Archive for the “media” Category

You know you have a problem when you go shopping for something when you have recently purchased examples of that same thing sitting around your house, unopened.  Well, maybe not in the case of food.  But in the case of art, I think I might have this problem.   Last year around this time I blogged about the photo auction season.  I also bought a couple of things, and not all of them have made it into rotation on my walls.  And it’s that time of year again, and I’m making a shopping list.

Last week it was Skinner’s auction of fine wines.  I didn’t get it together to go, and I hope I can find the sale prices online somewhere.  Morbid curiosity, I think.  The $12 screw-cap Bordeaux should fill my needs for now.

This weekend, it’s The DeCordova Museum’s annual benefit and auction.  I’ve never been to this one, and it looks like I’ll miss it again this weekend, but I’ve been having great times at the DeCordova lately so will pay more attention next year.

Coming up on October 11 is The Center for Photography at Woodstock’s Benefit Gala and 30th annual benefit auction.  For the second year in a row, they’re cutting the format back to a smaller sale of much higher-quality work.  I might be priced out, but I’m going anyway.  last year, I scored a beautiful Keith Carter print.

Just two weeks after that, on the 25th - not much time for budget relief - is The Photographic Resource Center’s annual benefit auction.  With almost 200 works in total and 3/4 of that in a silent auction, you can expect some bargains here, but also expect to see some amazing work sold for breathtaking prices.

November 1 brings us ARTcetera at the Boston Center for the Arts, a fundraiser for the AIDS action committee.  Keep an eye on this one, there’s an amazing variety of work - not just photos - on offer.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s what’s on the limeduck radar these days.  I’m very interested to see how these events play out.  Economic uncertainty suggests that people will be bidding timidly, but that also suggests that those with the guts and the cash might get some exceptional bargains.  It’s also possible that some investors will look to art as a better store of value than commodities or equities.  In any case, it’s a great way to buy local and get a unique gift for yourself or a loved one.

It’s rare that I know something about social media that C.C. Chapman doesn’t, but earlier this evening I left the third WBUR social media get-together and saw this tweet.

So, for C.C. and others, let me set the context.  WBUR’s social media guy, Ken George, called the third WBUR tweet-up, the usual informal social media gabfest with the added lure of a tour of the station.  I was lucky enough to be in on the first such event, but missed the second. I hope C.C. can join us for one in the future.

The discussion was pretty free-flowing, and I’m sure it flowed even freeer when the crew decamped to the bar, but I’ll try to mention some of the interesting people and themes I noticed.

David Boeri, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, kicked things off with a discussion of using twitter and other social media to source stories or find trends and ideas as they bubble up.  He came with an attitude of “beginners mind” and probably left with a headache.  The crowd was eager to help, but I’m not sure if even those of us swimming in new media fully understand what it is we’re in the midst of.  As one said, “I have over 800 followers [on twitter] and I have no idea why.”

A soft-spoken woman named Angie mentioned an event called Courteous Mass, a reaction to the sometimes controversial Critical Mass, but specifically committed to obeying traffic laws (in contrast to the “corking” through red lights common to Critical Mass) and being nice to both pedestrians and drivers while celebrating urban bike-riding. Bravo, I say.  As a pedestrian and a driver, I find the behavior of many cyclists unnerving and reckless while wishing that more people could safely ride bikes in the city.

Manifest Magazine is a twice-monthly free magazine about “ordinary people with extraordinary experiences” delivered, oddly to my mind, in PDF via a blog.  The creator of the magazine spoke of his use of “most favorited” searches to find interesting and up-and-coming authors and interview subjects.  Worth a look, as I’m sure will be whatever this gentleman does next.

On the way home, I walked over the BU bridge and watched the moon peek in and out of the clouds.

Last month I visited San Francisco and engaged in some art-peeping and food-eating with Professor N and La Doctorante.  One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to SFMoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I saw the headline show of Frida Kahlo paintings and the less-publicized retrospective of Lee Miller photographs and drawings.

Because of the restricted entrance time for the Kahlo show, I saw about half the Lee Miller, then the Kalho, then back to Miller.  The points of comparison were interesting, and when I get back home and did some reserach, it got more interesting. In fact, I really have to wonder how the museum put the two shows on at the same time without ever recognizing or celebrating the connection between them.  I think it could have been an engaging gallery talk or symposium.

For those who haven’t seen the exhibitions or the movie or otherwise haven’t geeked out on this as much as I, here are quick capsule artist bios of these two women that do them terrible disservice.  Click to the wiki to learn a little more.

Lee Miller worked as a model in New York until one day she decided to go to Paris and become a photographer and Man Ray’s apprentice.  She became more than just his student.  Many photographs attributed to Man Ray might actually be her work.  She runs in the surrealist circle and later becomes a photojournalist for Vogue, eventually covering WWII including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau.

Frida Kahlo was an art student when whe met painter Diego Rivera and asked for his help in developing her career as a painter.  They were married twice, covering most of her adult life despite frequent infidelity on both sides.  Rivera was a famous artist in his lifetime, Kahlo much less so.

Both were born in 1907.  I can find only one time and place where they might have met, in Paris in 1939, but can’t establish that they did.  Both agressively sought out sucessful male artists and became their protoges and lovers, Frida and Diego orbited eachother for a long time, while Lee was linked with several of the surrealists and eventually married surrealist painter Roland Penrose.

Kahlo had polio as a child and was in an accident as a teenager that left her with spine and leg problems throughout her life.  Medical themes run through some of her self-portraits.  Lee Miller’s childhood trauma is a little harder to pin down in her work, but she was raped as a child and was treated for a sexually-transmitted disease, and as a teenager, she was often a nude model for her father’s photographic hobby.  Psychologists could certainly speculate.

The surrealists adopted Frida Kahlo as a kindred spirit although she had little communication with them except for an exhibition at the Louvre organized for her by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in 1939.  This is the possible point of overlap with Lee Miller, who was clearly linked to the surrealists through Man Ray, Roland Penrose, Paul Eulard, and others, and who was in Paris for at least part of 1939 after returning from a sojourn in Egypt with her first husband and before moving to England with Penrose.

Both artists touch on the conflict of being the muse or the model in their work.  Miller had experience on both sides of the lens, and in some of her drawings and paintings showed some thought about being the observed and objectified body for the surrealists.  Kahlo never worked as a model in that way, but her likeness appears in many of Digeo Rivera’s works.  Her self-portraiture, the best-known segment of her work, constantly probes beauty and sexuality.  I’ve been unable to find web versions of some of the most illustrative images from the museum show.  I guess I should have bought the catalogs.

Am I seeing things that aren’t there?  It wouldn’t be the first time.  I did find two places where these two artists are mentioned together:

In the LA Times, Mary Mcnamara wrote a piece called “The muse steps off the pedestal” in 2003 about a Lee Miller show called “The surrealist muse.”  She talks about the discovery of a trove of Miller’s work after her death, and mentions Kahlo in passing and nominates another woman artist overshadowed by a more-famous partner.

“We look at the many ways inspiration occurs,” says Weston Naef, who curated the Lee Miller show. “At the many sources including raw nature, or art itself. It’s really just the process of looking at surroundings in a new way. Lee Miller was a primal force who changed more lives than they changed hers.”

In doing so, she helped redefine the term to include a kindred artistic spirit who creates as much as inspires. Someone who looks more perhaps like Frida Kahlo or Yoko Ono than Ophelia.

In a 1999 edition of Aperture magazine on the theme of male/female, there’s an interview with Madonna.  We all know about her interest in Frida, but it turns out she knows about Lee Miller too, mentioning her several times.

Madonna: And, by the way, artists through the centuries have been into role-playing. I mean Frida Kahlo always dressed like a man. And so did Lee Miller for a time. There are lots of people sort of switched back and forth, but that was always reserved for fine art; in pop culture, you’re expected to behave in a socially acceptable way.

…

Madonna: Well, a lot of the artists that I collect and that I admire: Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo - that whole group of females that kind of started off as muses and became artists in their own right and absolutely worked in a lot of different worlds and moved in a lot of different worlds and were artstic and political and still had their femininity about them. I can’t think of anybody now.

Maybe an enterprising art history student will take up this line of inquiry.  Maybe Madonna will push a Lee Miller movie the way she did the Frida Kahlo movie.  Maybe in that dissertation or in that movie, Frida and Lee will finally meet, and talk about art and life.

I found out, at the last minute as per usual, that the final performance of Harborwalk Sounds at the ICA was last night.  I quickly diverted prior plans with J (sorry, Toro, we’ll be back) and took the other side of the silver line to the ICA.  Harborwalk Sounds puts Berklee Jazz musicians on stage on the deck behind (in front of?) the ICA.  We heard bassist and vocalist Katie Thiroux in a trio format with so far as I can tell uncredited horns and drums.  They cooked, although I could tell that the harbor breeze was hard on their fingers.

It was windy and a bit chilly, at least it felt that way relative to recent weather, but I was out on a deck watching the sunset, so a cocktail was definitely in order.  And Wolfgang Puck’s Water Cafe was looking tempting, so we ordered up the Kobe sliders and crabcakes with corn bisque.

The sliders were hot and fresh, at least until the wind got to them.  A little cheese and mayo and some onion marmalade under the toasted bun helped make them stand out over the average little burger.  The crabcakes came perches on top of tube-like shot glasses of corn bisque with drops of different oils.  The bisque was tastier than the crabcakes, but the strange glassware made it hard to drink it.  Dunking was impossible, too.  I love small plates, but I guess it’s possible to be a little too precious.

Shivering lightly and listening to the music as the dusk turned to night, I thought about the imminent change of season.  Plans for weekend canoeing are starting to seem ill-advised.  It’s almost time to un-mothball the winter clothes, to switch from iced coffee to hot, from gin to vodka.  The five or six perfect days of New England Autumn are on their way.  I hope I don’t miss them.

You may have noticed that I’ve been critical of print advertising, especially in general interest publications.  But oddly enough, not that long ago, I encountered a print ad so compelling that I took action.  Repeatedly.  And yet the merchant did not win the sale.  Here’s what I saw in an expensive early page of Fast Company :

I don’t think it’s an invite to move up to Cape Ann.  It’s about the shoes, and I like the look of those shoes, so I clicked over to Rockport’s web site but couldn’t find them.  There were other nice shoes, but I really wanted to learn more about the pair pictured.  I tore out the page and kept it for future reference.  That’s the second action the ad compelled me to take.

The third action was to visit the website a couple more times, and then the fourth was to visit the retail store on Newbury street.  A friendly Rockporter asked, “can I help you find something?” and to both of our surprise, I said, “yes!” and handed over the ad.

He consulted with another, apparently more senior, employee who came over and explained, “That shoe wasn’t made.  We have it but not in brown and not with suede, and not in the store but we can order it.  You’re the third person to come in with this ad.”

The shoe wasn’t made?  Never?  Not even one pair for the photo shoot?  I guess it’s all done with computer graphics these days.  What do you mean you have it but in a different color and different material and not in the store?  Then it’s not really the same shoe, is it?  And if it’s not in the store, then you don’t really have it, do you?  I’m the third person to bring in this ad?  Maybe somebody should tell HQ that there’s interest in this imaginary shoe?

A friend suggested that I should sue for false advertising.  I’m not sure if I really have a case on that, but I must say this is a pretty lame bait and switch since there’s not even much switch.  More like bait and ditch.  Further, it’s not that the shoe played a supporting role in a lifestyle ad or an ad with a celebrity endorsement - the shoe is very nearly all there is to the ad.  The copy at the bottom reads in part (my emphasis), “There’s nothing timid about you - or these shoes.  Torsion(R) system technology by Adidas.  Rockport.com”

I guess they didn’t really mean those shoes in particular.  There are at least six pairs of Rockport shoes in my closet (and scattered about the hallway) - there would have been one more. I give this ad and the almost-geniuses at Rockport a grade of fail.