Sometimes people contact me with worthy causes – worthy sites – sites about Art in New York – and what could be more abotu Art in New York City than ….. www.NYC-ARTS.org and www.NYCkidsARTS.org ?

I took a look at NYC-Arts.org and it looks good!  Now, I do think they need to add a Social Networking aspect to the site, and I will speak to Joe Harrell, the Director of Marketing for the Alliance of the Arts, here in New York, about that.

But the sites, as they look now, are first class – they look good.  In fact, what I’d do, if I ran those sites, is add the content from Artcards.cc and also have artists, like me, go out and cover shows and post them to an accompying blog – that feeds into the NYC-Arts.org site – that would generate a lot more content.

Not sure what to say about the kids site – I have a son, but he’s almost 16 years old – and I think a kids site has a different demographic than me – (unless I’m trying to reach out to kids and their parents – in which case, maybe it’s relevent).  At any rate – these are Art Sites about our community – here in New York City – and they ougth to be supported.

Here’s the information about NYC-ARTS.org and NYCkidsARTS.org from recent press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Alliance for the Arts Launches NYC-ARTS.org and NYCkidsARTS.org in Beta Testing

NEW YORK – November 25, 2008 – The Alliance for the Arts has launched the beta versions of its new NYC-ARTS.org and NYCkidsARTS.org, the most complete, customizable and dynamic source of information on New York’s cultural institutions. Curated by people who know the scene, NYC ARTS provides an inside view of New York’s cultural life.

The NYC ARTS Web sites have launched during beta testing. The public is invited to participate in testing by submitting feedback through the “Send your feedback” button at the bottom of every page.

NYC-ARTS.org

Locals and tourists will find in-depth information on cultural organizations and their events, programs and activities.

NYCkidsARTS.org

Educators and parents will find the most comprehensive information on cultural activities for children, including arts education programs that support teaching in many subject areas.

Alliance for the Arts Research Center

The research tools in the Alliance for the Arts Research Center will provide easy access to accurate quantitative data on the nonprofit cultural sector in New York City.

In the increasingly competitive entertainment environment, NYC ARTS and NYCkidsARTS ensure that New York City’s arts organizations stand out in the clutter of choices. The NYC ARTS brand is a powerful promotional identity both for large cultural institutions that command high visibility and smaller groups with less promotional muscle. Unlike commercial cultural listings that have a narrow focus, these sites give all arts groups equal opportunity to promote their programs and attract visitors. The power of the NYC ARTS sites extends beyond the walls of the Web sites with weekly e-mail updates, interest-specific RSS feeds and connections to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Cultural consumers need a strong brand to help them navigate the rich and diverse resources of New York City’s five boroughs. Through recommendations, curated collections and other features such as “Events ending soon,” the sites will be proactive in directing individuals to cultural opportunities they might otherwise overlook.

The City of New York is the major underwriter of NYC ARTS. Because the system supports hundreds of cultural organizations and their events in all five of the city’s boroughs-in effect shoring up the cultural infrastructure-the City of New York has invested $1.5 million in capital dollars for the first release of the system. It has also pledged additional enhancement funds for future releases of NYC ARTS.

New York’s philanthropic community has joined the City as investors in this project. Local foundations and corporations supported the research and development of NYC ARTS.

About the Alliance for the Arts

The Alliance for the Arts serves the entire cultural community through research and advocacy and serves the public through cultural guides and calendars. Through its NYC ARTS guides and calendars, the Alliance promotes New York cultural institutions. Through its research studies highlighting the importance of the arts to the economy and to education, the Alliance helps government and civic leaders understand the importance of cultural organizations to New York City. More information on the Alliance’s work can be found at the new www.AllianceforArts.org.

Contact:

Joe Harrell, Director of Marketing & Product Management

Alliance for the Arts

jharrell@allianceforarts.org

(212) 947-6340

Again, what I think is needed is Social Networking that supports and encourages community – and I’ll help where I can, being of this community – we want to not just have engagement – but encourage it with Social Media for Engagement.

One of my friends and I talked about Art this afternoon, and the issues surrounding being an artist and she encouraged me to write the gist of our conversation down, because it reminded her of exactly the issues she’s going though being an artist but not making a living at it.

It reminds me that quite often lately, friends have responded to my thoughts about Social Media and Art, as well, and it seems to me when people, independent of one another are saying similar things there is probably some truth in it.

For example, my friend Valeria mentioned this post from my Webmetricsguru.com blog that was republished in Social Media Today – Social Media Measurement of Attention / Engagement – some more thoughts about it as a post that she wish she had written herself.   Others responded to a slightly earlier post on Making a Case for Social Media – are we doing a poor job of Marketing Social Media? and my friend Jared Freedman thought my Formula for Virtual Friending – what’s a virtual connection worth? Some ideas – a start, at least had some inspiring information – even if the formulae, he thought, was too complicated.

So, with those examples in mind, when my friend Janice, asked me to write down this information, which I normally would not – I figured….. why not?

Recently I’ve been in a dilemma about painting and my own work – I started painting again, after stopping for a long time, a few years ago after going though a difficult time (I won’t go into what spurred my decision); I felt I had to paint just to keep myself from exploding.

After a while, though, I noticed I was stuck again, that I was unwilling to really experiment that much with new materials and techniques, that I often went to paint being unprepared, having no real problem or show, or anything to work on – just a feeling that I’m paying for a studio space, I ought to go.   When I got to the studio space, I often struggled to get anything going and often enjoyed talking to artists as much, and sometimes, more than actually painting.

Painting itself, was an uneven affair, inspiration is often hit or miss – and I noticed that I got bored quickly.  When I began painting again, I worked much quicker, but I still felt stuck with my concept and often had a hard time with creating work that might be inconvenient for me (setting up oil paints and cleaning them up, buying, stretching and storing canvas, was just the beginning.

Also, while at an opening tonight at Brooklyn Artists Gym, the show was not well hung and lacked any real curator, and hardly anything really attracted me that I wanted to look at it – I chalked that up to my belief that work needs to speak to you first – just because an artist puts something out on a wall in fount of us does not oblige me to have to look at it.  There’s so much competing for our attention now, especially now (in fact, I deal with that in the post on Social Media Measurement of Attention / Engagement – some more thoughts about it – we have only 100%, not more than that, and with everything hitting at us, competition for our attention -we need to hold back and just engage with what draws us to it – and there wasn’t anything on the walls that spoke to me – so I made no real attempt to look at it closely.

Look, as an artist – I don’t think the world owes us anything – just because you do work does not mean anyone has to look at it – if anyone does look at work, likes, it loves it, its because it speaks to them, means something – otherwise, why bother?

I also saw that when I had my work in shows as recent as this spring (Art Opening in Williamsburg at Heart and Soul Pilates)

- I had no control over how my paintings were displayed, the lady put my Rejection painting, the landscape one, above, in a dark corner of her gallery, even as I was assured by her this would not happen – in the two shows I was part of this year, my work looked invisible with the dozens of other paintings they were displayed with.

Object placement and lighting, so important for physical objects, which is what paintings are, was not my friend, nor were curators – and I got discouraged, as I did, many years back when I also tried to paint – but lost my way.

And I found it again, a few years back, only to find that, having realized my own strength as an artist – that it was not the primary thing that marked my life – that I wasn’t really going to make my living as an artist, nor did I want to, and my work really was not meant for any kind of wide distribution – and, in fact, I had more control over how many people saw my paintings, as a blogger with a few blogs in subjects where I’ve been seen as an influential, that if I wanted to get my work out and seen – I had the means and knowledge to do it myself.

And then when I showed my works this spring, I had to frame them (which cost several hundred dollars) and drag them over to gallery spaces to they’d be shown, just to go back in a few weeks/months and pick them up again.   I had no hope they’d sell, I had no real desire to sell them either – and yet I didn’t have a place to hang them, and they sit in my studio bin, at Brooklyn Artists Gym, where I briefly looked at them, again, today.

So, I was telling Janice that it’s a lot of work to be an artist and at the end of the day, no one really wants the stuff – on one really cares – and that an artist needs a following – people who love the work – people who want to collect it – and people who paint and really succeed at it, like my friend Amy Crehore, feel they have to do it – there is no other way for them.

But I don’t feel that way about my work,  I don’t “have” to do it, and Janice said she felt the same way about her work  – she’s a vision therapist and paints on weekends – but realizes she doesn’t have the time to really do that much.     But in my case, I could have done more than I did – except I’d rather go to Art Openings, meet people, over actually locking my self up in a corner and painting.

And I came to terms with that – being a painter, and to some extent, a writer, is usually a solitary persuit – you need to do it, more often than not – with your self – away from others – even while in a crowd- a certain solitude is needed – it’s almost a requirement that you must, as an artist, be alone with yourself, and like it.

But I don’t like it – I don’t like being alone with myself – and yet, there are times I did enjoy it – but it was often only after I worked though my resistances.

When the spring began, and I took the steps to invest in my own work by framing some pieces, I felt the burden of not knowing where I would I would store them, and often, I’d go to the studio and feel no enthusiasm – and yet, I still did some good work I’m proud of.   But when the summer came, I just took time out and decided I’d sketch, but not paint.   I work full time as a Web Analyst, do a lot of freelance web analytics and SEO work when it’s available, , blog, go to openings, tweetups, several events in NYC and travel to conferences, and now, started a blog network, blogspeedway.com, but going to the studio felt like just “one more job” and I had enough.

And then, I tried to answer a bunch of questions … why?  Why am I in this?  Why am I painting?  Who is this really for?  Does anyone really want it.

I doubted myself and my own commitment to Art.

But, as I told this to Janice, she said that she has a lot of the same thoughts as I do, and that many artists aren’t really talking about it and there is no real place to go, no support really, for artists.

Nor did I really want to talk about it – either – but it seems like it’s something that does need to be talked about.

It’s really hard to be an artist – no one really wants your work, 99% of the time, you have to finance the activity yourself, and art, unlike a trade or profession, is not really considered integral to anything.  Sure, we have artists, museums, foundations, but art, particularly painting (which has lost it’s relevance over cinema and music, which are much easier for people to consume, is more of an appendage of society – something we feel guilty about – like we should have it – but hardly anyone really needs it and it’s hard to evaluate – the quality issue is entirely subjective.

So, in going for Art, as a career, or a calling, it seems those who do and succeed are those who failed, over and over, but never gave up – and cultivated the right friends, eventually forming a following.

I believe in order to succeed, you need a following – collectors (that’s an art dealers job, and often a thankless task – but till you get to the point where you can hire someone to promote your work for you, you have to finance and do it yourself, along with housing it and paying taxes on it – often a thankless task.

And if you just do it because it gives you pleasure, your dismissed as a “dabbler” or weekend artist.

I wish there was  place where artists could talk about all of this stuff – but there doesn’t seem to be – we’re all orphaned – and that let me to ask myself what role Art had in my life.

What I came up with was that I had nothing really to prove to anyone but myself, and Art, for me, was a package that framed my other activities (web analytics, search, blogging and writing art critic, socializing, etc) and it didn’t need to do anything else but that – how successful I was as an artist really didn’t matter – all that mattered was I had a gift and I was sharing it the best way I knew how, and my passionate feelings, when channelled into Art managed to balance me out somewhat, making me a better web analyst, blogger, writer, critic, whatever….. you fill the rest in – that’s what Art’s role was for me, in this life.

And I accepted it.

There, as my friend suggested, I wrote it all down, as best as I could remember it – I think I got most of what I wanted to say down here, on this blog.

Only now, I don’t know what the next step is for me …. what do I do now?

Been looking at David Galenston’s two books – thinking I’ll purchase the latest book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.   Got interested in David W. Galenson after reading a review of his ideas in the New York Times today.  

In The Art of Pricing Great Art, the writer, Mr. Leonhardt, expresses the following:

“The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million. Not even people who make their living selling art claim to have much of a definition of great art. In fact, they’re proud not to have one. “That’s where the market becomes magical,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, told me.”

In my www.webmetricsguru.com blog – I use with metrics to solve a business need (some times I make my own metrics – you have to be creative – you know); a theory explaining value of a work of art would appeal to someone with my values and way of thinking.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Leonhardt article so I’ll quote from it quite a bit, then comment at the end.

“…..he began collecting data on the sale price of works by Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other American artists, and he discovered a pattern. Most of them produced their most valuable work either very early in their career, like Warhol, or very late, like Pollock. When he expanded his research to European painters, he found the same pattern.

Not only that, but the two groups tended to approach art, and to talk about it, in strikingly different ways. The young geniuses, like Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, were conceptual innovators whose paintings broke sharply from previous work. They typically had a precise goal in mind when they started a piece and didn’t need long to finish it. “Above all, don’t sweat over a painting,” Gauguin once told a friend. “A great sentiment can be rendered immediately.”

The late bloomers, on the other hand, arrived at their innovations gradually, through trial and error, making their major contributions late in life. They painted the same subject again and again, experimenting on the canvas, often reluctant to say that a painting was finished. Consider that Cézanne, who did his most valuable and celebrated work in his 60s, signed few of his paintings.

Mr. Galenson has extended the theory to novelists, poets and beyond, arguing that most creative people fall on one end or the other of the spectrum, and he has earned a fair bit of attention. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech at Columbia University, described “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” which Mr. Galenson published this year, as “a really wonderful book.” Wired magazine recently profiled him under the headline, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Maybe few artists are exactly one type or the other – I believe there is polarity in just about everything – including creativity.

“……If you look through the prices from the current auction season, or walk through any major museum, you can’t help but notice that Mr. Galenson is onto something. When a still life that Cézanne painted at the age of 56, for instance, fetched $37 million at Sotheby’s last week, art experts cited the rarity of Cézanne still lifes. The next night at Christie’s, another Cézanne still life — one painted when he was 34 — sold for just $1.1 million. “

I don’t find that surprising – Cezanne’s late still lifes are much more “unique” than his earlier work – when he was struggling to find himself and his style.  While Cezanne’s early work is notable – yet he had he not evolved his later style and revolutionized art.  Had Paul Cezanne painted his early still lifes, then died all of a sudden, before doing his later work - we’d probably not know he existed today – he’d never become that well known for his early work.

Now, it turns out that Malcolm Gladwell (the same Malcolm Gladwell who I heard at Webmasterworld Pubcon X in Boston, earlier this year) has come to Galenson’s defense and spoke about Galenson’s theory in February at Columbia.   I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Age Before Beauty all the way through and it’s great!

Read the rest of this entry »

Got to go to this show of Cimabue at the Frick Collection - it’s the kind of show you have to see.  The NYTimes review by Roberta Smith tells you all you need to know, here’s an excerpt:

“Cimabue (about 1240-1302) is one of the Big Three — with Duccio and Giotto — who laid the groundwork for the early Italian Renaissance. His name is as weighty as it is mysterious, partly because so few of his works survive. This tiny exhibition makes his greatness crystal clear. At its center are two small works newly attributed to him, “The Flagellation of Christ,” which the Frick acquired in 1950, and “The Virgin and Child Enthroned With Two Angels,” a recently discovered work that is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

I will try to make it over to the Frick Collection this weekend, or next week, if I can.

The Frick Collection is not someplace I go to often these days, but did when I was younger.