The ellipse is the Frisbee of art, the circle freed from its flatness that sails out into imagined space tilting this way and that and ending up on the top of the soup bowl and silver cup in Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s still life or, imagine this, on the wheels of the speeding Batmobile.

From James Mc Mullan’s New York Times editorial, The Frisbee of Art, about the ellipse as a foundation of drawing.

This took me back to my 9th grade studio art class.

The show appealed to my belief that art only got better once the boundaries between high and low culture were relaxed, most famously by Andy Warhol, then by countless others. It also satisfied my hunger to try new things; my demons that demand I dance naked in public; and my desire to see if art criticism is supple and porous enough to be practiced on a wider stage–even if this stage distorted that practice.

Art critic Jerry Saltz, one of the judges on Bravo’s Work of Art, writes about why he did the show, and how it changed him as a critic.

Most of the time, renter’s, homeowner’s or condo owner’s insurance are for personal considerations, not commercial. Therefore, understanding whether or not your art is a hobby or a business is key to understanding whether or not you need any additional insurance policies for your art business. If it’s a hobby, then you may be covered. If it’s a business, then your current policy may exclude the kinds of coverage you need.

From Insure Your Artwork and Studio by Steve Yahn at Art Calendar.

Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is rejected by neighborhood people

That’s Kalamu ya Salaam in his 1994 essay “I DO NOT PROTEST, I RESIST.”

So true.

Also see this quote from Mira Schor.

The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority … But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within the bounds of existing authority, and there has never been a true “outside” that really stayed outside: public consumption, by definition, adapts to the change, co-opts and normalizes all culture.

That’s Michael Kimmelman in his April 18th New York Times column, “D.I.Y. culture.”

A nice counterpoint in some ways to the Mira Schor quote I posted yesterday.

Kimmelman’s main point, however, is about how culture survives and thrives as a marker of ethnic and national identity in the face of the globalization.

Resistance is what you begin to embody when the culture changes and you find that you stand for values that are no longer fashionable. … I don’t get up the morning and decide to resist. But I have an impulse towards critical speech and then the culture resists me. That is the counterintuitive truth about how resistance works: just as lightning appears to strike from the sky downwards but actually rises from the earth, resistance runs not only from the individual towards the culture but, more profoundly, from the culture against the individual.

Feminist artist, art critic, and teacher Mira Schor on resistance and art in her essay The White List. The essay overall discusses the effects of resisting — of being a contrarian voice, a radically critical voice — in a culture that sees itself as progressive, but is really establishment and only slightly left of center. Yes, I am using capital-‘p’ political terms here. I think they’re appropriate.

I had not heard of Schor before hearing about her lecture at The Contemporary, but I am intrigued by what she said and plan to learn more.

Check out images of some of her pieces in the Brooklyn Museum’s Feminist Art Base. Or you can see a few of them in person at The Contemporary’s current exhibit “Substitute Teacher, ” on view until May 16.

Schor is also the author of two books, Wet and A Decade of Negative Thinking.

Let’s not worry about whether you have talent. Talent is a nonissue. It can be neither measured nor defined, and agonizing over it serves no purpose other than to create both anxiety and, if you’ve developed a talent for worrying, an excuse for avoiding work.

From the introduction to Taking the Leap: Building a Career as a Visual Artist by Cay Lang.

Lately I have been toying with the idea of trading in my life as a code wrangler for the flexible, yet broke life of an artist. It’s a childhood dream, to tell the truth. And it is starting to feel like a calling.

The art world is not reflective of any entire society. It represents the tolerant and pluralistic factions that encourage—and even celebrate—difference and dissent. On one hand, as Davis points out, this can be a symbolic release valve for class differences, but it is also reflective of the moral and ethical differences that fracture the societal landscapes of diverse cultures, from Iran to California.

From The Conflation of Ethics and Morality by William Powhida on the art:21 blog.

There’s a bit of back story involved that is only sort-of explained by Powhida’s piece How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality. Still it’s an interesting post about the tensions between and limits of both publicly-funded and privately-funded art institutions.

Related: New Museum

For the record: I now want to be besties with Krista Thompson, the 2009 winner of the David C. Driskell Prize and Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. Her recent High Museum lecture, “Of Shine, Bling and Bixels: Toward a Post-Soul Art History,” blew me away with its analysis of contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley‘s work and the ways in which it references both pop culture and Renaissance symbolism.

If you have seen portraits of hip-hop stars featured in VH1′s Hip-Hop Honors series, you are familiar with Kehinde Wiley’s work. His portraits feature contemporary black male subjects — famous and not — in poses that replicate or give a nod to Renaissance-era portraiture.

Wiley’s portraits, Thompson says, use a hyper-luminous light source. He often oils the faces of his subjects to bring out their ‘shine.’ Wiley then places them against backgrounds pulled from 1950s era wallpaper or 1990s Martha Stewart wallpaper patterns. At once, she argues, Wiley references both Hype Williams’ shiny video aesthetic that ushered in the ice and bling era of hip-hop and American mass consumption and consumerism.

By posing these men against backgrounds of wallpaper, I think Wiley is also commenting on the ways in which we relegate black men to the background of politics and power, though they are in the foreground of contemporary pop culture. Thompson also suggests that the use of wallpaper — very domestic, very feminine — is also a way in which Wiley (who is gay) plays with notions of black masculinity.

Kehinde Wiley and the Renaissance

Thompson also tied Wiley’s work to the use of light and sheen (or shine) in Renaissance Era portraits, particularly those from the Dutch school. As she explained, oil paint was a new medium in the late Renaissance. It appeared at the same time luxury goods were arriving in Europe from abroad. Painters from the Dutch school, in particular, used light and sheen to capture the opulence and sumptuousness of these new fabrics and products and wealth.

But the faces and flesh of white European male subjects? Shine and light were never used. Shine was used to emphasize objects, not people. Yet black and African subjects from the period were frequently portrayed as ‘shiny.’ I believe Thompson argues that this was a part of the objectification and ‘othering’ of blackness that was part-and-parcel of the burgeoning trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Classism, bling and Black Folks

What struck me, however, was a comment Thompson made in response to a question from an older, obviously middle-to-upper middle class black gentleman in the audience. He asked (if I recall correctly) about the ethics of hip-hop’s conspicuous consumption culture of at a time when black folks are in such dire straits.

Thompson said, roughly: “We don’t see a driver of a BMW as consuming in the same way as someone who’s wearing a shiny watch, even if that watch cost $10.” It is about, she said, who we think should consume and who shouldn’t.

In many ways, bling and the related “ghetto fabulous” aesthetic are about visibility and asserting power through visual, material display. It’s in contrast to values of restraint and a comparatively modest display of consumption that are hallmarks of middle-class aesthetics. It’s expressed in the differences between Facebook and MySpace users. Among black people, it often plays out along generational lines.

Let me suggest that the bling aesthetic is a way for poor and/or urban black people to claim and stake visibility in a period when both white and bourgeois black flight rendered them silent and invisible.

Much of the visibility of the Civil Rights Movement — the ‘soul’ era if we use musical shifts as our markers — came from respectable Negroes: college students, preachers, prim-and-proper women of high moral character and community standing such as Rosa Parks.

I am stealing a point from feminist critic bell hooks here by arguing that the Civil Rights Movement was, in many ways, a movement of the black bourgeoisie. The goal was about access to middle-class mainstream (read: white) society and its trappings — equality of opportunity, rather than cultural transformation or revolution. When the movement stalled, thanks to the contributions of integration, bourgie-Negro flight and Reagonomics, poor and/or urban blacks disappeared, except in demonized forms (‘Welfare Queen,’ Willie Horton, etc.).

Enter hip-hop and its aspirational consumption patterns and conspicuous display. Looking rich is as important as being rich. After all, how fly can your $800 Louis Vuitton bag be if I have one too? (Don’t worry about the fact that I got it on Canal St.) How fly can your $3,000 Rolex be if my $25 rhinestone watch is way blingier? I mean I got a quarter tank of gas / in my new E Class, and Got everythaaaang / In my mama naaaame but I’m Still Fly, right?

I think this is where my point ties back to those raised by Thompson in her lecture, and Wiley’s work. Consumption on display is a way of asserting and displaying power and prestige — something which the aesthetic of bling at once adheres to and subverts.

More about Kehinde Wiley

• Kehinde Wiley’s ‘Black Light’ series, the focus of Thompson’s analysis
• A Q&A with Wiley by M.I.A. in Interview magazine
• Kehinde Wiley in New York Times Topics
• Kehinde Wiley’s profile on ArtNet

Creativity is usually thought of as internally motivated — a response to a deeply felt personal urge to challenge convention, push boundaries and explore. But newly published research suggests that, at least in the business world, the link between inspiration and ingenuity is strengthened by focusing on the needs of others.

From Empathy Conducive to Creativity from Miller-McCune.

What this says to me is that the key to thinking outside of the box is to put yourself in someone else’s. User experience folks are familiar with this concept in the form of personas. Authors do this when they get inside the head of their characters.

One common bond linking McCarthy, Jackson, and Stein — three women featured in Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers — is that their spouses allowed them the time and solitude required to imagine, write, and produce. Even if their spouses’ approaches were controlling or their motivations questionable, the writing flourished.

From ‘The woman writes as if the Devil was in her…’ by Anne K. Yoder on The Millions

There are three:

1. Mistakes can be the catalyst for something beautiful. The piece above is a perfect example. I was going for an entirely different effect when I realized it didn’t look so good. So I took a paper towel and wiped off the layer of burnt umber I had just painted. It two left streaks that were in line with the look I wanted to achieve. What started off as a mistake propelled me on a new — and I think better — path.

   As importantly, making art has taught me that the effects of mistakes can be mitigated. On the canvas, what isn’t working can usually be scraped away, wiped away, or painted over. The mistake can’t be unmade, of course, but neither is it a disaster.

2. Remember to step back and consider how this affects the big picture. With larger canvases, I find myself focusing on one 4″-by-4″ squared patch at a time, without considering the entire composition. But when you paint, you need to be aware of how each stroke of affects the piece’s overall balance and symmetry. It’s hard to do that when you’re standing a foot from the canvas. So I step back. Literally. The change in perspective helps me avoid making a mistake that can throw the whole piece off.

3. Sometimes waiting is the best thing you can do. It’s trite to say “painting taught me patience.” If I’m being honest, I don’t think it has.

   What painting has taught me, however, is this: some things require time. I would love to create an entire work in an hour or two, but the paint has other ideas. Acrylic products — my primary medium, though I also draw — usually dry in minutes. Thick layers can take several hours. Really thick layers can take an entire day. What’s more, if you try to attempt to hasten the drying process, say, with a blow dryer, you may damage or distort your work.

   No, sometimes it’s better to walk away, wait, and let it do what it does. <murs />

It’s absurd to expect every piece of black art to reflect everyone’s black experience, but that’s exactly what many black artists are expected to do. This discourages black artists from taking the kind of risks that make what they’re creating worth consuming, because unless you want to draw someone’s ire for “making black people look bad” or “reinforcing stereotypes” you have to make something, well, boring. The paradox is that if we had more commercially successful black art, there would be less of a crisis of representation and more opportunity to make books and movies that would offer more insight into the diversity of the black experience in America. It would also mean more and better art.

From The Problem With Black Movies Is That There Aren’t Enough Of Them. (Via @negrophile)

Also see: On black folks and the movie “Precious”

But the hoodie belonged to the Noughties. I don’t believe it was just about the ASBO generation hiding their faces from CCTV, either. It’s more practical than that. If you spend all your time hanging around on the street in a coldish, wettish country, a hood will keep you warm, and stops the rain spoiling your hairstyle. Plus it creates a safe anonymity for a teenage boy to hide in: if you’re a skinny, pimply 14-year-old who has to deal with a lot of confrontation, putting your hood up means that, from behind at least, someone might take you for something more dangerous than you really are.

From The Economist’s More Intelligent Life blog.

Also mentioned: Apple everything, poor-quality pixellated images, Eindhoven design academy, anti-modernism, Frieze magazine and Bernie Madoff’s smile. Also see, More Intelligent Life‘s The i-Decade.

By Canadian illustrator Marc Johns