The Accidental Masterpiece

Throughout my career teaching art, there's no phrase I've heard more often than 'I just can't do art', as if making art was akin to sprouting wings or instantaneously speaking French. The reality, I think, is that anyone can 'do art'. The caveat is our particular definition of what it is. Not everyone can draw realistically, nor should they spend undue time trying to; we need people's who are naturals at microbiology to start working on that rather than sweat through still life compositions.

Michael Kimmelman's book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa provides hope for those of us who prefer a wider definition of what art actually is. In his words, "This book is, in part, about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece." He gives funny, strange, and memorable examples of people involved in 'art' and the value their unconventional approaches brought to the world. Chapter titles such as 'The Art of The Pilgrimage' and 'The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies' provide the first hint of his approach.

In the chapter titled 'The Art of Making Art Without Lifting a Finger', he examines Sol LeWitt, an artist known for giving instructions on how to make an artwork rather than making it himself (ie, '24 lines for the center, 12 lines from the midpoint of each side, and 12 lines for each corner').

"[Sol LeWitt] didn't care about making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity. Objects are perishable, he realized. Ideas need not to be."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/design/09lewitt.html?pagewanted=all

In fact, collecting art is an act of art-making, argues Kimmelman. In the section The Art of Collecting Lightbulbs:

"The combination of public service and the strength of one's conviction is what defines an admirable collector."

In The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost, he relates the story of Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer on Earnest Shackelton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to Antarctica. After their ship was crushed by ice floes, Hurley had to decide which negatives (then on heavy, fragile glass plates) could be saved.

"I had to preserve them almost with my life, for a time came when we had to choose between heaving them overboard or throwing away our surplus food -- and the food went over."

After surviving several years living on the ice with his shipmates and the negatives, they were final rescued in 1917. Hurley's photographs remain some of the most haunting and inspiring ever taken.

http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425812025/141083/frank-hurley-the-dying-sun.html

The most important part of Kimmelman's book is that it gives permission for all of us to be great artists -- even of our art, like the dentist Hugh Hicks, is the world's largest collection of lightbulbs.

Great basin artist in residency begins . . .

Great Basin blog

9/13/11

Great Basin National Park (GBNP) is a small part of the actual Great Basin, which stretches between California to Utah and Mexico (plus a dash of Oregon and Idaho). Roughly speaking, that's about 150 million acres.

That's a large charge for a relatively small 77,000 acre National Park.

That gives us about a 2,000:1 scale for all us math nerds. In other words, if you put your palm on the ground in GBNP that chunk of earth you have coved up is responsible for representing two thousand times its size, or the handprints of 1,999 other people.

One of the things that fascinates me here is that sense of scale; both the scale of what this park represents as well as the sheer magnitudes of size and age here.

Take Bristlecone pines, for example. Oldest single organisms on earth. Many are 4,000 years or older, although we don't know for sure without cutting them down (which happened to the oldest one we've found so far. Oops).

Rather than living in the arboreal land of milk and honey, they are found at extreme altitudes where the lack of soil, 100mph winds, and sub-zero winter temperatures give a Honey Badger smack-down (YouTube it, you won't be disappointed) to lesser competitors, diseases, and creatures that would end them.

Interestingly, climate change may be the biggest threat to the trees. As it becomes warmer and warmer at these high elevations, it makes infestations and competition from other species possible.

The other thing that strikes me here are the superlatives. Specifically, GBNP has been called both the quietest and darkest place in the continental US, and I believe it. Where I'm staying looks out over a valley that separates us from Utah, and it is quite the experience to look out for miles and miles at night and hear . . . absolutely nothing. I'm sure the folks at the visitor center hear the White Stripes a quarter mile away from my iPod.

There are many folks who have written much more eloquently and profitably than I have about this area. Here are a few I'm reading that I'd recommend:

The Void, The Grid, and The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin by William Fox
A fascinating exploration of the metaphors we use to explain this area; I'd recommend to people who have actually been to some part of the basin and range. Without having the physical experience of being here it wouldn't make any damn sense.

Basin and Range by John McPhee
I love me some McPhee, and this volume doesn't disappoint. It avoids being long, dense, or boring, which has been the fate of many a geology book. His story follows I-80, more or less, and almost makes me want to drive on it.

The Bristlecone Book: A Natural History of the World's Oldest Trees by Ronald Lanner
An interesting quick read on these fascinating creatures, and beautiful photography.

The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin by Stephen Trimble
I know Steve, and the book comes alive for me because I can imagine his voice reading it. He also took the fantastic photos, just to rub it in that he can be the Bo Jackson of the art world.

The Woolf Table, completed

My collaboration with Stefanie Dykes referencing Virginia Woolf, recently completed --

A log of the process can be found at:
http://blueboathome.blogspot.com/2011/02/woolf-table.html
http://blueboathome.blogspot.com/2011/03/woolf-table-part-2.html

Collaborative Consumption

What would life be like if you didn’t have to actually own the stuff you use everyday?

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ book What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collabortive Consumption explores companies who are trying to provide just that.  Imagine the Netflix business model applied to everything from apartments to cars to lawnmowers, and that’s what they’re talking about. It sounds like a great way to save money, time, and the resources that go into making stuff that sits unused for most of its life in our garages and closets.  But, it requires a fundamental shift in thinking from valuing the ownership of the things in our lives to valuing the utility they give us.  Do we want the powerdrill or do we want the holes that the drill makes?

Some examples:

Airbnb is a site that coordinates travellers with people wanting to rent out anything from couch for the night to a villa for a month.  There are rating systems so that you can rest easy knowing that your host probably isn’t an axe murderer.

Zipcar is a service that allows you to reserve a car any time of the day or night for as little as an hour.

Freecycle coordinates people who have things to get rid of with people who want them.  Their tagline:  “There’s no such thing as waste, just useful stuff in the wrong place”.

TechShop is a series of  workshops on steriods -- they have the space, advice, and tools that any tinkerer would want but few could afford.  Monthly fees give you access to half a million dollars worth of equipment.

Swap.com matches you up with people who have books, CDs, and DVDs you want while coordinating others who want the ones you have.


Now lest anyone gather their pitchforks, burning torches, and mobs and start screaming ‘Socialism!’, let me assure you the collaborative consumption model doesn’t involve government ownership or intervention.  It is a way of organizing group behavior that preserves the individual’s autonomy and freedom, perhaps even more so than our current economic model (credit card debt from the garage full of stuff, anyone?).

There is a high degree of trust required with consuming collaboratively, and hence mechanisms like eBay’s user ratings system have emerged.  In fact, trust between strangers is one of the four principles of successfully collaboratively consuming.  The three others include critical mass (enough people participating to make it work), belief in the commons (the more people that participate, the better it is for everyone), and idling capacity (the stuff being shared needs to be sitting ‘idle’ enough with a single user).

I foresee two major resistances to the collaborative model.

First, companies that make products (cars, toasters, iPods, etc) have built many of their core competencies around the production, marketing, and distribution of that stuff rather than the re-distribution and maintenance of it.  I expect a large resistance from manufacturers as they are asked to profit not from producing and selling but from organizing and redistributing products.  We are, after all, known as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘users’ (or even ‘people’).  Consumers consume things, after all; in the Collaborative Consumption model, we might better be described as ‘sharers’.  It will require a fundamental shift in the corporate DNA of many companies to address this change, from selling the product to selling the function it provides.

Second, many of the profitable business models now using collaborative consumption rely heavily on the internet and its related infrastructures.  Should access to that infrastructure be disrupted or inhibited (by cost, natural disaster, or Godzilla) the geographically dispersed collaborative communities cease to function.

Botsman and Rodgers contend that ‘ . . . the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people.’  With the rise of collaborative consumption, I hope the corrollary is also true.