What do you lock, what do you not? Spotted in Venice Beach: a bike locked but a surfboard left for anyone to grab.

Sometimes, the object itself is the biggest barrier to theft.

Labels: citylife, design, los angeles

Labels: audio

Attention arts friends. The fabulous Maryann Devine of smArts & Culture is starting a new online course on arts blogging. It's designed course especially for people in the arts who want to (finally!) get their institution’s blog off the ground, or give a neglected arts blog new life.

She's offering all of you 30% off the course until August 15. That means you'll pay $47.60 or $42.70, entering the coupon code THATWASZEN at checkout.


What you’ll learn:

* How to avoid the pitfalls that plague most cultural organizations when they decide they want a blog. I’ll walk you through the planning process, and make the tough questions easier to handle.

* How to reach your ideal online audience and turn them into intensely loyal readers and fans.

* How to come up with story ideas when you’re running dry.

* How to make blogging an essential part of your overall marketing plan.

* How to choose the best person to write your blog. Hint: it’s not the intern.

* How to keep your blog from becoming the least-updated part of your site.

* How to deal with organizational anxiety over “transparency” and commenting.

What you’ll get:

* The 10-week course – a lesson is delivered fresh to your inbox every week for 10 weeks. Each lesson is meaty enough to increase your understanding of organizational blogging and address common issues, and direct enough that you know what to do next. You’ll receive your lesson in easy-to-digest chunks that fit into your already busy schedule with no problem.

* Work sheets for each of the 10 lessons. You’ll use the worksheets to help you stay on track and make your successful arts blog a reality.

* Bonus PDF: The right social media metrics for the arts. Measuring social media efforts can be confusing. This 17-page ebook will help you figure out if your blog is meeting your goals.

Be sure to check it out, and to visit Maryann's blog when you have a free moment. It's well worth a visit if you're interested in learning more about arts marketing.

Labels: art, friends, marketing

Expectations of cleanliness and order.

...

Been super busy as of late, mostly traveling. San Diego, Los Angeles, Ventura County, parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Bloggage should resume in fairly regular force, though I am usually drained energy-wise during August. It's not that I'm not writing, it's that I'm writing too much, and it's all going toward art projects at the moment. Keep an eye out on Twitter for the latest from me, as I work on my installation for the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, and stay tuned for some posts for the Art:21 blog and an interview with Stefan Goodreau, the current 5-day champion on Jeopardy.

Labels: design, personal

Can't attend the show at Yale/Haskins Laboratories to see my postcard installation? Never fear! I've set up a text message-based system with Textmarks.com, who've generously donated a pro account for the duration, to allow those not in the New Haven area to experience the installation. You'll see a small message in the Times photo of the installation instructing you:

Text AXYALE to 41411 to subscribe

You'll get a text message until August 1 with a few select postcards each week. Just as the postcard installation took status updates out of the context of the digital space and into a physical environment, so does the text messaging service take the installation out of the gallery context and into a mobile space.

Let me know what you think - should be an interesting phase of this many-month installation. You can also subscribe using this widget:

Labels: art, technology

Me with Haskins CEO Dr. Philip Rubin. Photo courtesy Arts Council of Greater New Haven.


My installation for Status Update at Yale/Haskins Laboratories has been reviewed in this Sunday's New York Times.

Identity through social media is also the core of An Xiao’s work. Trained in philosophy, Ms. Xiao, 25, came to art through photography, writing and an interest in communication that goes back to her childhood, when she wrote letters to her grandmother in the Philippines. The letters, she said, related little moments that add up to a portrait of the writer, the way social networking does now with a series of — as she put it — “totally inane things.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/nyregion/05artsct.html

Many kind thanks to Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, and Sharon Butler, the panel moderator, for inviting me to exhibit my work and speak at the opening, and to Jan Ellen Spiegel, for taking the time to interview me for the piece.

It's interesting to think about an "old media" article posted to the "new media" Internet, discussing the use of "new media" in an "old media" gallery. I have a feeling traditional journalism and user-driven media will find a happy coexistence, after a few road bumps.

Labels: art, news

Much has been said about Michael Jackson's being the last bastion of traditional news media, the global pop sensation who could only have become so popular in a world with only a handful of media outlets. I grew up with a strong aversion to him, as by the time I was paying attention to popular culture, his image was mired in allegations of increasingly odd and then horrifying behavior. But as one friend told me, now that the man himself is gone, it's become a lot easier to appreciate his music, which is still thrilling after all these years.

The events around his death have, strangely enough, helped me solidify some ideas in my head that I've been tossing around, and I'll share a few of them in bullet form here.

* Seth Godin's notion of tribes, and how that disrupts the power of a global monoculture. How Obama unified tribes with his use of social media. But I wonder--can an entertainer, in this world of 300+ cable channels, NetFlix, YouTube and blogs, ever again reach the level of stardom that Jackson had? There's only one Presidential election in America, but there are now so many different ways to express yourself and find artistic expression. Does Jackson represent that brief moment in human history when almost all the world was consuming the same contemporary entertainment?

* The advent of the microcelebrity. Michael Jackson as branded product vs. Michael Jackson as complex human being. The branded products of ourselves that we project in new media.

* The difference between art product and artist creator. Can we distance the art from the artist? I believe that, yes, even if the artist has engaged in immoral behavior, we can still appreciate the art on its own terms. But where do you draw the line, if any? How might perceptions of Jackson's death be different if he had died in prison, a convicted child molester? Who continues to celebrate OJ today? Phil Spector? Picasso? How does the passage of time help fade the pain brought about by the artist's life?

* And how about death? To what extent does the death of someone help us willfully forget their shortcomings? Why do artists, even those whose careers have long since died, enjoy greater popularity after their passing?

* American traditions of public mourning. We live in such a consumerist culture that even public mourning takes a commercial manifestation, as shirts and mp3's trade on the streets and online. But as the buzz on Twitter and Facebook and other new media attests, we're also finding non-commercial ways to mourn publicly, as the YouTube generation, one infused with a culture of free and individualistic expression, comes into its own.

Oh, and who could resist some photos near Michael Jackon's star in Hollywood? Was in the area for Shakespeare Unscripted (which was very good, by the way) so I dragged my friends along to see the star.

Labels: culture, internet, los angeles, photoessay