MURKETING

Flickr Interlude

Last Days, originally uploaded by RYN TMRW.

To Do in NYC [??]

Actually I have no idea what this is, really. But I gather it’s tonight. I guess. Or something.

If I were in the area I’d have made an effort to find out. But I’m not, so I didn’t. If you go, or whatever, let me know.

AntiFriday: Your weekly compendium of backlashes, dissent & critiques

That’s right, AntiFriday is on Saturday today. Here goes.

* Heart asked the GOP to stop using “Barracuda” as Sarah Palin’s de facto theme song — and the GOP promptly played it again after her convention speech. “I feel completely f—ed over,” Nancy Wilson says. She and sister Ann add: “Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late 70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women.” Slate says the GOP may not need the band’s permission.

* Unplug Your Friends features a cute video intended to counter “screen addiction.” Specifically you can counter screen addition by joining/forming a Meet Up group — or (in a classic murketing tactic) emailing your friends to get them involved in Meet Up. And I must disclose that this came to my attention because someone at Meet Up sent it to me. [Link goes straight to video]

* The Washington Post assesses retail signage that looks a lot like Barbara Kruger’s work. Guy responsible says it’s an “obvious homage.” Kruger doesn’t seem to care one way or the other. Writer Blake Gopnik concludes: “Sometimes — maybe even most of the time — the look of an image is itself the thing we care most about it. Its look is its crucial content. Its style is its meaning; it’s what gets distilled out of it, as the message we take home. When a real estate agent borrows Kruger’s look and leaves most of her ideas behind, he may be treating art the way most of us do.” [I’m a devoted WaPo Style page reader, but thanks also to Braulio for mentioning this.]

* And finally: E directs my attention to this video in which you “meet the graphic designer behind Hollywood’s most famous floating head movie posters.” Amusing. [Again, link goes straight to video.]

Little Friends of Printmaking: The Q&A

Here, then, the third Q&A connected to artists I commissioned to create posters related to Buying In. This time it’s The Little Friends of Printmaking, who I believe I first heard of from Faythe Levine; then I checked out their site, and saw their work in person when I happened to be at Renegade Chicago a year or so ago. I was thrilled when they zithromax were willing to make a poster in connection with the Washington D.C. Buying In event (see below; there’s also a version of this poster that’s sort of like a “tour blank,” but more on that some other time).

As with F2 Design and Amy Jo, the other esteemed creators I was fortunate to enlist in my largely ego-driven cause, I asked The Little Friends of Printmaking if they’d be willing to do a Q&A here, and they said yes. Read on for their thoughts on working as a team; on getting applications from hopeful Brand Managers; on the inspiring effects of crippling student debt and no particular professional prospects; on the effect of so many poster-makers; on how their life is actually not that much like a sitcom; and on which of their cats is less helpful, among other topics.

Very briefly: The Little Friends of Printmaking are Melissa and JW Buchanan; they are based in Milwaukee; they make posters and art prints and illustration work and apparently even at least one toy. (Blog; Flickr stream.) And as you’ll see, they’re very funny.

Q: So you are a married couple who work together as Little Friends of Printmaking. At what point did you decide to take a team approach? And do you think it made it harder or easier to establish yourselves as Little Friends of Printmaking than as two separate artists? Do people ever think that you’re more of a company than two collaborating artists?

Melissa:  We started working together when we were in school. We were both studying art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and we had met early on. I don’t know when exactly we started to work as a team, or if there was a specific project that made us want to pool our resources; I think it was a gradual extension of us working side by side. When you’re a printmaker the work goes much faster if you’re working with a buddy. That kind of relationship, where you help someone else print their work, that wasn’t unusual. What we did, collaborating from beginning to end, was unusual. Our professors didn’t really encourage us or even approve of our partnership, probably because it was harder to grade us as individuals. We made their lives 0.15% more complicated, which of course was unacceptable.

JW:  It’s a big step to throw everything together into a partnership the way we did. Maybe we didn’t have the sense of propriety that other people had for their own work, or maybe we just liked each other’s work a whole lot. Who knows. As a team, we have had an easier time establishing ourselves in some respects. When you work under a name that isn’t your given name, or from under the umbrella of a collective, you kind of get to invent and define who you are as an artist without sounding too much like an idiot or an asshole.

It’s been much easier for us to promote our Little Friends projects because our names aren’t front and center. I don’t think we would have made it very far if we had to rely on reserves of self-confidence that we don’t have. We can hide behind the name, use it as a bully pulpit, whatever. It works for us. There’s still a lot of glamour attached to the idea of the artist as a genius with a singular vision—we don’t get any of that. We’re glamour-deficient. Read more

Just Looking

I have no further information. Via Hipster Runoff.

Flickr Interlude

Soft Serve Summer, originally uploaded by EssG.

Art v. commerce: On the other hand…

… mere moments after that post below, I see (via PSFK) that Urban Outfitters has “has offered a set of windows facing the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art as a canvas for artists to present public installations.”

Something’s Hidden In Here has taken the retailer up on this offer, with a project called Your Message Here.

Basically they have installed a sign in said window, and are inviting you — yes you — to make suggestions for what it should say. Apparently they’ll change it daily. Maybe a line from that Guardian piece (“Adverts are the enemy of art”) would be interesting? I don’t know. Maybe this project is an example of art and commerce coexisting happily. What do you think?

If you care to suggest something to be put on the sign, go here, and type away. As I bang this out you have 160 competitors and counting.

Art v. commerce: When to walk away

Maybe this should wait till AntiFriday, but …

Via ArtsJournal, here’s Mark Ravenhill in The Guardian:

Recently, I became excited about the possibilities of creating a drama serial on the internet: thrice-daily instalments in a fresh medium. But I quickly discovered that the only source of funding lay in business. There are no ad breaks in internet drama. If money is forthcoming, the only option, at the moment, is for the drama and the advert to become one. Current internet dramas are funded by – and feature characters prominently using – a particular type of mobile phone or sanitary towel. The drama’s hero, driving the action of the scene and determining the final cut, becomes the product, not the character.

If this is the only choice available, then I figure, as a dramatist, it’s best to walk away.

Just looking

Flickr stars Red and Johnny — I noted them once here, and even attempted to get them to do a Q&A, though that didn’t work out* — have moved to a new level by way of a collaboration with Jim Hance.

The image above is a painting by Hance, based on one of R&J’s Flickr pix. $495 for the original; prints $40.

I gather there’s more to come.

Hance’s blog here.

[* “Didn’t work out” = They stopped answering my email!]

Playlist

A friend  who is savvy-about-Web-music-stuff for a living assures me I can’t get into trouble for uploading stuff to 8Tracks.com, so I’ve been toying with it a little. I have mixed feelings. I buy a lot of stuff on iTunes, and can’t upload those songs (I understand that this is because of Apple’s technlogy/rights decisions.) More annoying is that when I test listen, the tracks don’t seem to stay in the order I want them to play in. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Either way, this is my batch of eight songs I acquired in the month of August and have enjoyed. It’s not my top eight — it’s just eight that I could upload.