failed artist named Theobald who sees a beautiful woman and is inspired to paint her as a Madonna. He studies Raphael's ''Madonna della Seggiola'' for so long that his own model, as Danto writes, grows ''coarse and stout and sexual.'' Theobald dies, leaving behind a blank canvas.

Danto, a lover of hypotheticals, imagines the story a little further. A curator from the future looks at Theobald's blank canvas and declares it ''a masterpiece.'' He tells Theobald that ''the history of the all-white painting, which includes Rodchenko, Malevich, Rauschenberg and Ryman, begins with him.'' What would Theobald think? He would probably still see himself as a failure, but if he's smart, Danto suggests, he might also glimpse the beginning of the end of art, the glorious time when the failures of today are transfigured into the successes of tomorrow and everything is potential art.


Sarah Boxer is a reporter for the Arts & Ideas pages of The Times.

healing arts?

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/does_art_heal

Does Art Heal?By Meera Lee Sethi | Winter 2009 | 3 comments

At Shands HealthCare in Florida, artists and physicians have been partners for 18 years, reports Meera Lee Sethi. Their program is helping to prove the clinical benefits of creativity.

Seven-year-old Catriona Chennell’s room is filled with samples of her artwork: strings of differently-shaped beads, a painting of a rainbow blazing across a blue sky. For her most ambitious—and painstaking—piece so far, she glued small red and glass tiles onto a piece of ceramic about the length of her arm, shaped like a heart with wings.

The image is apt. Cat (as everyone calls her) has primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH), a rare and potentially life-threatening disorder characterized by abnormally high pressure in the artery carrying blood from the heart to the lungs. Like others with PPH, Cat’s heart is slowly enlarging from the stress of pumping hard enough to overcome the increased pressure. She experiences fatigue, pain, dizziness, and shortness of breath. “I also have a chest port,” she says, “so it doesn’t really feel comfortable.” This device, implanted beneath Cat’s skin, delivers a medication that dilates her blood vessels. “We’re talking about a seriously fragile kid,” says her grandmother, Lila Johnston.
Courtesy of Shands Arts in Medicine

Cat’s art decorates her room in the pediatric intensive care unit at Shands at the University of Florida, the hospital in Gainesville where she has spent six months waiting for a heart-lung transplant that may one day enable her to play soccer—her second favorite hobby.

But Cat is too busy to dwell on her discomfort. Instead of spending time only with “my boring parents,” she is regularly visited by artists offering materials, project ideas, and instruction—part of a unique therapeutic program at
Shands known as Arts in Medicine (AIM). Cat has been at two other hospitals in Florida, but only here has she been given the opportunity to create art. “What a tremendous difference,” says her grandmother. “It really gets her mind off things.” For Cat, the point is simple. “I feel really good when I do art,” she says.

Cat is just one of thousands of patients to have been reached by AIM through Shands HealthCare, a network of hospitals and outpatient services affiliated with the University of Florida. Through the AIM program, paid artists-in-residence and volunteers involve patients in creative activities like painting, writing, and singing. While the occasional hospital clown or musician is not uncommon elsewhere, Shands is the first institution of its kind to fully integrate the arts into its medical model. The AIM program doesn’t just operate once a month or week; it’s part of the care that patients receive every day, and AIM artists are in constant contact with physicians and nurses.

For years, AIM has been making hospital experiences less stressful. Staff and patients believe it has also done something more remarkable: improve patients’ health. Now, research documenting the therapeutic benefits of the arts is helping to explain why that might be the case. Together with stories from AIM, science is raising the provocative question: Does art heal?

My patient needs an artist
Courtesy of Shands Arts in Medicine

In 1990, John Graham-Pole was a pediatric oncologist at Shands with 25 years of medical experience. He was also a poet. Frustrated that “the art of medicine was getting lost under the weight of medical technology,” Graham-Pole began writing poems about the hospital. Poetry helped him come to terms with the reality of death, and he found solace in examining difficult experiences through the lens of art.

Wanting to share this experience, Graham-Pole and a fellow artist began holding their own informal arts workshops in a single hospital unit. He says their goal was never “curing disease.” Instead, they hoped to help both patients and staff “cope better with whatever was happening to them” through writing and painting. At first, Graham-Pole recalls, most doctors “couldn’t quite understand what this was about. But we became more and more bold with our presence in and around wards.”

Today, 18 years after its humble beginning, AIM runs on an annual budget of more than $350,000, operates in five different hospitals, and recruits 150 volunteers per year to support more than a dozen paid artists-in-residence. The artists each spend 10 to 20 hours a week in the hospital, using their professional expertise to organize a dizzying array of activities. On a typical day, one might hear a banjo player and a transplant patient singing together, see a dancer and a bed-ridden patient moving their arms in slow, undulating waves, or encounter a theatrical performance in a hospital atrium. And AIM programs reach beyond patients: Medical students participate in reflective writing exercises, there are weekly meditation classes for nurses and doctors, and visiting family members are often drawn into AIM sessions. Shands also installs fine art and patient art—like Cat’s heart with wings—on hospital walls.

AIM artists are overseen by a small group of administrative staff, who hold weekly conferences and receive patient referrals. Tina Mullen, AIM’s director, explains that clinicians at Shands don’t see art as a frill at the hospital; they’re convinced it provides real health benefits. That’s why they take the time to make referrals. “The nursing staff and medical staff are making judgments about when to use art as one of the therapies at their disposal,” says Mullen. “They’re saying, ‘My patient needs to see an artist today.’”
Courtesy of Shands Arts in Medicine

Research suggests that such judgments are grounded in scientific evidence. A study at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 2001, for example, found that patients who listened to their choice of music before, during, and after eye surgery experienced lower blood pressure and heart rates, and less perceived stress. In another study, published in the February 2006 issue of theJournal of Pain and Symptom Management, cancer patients who participated in a visual art session reported feeling less pain, tiredness, drowsiness, and breathlessness afterwards.

Indeed, scientists have documented health benefits from exposure to art at all stages of life. Lullabies have been shown to promote neurological development and weight gain in premature infants, while dance appears to help elderly
patients with dementia retain greater intellectual, emotional, and motor functions.

To Lauren Arce, a transplant nurse at Shands and a dancer-in-residence, AIM brings these kinds of results to life. In her decade with the program, she says she’s seen the arts bring a host of improvements to patients’ health, from reduced anxiety and shorter hospital stays to diminished feelings of pain and lower blood pressure.

Arce recalls a 12-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis, struggling with the final stages of her disease. Two AIM artists, a painter and a musician, visited her room bearing rocks for a medicine wheel, a traditional Native American artifact associated with healing. The girl had an elevated heart rate and low blood saturation—low levels of oxygen in her bloodstream—and was too weak and uncomfortable to paint a rock herself. But she picked out several for her family and instructed the artist to paint specific images on each of them. She also requested a song from the musician: “Amazing Grace.” As the song played, says Arce, the adults in the room were in tears, but the girl seemed to become more comfortable. “You could see her muscles relaxing, her blood pressure lowering, her heart rate going down, her blood saturation levels going up,” she says.

This would not surprise Graham-Pole, who tells of a Shands patient with a particularly painful case of sickle-cell disease. Movement sessions with dancer-in-residence Jill Sonke-Henderson brought her so much relief that her doctors soon became used to an unusual cry: “Don’t give me morphine, just bring the dancer!”

Other effects are more subtle. Sonke-Henderson notes that positive experiences with movement can be therapeutic for people who feel disconnected from, or “let down” by, their bodies. She describes going through an exercise with a bone marrow transplant patient who said the beach was her favorite place. They closed their eyes, stretched their arms toward the horizon, and reached down as if to scoop up water. Then, Sonke-Henderson recalls, the patient “took a deep breath and said, ‘Now I know I’m going to be all right; the seashells all turned to jewels.’”

The image is startlingly ethereal, but seeing those jewels may have had a concrete physiological impact. A 2007 study from the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, for instance, found that pre-surgery optimism in bone marrow transplant patients is associated with better survival rates in the first year after surgery.

More than a diagnosis

Why might the arts provide such benefits? Artists at Shands have some ideas. They say artistic processes restore a sense of identity and agency that hospitalization takes away. Barb Esrig, once attended by AIM artists after a car wreck broke 164 bones in her body, now interviews Shands patients for oral histories. She says AIM “reminds people they’re a whole lot more than just a disease process or a diagnosis. We find out who they are outside of the hospital gown.”

Paula Patterson agrees. She leads a theater troupe whose members listen to patients speak about their lives, then “play back” the patients’ stories by transforming them into theater pieces. Patterson remembers a patient who, enthralled by seeing her life turned into drama, decided to join the group herself. The woman had an IV pole by her side, so she draped it in black cloth and gamely dubbed it “Ivy.”

“She learned that her story was worthy of being art,” says Patterson. “And when she became a performer, rather than being the person who always received help, she could be giving help to others.”

Some scientists believe that such feelings of control and mastery trigger an increase in the production of disease-fighting cells. A 2004 study found that HIV-positive patients who engaged in expressive writing, or writing exercises specifically designed to help them process traumatic events, had higher levels of a particular group of white blood cells known as CD4 lymphocytes.

Other research reveals different mechanisms by which art may improve health. A 2006 study tested the saliva of college-aged singers before and after rehearsals. Singing appeared to raise their levels of salivary immunoglobulin, a substance that defends the respiratory tract against pathogens. And singers who were pleased with their performances had lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that is a marker for stress, in their saliva. In other words, artistic engagement doesn’t just make people feel better in the moment—it may protect their future health by boosting their immune systems.

The arts can play a role in medicine in more basic ways. When a physician at Shands studied the health of patients at an outpatient hemodialysis unit, he found that AIM patients not only gained less weight (a good thing for many of those on dialysis therapy), lowered blood pressure, and improved mood, they were also more likely to take their medication consistently after they left the clinic, reducing their risk of complications. Findings like this, Mullen explains, are why “more and more institutions are coming to Shands and saying, ‘We’d like to learn about this!’”

Graham-Pole, now retired, envisions a world in which art is an integral part of every health care system. He says a model of medicine that embraces the arts is extremely cost-effective when one considers the impact of the AIM program and its “tiny” budget, relative to the overall cost of running a hospital.

“Art is a social determinant of our health,” he says. “It doesn’t cure a particular disease, but benefits whatever ails you.”

keith oatley short

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/art_vs_non-art


Art vs. Non-ArtBy Keith Oatley | Winter 2009 |

My research with Maja Djikic and Raymond Mar suggests that reading fiction improves empathy and social intelligence. But do films, TV, and video games bring the same benefits? The answer is yes, they can, but it depends on the subject matter of each work and the intention behind it.

When we talk about intention, we must make a distinction between art and non-art. In our view, non-artistic communication tries to produce some specific emotional response. In a thriller, for instance, the intention is to produce anxiety, which will later be relieved. But in art, the intention is to give people material to create their own thoughts and emotions.

No sharp boundary can be drawn: Fine art can have political implications; advertisements can have artistic aspects. Many fiction films share properties with short stories and novels. Just as in reading, film viewers must create simulated worlds. The camera is in places a person could never be. But there are differences between writing and film: Literary fiction can more easily prompt inner reflection, whereas films juxtapose verbal and visual elements in ways that can be more literal and manipulative.

The second consideration is subject matter. My colleagues and I argue that literary fiction tends to be about problems of understanding selves and others in the social world. But some movies and video games actually seek to obstruct that understanding, particularly in the use of violence. Most violent television programs and games offer experiences of angry vengefulness, but little in the way of suffering or consequences.

In these cases, violent, non-artistic media have the opposite effect of a short story by Anton Chekhov or a novel by Jane Austen. Instead of encouraging understanding of ourselves and others, they limit empathy and social intelligence.

non/art binaries

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Art-Non-Art.html

just about wrapping ym head around this, i;; come back with edits and note once fully digested

The Art/Non-Art Binaries: The Logic of the Artworld and the Art Market Art/Not-Art: The Artworld at Work The political economy of the artworld depends on the ability to maintain "art" as a cultural category and to differentiate it from non-art. A primary social function of the artworld is thus producing the consent of the wider society and of economic actors outside the artworld for the authority to construct the category of art and to be the guardian of the art/non-art differentiation for the rest of society. The artworld and all its institutions depend on the ability to reconfigure or reinstall the art/non-art differentiation at any given moment in the production and reception of art. Since the artworld and all its institutions are configured around a largely unquestioned belief or acceptance of "art" as a category to which the institutions refer, there must be a set of strategies for determining the institution's objects and activities while differentiating these objects and activities from everything else. The artworld elicits and requires everyone's participation--the tacit cooperation of the various agents or "actors" in all the interdependent institutions--to be able (at any level of awareness or sophistication) to circulate the artworld discourses that constitute art as a category in the art/non-art binary. Like all cultural binary oppositions, the artworld binary constitutes a structure of mutual entailment, one term deriving meaning and existence from the opposite term. This structure forecloses any appeal to an extra-institutional, permanent, or transcendental ground for art as a name for something with essential trans-historical properties. That is, there is no possibility of art as a cultural category or of individual art objects to appear as such, outside the institutional network in which the art/non-art opposition exists. But the binary model has severe limits in describing the full operations of the artworld and the micro-cultures of reception and production within the artworld. In a complexity system of contingent relations and binary oppositions of mutual entailment, there is no "there-there," no independent space outside the meaning and value constructed in the network of differentiations (see the network complexity modelfor completion of the binary structure). The construction of "art" at any given moment within discourse is a network activity--cf. Foucault's "discursive practices," Bourdieu's "fields"--not a simple binary, even though the results may be a reinstallment of the art/non-art binary. The Traditional Model of the "Semiotic Square" or Structure of Differentiation and Mutual Entailment Logical structure of the semiotic square: mutual entailment and structure of contraries and contradictories Example of cultural binaries Artworld binaries (fill in terms) Art Non-Art | | | | Not-Art Not-Non-Art Some Examples of Dialogic Interplay Among Categories Art (Positioned against Not-Art) Not-Art (Sometimes looks like Art) Ironization, subversion, hybridization, or deconstruction? Non-decorative, non-functional (non-service, non-entertainment, non-visual enjoyment [Kosuth]) Decorative art, mass media images Yes: Warhol, Salle, Koons, street art Intentionally non-mass media, difficult, requires insider coding Advertising, pop media art, popular codes Yes: pop art, Warhol Unique objects, carrying signs of artist's work, intervention of hand (view of Frank Stella); marks of activity of artists as artworld functionaries barring outsiders Mass-produced (decoration, imitation high design, "Ikea," posters, shopping mall galleries, commodities, poster reproductions) Sometimes: ironic use of consumer objects and images Avoids beauty and aesthetics (as kidnapped by mass culture). Strategies used: intentions and interventions often unfinished, coarse, rough, inelegant, primitive, outside the perfection of mass produced commodities Mass culture, middle class notions of beauty, design, and "aesthetics," arty look and materials Sometimes; seduction of the image, pleasure of the visual Non-sentimental, against mass culture emotions. Subversion of nostalgia and received ideologies. Kitsch (easy and easily reproducible visual clutter, often sentimental or politically correct). Visual Muzak. Yes: Koons Working with Case Studies: Encoding of Material Medium All art media is subject to the already-encoded value system from traditional high-art media (oil paint, marble, etc.) through modern materials (acrylic paint, steel/metals, plastics, lighting, film, video, etc.) to outside and newly introduced materials (organic, industrial, found, biological, excrement, food, digital processes). All are constantly being repositioned in a network of systemic relations (mediology). Andy Warhol The Piss Paintings (Oxidation Paintings): acrylic ground, metallic paint, urine on canvas panels. Especially the Oxidation Painting of 1978 with diamond dust: a Warhol tour de force. Merging of high/low, sacred/profane, ideal/excrement, diamonds/urine Warhol's revenge on abstract expressionism? Piss and cocks as painting tools, humiliation of action painting and macho swagger of Pollock and company. In the process, created amazing abstract works with metallic and chemical oxidation. Commentary on the "piss works" tradition in painting. Next: a "network complexity model" for interpreting art in the artworld context. Martin Irvine irvinem@georgetown.edu © 2004-2009 All educational uses permitted with attribution and link to this page.