I am so Celebrated

I was interviewed and quoted in the current issue of American Airlines' Celebrated Living - their in-flight publication targeted at first class passengers.

Check it out here. The article describes the ways museums and other cultural institutions are seeking to appeal to the younger generation through parties, cafes, and other updates to their core missions. I'm talking about museums and Figment, of course.

For Hire

Hello, world, I am applying for museum and gallery assistant jobs. I completed my masters' in museum anthropology (whatever that is) and I'm now ON the Market - just in time for the Recession Obsession! Please accept my slave labor.

Right.

While I'd prefer not to work in a sales-driven gallery, work is work, experience is experience, and you have to get your foot in the door somehow. Many nonprofits in New York have hiring freezes on now in response to the dip in the economy, meaning that some of the only institutions with money for staffing are the commercial galleries. Many of them have the words "Fine Art" or "Antiques" in their names and they sell paintings whose strong suit seems to be that they match the tile in your bathroom.

I do not mean to criticize the role of commercial galleries in the art world. They provide an important service for artists who make their livelihood by selling their work. Galleries promote artists, presenting their work at fairs and in exhibits designed to garner the best price. Galleries may be a middleman, but they enable many artists to quit their day jobs and focus entirely on the creation of art. They introduce the public to up and coming artists and facilitate the enjoyment of fine art at home, in the office, and in other quotidian spaces. By way of galleries' sale, people can experience fine art in their daily lives instead of only within museums' hallowed halls.

Galleries are peculiar, though, in that I think they often end up defining art only as a profession. They construe "art" specifically as "the type of object that we sell in our gallery" - and therefore "artists" often get cast as a specific class of people who "make art for sale in a commercial marketplace". While that's true to some extent - and artists who make their livelihood through the sale of their art have attained a certain level of achievement - I believe that people end up forgetting that anyone can be creative and art is more than what is labeled as such.

To be sure, not all galleries present this cut-and-dry view of art and artists. I think that most artists would agree that being able to make art for a living constitutes "living the dream."

I just wish that some of these galleries wouldn't sell such boring stuff and be so uptight about it. I'm not going to post any images or name artist or gallery names because who knows who I'll have to kiss up to in the future, but you know the sort of work that I mean. The painting in the office reception area that has a couple of wayward spheres on a gray background. Or the one in the bank with those scratchy blue lines on a piece of wool. The pink monstrosity in your grandmother's bathroom. I just don't get it. I love art and I feel that I can commune with it, and yet these sort of pieces say nothing to me. Nothing at all. I understand that corporations often seek to display "neutral" pieces so as not to offend, incite, or pass out of fashion too quickly, but really. Spice it up a bit.

Are the accused works tight lipped and mysterious, sitting there cryptically as hundreds of worker bees pass by them on their way to the bathroom? Or are they just boring and meaningless?

Discuss.

Making a Mess Elsewhere

While I am certainly not giving up Lowconcept, you might agree that things have been a bit "slow" around here for about a year.

Odd as it may seem, Lowconcept can feel a bit "serious" at times. That is, I have to BE MYSELF. Really, it's just a lot of work because I want the posts to be snappy: coherent, cohesive, correct, all that good stuff.

So, I'm not going anywhere, but please check out my mid-season replacement Today in Tentacles - todayintentacles.blogspot.com. Consider it *your source* for up-to-the minute, breaking tentacle news from around the world.

Oh, I am *so* serious. Look at me, with my news blog! I'm even wearing a blazer with gold buttons, so you have to listen to me!

Other People Write!

My dopey friends, the brother Gaz, have their own soapbox.

Check them out, they post a lot. A *lot*.

Unlike me:

gasner-bros.blogspot.com

<3

Maybe I will Post Something Someday

Because I like to think you all miss me.

Think about *that*.

A, who is THIS CLOSE to being a MASTER of ANTHROPOLOGY. Like bad breath in the subway close.

Whatever Happened to that Audrey Girl?

The best way to put it, I suppose, is that I've been expressing myself in the three dimensional world - both in writing and in physical structure - more than I have been doing so online.

The latest project - Emergence: Creative Pioneers in Uncharted Territory. Check it at emergenceshow.org. Yes, has a blog, which also serves as the show catalog. You like blogs. You'll like it. It's interactive. Promise. I curated Emergence with my buddies Joyce, Johan, Elke and Ntd. You'll like them, too.

It is ALSO a participatory art show on Governors Island in New York Harbor, accessible via free (*free*) ferries on weekends from now through mid July. GI is open for a bevy of other art events this summer, including the much heralded David Byrne "Playing the Building" installation on the Manhattan side of the ferry. The show includes over 30 artists and collectives in the visual and performing arts, encouraging audience participation, interaction with the works, and generally unlocking one's own individual creativity. The show actively seeks to break down alienating barriers between people and creative output. It's super cool.

Drop me a line at lowconcept [at] gmail [dot] com for more information or a personal invite. I can be very personal.

xx
Audrey.

I Made You Some Bad Art

From my many travels throughout the past month, as international art thief, woman of mystery, feasting foodie, advertising mogul, armchair anthropologist and general gliterati /literati /digerati /anything-ati about town* I bring you...

Not much. (I refer you back to the name of this website.)

As I have moved much of my creative process off of the internets and into "reality" in the past few months, I am still cognizant of the power of the pixel, the soapbox of the information superhighway, the bleat of the blog. So - without apologizing for sitting around attempting to be artsy, weird and HighConcept(tm) off of the internet, I do hope to share more of my projects in this uh, "forum" in the near future.

If you want to be artsy with me, please visit www.figmentnyc.org/participate. I'll explain later, k?

And the art I made for you? Unfortunately due to copyright restrictions (or perhaps because I'm not a good enough hacker), I'm going to have to redirect and instruct you how to make it yourself. Go to the Brooklyn Museum website and view the time lapse video of the installation of Murakami's "Mr. Pointy" in the Rubin Pavilion here. While watching it, listen to the Justice vs. Simian song "We Are Your Friends." (Free Youtube video version here, but minimize the window so that you just get the sound and not the visual.)

Well, *I* think it works nicely.

______________________________________
*Please note: lies, exaggerations, fabrications.