Do You Even Art, Bro?

One time I was listening to this podcast on Spotify called GirlBoss Radio. On the podcast, Sophia Amoruso, founder of NastyGal, interviews powerful women who are striving in their industry and living their best life.  One of these women was Petra Cortright, a digital media artist who certainly started off on the New Media Art track before she turned to painting in Photoshop.

digital renderings of Fabergé eggs. The jewels, precious stones, and metals were replaced with satellite dishes, Starbucks storefronts, and charging ports.  Jonathan Monaghan created this exhibition, calling it After Fabergé. He parodied the famous and precious eggs by using materials that we hold value to today in the 21st century and manipulating ideas that are considered “aesthetic”.

In 2016, Baltimore City debuted the “first large-scale festival containing art, music, and innovation.” This, my friends, is called Light City.  It’s full of very cool, interactive art having to do with lights and technology, and it goes on for about a week down at the Inner Harbor.  This year, some of the installations included a net of lights that buzzed and moved with you as you walked underneath them (like they would if you drove under them during bumper cars) and art made with a pile of circuit boards and lights. 

Hi there!

I know you’re probably going to read this blog pretty soon, considering it was due yesterday.  I just wanted to say something to you about this blog before you got any further down the page.

Yes, this is a blog, and it is for a class.  I understand that.  But this is also a Tumblr blog. As you probably know, Tumblr can be so different from any other micro-blogging platform. That includes the vernacular, and what’s appropriate to say and what not to say.  I’m not telling you that I cuss in this blog or anything, I’m saying that I use Tumblr vernacular and formatting a lot here. (ie: “smol” and memes... definitely some memes.)

Just like any other kind of thing that you create (ahem, art), blogging has a signature, a style a movement.  And this is my signature, style, movement.  So I hope you enjoy.

Signing off.

There was this special exhibit on race and sexuality (but mainly race).  This was a couple years back.  It’s still, by far, my favorite exhibit in the museum.  I wish that I could have remembered the artists that were shown there, but the pictures I took are gone. (I have bad luck with phones... that one got stolen.)

Okay, so you’re probably like “Sarah, wtf is with this title. tHIS is A nEW MEDIA aRT bLOg”.

I never really thought of new media art before I took this class, but after learning about and researching artists under this movement, I realized that it could make a difference. Some artists choose not to make a political statement with their pieces, but others do. Many explore feminism, political beliefs, and their ideas for and about the future, just like people do with many other art movements.

My professor told my class and I to attend this panel of black queer female artists instead of going to class, and he told us to write a blog about it. I already wanted to go to this, so I had no qualms. As a queer woman of color and as an artist, the panel resonated with me.  

They spoke about how people like to put them in a box (ei ”No, you can either be black or queer.”), and how they were always expected to have a deep, traumatic meaning behind their work, being women of color.  All six of them had their own creative feilds--from music, to painting, to sculpture, and they all supported each other.  They emphasized the importance of community for artists, black women, and queer people.  “Support your fellow black artists so that we all thrive together,” one said.  “And if there aren’t any black artists, then go to an artist of color.” One of them is a DJ, and she puts on a queer dance party every month.   Overall, they kept circling back to this idea that minorities, especially in the same categories, should stick together and support each other.

A concept: something is lost when art is reproduced.  Value, perhaps.  It’s like this: if you print more dollars, the value of the dollar goes down.  If you reproduce art, the value of rarity goes down.  Now, the first piece, the original piece, will usually stay at a higher value.  For example, if someone decided to reproduce a Picasso or Van Gogh, a collector will still pay millions of dollars for that painting.  However, if a company produces a bunch of statues of Venus, it will mean nothing, because Venus has been around and reproduced for centuries.

New media art is the kind of art that people like my father mock.  I’m certainly not saying I agree with his stance, as art comes in all different form.  Marcel Duchamp certainly made a statement like this with his ready-made art.

In new media art, one of the themes is collaboration and participation.  I’ve recently read about this man, Alan Kaprow, who had a series of pieces referred to as Happenings.  A particular example the reading gave, for example, was 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 1959. The audience follower choreographed movements specified by Kaprow.

In Alan Kaprow's seminal 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 1959, for example, audience members were directed to specific seats in various rooms of the exhibition venue, where they followed strictly choreographed movements at particular times.  I’m not quite sure if what this reminded me of counts as new media art, but I used to work at an art museum and this man came in.  He was going to be an artist of this exhibition on scent. He would go to a city where he would have an exhibition, and survey people on what certain sectors of that city smelled like (ei.: North-West, North, East, North-East, Central, etc.) Then, he would find the most common smells from each section, pick three or four of them, and make them into perfumes.  People would come to the exhibition, tell them which part of the city they were from, or if they were a tourist, and they would get sprayed with they’re perfume.  If they wanted to know what another part of the city smelled like, they would go up to the facilitator, and the facilitator would tell them to go up and smell a certain person.  In doing this, the audience was interacting with one another and participating in the art piece.

Another thing I thought of is the exhibition called “Imagining Home”, which is located at the Baltimore Museum of Art until October 7, 2018.  This exhibition has several interactive features including Home Stories videos that show people’s “experience living with a reproduction of one of four objects per month.” (BMA)  There’s also an area where you can sit down and use one of the iPads provided to complete the phrase, “Home is...”. Your response shows up as a projection on the floor in front of you, along with everyone else’s responses.