Fritinancy

NEA's New Slogan

The National Endowment for the Arts has a new director, New York theater producer Rocco Landesman, who received Senate confirmation last week. Landesman has already indicated that his tenure will be different in at least one way from that of his predecessor, poet Dana Gioia. From an interview with Landesman published last Saturday in the New York Times:

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy. ...

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

As for the former agency slogan, “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” he said, “We might as well just apologize right off the bat.”

The old slogan had long been unpopular with some prominent critics. Here's what the Los Angeles Times arts blog, Culture Monster, said about it in May:

Wince. That imperial bit of provincial pomposity has things exactly backward.

Culture Monster proposed, instead: "Great Art Makes a Great Nation."

"Ms. Cosmopolite," the blog written by the executive director of L.A.'s Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), had this to say in March, in a post titled "If I Ran the NEA":

First, I would do away with the current NEA slogan, “Because a great nation deserves great art.” This line gives me the hives from start to finish and raises many questions. Does a great nation come before great art or the other way around? Based on what criteria does one define greatness? I also don’t get the deserve part. Is there a nation on the planet that doesn’t merit culture? In my mind, the creation of art does not occur in a parallel universe, but is a naturally occurring byproduct of society. Instead of this rather empty line, I would borrow the slogan of a colleague of mine from the Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture that captures my sentiment perfectly: Art=Culture=Community

To my own ear, "Art Works" is the best solution of all. It's succinct, it's positive, it puts "art" in the first position, and it includes an active verb. It plays on artworks, the noun, and has a roll-up-your-sleeves, WPA* flavor that suits the current era of cutbacks and belt tightening.

I'm looking forward to seeing whether Landesman's innovations go beyond slogans. He certainly represents a stylistic change from the mild, conciliatory Gioia, a published poet. In the Times story, a colleague described Landesman as "mercurial," "unpredictable," and "an extraordinarily hardheaded businessman."

He's also a guy who doesn't shrink from making controversial statements on the record:

In American politics generally, [Landesman] added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” 

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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* Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943.

The Hub: My Guest Post at InBerkeley.com

I'm a border-crossing guest contributor today at InBerkeley.com, the local-journalism blog started by Lance Knobel and Dave Winer. I don't live in Berkeley, but I did attend last night's "Money, Mobs, and Media" panel discussion at the new David Brower Center near the UC campus*, and I somehow sorta found myself volunteering to file a report.

The event was sponsored by The Hub Bay Area, the first U.S. location of an international network of collaborative workspaces for social innovators. The actual office won't open for a couple of weeks, but the renderings look appealing and the Brower Center is a beautiful and inspirational addition to downtown Berkeley.

A handful of observations I didn't include in my InBerkeley story but thought you'd enjoy:

• One of the group workspaces at The Hub is called The Hubble, which appears to be a portmanteau of hub and huddle. (It does not appear to be connected to the Hubble Telescope, which was named for astronomer Edwin P. Hubble.) Love the name. It has room for eight people and is surrounded by frosted glass walls that form a writeable surface. Love the concept.
• The home page of the Bay Area Hub website includes this phrase: "During the day, The Hub is a dynamic, collision-rich workspace..." Collision-rich? Ow! I hope they have really good liability insurance.
• Last night's panel featured the founders of three prominent social-innovation organizations: Kiva, Virgance, and Change.org. Not only do the three companies represent different approaches to social change, but their names represent three distinct name styles. I'm working on a post comparing the three names.
• Filing my report on InBerkeley.com required my learning the rudiments of WordPress. I'm told it's a vastly superior blogging platform to TypePad (which hosts my own blog), but naturally I felt like a complete oaf. Learning stuff is hard!
• If you find yourself in downtown Berkeley, do check out the Brower Center, which was designed by prominent Bay Area architect Daniel Solomon to the most rigorous "green" standards. (Example: recycled rainwater in the toilets.) Through Jan. 31, 2010, there's a stunning exhibit in the  main-floor Hazel Wolf Gallery of the large-format black-and-white photographs of Sebastião Salgado, which span 30 years and several continents. Born in Brazil, Salgado began his career as an economist and taught himself photography in order to document the lives of the world's poor, displaced, and oppressed people. Despite what may seem to be depressing subject matter, the photographs are breathtakingly beautiful. Definitely worth a visit.

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* I included the Brower Center's address in the InBerkeley post but neglected to do so here: 2150 Allston Way. Thanks, Jon Carroll, for the reminder.

Word of the Week: Ghillie

Ghillie: A sportsman's attendant or guide. Also spelled gillie. From Scottish Gaelic gillie: a boy or servant.

By extension, a ghillie is also a lace-up shoe of the type worn by Scottish and Irish dancers...

Source: Amazon.

...and comfort seekers...

Source: Zappos.

...and fetishists.

Source: Rosa Shoes.

But when you Google "ghillie," the first and most abundant results are for ghillie suit, a type of camouflage worn for centuries by hunters, soldiers and, more recently, paintball enthusiasts.

Source: SniperGhillies ("Si, Hablamos Español!")

Any resemblance to Chewbacca, a Yeti, or Birnham Wood come to Dunsinane is probably intentional.

My favorite take on the ghillie suit is this artist's interpretation, a colorful homage to IKEA (video).

BldgBlog, a serious blog about architecture and landscape, recently published a post about ghillie suits that includes many wonderful photos and this rumination:

Whatever you might think of wildlife slaughter ... how unbelievably interesting would it be to get Ghillie suit designers, deep wilderness hunters, and some landscape theorists together for a long afternoon of spatialized discussions. Throw in some anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes and maybe some military camouflage field testers – and, at the very least, you've got yourself an interesting book proposal.

My thanks to graphic designer, illustrator, and fine artist Susan Bercu, who discovered the Urban Camouflage video and introduced me to the wide world of ghillie suits.

The Other F-Word

I've written in the past about names so deliberately provocative that they cross the line from amusing to retch-inducing. Chicken Poop lip balm. MomSpit cleaner. Alligator Poo lollipops.

I thought I was inured to the gross-out factor. But that was before I encountered Fecal Face Dot Gallery.

I learned about Fecal Face just a few days ago, although the name has been around—originally as a 'zine, then as a website—since 1998. The physical gallery, in San Francisco's Hayes Valley, on Gough near Market, opened in February 2008. And even though I'm interested in art and the gallery scene, I've somehow missed the reviews of FF shows in mainstream publications like the San Francisco Chronicle; the San Francisco Bay Guardian (a long-established, no-longer-"alternative" weekly), and the local public-broadcasting station's arts page. If reviewers offered any commentary on the gallery's name, it was brief. "Unusual," wrote one. "Quizzical," said another, possibly meaning "puzzling" or even "quixotic".

Because it is a puzzlement. As an institution, Fecal Face is seriously committed to art and artists. Here's how it explains itself on the Info page:

Fecal Face is a content-rich, comprehensive, multidisciplinary art and culture website supporting the art scene in San Francisco and beyond since 2000. The site greets between 11,000-13,000 visitors a day, occupying a unique niche online and in the "real world," by chronicling and shaping the contemporary arts scene in the SF Bay Area and beyond. Visitors to Fecal Face find photo rich features including artist interviews, studio visits, blogs by prominent artists and personalities, an hourly updated news section and coverage of current art openings. Additionally the site supports a forum board with over 2000 users, a comprehensive creative jobs database and an events calendar offering some of the more obscure attractions in San Francisco, Los Angelos [sic] and New York. It's helped launch the careers of many a creative, and catalyzed a community of artists working in various mediums from around the globe.

Moreover, you can't accuse Fecal Face of not maintaining brand consistency, albeit whimsically. (Some might say "sophomorically.") One of the website's main tabs is called "Fecal Stuff." The "Good Stuff" section is explained as "reviews of the good crap you send us." Mouse over the "Blog" tab and read this pop-up text: "The word is a combination of 'web' and 'log.' Spider turds!" The technical editor is listed on the Info page as "Poo." (UPDATE: Commenters point out that "Poo" is the name of Trippe's cat.)

Then there's the "dot" in the gallery name. It's a wink to its online predecessor and to everything dot-com that rose and fell between the 'zine era and now.

But why and whence "Fecal Face"?

Founder Jason John Trippe hasn't provided many clues. (Nor did he respond to an e-mail I sent to the gallery, asking for information about the name.) In February 2008 he told Tyler Callister of the Bay Area ArtQuake blog that when he started the 'zine, at age 22, "Fecal Face" just sounded funny. "I didn't think the site would grow to what it's become," he told Callister. "At times I considered changing the name and then I'd be like 'ah whatever.' Now it's just the way it is."

Yes, I wonder whether Trippe was fecal-faced drunk when he got that particular brainstorm. I also wonder what his runner-up names were. Did he arrive at his final selection by process of elimination?

But what's truly amazing is the nonchalance with which the name appears to have been accepted. How cool does one have to be not to gag or giggle at this name? Obviously, cooler than I am. I'd have a hard time not stammering if I tried to recommend a show at Fecal Face to a friend. Maybe I'd give "Fecal" a vaguely European pronunciation. Feh-CALL, darling: it's divine!

On the other hand, it's not much of a stretch to imagine Marcel Duchamp and his fellow Dadaists roaring with laughter around the giant urinal in the sky. "Fecal Face?" Marcel says, wiping his eyes and gasping for air. "It's the shiznit!"

UPDATE, June 23: The gallery finally responded to my email with a cheery note—"This should answer your question!"—and a link. I remain unconvinced.

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Photograph by Sangroncito, reproduced under Creative Commons license. See more Flickr photos of Fecal Face Dot Gallery art and artists.

My Fifteen Minutes

There's an current exhibit at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum called "Warhol's Jews"—ten Andy Warhol portraits of famous 20th-century Jews such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka. Space limitations prevented the inclusion of an eleventh portrait, which I present here:

More photo fun at PhotoFunia. Hat tip to SueBob, who really went to town with this. And many thanks to Joyce Benna, who took that picture of me at an Oscars party almost five years ago. It remains the only picture of myself that I've liked in my entire life. Perhaps I should wear veiled hats and bling-y earrings more often.

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I had to futz with the image a bit to make it fit within the blog borders. Click on it to view an undistorted version.

Nowheresville, U.S.A.

Why would anyone name a town "Dearth," "Nada," or "Zero"? Why would three towns name themselves "Nameless"? American artist Peter Wegner may not have the answers, but he knows the map coordinates:

I saw Wegner's mammoth (400 square feet) neon-and-vinyl installation, "The United States of Nothing," last weekend at SFMOMA, which recently acquired the work. The piece occupies an entire wall and manages to be both dazzling and desolate. I gazed at it for a long time, marveling that all the place names are authentic and wondering why, why, why. Were some of the names jokes? Bitter admissions of defeat? Was "Zero" someone's lucky number?

In an interview with KQED Arts earlier this year, Wegner had this to say about the work (then in progress):

It's about the act of naming, the desolation of the American landscape, redundancy, cartography, boosterism, bad luck, the void, and what happens when you put a spark of electrical current through invisible gas.

Wegner is originally from South Dakota, where I'm told nothingness is a familiar part of the landscape.

By the way, one of the stories about Nome, Alaska, is that the town's name was originally written as "? Name" and a mapmaker misread the note as "C [for Cape] Nome." However, there are other versions of the story.

Readers who live outside the United States: does your country have "nothing" place names? Or is this a peculiarly American phenomenon?

More images of Wegner's work here.