The Artist Has Left the Building: “Exit Through the Gift Shop”

It seems there are a lot of issues raised with the film “Exit Through the Gift Shop”: Was it a mockumentary? Is this Mr. Brainwash a “real” artist, or is he just conning the audience with a fake French accent and those dumb lamb chop sideburns? Is this art a joke on the art world? Is the art world a joke? Etc. etc.

I thought the film was really provocative, but maybe not in the same way that reviewers are talking about it. And maybe it is a joke, on everyone, even the collectors (yeah) who are putting hundreds of thousands out to buy an “original” from Mr. Brainwash (aka Thierry Guetta). But if you’re an Art Director, you need to listen up (or at least see this film!)

Humble opinion: “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is wonderful and I think it proves, once and for all, there is no longer any difference between “applied” art and “real” art…except of course the attitude of the “artist” and how well he or she is able to convince someone else that this attitude is somehow special or original or important. And in the spirit of the film, this attitude is the elephant in the room, not the art.

The attitude is awesome
Once in a class taught by the venerable Milton Glaser at SVA, someone asked what the difference was between art and graphic design. Milton replied “art inspires awe” and in the case of Mr. Brainwash, he may be right. Only not the kind of awe you might think of when looking at the Sistine Chapel. (Questions like “Wow, how’d he get up there and not break his neck?” are not what Glaser meant).

In this case, I am awed by what attitude can create and provoke. In the film, we see Thierry Guetta, after what seems like years of following other artists around, filming them and helping them in the clandestine process of making street art, decide that he too is an artist and will make his own work. According to the film, this decision was “encouraged” by Banksy himself,  but when it happened and Guetta became Mr. Brainwash, he was so convinced he could become an overnight sensation, he put everything on the line, as in every penny he had or could leverage into making his first show. And with a little help from friends like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, he does become an overnight sensation, possibly overshadowing both of these guys, the ultimate joke of the film. Is nothing sacred?

When nothing is sacred, make everything sacred.
What if “modern artists”, especially the visual ones, were actually Art Directors with attitude? I don’t think this takes anything away from them, but it sure makes me look twice at what we used to think about Art Directors. I’m not talking about the shrill guy (or gal) that carries on all morning about the fact that the client insisted on another font and ruined the ad. It’s the 21st Century artistic paradigm shift –  Either “real” artists today are much lower on the food chain than we thought, or Art Directors are actually much higher. Either way, things just aren’t what we thought they were. I like that a lot.

Doing the work yourself isn’t better, just cheaper
My favorite quote, coming out of the New York/Culture Vulture review and interview with Mr. Brainwash (see link below) is when he says:

“Like I say, a big artist – I don’t want to say name – but this big artist has 140 people working for them. Sometimes, they don’t even come up with the idea. They say: ‘Like, No like.’ But I respect that. The mind goes too fast. It’s not me having a nail and building a box, who cares, it’s a box, take it.”

The honesty of Mr. Brainwash! In the film, we get to see an army of creative worker bees preparing for the “Life is Beautiful” show in LA. They execute the idea: he approves or not. Sounds a lot like an art department, huh?

We were told that artists have “vision”, and maybe, in the end, that’s all they are supposed to have. Mr. Brainwash claims to have it, except that his vision is dependent on the vision of someone else; well, Andy Warhol for one. But this doesn’t matter. The collectors who bought the Warholesque stuff by the dozens didn’t care one bit. In fact, I think it helped them feel more comfortable about writing that big check.

Are you the next Mr. Brainwash?
Art Directors, Graphic Designers, “applied” artists…. take heart. You may be throwing your vision away on that soap ad, but it could pave the way for your first big show. Save your money, get the attitude (at least on weekends) and don’t be afraid to be derivative either. Your client may still force you to change the font on the soap ad, but who knows, an entire world of rich people might be waiting to call you a genius. Confusion about creativity may work to your benefit. When everyone is an artist, we would have transcended artistic attitude entirely and since we don’t know what that looks like at this point, we’re scrambling for a light switch. But I am sure in the future, ideas won’t need to be produced by worker bees, money itself will be old school and we’ll make art between the dimensions of space/time just to have some fun. There would be no reason to “collect” anything and identities would be fluid and unthreatened. I’m looking forward to it as
L­_Switch2020 (aka Clare Ultimo). Keep your eyes on the tops of buildings at night.

I would love to hear your ideas about this, especially if you happen to be an “Art Director”. You don’t even have to use your real name…

Read the New York Magazine article
http://bit.ly/bkR53j

See the film “Exit Through the Gift Shop”
http://www.banksyfilm.com/

The Joy of Working for Non-Profits

The pitfalls of working as a communication designer in the non-profit world have been well documented (I think). I even wrote an article for a trade magazine years ago in an effort to help younger designers avoid the holes on that street. (See link at the end). But things have actually improved since I wrote that list of warnings to the wise; and while I can’t say that the value of graphic design is better understood by your everyday straphanger, it is certainly more visible. And non-profits, like everyone else, see it as a way to send their message out to the world. Possibly more than ever, they are beginning to see that non-profit doesn’t mean poor image.

My latest experience with the Joseph Campbell Foundation is the case in point, and it has been a truly wonderful one, I confess. My long history with non-profit work, years of struggle with budgets, Boards, Directors and “too many cooks” in the proverbial Do-Gooder kitchen evaporated with one phone call. Pinch me but it happened.

I was given the task of creating the Foundation’s “product” line, a series of gift items that would represent the teaching of Joe Campbell. The Foundation is well-run, but like all Foundations, non-profits, etc., it runs on the good graces of members, grants and donations and a lot of not-for-pay work that staff puts in, after their “regular” jobs. It’s also actually run by very few humans, though from the looks of it, this can be hard to believe.

Maybe it’s the subject matter, the ultimate message that Campbell communicated about each of us as our own personal heroes (a truly original message when it surfaced in the 70s) that pulls this group along so well. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Campbell’s famous work, inspired me and so many others (like George Lukas when he created “Star Wars”). Maybe it was the people I dealt with, who treated me with respect and kindness and actually expressed appreciation for what I was doing. Whatever the ultimate reason, I have seen the light at the end of the non-profit tunnel, and this one at least, seems pretty well lit.

Since my creative work focuses primarily on the word as image it was pretty exciting for me to work on this. With this initial group, I wanted to remain simple, clean, direct. And of course I had a million ideas, but I purposely pulled myself in so that I could at least get an initial group up and running. Joe Campbell said a lot of things that have become part of our pop culture, but not everyone knows that he was the one who said “Follow Your Bliss”. He said a lot of other stuff too, so there’s plenty to work from I’m pleased to say.

I don’t even mind the fact that I have to tell my younger friends who he was…Campbell was “just” a teacher. He was a professor at Sarah Lawrence, a scholar of course, stuff that doesn’t make front page news. But Bill Moyers put him on a lot of televisions in the late 1980s in hours of engaging conversation with “The Power of Myth” and his passion for the mystical stories of the world began a kind of cross-cultural revolution that America had never seen before. Even my corporate clients were talking about him at the time.

While I begin a new group of Campbell quotes and sayings, I’m happy to be working for “just” a teacher. To me, teachers are the real heroes of our culture, so overlooked and underestimated. When the world gets set straight someday, we’ll see that the folks we sit with in classrooms when we’re young especially, who give us new ideas and new horizons to imagine, are creating the heroes of the future; they really have the power to make a deep difference in our personal lives. I know my teachers have. In the meantime, I’ll give this next batch my most inspired shot and hope to have you visit the store online. There will be more to come soon. Here’s the link so please check out the stuff:
http://www.cafepress.com/joseph_campbell

Read my article “Want to work Pro Bono?”:  http://www.clareultimo.com/des2.php

Confessions of a Teenage Vegetarian

Some of us were “earthers” from way back but it was so much a way of life for us, a natural attitude, that it became integral to our lives and relatives or friends weren’t much interested in hearing about it. We ate our whole grains quietly in the back of the bus so as not to gather unwanted attention and avoid the inevitable annoying questions about why our lunch was so funny-looking.

I was a young teen when the first Earth Day hit, but even way back then, some of us went out of our way to find recycled paper (which always looked brown), find great vegan food, eat organic or raw, stuff like that. I found a naturopathic doctor when I was 17, after asking some questions in a local health food store. Eating organic was seen as eccentric and no one knew what a naturopathic doctor was either. I remember defending my organic food passion to my boss in 1979, who said (as he ate his hamburger) …”it’s all polluted, you’re fooling yourself, it doesn’t matter”. I didn’t like being the only soy eating girl in the room, and I really did feel alone back then. Everyone just thought I was nuts and I accepted it. But even though they laughed, I didn’t stop eating my soyburgers.

No one makes fun of me now, because, after all, I was right. Tofu is on diner menus and health food stores are hip. I’m really happy to see many of my twenty and thirty-something friends “discover” vegetarianism, talk about the dangers of white flour and white sugar, and praise the benefits of naturopathy, raw foods, juicing, alternative medicine, etc. etc. They get all passionate about it, and righteous, sometimes strangely dogmatic too. I don’t have the heart to tell them this is really old news to many of us quiet revolutionaries who basically grew up on the stuff. I’m thrilled that their bodies, their lives (and possibly our planet) will benefit from this new consciousness they’ve found because the quicker we move away from ham sandwiches and coca cola, the better. (Do Americans still eat this stuff? Did it have to take all these years for people to connect their health to the stuff they put in their mouths every day ?) I guess so.

Earth Day is all about the connections between all of IT and all of us. Now that it’s become hip to care if the packaging is reusable, and school kids are being taught to recycle, I have lived long enough to get to the first plateau you might say, and it does feel much better to have company when I’m eating my escarole. Since I have the added pleasure of having Earth Day as my birthday, I feel like the universe was always winking at me in approval, only I didn’t know it until now. And who cares if some beedie- eyed bald man is making fun of your lunch when the Great Mother herself is giving you the go-ahead ?

Earth Day is a little bit goofy though, if you think about it. Every day is Earth Day. After all, where would we be without her ? Finally, more of us are really thinking about it and that’s really something to celebrate.

Women’s History Month and the Two Things My Mother Gave Me

There’s a few minutes left to March and it’s been one deadline after another, but I couldn’t let Women’s History Month slip by without noting the greatest female hero I knew first hand, my mom.

Of course I spent the month enjoying whatever public celebrations of great women I could find…the Joan Baez American Masters special on PBS was probably my favorite, since I could re-appreciate her political stamina over a lifetime more than I ever did. Whatta chick!

But I guess my number one female hero would have to be my mom. Everyone called her Millie, though her formal name was Carmela. Carmela Mary Musto before she married my dad.

It would be great to tell you that my mom fought for public justice, ran for senate or started a non-profit organization. I think you would be impressed with her if she did those things. But in her own way, she lived the life of an iconoclast, and I saw her struggle to be herself without the advantage of education or social enlightenment, long before women’s rights were cool. I saw her do what she wanted and face the consequences, no matter what anyone said. I saw her help others without a thought of what she would “get out of it”, and this extended far beyond her family. She saw through people’s facades with an uncomfortable accuracy. And of course, like many Italian American women of her age, she was a great cook! But more than anything, there were two great things she taught me that have become foundations of my life.

Being Different is Just Fine!
Millie  really liked being “different”. In fact, one of the things I remember about her now, was that she encouraged me not to do what everyone else did…one of her famous (and classic) “mom” sayings to me was “so if everyone was jumping off the bridge, does that mean you would jump too?” Maybe this started me off with a certain comfort level to follow my own heart and not someone else’s (though I won’t say it’s not sometimes a lonely road). She was naturally skeptical of what I have learned to call social consciousness: doing, feeling, or going along with what “everyone else is doing”…the mindless march of the masses. Millie was full of her own mind, and certainly marched to her own drummer.

Being Generous is What Life is About
Millie’s generosity was legendary and didn’t seem to have any edges or boundaries to it. When she was in her mid-fifties, she took on the full-time care of two small children, they were three and four years old at the time. Their mom had just died. They were cousins on my dad’s side, not even her side of the family, but my mom took on their care like it was a mission from god. And it probably was. We all lived together and she did everything from breakfast to bedtime, 24/7 with these two beautiful girls; with occasional Sunday breaks when their dad would take them out. I guess I don’t know many women who would take on the care of toddlers at that point in their life, when their own child was almost grown; seems a bit nuts to me when I think about it. Unless the situation was forced on someone, most women would run from this kind of thing. Maybe my mom saw it as her opportunity to really make a difference in the world,  one person at a time. I know it wasn’t easy for her.  And while it’s not like inventing a cure for cancer, this attitude of hers did indeed impact the lives of so many, not to mention those two young girls, now grown with children of their own.

Millie and I argued a LOT, fought like boxers for a championship title and neither of us ever gave in. Like all heroes, she went beyond what was expected, she went where her own heart took her, no matter how unlikely that seemed to be. I still miss her. She’ll always be the first woman who made history in my life and I’ll always be proud to have had the good fortune of being her daughter.

Internet Radio: The Small, the Independent, the Future!

BEFORE THIS SHOW GETS TOO OLD, I wanted to post it here so that you could listen to the podcast. There are maybe at least 20 reasons why I love internet radio, but mostly because I believe (next to YouTube) it’s the best and most entertaining learning  you can do. The democracy of it all makes some people nervous (”you just can’t trust the internet to give you THE FACTS”) but lest I remind you, we just can’t trust our corporate-run media to give us THE FACTS either! As I always say…think for yourself or someone else will think for you!

So, speaking of thinking for myself, I had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by journalist, poet, and musician Mike Marcellino on Red River Radio (a BlogTalk internet channel) on March 3.  I got to talk about Media Conrol, Verbs on Asphalt and I even read an oldie but goodie at the end. I open the show for the first half hour, but Cherryl Floyd-Miller, Louis Bourgeois and Shaindel Beers follow and are super. Mike is a great host, with an eclectic ear/eye. His journalism background is a great asset to the show.

If you don’t support independent media already, think again. There’s a lot of it out there, (yes, and some are dumb I know) but I’d love to hear which shows are your favorite and why so tell me. I’ll post my own list soon…And the best part about radio…you can do your work while you listen. The show was March 3, 2010. This link should do it:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rrradio/2010/03/04/red-river-writers-live–notebook-writer-with-mike-