UPDATE 6/01/09: Only artists who paid the $50 registration fee can see the “Connect with venue” button. Sorry for the confusion.
Matching begins!
Ok, so there’s a lot of bustling at the office over a pretty “simple” feature we call “connections,” but it is the foundation of ArtPrize’s ability to actually track artists and venues participating in the event. It’s a new feature and may be buggy, contact support@artprize.org if something seems broken or not working right.
Want to know the bigger picture about this “matching” business? Read this.
HOW IT WORKS
Venues can browse the list of registered artists
Artists can browse venues that are currently available
The general public will only see artists on the website after they secure a venue
If you are an artist or venue, KEEP READING… Read More »
Here at ArtPrize Global HQ, it’s a big day. What we’ve been calling “matching” between artists and venues is about to go live. Phase 1 was launching the website and making the announcement. Phase 2 is the ability for artists and venues to officially connect to each other. Phase 3 will be the ability to vote and the final phase is the event itself. We’re still working on Matching as I write this post, and frankly we could use your help. If it is buggy or confusing, please tell us! Contact support@artprize.org if something seems broken or not working right. (You can also give me an earful at paul@artprize.org.)
When this change goes live, it may not look like much of anything happened. But keep in mind, this “matching” process is the central hub of how ArtPrize will track all venues and artists for the event and without it, there is no ArtPrize. As a venue, you will be able to browse the list of artists and each click “Connect with artist.” Artists will see a button on each venue page that says, “Connect with venue.” Everyone else will start to see artists trickle on to the website as they secure a venue to show their work.
As artists and venues come to an agreement (we’ve provided the Hosting Agreement as a standard template for them to use, learn more about it), venues will accept the artists’ request to connect and vice versa. As artists “connect” and secure venues, they’ll appear on artprize.org. As August approaches the trickle of artists appearing on the site will become a stream and we may see a flood just before the matching deadline on August 15.
I’ll publish another announcement when Matching goes live. Let me know if you have questions. If you’re a venue or artist and haven’t looked at our Hosting Agreement template yet, please download one and take a look.
We stress that artists and venues must work out a “Hosting Agreement” before the artist secures space within a venue (download the template). ArtPrize won’t police if a venue and artist actually signed the agreement. Artist and venue could come to a verbal agreement, but we strongly suggest you get it on paper. I’ll use a tacky analogy about online dating to explain why.
Nancy Artist is looking for a relationship and stumbles across Alan Venue’s profile online.
Nancy Artist finds Alan Venue appealing
She clicks “Connect” to let Alan know she’s interested
Alan is notified that Nancy is interested
Alan checks out Nancy’s profile
He likes what he sees
This is the point where the Hosting Agreement comes in. Alan Venue could just say, “Meet me at the Casbah,” but he knows that wouldn’t be prudent. He wants the terms of the relationship to be clear before things get serious, so he doesn’t shock Nancy when he demands she get rid of her cat on the third date. Read More »
One of the venues that has opened up for ArtPrize is the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT). The facility was built as a next generation learning center by global office furniture leader, Steelcase. It’s an open space with a gallery integrated into the central meeting area. One of the central functions of WMCAT is to take at risk high school students within the city and engage them in art, film and design to explore not only their creative abilities but their own identities and where they fit within a larger community.
What’s interesting about WMCAT when it comes to ArtPrize is they will be looking for artists who are open to engaging their students. They are looking for some kind of connection in the work with community, be it a commentary on local community or exposure for the students to a global community.
We’ll be uploading a video of the space in the near future to help artists get a better feeling for the opportunities and limitations of the space, but I wanted to write about it now as we’re on the eve of artist/venue matching becoming available on the website. If you’re an artist who has desire to engage students like the ones WMCAT works with, be sure to try and connect with WMCAT in the coming week.
We watched this video over lunch today and it really got us talking. The experiment is basically thus: Take a painting that has a wide appeal in the art world, which would sell for a million dollars at auction, and put it on the side of a building without anyone knowing. Will it draw an audience the same way it would in a gallery or museum?
The results were startling. Only 4% of passers by stopped and looked at the piece. Experiments like this, obviously, get us thinking a lot about ArtPrize. ArtPrize is creating a context that’s opposite from The Tuymans Experiment. In fact, we’re creating a new context for the city to be seen as an art gallery. (It’s more likely attendees will stop and wonder if a parking meter is a sculpture, rather than assuming a work isn’t significant because it’s not in a museum.) This raises a lot of questions about how people ascribe value to a work based on context. The most obvious value is monetary.
Imagine in the experiment above if a velvet rope had quartered off the painting and a security guard were posted next to it 24 hours a day. Suddenly, the feeling of value–like you experience in a museum–is boosted. I argue a lot more people would have stopped as the painting drew importance to itself by virtue of it having its own security staff. How will people ascribe value to a work if the price tag is not readily available and it’s not showing in a context where the price tag is implied, like a museum? Will they seek out people in-the-know to educate them? Will they go by their gut? Will they talk to the artists about their motivations and create a personal connection?
It excites us that ArtPrize could be a context where the market rate of the work plays second fiddle to another way of ascribing value.
One of our favorite art bloggers, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, has an interesting post up about the idea of popular opinion affecting public art. For the second time now, another of our favorite bloggers, Edward Winkleman, pointed out a connection between Jones’ comments and ArtPrize. There are lots of great ideas flying around, and I thought I’d throw in my two cents.
The thrust of Jones’ post, as I understand it, is that allowing the public to vote on proposals for public art results in mediocre work at best, and terrible work at worst. He says, “The secret to finding great art for public spaces … is to find talented artists who happen to be interested in working in that arena. Then let them indulge themselves.”
He cites two public works that were not voted on by the public, and were later removed due to public outrage, as exemplars of public art; Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc and Rachel Whiteread’s House. On the surface it may look like Jones’ ideas about public art run counter to the mission of ArtPrize, a contest decided by public vote. I don’t see it that way. I agree with Jones that Tilted Arc and House are among the finest examples of public art. I also agree that artists, even those working in the public sphere, should be allowed to indulge themselves. And I feel that this speaks to the core of what ArtPrize is all about.
Serra and Whiteread are both exceptional artists, but there’s a reason Tilted Arc and House are talked about much more than their other works. The reason is that Tilted Arc and House ignited a vigorous debate about the role of art in public life, which still continues today. Even though both pieces met an early demise, I would argue that they are two of the most successful, and (ironically) enduring works of art made in the last half-century.
The goal of ArtPrize is not to laude the artist who can distill the perfect average of public opinion. The goal is to encourage a vigorous and sincere debate with art on a massive scale. If people who come to ArtPrize continue to talk about it years after the art is gone, that is arguably more enduring than one public work people walk by every day and rarely consider.
I was speaking with Caroline Older, Executive Director of Arts Council of Greater Grand Rapids. She has opened up their small gallery space for ArtPrize and her building is located north of 196. (For out of towners, check out the Orientation post that just went up).
Caroline mentioned that her building is outside the main thoroughfare for a lot of the venues and was wondering if ArtPrize would organize certain neighborhood walks on different nights. My response was, “Wow, that’s a great idea.” Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot to do between now and September and organizing neighborhood walks on top of the different educational events and parties may prove to be a bit too much. (Or not, we’ll have to see.) However, that does not prevent venues from getting together to organize simultaneous events to pull people into their neighborhood.
For instance, Arts Council may open their doors on opening night, but save their catered reception until, say, the Thursday after opening night. On that same night, there could be receptions for the artists showing in the parks north of 196 and at the Boardwalk Condominium lobby down the street, which has a nice bar, JD Reardon’s, which could host a party as well (hypothetically). Now, if several venues got together to organize such an evening during ArtPrize, we would certainly help publicize that evening and make sure it is in the schedule for the event.
Thanks, Caroline.
The photo at the top is from The Library of Congress 1930′s-1940′s pictures in color, called “Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee (LOC)”
For those of you unfamiliar with Grand Rapids, I want to give you a little orientation. To best understand how a venue is situated amongst other venues and how foot traffic will flow from one to the other, buckle up, get your map handy and keep reading.
The section of the city that falls within the ArtPrize boundary is divided into several neighborhoods. The city itself is divided into four quadrants from a central intersection, but also neighborhoods are divided by some large geographic “interruptions.” I’ll start by explaining the four quadrants of the city and then get into the natural dividers of the neighborhoods. Read More »
I love a good doom and gloom tale. Before working on ArtPrize I wrote a weekly column on SpoutBlog about post-apocalyptic and doomsday movies. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about why predictions of immanent destruction are so appealing, and the answer, at least to me, is simple: When established systems crumble, people are forced to reassess their core values, then adapt or face destruction.
I couldn’t help but smile when I read Hrag Vartanian’s NYFA Current write-up about a recent Jerry Saltz lecture. Saltz, who made his name as the art critic for The Village Voice, now writes for New York Magazine. His lecture was titled “This is the End; The Rising Tide that Floated All Boats has Gone Out and All Boats are in Danger of Sinking.” Amid the ruminations about the floundering art market, criticisms of overly academic “late late late late conceptualism,” and the savagery of art fairs, Saltz punctuated his lecture with clips of Hollywood movies with apocalyptic overtones, including Titanic.
Saltz went on to say that the problem with the market-focused art world of the last 15 years was that everyone was in the same boat. Now that the economy has stumbled, everything is vulnerable, from lagging auction sales, to museum lay-offs, to slashes in government arts funding. Saltz’s hope is that when the current system settles into a watery grave, many small boats will emerge, most of which we won’t recognize. Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I can’t help but think of ArtPrize as one of those little boats.
The market (and academia, for that matter) was never a perfect system for the discovery, display, and appreciation of art, and ArtPrize won’t be a perfect system, either. What we’re doing is employing economic and psychological incentives to challenge artists, viewers, and institutions to engage one another in new ways. To me the “little boats” analogy represents smaller, but more diverse opportunities for artists.
You might say we’re picking up on something Hollywood has known for years: Apocalypse always equals opportunity.
Here’s an update of what’s going on behind the scenes at the ArtPrize World HQ this week:
Matching
“Matching” is the capability–currently under construction–for venues to browse the entire list of artists who have registered and paid the $50 fee. There is quite a variety of artists to choose from who have registered from all over. (Artists can currently browse venues, but since there’s no way for venues to tell the website they’ve accepted an artist’s proposal–or even seen the proposal–we’ve been asking artists to hold off on contacting venues.) With Matching, the website will begin to change.
Once a venue works out an agreement with an artist and accepts their proposal, they will be “matched” and the artist’s profile/proposal goes public for the world to see on artprize.org.
If you take an example like the Telluride Film Festival where the program is announced the day everyone arrives in town, you’ll basically see the opposite happen on our website. It will begin like a program with nothing printed on the pages. Starting in June, different artists and their work will trickle out and start filling those pages. As the deadline for matching approaches, August 15, those pages will become filled and we’ll watch the program for the event build before our eyes.
Venues
We’ve been speaking with many different venues. It turns out a lot of them want to loan their space to ArtPrize, but want somebody else to host it. Some arts organizations in town are planning to host these venues and have already begun contacting artists they’d like to see come here, some who have heard of ArtPrize and some who haven’t. This means that a couple venues will have a few artists with an agreement already worked out by the time matching begins on the website. If you’re an artist worried about not getting space, don’t worry because there is plenty of space to be filled, even in the Old Federal Building (which, judging from the emails and phone calls, tends to be the artist favorite).
In the next couple weeks before matching begins, you can expect to see several more significant venues signing up. If you’re interested in hosting/curating one of these spaces, contact Dave Deboer, dave@artprize.org. For all of the out-of-town artists who want to know more about these venues, we’ll be putting together videos for some of the bigger spaces to help you out.
Artists
It’s been exciting to hear from a lot of artists who are thinking of doing something specific for ArtPrize. It’s confirmation that we created a context that gets the wheels spinning in new directions. The IP addresses of people hitting the website are coming from as far away as Albania, South Africa, Ukraine and Iran to name a few.
As the matching capability has been looming, we’ve been telling artists to spruce up their profiles, and upload images. Descriptions and images do not have to be the completed work. They can be sketches of proposed work or images of similar past work.
That’s the down low. Sign up for email announcements about Matching in the upper right corner of this page.
UPDATE 6/01/09: Only artists who paid the $50 registration fee can see the “Connect with venue” button. Sorry for the confusion.
