"My life would have been different if only... I'D GONE TO ART SCHOOL".

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Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on September 2, 2014 at 5:50pm

v) Advertising normalizes conspicuous consumption in the USA and that scares me. It affects all levels of our society. The poorest people desire luxury cars, fashion designer clothing and mansions. Media drives greedy and materialistic thinking, reinforces consumerism and undermines realism. Too many people are disconnected from each other and chasing after money. Few people stop and consider the role of government, social structures or trying to enact positive change through group collaborations. I wish I could meet my basic needs on my own, and I try to do the best that I can, while so many are enthralled by the idea of luxury they live like if they dream hard enough their wealth fantasies will become real. Every reality television show and celebrity gossip garbage media outlet makes insane rich people and conspicuous consumption seem normal and desirable. Make no mistake, there is Third World level gut wrenching poverty that people are dying from in the USA. We have slums equal to those shown in charity causes in Africa. One slum is a death camp: it does not have running water, electricity, enough homes for  people, or medical care for diseases, and the houses that stand are contaminated with mold, the area has constant crime, violence and hopeless. Go read about the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) Reservation. Those people live in hell. There are many more reservations like that. In Chicago, we have Terror Town. Around the 70th streets and the gangs and shooting kills a classroom of children and innocent people year after year. And the general public are fed "news" about Hollywood actors and Pop musicians antics. I don't want to be represented as an American to the world by disgusting people like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, famous for being famous: they do nothing, have no talents or intellect. Rich families and a sex videos get them world fame and more wealth? They make me angry. They spend millions of dollars on their own self-aggrandizement while people in the world need medicine, water, food, clothing. They are a shame to the USA and the human species. Conspicuous consumption makes me angry.

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on September 2, 2014 at 5:50pm

v) **Ironically, I had an educational experiment with outward displays of conspicuous consumption and how it makes people respect and obey you. I am morally opposed to all diamonds, they are all blood diamonds. I like how they look because sparkly rocks are pretty so I bought a set of fakes for $30 and they look perfect. I have earrings and a pendant all in half carats of cubic zircons. Only laser testing can show them to be fakes, the brilliant cut is perfect. Rich people do not wear last year's clothing or usually not for more than 2 years and I have a few nice things from thrift stores and second hand shops. I recently bought a designer silk skirt for $3, some lazy rich woman discarded because it needed a hook sewn on. Closely watching all the art school snob girls taught how they manage to dress down in jeans but still wear enough designer clothing to flaunt their social status. Rich women and usually housewives of the rich wear expensive jewelry and running velour track suits to go shopping at malls. This subtle way of dressing shabby, dressing down and flaunting status at the same time to advertise they are rich is like a secret language. I wore my fake diamonds and a designer top with old jeans to look like a rich art school girl. I went a major art show event where I had been treated with disrespect in prior years and pretended like I was important. Getting the shoes right was the hardest part. Gallerists fawned over me like I was rich because I looked the part and leveraged my art history knowledge in front of them. "Oh, only $10,000 for that Robert Motherwell piece? That would be a wonderful piece and great investment," I would say. "You have so many works on paper by Warhol this year, so many news things from last year." The gallerist agrees and knows I have seen him before. "Do you have anything else you can show me?" So if you want your art experiment to work maybe the best art work you can do will be performance involving yourself and a phony makeover. You need to look the part and be an actor and suddenly you are finding success. Being earnest will get you nowhere. So believe in the power of the mind ("if you want it badly enough, you can do it") by hacking the system of boot lickers in a borrowed Armani suit. See if someone can lend you an expensive or antique watch. Be sure to look at it so they can see it. Watch them fawn on your like whores and know you have beat the system by creatively using it against itself. Maybe you will get your art show funding when they think they will gain something basing this idea on how you look and nothing more. 

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on September 2, 2014 at 5:49pm

viii) YAY! Have a happy protest art event. Stencils are very helpful. If you just paint on the window glass, it will not cause permanent damage. If you find works by Pop artist USA Ron English, he has been arrested many times for protest art, especially changes to McDonalds billboards and signs. He attacks junk food and junk culture. He has battled many lawsuits against him. He was also second runner up the Obama Hope art contest, but Sheppard Fairey won.

In the USA people are rushing to ban candy flavoured e-cigarettes right now because they are rapidly being picked up by children. Also, same concerns for candy with marijuana THC drug in it for the two states that are experimentally legalizing marijuana sales. I'm sure some creeps dream of a world where they can sell endless amounts of drug infused candy to children.

ix) Maybe I want the show since it has been placed out of my reach. ^^' Greedy CBC! lol. Bobby Orr was an amazing player. I'm too young to have seen him. My boyfriend is a member of an international hockey history group and told me Bobby Orr sent his paychecks back to the Chicago Blackhawks because his knees were too injured and so he never played with the team, he would accept any money. 

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on September 2, 2014 at 5:46pm

x) I'm too poor to go anywhere anyway. Poverty causes immobility. You are hindered from travel and relocation is very difficult to impossible. Otherwise I think all the poor people in the worst slums in Chicago would escape and go somewhere else, and some manage to do this, but many need money to move away and often work low paying jobs which they are afraid to give up. They are hand to mouth paycheck to paycheck with no savings. That is the definition of "the working poor" to me, people working all week long year after year with no increase. Sometimes working two jobs, every hour they can, with no increase, and the government will not raise the legal minimum wage. I am a very poor person living in a very white and rich neighbourhood, the median home value for owners is $2.2 Million around me, but I am here mostly because my apartment is awful, allows dogs and we can afford it. It has a easy train and bus access and most things like the library and grocery stores you can walk to. In the USA we have what we call White Flight. White people with enough money flee when an area becomes troubled. We had a huge burst of gang graffiti this summer and a few shootings, suddenly the richer white people are gone, their beautiful and expensive houses sold and I think it was White Flight. It seemed the richest people suddenly offered their antiques for sale and left their apartments or sold their homes and they have the money to be mobile.

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on September 2, 2014 at 5:46pm

I have a hard time remembering all the times I have been robbed because it takes time to think of it in all and what type of theft was committed. One car I owned was stolen and destroyed, total loss. Childhood home invasions and robberies: 3, and the third time there was nothing much to steal so they burned the house (total loss, no insurance, family homeless.) As an adult, break in / home invasion robberies: 4. One computer alarm system stopped the robbery in progress, nothing lost and the most recent one I had insurance to claim the loss. Robbed in person by pickpockets: 3, one theft on the train (iPod), two on the college campus (school library and in class) so I learned one cannot set things on desks or tables and step away from them, told hold everything all the time, especially your books which cost a few hundred dollars. The library thief slipped my new rain coat off the chair while I sat at a computer and walked away with it. A few weeks before they, thieves stole all the computer monitors. The college library screwed the new computer monitors to the desks, the thieves came back and broke the plastic mounts and stole those also. So age 40: 7 home robberies, 1 car theft, 3 personal robberies for a total of 11. That's with the privilege of never having lived in a "high crime" neighbourhood. Unrelated to robbery, I had two guns pointed at me. I was almost shot in a drive-by, I mistakenly wore the colour red, and I did not know there was a three way gang war going on. The second time I had triggered a silent alarm in a clothing store as I was hired that morning, the manager did not tell me the store was robbed at gunpoint the prior day and all the women working there quit because they had children and did not want to die, nor did the manager tell me there was a silent alarm button near the cash register and I bumped into it. So the policeman ran into the store with their guns out while I was behind the counter and alone in the store. Also in the USA the law is for police to shoot to kill, not injure, as the law is such that they must use their weapon at all then they must only to use it in a terminal fashion. I have had enough police friends explain their training to me. I was too afraid to move and I was not ordered to do anything and so I asked "Um, can I help you?" then 911 called on the phone and I while he still had the gun pointing at me answered it, and I told the 911 operator I had no idea what was happening and the police were furious with me since I did not know about the robbery the prior morning. And those are my funny stories! :p So I don't look down on anyone who wants to live in a nice village or the countryside when I remember things like these. ^^'

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 1, 2014 at 8:06am

PS (missed this earlier)

Do I want a giant squid?

Yes, please...although I'm not sure what I will do with it, eat it?

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 1, 2014 at 5:17am

vi) I consume books on ethnic art though...when I can get hold of them, and when I can afford them. For the aboriginal art, the untold and untellable (to white men) stories behind the works fascinate me.

vii) I once wrote a self-published book called 'Collections...and Collectors", in which  I asked a number of my friends to describe whatever it was they collected, and explain why they collected them. The 'why' was often more interesting than the 'what'. I rotate paintings at home and in my studio, depending on what mood I am in. But there is never enough spacce to display more than a small percentage of them. i am increasingly drawn to making small things (floppy discs and vinyl art at the moment), and lots of small things can be displayed in the space of one big thing.

viii) by 'Also Ran' I meant that Matisse is seen, compared to Picasso, as a 2nd Division artist. When I get round to it, I am going to make a dawn graffiti raid on the local ecigarette shop that advertises it's ware under the heading, 'ecigarettes, smoke, enjoy'. I will add, 'AND DIE" to this. But I need to get hold of a spray can of paint first.

ix) those are the sort of programmes that I will never watch. Life is too short. Is the ice hockey player Bobby Orr, by any chance? i remember watching him when he was at his best when I spent a (miserable) year in Ottawa.

x) I have done the medium and big city thing, but am now perfectly content living in a small, sleepy village of 5-6000 people. I can understand wh, and how, a big city gives tou the infrastructure and the support that you need. Nothing much happens here, but I like that. I go to the local bar, there are concersts and street theatre in the summer, and a few local art shows. It's a simple life faraway from the maddening crowds, but after being a corporate creature for many years, I like that, and enjoy having friends who are artists and 'peasants' and not university/professional high-flyers. My car, which I also use very litte (4000 miles/year) is 29 years old, and is called Oranje. I will end this with a photo of her taken at one of he local lakes where there are flamingoes and pelicans and other fancy birds. Byeeeeee!

Comment by Valentine Mark Herman on September 1, 2014 at 5:06am

Bonjour! Thanks again for the comments. My latest views...

Whereas, in general, I believe in the power of the mind ("If you want it badly enough, you can do it",) in practice, I really can neither paint nor draw. Or at least paint and draw well. A couple of years ago I was Artist in residence in a local art gallery that openened up in a shop. It was a sort of pop up gallery, but it didn't work out very well, because the owner neither knew what he was doing in the art world, nor had any sort of vision for the gallery. In the end I got thrown out...but I didn't mind. I've drawn up a plan for the local counci, at its request,  for a week-long visual arts festival next summer. It involves lots of pop-up, spontaneous, small scale, home-based and do-it-yourself art exhibitions. Whether it gets accepted or not (budgetary constraints, political rivalries, cultural confusion, etc) remains to be seen, but at least there's a plan on the table. My village is too small to really make the kind of garage show you describe work. And rhere aren't enough (contemporary) art lovers.

i) lots of wars, too many wars. Edwin Starr (& Bruce Springsteen): "War/What is it good for/Absoutely nothing/Say it again, y'all"

ii) I knew a Dr (sadly dead now) in the UK who when he retired couldn't afford to pay the large insurance fee necessary to be an occasional mediical practitioner. he had a neighbour who required some special diabetese injections. My friend was not allowed to walk 20 yards and give him the injections, and instead the poor bloke had to spend an hour each way, every other day, to go to a hospital for his shots. What a bureaucratic waste.

iii)- iv). I have nothing to do with social media sites (that I consider to e anti-social). I try and spend as little time as possible looking at screens -- TV screens, mobile phone screens, computer screens, film screens, etc. I know that there is another and a different world out there, but I want nothing to do with it. And yet, I used to work for an ITC company, and spent many years lobbying governments to develop internet services and projects. But now I'm out of all of that.Our conversation is a noteable exception.

v) ah, conspicuos consumption. I have nothing to do with that, either -- but then I can't afford to. And if I could, I don'rt think I would. So when we occasionally play the gale, "What would you do if you won millions on he lottery, Val?", I disappoint people when I say "I have really no idea3. Buy a new camera, get a juke box and an acquarium...but that's about all, leaving all those millions unspent. I could give them to my kids or animal charities, i suppose. Also there is snobery attached to many degrees  - bad degree pass from a good university is often thught to be better thanb a good degree from a not-so-good/famous/well-known university.

MORE FOLLOWS....

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on August 31, 2014 at 8:16pm

 

Hello Val,

 

I think anyone can draw and paint, you just have to put the time in to learn. Both skills are hand eye coordination and training the brain. I'm totally against the whole Renaissance mysticism of the genius gifted by God. The mythos of the artist as special and genius is nonsense. People who most believe this myth react violently when you tell them anyone can be an artist.

Also, why wait for someone's to give you permission? Just go start your own gallery or art collective. That's most of the scene in Chicago that I follow when I can. It does not have to fit preconceived ideas. Hire someone with a cello and violin, hang some lights and put the art in a garage, a barn, a warehouse or whatever you have with space. Chicago has a tradition of underground "apartment galleries". If you are keyed in to who is running an apartment gallery, they take the furniture out of as many rooms as they can and put it in a bedroom, display all the art for one night, and it is also a nice party.  

i) I was brushing my teeth this morning and trying to remember all the wars and mini-wars I we have had in my lifetime: Panama, Bosnia, Iran-Contra, Somalia, Gulf-War, Afghanistan, Iraq and probably I am forgetting something.

ii) Medicine is largely controlled by a private corporation (American Medical Association) in the USA so someone could be a military surgeon for 20 years and the laws would not recognize this doctor even to be a pediatrician or practice general medicine. The military system and college/university/corporate public systems are separate, and the latter does not want competition.

Comment by Shellie Lewis | moved 2020! on August 31, 2014 at 8:16pm

iii)-iv) I don't blame the platforms for social media: the platforms are usually neutral, it is people who are the problem. Also, how is this rum and how we are using it any different from social media in its function? I pay attention to what I value and promptly ignore anything else. There is a lot of garbage on YouTube, because anyone can use the site, but there is a lot of great stuff. I just don't waste my time with stupidity and ignorance, narcissists and haters. One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Sea Lemon, which has high production values and a great series on hand book-binding as art. She is a very good teacher. You have to look for the gold among the garbage. Friends share good places to find things we like. Social media is here to stay and you may as well be angry at the sun rising in the east. :/ It's about controlling what you consume, understanding why you consume a media. For me, in depth discussion on a forum is good time investment (intelligent, makes connections) some moron trying to jump a moving truck on a bicycle is bad (idiot trying to seek fame or commit suicide does not merit my attention.) Some dumb videos are just light hearted entertainment like a dog chasing soap bubbles or cute kittens or whatever. I used to put malicious stupidity and dumb entertainment in the same category but I've decided that some are just light hearted distractions and there is no harm if someone wants a thirty second break to watch a baby sloth.

v) If you are paying $260,000 for an MFA from SCAD, it is about the product. You are rich and can waste money or spend as much as you like; so this is a person who can buy a $30,000 Honda but demands to drive a $150,000 Mercedes Benz. The education has become a product, creating the impressions of exclusivity and connoisseurship. The education as a product is showing social ranking as much as any other form of conspicuous consumption like yachts, private airplanes, jewelry, watches. It has less to do about learning art and more about a pedigree of wealth.

vi) African and Aboriginal art have their own fascinating languages of abstraction. It is a whole body of what we name abstract art and this is also why Picasso, Modigliani and many others have copied African art, to learn that abstract style.

vii) Blind collecting is an interesting idea. I will remember that. There are really little to no famous artists in Chicago so it may not be useful. It is a nice idea for raising money for charity. Also, if you have a large number of paintings, rotate them by season. If you can store painting sin an area, then you can buy more and there is no law that says they all have to be on the walls at the same time all the time. Definitely, mail art, art on paper and smaller works are easy to store. I have five binders on a book shelf with probably well over 600 items in them. I would have to inventory the collection. A lot of my collection are artist trading cards, which I exchange on about four sites. I use sports cards plastic pages and three inch wide binders.

viii) I never heard of Also Ran is that some street artist thing? In USA all the hipsters and Faux Bos want to be Sheppard Fairey and in the UK they want to be Banksy. I love spray paint and do a lot with it when I can but I am so tired of so many people wanting to copy Sheppard Fairey and Banksy. :3

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