Implications – Art is increasingly being commodified and made available to not only the upper classes. Art is being sold in small, on-the-go formats that appeal to the busy, but culturally-inclined, consumer. This trend also shows the continued popularity of vintage and retro designs, especially in now-simple technologies like vending machines or juke boxes.
Honestly, this strikes me as a rather trite analysis of the implications of this trend. The example Trend Hunter uses is the Art*o*mat®, who has this to say about their mission:
Artists in Cellophane (A.I.C.), the sponsoring organization of Art*o*mat® is based on the concept of taking art and “repackaging” it to make it part of our daily lives. The mission of A.I.C. is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form. A.I.C believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable.
I’ve found similar sentiments from other art vending machine proprietors. It’s not about commodifying art and making it lower-class. It’s all about making art more accessible. But maybe I’m just splitting hairs.
Portland, Oregon’s Gumball Poetry stopped publishing in 2006. That’s a real shame. However, Gumball Poetry was just one of its co-creator Laura Moulton’s many fascinating creative endeavors. Most recently she received a grant to run Street Books, a “bicycle powered mobile library serving people who live outside.”
It makes me really happy to know she’s continuing to be creative. When I first encountered Gumball Poetry, it struck me as a wonderful way to get people to experience poetry who might never pick up a book of poems. Now she’s finding new ways to get people to read things they might not have access to. It’s really kind of a natural evolution of an idea. I wonder where she’ll take it next?
Recently, Olly Moss created a new poster for the movie Totoro. Totoro is one of my all-time favorite movies and is certainly one of the best children’s movies ever made. I wanted this poster. I would have hung it in the room that will one day belong to our child, so that Totoro will be there right from their earliest memories. If you’re a fan of this movie, you’ll agree that there’s no better location for such a poster. Unfortunately, the poster wasn’t to be mine. Within minutes of the poster dropping, it had sold out. Shortly after that, this had happened:
Screenprint Speculation
It appears that a huge chunk of posters were bought not by people who love Totoro or Olly Moss’ work, but by speculators. That’s a real shame because speculators tend to ruin good things. It’s going to happen to screen printing unless we do something to stop it.
The screen printed poster is having a golden age right now. There’s an astonishing level of variety and quality out there. Scroll through OMG Posters for just a minute and you’ll get an idea. What makes this moment especially golden is how affordable these posters are. Often for under $50, it’s possible to own a piece of original, hand-made artwork. This gets trickier once something gets “discovered.” It appears that this has happened to Mondo, publisher of the Totoro poster and many other fine posters. While Mondo has kept its posters affordable, they have limited runs that are released at unspecified times on specified days. This makes them difficult for ordinary people who have lives to actually buy them. If you don’t have time to sit around all day, refreshing your browser window to find out if the print has been released, you’re not going to get that poster. These posters are so popular, if you buy one you’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to flip it on eBay for much more than you bought it for. It’s likely that many, if not the majority, of these posters are going to speculators and not to people who love them.
Mondo is just one publisher, though. There are many others out there who are doing great things. So many, in fact, that it’s only a matter of time before Martha Stewart “discovers” them and puts a link to OMG Posters in Living magazine. Then it will be letterpress all over again. Every decent screen print will be bought by speculators while the people who loved the medium and made it possible won’t be able to afford to buy the work of the artists they once supported. The market will be flooded and diluted by mediocre “me toos” trying to cash in on the latest fad. Screen printed business cards and wedding invitations will proliferate.
It doesn’t have to go down this way. Screen printers could decide right now to take a different course.
For starters, stop this “to be released at a random time” crap. Who does this serve? Is there anyone buying posters because not knowing when it is going to be released is such a thrill? No. The random time thing is just stupid, insulting, and pointless, and only caters to people who are buying the prints to resell them.
Stop manufacturing scarcity. There was a time when the signed, numbered, limited edition prints were a matter of honor. The plates that made the prints degraded with each print, so lower numbers really did mean a better quality print, and the artist would stop before the quality degraded to an unacceptable degree. However, a properly treated silk screen can last for 5,000 to 10,000 prints, far more than the 200-400 prints that screen printers usually limit themselves to. Scarcity is why speculators buy things, but it’s not why true art lovers buy art. There are legitimate reasons for doing a limited print run. Many screen printers are one-person shops, handling everything from creating the artwork to pulling the print to rolling it up and mailing it out. An artist would go crazy, and never be able to start producing new work, if they didn’t find a way to limit the run. However, there must be ways to cater to the true fans, not the speculators. Instead of random drops, how about pre-selling a run? Limit the print to the number of orders received on a specific day? Announce that day in advance. Don’t make it random. Leave a wide enough window open so people who have jobs can order. The worst thing that would happen then is that you might get 10,000 orders for a poster and have a lot of work to do. But you know, if you’re selling that print for $45, you now have $450,000 to solve that problem with. Expand your shop. Hire an assistant. That’s not a bad problem to have!
Poison eBay. To their credit, publishers like Mondo have a lot of integrity. They’ve kept their prices low even while speculators are selling their posters hours after their printed for many times what Mondo sold them for. Mondo and artists like Olly Moss deserve all the success they’re getting right now. Hard work and talent should pay off. Clicking “refresh” until you can click “buy” on something just so you can resell it isn’t something that should pay off. If a printer were to say, print an extra hundred copies and then sell them on eBay the day it dropped, with an opening bid of whatever the print sells for on the main site, it’d make the speculation a little more unattractive. There might be some complaints that it’s unfair, but you could shut that up by giving any extra profit to charity. As a buyer, if I have to pay extra to get a print I really want, I’d much rather that go to the artist, not to some speculator.
That’s just the first three things off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to keep screen printing awesome. The time to fix it is now, however, while it’s still fun.
Do you make/sell things that are suitable for the magical
VogVending Machine in Calgary?
You remember the phone booth in Dr. Who? Well, similarly shaped to that, a mysterious vending machine will be going in the public BreakRoom & Flueseum, both of which are opening soon on the Mezzanine of Fluevog Calgary.We want to sell things in this magical machine that even the Japanese have never thought of – and we want Fluevogers to help us. Do you have a little company that makes cool things that could fit into the rings of such a machine? Dolls, ties, pencils, notebooks, magnets, weird-o-meters, penguins, mosquito gum, tin cowboys, mini orange bike seats, whatever… Tell us about them – send the details toVogVending@fluevog.com and we’ll see what we can do.
On the one hand, I love Fluevogs above all other shoes. On the other hand, art vending machines are a medium that artists appropriated from the corporations to put to better purpose. Much as I love Fluevog, it’s still a corporate entity, so it’s like they’re taking it back. If they’d contracted with, say, Art-o-mat®, I’d totally be celebrating. Then again, I’m thinking, “How cool would it be to be noticed by Fluevog! I should totally do this!”
We’ll see how it plays out. I guess what I find irksome is their lack of acknowledgment that there’s a long history of other people doing this sort of thing. None of us are in this for the money, but it’s nice to get some acknowledgment now & then!
Remember the good ole days when the Internet was cool? Must have been, what, 3 years ago? 5? Ages ago. It was so exciting and filled with promise. It seemed poised for an explosion that would fundamentally change the creative world. But now it all seems kind of tired. All the cool kids have left and now it’s a school cafeteria filled with Facebook and YouTube. What happened?
Remember what the Internet was like when it first started? When it was all text and all business, designed to be a nuclear-war proof communication system but opened up to research and academic institutions. Then support for graphics was grudgingly added. But they had to be GIF or JPEG, restricted to 216 “browser safe” colors if you wanted them to appear consistently from screen to screen. Then, as with most good things, it took artists and pornographers to show people how to use a new medium properly. Net.artists like 0100101110101101.org and jodi.org subverted the dominant paradigms and showed us it was possible to unleash unbridled creativity in this new medium.
Some of us were extra thrilled by the World Wide Web. We’d published zines and embraced desktop publishing because of its democratizing power. Before desktop publishing, the ability to get your message out to the world was concentrated in the hands of the elite who had the money to publish books, magazines and newspapers. Desktop publishing, combined with exciting new technologies like laser printers and photocopiers, and access to places like Kinko’s, meant that for a small investment ordinary people could get their thoughts out to dozens, even hundreds of people. It may not sound like much now, but at the time it was huge and revolutionary. The World Wide Web reduced the costs even further, and expanded our audience to the whole world (at least to the portion of it that had Internet access). It was obvious that the World Wide Web would be a world-changer.
Then a lot of amazing things happened. There were real destinations on the Web like Homestarrunner.com that we got excited about. If a friend was visiting who hadn’t heard of it, we’d drag them over to the computer to show them this amazing, hysterically funny thing that a couple ordinary people had done up in their spare time. There was so much coolness happening on the Web that we needed aggregator sites like Boingboing to keep tabs on it all.
Then the Web peaked, but we didn’t notice because it looked like the start of something so big that it would make everything else that had been done on the Web seem boring. Ze Frank’s The Show aired new videos of humor and social commentary every Monday through Friday for a year. Meanwhile, on Thing a Week, Jonathan Coulton recorded and released a new song every week for a year. Both sites leveraged many of the Web’s best new ideas. Jonathan Coulton released everything under a Creative Commons license that encouraged fans to re-record his songs, make music videos, illustrate the songs or creatively engage with the music in any way they saw fit. Ze Frank also provided a variety of ways for fans to extend The Show beyond its short videos, including international collaborative creative challenges.
The Show and Thing a Week seemed like the culmination of everything good about the Internet. Two ordinary guys, self-publishing and becoming international stars. Their work broke down the barriers between author and audience, and made the world potential collaborators. Here’s where the Internet should have blossomed into maturity and become an explosion of creativity and innovation. Instead, once Ze and Jonathan ended their year-long experiments, the Internet appeared to wind down. Instead of looking at this as a starting point, it’s almost like there was a collective, “Well, this is as good as it’s going to get,” and everyone stopped trying.
I think there’s a few reasons why this happened.
Facebook. I blame Facebook, for starters. I think most of us have ideas we want the world to hear. Some of us are more driven than others. For almost two decades it’s been possible for anyone who wants to be heard to get their word out there. It just took a level of skill, effort and expense. Facebook reduces these all to zero, while still providing an audience that can be huge in comparison to other mediums. Unfortunately, there’s little incentive to do better. Take this post, for example. I’m putting more effort into it than anything I’d do on Facebook and yet a fraction of people will read it compared to my most banal post on Facebook. Before Facebook, we had blogs that filled the “I want to be heard” niche. Blogs reduced skill and expense to zero, but still required effort. You had to write, and what you wrote had to be interesting, readable and timely if you wanted to build an audience. On Facebook you have a built-in audience of friends and family who will read anything you post and “like” it. I believe that blogs for some were a gateway to bigger and better things, or at the very least, to better blogging, because the feedback loop encouraged it. The better your blog, the more comments and more traffic you got, which only motivated you to write more and better things. Facebook does the opposite, reducing creative output to a mere popularity contest. At the same time, striving to create content outside of Facebook is discouraged because when you’re starting out, you won’t get the same level of attention and positive feedback that Facebook gives.
It got too easy. For many creative types, it’s not just a desire to be heard that motivates us. It’s the feeling of accomplishment you get when you overcome a creative challenge. There was a time when creating quality content for the Web was challenging. In a short time, though, the tools got easier to use, browsers got more flexible, bandwidth increased, costs came down and everything got very easy. It was around this time that I started doing the Callithump! stuff, creating materials that existed only offline and trying to figure out what sorts of experiences I could create that could only exist off the Web. Around this same time we saw a resurgence in things like silk screening and letterpress, and yarn bombing and the whole “new” craft movement. I think a lot of people who might have once turned their attentions to making interesting things happen on the Web packed up and left for more challenging and “real” creative spaces.
There’s no “there” there. The Internet itself has changed from a specific destination and activity to more of an extension of ourselves. We don’t “surf” the Web now so much as inhabit it. It’s integrated with our daily lives. Even the most modest cell phone now has Internet access. We’re constantly connected in ways we don’t even realize. Getting maps and directions on our GPS, texting, checking stocks, looking up recipes in iApps, watching movies on Netflix On Demand. Not long ago we accessed the Internet through a specific device, a computer, with a specific application, a web browser. Things like Homestar Runner and The Show and Thing a Week are destinations that require attention and involvement in order to work, just like the Internet itself at the time.
Will the Internet ever be cool again? Technologically, all the pieces are there for a creative explosion the likes of which the world has never seen. We’re at a paradoxical point where although the media monopoly is stronger than ever, the mediums themselves are the most democratic they’ve ever been. The tools are easier and more affordable and there’s a diversity of publishing platforms. Whatever your creative desire, you have the means to reach a wider audience than at any point in history. We could be doing amazing things. I should be doing amazing things. And I will, once I get done updating my Facebook status.
Atomic Razor Blades, for that radioactively healthy glow!
A recent piece in the Callithump! vending machine ended on a more downbeat note than I’d intended. The three part piece, called Freedom of Choice (yes, after the Devo song) discussed how the Gillette company combined company founder King Camp Gillette’s “razor and blades” business model: sell something at little or no profit (in this case a razor) so that one might sell a lot of something at greater profit (the blades).
King Camp Gillette himself was actually a really nice guy, a Utopian Socialist who planned to use his great wealth to build a better world for everyone. It didn’t work out that way, and the company he started continued without him. The razor and blades business model got nasty by incorporating proprietary formats (in this case plastic cartridges containing multiple blades) to eliminate competing blade manufacturers. Before Gillette (the company, not the man) did this, you could choose between more than 30 manufacturers who made blades that fit Gillette razors. Now in grocery and drugstores you can choose from Gillette or Shick razors and blades. These aren’t interchangeable. Once you buy a razor, you have to buy specific blades that fit that razor. We went from having many choices from many companies to severely limited choices from two companies.
The razor and blades model is now pervasive. Companies sell need, not solutions. We buy a television, we need to get cable TV and buy a game console. We buy the game console, we need to buy peripherals and games to go with it. We buy a game and a year later the bigger and better version of that game comes out And so on, in perpetuity.Think about how many of the purchases in your life only guarantee you have to buy more.
It doesn’t always need to be this way. Of course, we’re consumers. It’s wired into in our animal natures. However, there’s genuine need and the perceived need that’s put into our heads by marketers. There are more choices, but they aren’t necessarily on the rack at the supermarket. The fact is, the multi-blade proprietary plastic cartridge razor blades never shaved better than the single-bladed safety razor. It was all just marketing.
I discovered this a while back. I was holding my 5-bladed Gillette Fusion with Lubricating Strip and battery-powered vibration, and I was trying to decide whether to torture myself for a few more days or not buy food because the blades were just so expensive, and I was thinking, There has to be something better. It turns out there was, and always had been. You can still buy safety razors of the sort King Camp Gillette first made. If you shop around you can still find safety razors that were made in King Camp Gillette’s day for cheaper than a Gillette Fusion. There’s all sorts of myths about these razors like, “They’re hard to use,” and “You’ll cut yourself.” This is true for about the first two weeks of using a safety razor (aka, dual edge or DE razor). Once you get the hang of it, you’ll get a far better shave than you’ll ever get from a 5-bladed monster razor.
What’s even better is, for the price of an 8 pack of Fusion cartridges, you can buy a pack of 100 Feather dual edged blades. Feathers are regarded as among the best DE blades you can buy, and yet they’re so cheap compared to the Fusion that you can swap out a fresh blade before it even shows signs of getting dull.
Make the switch to a shaving brush at the same time, and you’ll discover that there’s many more choices beyond the canned chemical goo that the stores try to pass off as shaving cream. In the morning I have the joy of a hot lather scented with things that I recognize, like lavender or lime, made with non-toxic, natural ingredients. Making the switch away from expensive gimmick razors has turned a morning chore into something I look forward to. I wholeheartedly recommend it!
You too can shave like the World's Greatest Lover!
This is good news! Sarah Cottrell is now doing a solo show using all three of the vending machines in Lord Hall, University of Maine, Orono.
Sarah Cottrell's Doomsday Project, now featured in Callithump!
The contents are all part of Sarah’s Doomsday Project, an ongoing exploration of the lighter side of nuclear annihilation. Read more about it here.
We’re really excited by this. It’s always been our intention that Callithump! be a kind of tiny gallery, showcasing the works of one or multiple artists at a time. Hopefully this will be the first of many. Who wants to go next? Drop us a line with your ideas!
Callithump! isn’t dead, but it has been in “maintenance mode” for a few months now. It’s kind of a long story why we’ve been so unproductive, but I’ll try to keep it interesting. Skip to the very last line to the short answer as to why Callithump! has been so absent lately if you’ve got a short attention span. Otherwise, keep reading!
It all started a while back with a broken leg and no insurance. In the space of a blizzardy afternoon we went from keeping our heads above water financially to being five figures in debt. So we left our lovely creative community in Belfast, put our plans of careers in art & education on hold, and moved to southern Maine to go work in the corporate world.
Corporate life is seductive. The pay was better than I’d ever made before, and the health benefits were phenomenal. I was also constantly surrounded by people who were really into being in the corporate world. This was their career track, and they were really committed to getting ahead. For a while it caught me. I started thinking about all the things that long term financial stability could bring. Nicer cars, a nice house, kids… It’s not that you can’t have those things without financial stability, but it’s a whole lot more stressful. I started thinking, “I can do this for five years. I can put my other plans and dreams on hold. We can pay off our debt and buy all the things we’ve had to do without…”
It didn’t work. Sitting in front of a computer screen inside a beige cubicle under fluorescent lights from 9 to 5 every day I could feel my soul going numb. Corporate logic started getting under my skin. For example, having a window in your office is determined by your pay grade. So if your cubicle was near a window, it had to have extra-high partitions so you couldn’t see it since only management was allowed to look out windows. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that it started making sense. I started understanding and accepting the necessity of such rules. The worst thing was that it started changing Jess and my relationship. We started conforming to traditional gender roles. I was the breadwinning husband, putting food on the table, Jess was the dutiful housewife, cooking and cleaning and doing laundry. I’d get home tired and cranky, with no energy to do anything but watch TV for a few hours and then go to sleep.
Let me just clarify something important here. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining about a bad employer. My employer probably has one of the best corporate cultures of any company, and I was privileged to work with an amazing number of talented, intelligent and truly good people. The things that were good there outnumbered the things that bothered me 10 to 1. It was good to the point that I actually considered getting therapy to help me adjust to the corporate environment! It’s like that cliché break-up line, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I’m just not the kind of person who can be happy working in a corporate environment.
These problems will hardly seem like problems to most people. In some ways I’m complaining about being gainfully employed. I was living a life that was anathema to me. The majority of my waking hours were spent helping people with money make more money. We dreamed of a life of creativity, adventure, exploration and making a difference in the world. We got cubicles and television and gender roles we’d never intended.
So we made a change. We’re playing a hunch that there might be more paths out there than “starving artist” and “desk jockey.” We bought a house in Bangor, Maine. It’s actually cheaper than renting! Buying a house in Bangor vs. buying in the southern part of the state means for half what we’d spend on a “I guess we can live with this” house, we got to buy a house we love! Now we have room to build the creative spaces we’ve been lacking in the apartments we’d been renting. We’ve gone back to school, Jess to get her MFA and me to finish my PhD. I’m teaching classes again.
The new Callithump! HQ
I don’t know where exactly all this is leading us, but I know that sometimes you have to make the space for good things to happen. We’re not “there” yet, and we’re not even sure what that destination is. However, we’ve created possibilities for wonder, excitement, creativity and learning that we haven’t had in ages.
This change, however, has come with a price. Looking for a house, buying a house, moving, working two jobs while I wrap up my commitments to my corporate employer, commuting 400+ miles a week, taking classes… Unfortunately, Callithump! has had to move to the back burner, along with most of the rest of my life! However, I think Callithump! will revive soon in its new environment, in ways that will eclipse all previous work.
The challenges didn’t end with the move, though. Just as things were starting to settle, this happened:
Thumbs up to being alive!
Yeah, that’s me in the hospital, giving a big thumbs up because I was awake after a surgery that might have killed me! It wasn’t an unexpected surgery. My friend Peter was going to die without a new liver, and I was a match. People keep telling me what a nice thing I did, but you know, I just feel lucky. Having someone you care about die is on one of the worst things in the world. Having someone you care about die, while you’re left wondering if there was something you could have done that would made a difference is worse. The pain of donating a liver is minor in comparison. However, it was a big pain, nonetheless! To be a donor you have to go through a tremendous number of tests. MRI, EKG, CAT scans, I’ve had them all now, as well as a colonoscopy, at least a pint’s worth of blood tests and even psychiatric exams. Before the surgery I was going to Lahey almost every week from the end of December to the end of February. Then I was in the hospital for a week after, and I’m still operating at diminished capacity a month after. It’ll be another two months before I’m back at 100%. It’s worth it, though. Peter is alive and doing better every day!
It’s been a long trial for sure, but now that we’re getting through it, I have to say, it’s really awesome to be the LeClairs right now! Our lives are filled with more inspiration and excitement than they’ve ever been before. We’re making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. One of our big stresses is that we feel like there are so many possibilities here that we can only take advantage of a fraction of what our new lives have to offer. That’s sort of like stressing out about having so much money you couldn’t possibly spend it! This happened while we were thoroughly overwhelmed with all the other things in our lives. What will it be like when we’re done with all this other stress, and can devote all our energies to our new lives?
So anyway, the short answer to why I haven’t been posting is I’ve been really, really busy!
Orlan is best known for her plastic-surgery-as-performance-art pieces wherein she had parts of her body reconstructed to match the feminine ideal as depicted by male artists. She’s received the Mona Lisa’s forehead, the chin of Boticelli’s Venus, and so forth.
Long before she started with plastic surgery, she was still courting controversy, with an art vending machine:
In 1977 she was fired from a teaching job after she presented Le Baiser de l’Artiste outside an art fair in Paris. She sat behind a life-sized photo of her naked torso which operated like a slot machine. Customers inserted five francs between her breasts which dropped to her crotch. As it did Orlan leapt from her seat to give the customer a kiss. The performance prompted outrage. But the French art critic Catherine Millet likened the piece to “an X-ray of the frenzy of exchange of contracts in the contemporary art world where the merchandising of the artist’s personality replaces the merchandising of art”. Source.
I’m pretty sure I took this picture in the sculpture studio, UMaine, Orono, but I may have grabbed it off the web a long time ago. The sentiments are brilliant, regardless. I love the ongoing unintential collaboration between the professor and random students who walked by the board. Click for the big image. It’s worth it!
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