E R I K V I D A L

Jaume Plensa's ECHO Sculpture at Madison Square Park (PIC)

HITFIX: Why RIDLEY SCOTT returning to BLADE RUNNER really is the beginning of the end

It is easy to get worked up over remakes and prequels and sequels these days, but it's also not terribly productive.  This is the modern Hollywood film industry in the year 2011, and you can either accept that or you can rail against it, but either way, they're going to keep on doing business this way until there is a compelling reason for them to not do business this way.

I wrote about my experience at Comic-Con this summer with the "Prometheus" panel, and certainly I hope that film delivers something special when it is released next year.  I am willing to walk into it open-minded, especially since it's not like the "Alien" franchise is this untouched, pristine thing.  Any time your iconic creation has already been roughed up behind the bleachers by Paul "Show me on the teddy bear where he touched your favorite movie" W.S. Anderson, it's fair game for anyone.  Besides, having Ridley Scott back in the world that he helped create in the original 1979 film is interesting, no doubt about it.

But that "helped create" is important, and something to consider today as the news breaks that once again, Ridley Scott is planning to revisit one of the SF worlds he was part of with a "follow-up" to "Blade Runner" being announced this morning.  And while I'm a big fan of the 1982 film, I think the notion of any sequel or prequel in that world is a terrible one.  Awful.  Catastrophically bad.

The simple truth is that not all films are franchises, and not every narrative can support a sequel or a prequel.  This disturbing idea that has taken hold that we need to wring every drop of creative juice out of any film that has ever attracted any audience of any size is, quite honestly, death.  This is what the death throes of studio filmmaking look like, folks, and the only real or substantial thing that film fans can do is grab a bag of marshmallows to roast as the whole thing goes up in flames.  People love to point at the occasional fluke like "Inception" as proof that the system isn't broken beyond repair, but the only reason that film happened was because Christopher Nolan made a remake, which convinced the studio he was responsible enough for them to trust him with a reboot, and then he made a sequel to his reboot that made a billion dollars.  And for that, finally, they "rewarded" him with the opportunity to make something he wrote.  That ended up making the studio some $800 million, which is great, and which guarantees him more freedom.  So far, he's used that freedom to sign on to direct another sequel while producing, yes, another reboot.  This is the guy film fans love to hold up as an example for how to do it right in Hollywood, but so far, what I see is a very good filmmaker who is still having to navigate the same blood-filled waters as everyone else.  He does it well, certainly, but he's still stuck in the same box that other filmmakers are, and his work hasn't changed the system at all.  If anything, he's given the studios more ammunition to prove that what they are doing is right.  It works.  It's the correct model to follow.

Ridley Scott may never set foot on a set for a "Blade Runner" follow-up.  Signing a deal is one thing, while making the actual film is something totally different.  There's a long way to go before that film is a real and tangible thing.  And in that time, they may end up deciding not to ever roll film, something that's happened with plenty of in-development projects, particularly with things Ridley Scott has been attached to over the years.  After all, I'm not sitting down this summer to a big-screen giant-budget version of "The Forever War," so just because he says he's going to direct something, that doesn't mean it will really get a greenlight.

With "Blade Runner," though, there is a special level of anxiety that the announcement brings.  I've said before that the real problem with filmmakers who go back to continue screwing around with a film after it's been in release is that filmmakers often have no understanding of what it is that an audience loves about a film.  Once you've released it, you have to stop touching it, because further adjustments could well erase the thing that made it important to someone.  You could screw up a character or the timing of a sequence or a thematic point, and the various versions of "Blade Runner" perfectly highlight that problem.  When I first got Internet access in 1994, I was amazed to find people in newsgroups debating ideas like "Was Deckard a replicant in 'Blade Runner'?," especially since I know from firsthand experience in 1982 that general audiences totally rejected the film.  That ambiguity, and the way the film left room for interpretation, was one of the reasons it lingered so well.  When Ridley Scott started playing around with the movie and adding new effects and tinkering with it after the brief release of the Workprint version, all of a sudden that ambiguity started getting a lot less ambiguous, and Scott seemed determined to answer the question for us.  I found it infuriating, but at least I knew I still had the original version of the film to go back to.  If Scott's planning to return to the world of the movie, I'm afraid of him creating something which will not just rob that first movie of any and all ambiguity, but which will make me wonder if what I saw in the original film was ever really there at all.  He can't erase the original from existence, but he can absolutely destroy my interest in the narrative, and I'm afraid that when it comes to "Blade Runner," he's the last person I want to see playing around with that property.

>> To read the rest of the article at HITFIX click here

Saw this tagged poster of LANG LANG in the subway today... (PIC)

Play THE GREAT GATSBY adapted for 8-Bit NINTENDO (FREE FLASH GAME)

Instructions: space jumps, z shoots (in fullscreen mode, tab shoots), arrow keys move right and left. Hit the f key to full-screen! Click on the game once if the keyboard isn't working.

>> From THE GREAT GATSBY GAME

GEHRY NEW YORK Building (Finally lost the scaffolding, lookin' pretty good) (PIC)

Are You...?

AUSTIN KLEON: How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)

1. Steal like an artist.

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”

The honest artist answers, “I steal them.”

I drew this cartoon a few years ago. There are two panels. Figure out what’s worth stealing. Move on to the next thing.

That’s about all there is to it.

Here’s what artists understand. It’s a three-word sentence that fills me with hope every time I read it:

It says it right there in the Bible. Ecclesiastes:

That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of previous ideas.

Here’s a trick they teach you in art school. Draw two parallel lines on a piece of paper:

How many lines are there? There’s the first line, the second line, but then there’s a line of negative space that runs between them. See it?

1 + 1 = 3.

Speaking of lines, here’s a good example of what I’m talking about: genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.

You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

Jay-Z talks about this in his book, Decoded:

We were kids without fathers…so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves…Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Identify one writer you really love. Find everything they’ve ever written. Then find out what they read. And read all of that. Climb up your own family tree of writers.

Steal things and save them for later. Carry around a sketchpad. Write in your books. Tear things out of magazines and collage them in your scrapbook.

Steal like an artist.

>> To read the rest of the article at AUSTIN KLEON click here

The Single Greatest Desktop Wallpaper EVER

>> DOWNLOAD THE FULL HD VERSION HERE

TED TALK: DAVID BYRNE: How architecture helped music evolve

ROGER EBERT: The Quest for Frisson

The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It's often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you're web surfing.

You know how it happens. You're clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests' mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Oh, there were many more. A frisson can be quite a delight. The problem is, I seem to be spending way too much time these days in search of them. In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.

Twitter is an enabler for this behavior. It provides a quiet, subtle pressure to tweet frissons, and be tweeted in return. A good tweet can involve a funny comment, a snarky one, or one so poetic I read it and marvel. It can contain breaking news. It can be a small autobiographical revelation. I enjoy this. Deprived of speech, I chatter all day on Twitter, and have virtual relationships with the carefully chosen Tweeters I follow. Some are great writers. Some are deep thinkers. Some keep me updated on American Idol. Some persist in updating the scores of sporting events. I hate that, except in a situation like the Blackhawks' winning season. I care about the Blackhawks, but not enough to watch. All I require is the frisson.

This is not in praise of Twitter. It has to do with the possibility that my brain--and yours too, since you are here--has been rewired by the internet. There's an article by Nicholas Carr in the new issue of Wired magazine about a UCLA professor who used an MRI scan to observe the brain activity of six volunteers. Three were web veterans, three were not. He found that veteran Web users had developed "distinctive neural pathways."

He asked his newbies to surf the web for six days, and then he repeated the experiment: "The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers." The article suggests this possibility: "When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

In other words, instead of seeking substance, we're distractedly scurrying hither and yon, seeking frisson.

>> To read the rest of the article at ROGER EBERT click here

"No! YOU Listen!!"

IFC: Exploring the Lines Between Art, Hype and Biz

"I had reservations about making art a business," the famous art collector Mary Boone once said. "But I got over it."

Such is the tension within all artistic industries -- film, painting, theater or music, the idea of selling-out dogs them all. Are the high prices that paintings go for at Sotheby's or films sell for at Sundance indicative of their success, or their impurity? And how do you distinguish the "true" art from the art that's just hyped? Do the two have to be mutually exclusive?

The recent documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" takes up these questions and then some. Ever since its "surprise" Sundance premiere in January, the film has generated a considerable amount of attention. Supposedly directed by British street-art provocateur Banksy -- famous for his political and controversial acts of graffiti, such as painting on Israel's West Bank Barrier -- much of the buzz has circled around questions of the film's veracity: Was the film's protagonist, a French videomaker-turned-artist named Thierry Guetta, just a fabrication? Was the entire project yet another infamous Banksy prank?

But whether the film is real or staged or somewhere in between misses the point: "Exit Through the Gift Shop" -- as its title suggests -- is ultimately a lacerating critique on the commercialization of art, making it the latest in a new wave of documentaries that focus on the struggles of artists and art aficionados to define the value of art in a world dominated by profit motives and capitalist enterprise. As the recently released "The Art of The Steal" makes strikingly apparent in its chronicle of Philadelphia's power grab of a private collection of impressionist masterworks, art is big business.

It's no surprise that Banksy also raises the ugly specter of art's commodification in his debut film. After his works sold at Sotheby's in 2007 for record-breaking amounts for a young artist, he posted a painting of an auction house on his website with the caption, "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

One could pose a similar question to the patrons of abstract expressionist artist Marla Olmstead, the four-year-old painter at the center of Amir Bar-Lev's 2007 documentary "My Kid Could Paint That." Like "Exit Through the Gift Shop," which contrasts art that's heralded as legitimate (from Banksy) with work that is depicted as a rip-off (by Guetta), Bar-Lev's film addresses a similar conflict. Are Olmstead's paintings true expressions of childhood genius, or is her art guided by her father, an amateur painter, and then exploited for profit as the work of a prodigy?

2006's "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" starts with a matching quandary. The film opens with an image of an abstract expressionist painting and the voiceover: "Is this a genuine honest-to-god no-doubt-about-it American masterpiece, possibly worth up to $50 million? Maybe." In a former female truck driver's quest to make millions off an alleged Pollock she bought at a thrift shop, the film explores the ambiguities inherent in the validation of a piece of art. While art experts claim the painting is a cheap knock-off, the woman and her family hire forensic scientists to prove the work to be Pollock's based on fingerprint analysis. Despite the high-brow art world's unwavering refusal to acknowledge the art as legitimate, bids for the drip painting go from $2 million to $9 million. (As of last reporting, the painting was still awaiting higher offers.)

Ultimately, "Exit," "Kid" and "Pollock" leave the question of their art's authenticity up for the audience to decide -- it's actually this ambiguity that helps construct the films' central conflicts and mysteries. But by the movies' final frames, a few things become clear: quality art is difficult to define, the people who buy it (and buy into it) are often ignorant about what makes it worthwhile, and the background of the artists may be more important to observers and consumers than the artwork itself. There may be no more ironic display of such misguided celebrification and misunderstanding of art than the array of young L.A. hipster-fashionistas in "Exit" captured on camera declaring brand-new art-star Guetta's laughably derivative debut show "a revelation."

These issues are nothing new in the art world, of course. "It's always been there," says arts journalist David D'Arcy. "You're not just selling a work of art for what it is; you're selling it as an abstract painting by a child. It's not so different from selling a painting by a serial killer. You're selling an autograph," continues D'Arcy. "When Basquiat died of an overdose in 1988, it had to be his shrewdest career move. Modigliani, Frida Kahlo, same thing. You can sell martyrdom. Would these pictures mean anything if we didn't have the biography? It's almost like having the footnotes."

If personality has supplanted quality, who gets to determinate art's "quality" in the first place? Or to borrow the title of another recent doc, about Henry Geldzahler, the Met's first curator of contemporary art, "Who Gets to Call It Art?"

"Who gets to call it art is still a relevant question," says art-world and museum veteran Karl Katz, who is also an executive producer on "Who Gets To Call it Art?" and another recent art-doc, "Herb and Dorothy," which looks at two unlikely art collectors, a retired postal worker and librarian, who humbly amassed a multi-million-dollar collection of minimalist and conceptual art. "There is such a proliferation of art now that you have to turn to a museum or their chief curator. Who the hell knows what art is," adds Katz. "But if a curator wants to call it art, then it's art."

>> To read the rest of the article at IFC click here

STEVEN BERLIN JOHNSON: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.  Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.

>> To read the rest of the article at STEVEN BERLIN JOHNSON click here

IGN: Rebutting Roger Ebert's "Video Games Can Never Be Art"

One of the great thrills of being wrong comes during the moments after having made a demonstrably false assertion. You can begin to feel the adrenaline flow as you try and defend your position while your claimed territory constricts around you. I remember one night on the eve of a friend's wedding when I'd made an off-hand remark about Charlemagne having played a crucial role in the American Revolution. My friend, now a tax attorney in Texas, spat out a mouthful of beer in disbelief. I could see the gathering relish in his eyes as he realized he had me pinned to a wall. Charlemagne obviously had nothing to do with the American Revolution. I had been thinking of Lafayette, but the difference between Charlemagne and Lafayette had, after five hours of celebratory drinking, passed me by. As I saw his coming antagonism, I didn't stop to think about what I'd said, I simply entrenched myself in the idea that I was right. After having my stupidity corroborated by literally every person invited to comment on the matter I was left to embrace the awful idea that I had been wrong, even while trying to say something positive about the long history of Franco-American cooperation.

In recent years, Roger Ebert has become a significant critic of videogames. Not of the industry or the aesthetics of any particular game, rather he has disavowed the medium itself. Videogames can never be art. Ebert recently reconsidered the question after a reader forwarded him Kellee Santiago's recent TED presentation arguing that games are art. Five years ago, Ebert made his original assertion that games could never be art in the same way as "serious" film and literature can. He has now revisited the subject by issuing a decree, in part, on my behalf, "no video gamers now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

Consider me Exhibit A in the case against Ebert's assertion. I experienced the medium as an art form from the very first moment I played a videogame almost thirty years ago. Ebert says no critic has ever forwarded a videogame that could be compared to the great works of the old, canonized art. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, he's wrong on this count as well. I did just that six months ago when I described my experience playing Metroid Prime as of equivalent emotional and thematic value as my time watching Citizen Kane. I invoked the moral anarchy of Richard III when I wrote about Haze. I wrote about Mirror's Edge as a sublime memento mori, comparing its self-directed sensoria to the novel's shift from plot to internal narrative with writers like Knut Hamsun and Virginia Woolf.

If you're unwilling to take my arguments, consider Tom Bissell the award-winning contributor to the New Yorker who wrote of Grand Theft Auto IV, "There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years." Or else you might consider Steve Poole, author of Unspeak and Trigger Happy, who described his experience with Shadow of the Colossus. "For me, the aesthetic pleasures weren't enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?"

Or consider Brenda Brathwaite, the game design veteran who is now working on a series of games intended for play in art galleries. I saw her standing at a podium at the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta and break down in tears describing her experience with Tale of Tales' The Path while recovering from an attack in real life. She pointed out Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey who were in the audience as her voice wavered and her eyes filled. "Thank you," she told them.

Is there a purpose in not allowing these experiences, ideas, and feelings to be considered alongside those provoked by Nabakov, Dostevsky, Stravinsky, Joyce, Lang, Bergman, Kurosawa, Beethoven, or whomever you'd like to include as an emissary of great art? Does it enrich us to exclude Smerdyakov from a conversation about violence and Colossus? Are we better for having bucked at the suggestion that Prime's ethereal isolation could have the same human fingerprints as Kane's loneliness?

>> To read the rest of the article at IGN click here

THE TECHNIUM: 1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don't know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive.  You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

>> To read the rest of the article at THE TECHNIUM click here

ANDREW WYETH does MISSLE DEFENSE

What a still mashup should be. I love it.

What the '90s should've looked like but didn't (ELKE HESSER'S PARIS)

One of my favorite photographs, having been blown up, framed, and hanging on my kitchen wall for years. Makes me think: coming from the standpoint of the late '80s, this is what I always thought the mid '90s might look like, with this kind of meta-glamour, but never did... (A pity we got grunge instead.) Ah well--with the new decade upon us, always the new possibilities...

Art Day (with Rockefeller Tree)

Ah yes, another successful Art Day, come and gone...

You see, the concept behind the "Art Day" is a simple one: when one writes for a living, one slowly but surely goes stark raving mad unless one makes an actual appointment (and here, I mean an iron-clad obligation to oneself which absolutely must be met), once a week, to get out of the house--preferably, for an entire day, though a single afternoon is acceptable--this in order to consume the work of other artists who, surely, are also and at the same time going stark raving mad in their own very quietly acceptable fashions... The procedure is simplicity itself: one books, first thing in the morning, an appointment at a spa (for me, this is Eden Day Spa, in Soho), this for a 90 minute session of deep tissue massage. One leaves two hours later feeling refreshed, renewed, revitalized, and, perhaps most importantly, re-ready to consider that, indeed, there just might be some new works of art out there, some MODERN works, that are actually worth consuming (trust me on this one--you skip the massage, and you're going to be about half as willing to consider the validity of any new series you come across that day. Considering that I'm willing to give my time to less than 1% of what's out there, these days... Well, you can easily see how getting the stress knocked out of me by a small Asian women with hands of steel becomes, not a luxury, but a necessity when pondering all that is new in the art scene here...) One then takes a long and leisurely lunch, at which time one flips through a copy of the current week's "Time Out New York"--you hit the Art section, and simply go through the listings, gallery-by-gallery. Stick to anything in Chelsea, and then from there, mark-up whatever may be going on at the Met, the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim (you'll be probably get about half a dozen interesting hooks from the former set, and one or two from the latter, depending). One tears out the relevant info, pays the bill, gets up, takes a stretch, cracks his knuckles, gazes off at the horizon line with a sort of dreamy, half-lost "I'm-ready-to-see-something-NEW-so-bring-it-on..." look...

And off you go for your inspiration.

As for me, on this fine and sun-drenched day, I opted to walk everywhere, and as a result said Art Day did take a bit longer than planned (five hours total--and I only worked in about half the items I'd intended to), but being outdoors and taking in the air more than made up for anything I might have missed (and which I can always get to later). My itinerary, below:

-- Araki's "Painting Flowers and Diaries" at Anton Kern, 532 W 20th and 10th

-- "Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game" at Pace Wildenstein, 545 W 22nd Str and 10th

-- "Dialogue: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock" at the Robert Miller Gallery, 524 W 26th Str and 10th

-- Gerard Richter at the Marion Goodman Gallery, 24 W 57th and 5th

Here I took a break at Rockefeller Center, admiring the tree (in all its excess--I swear the star atop it would feed and house NYC's entire homeless population for a month...), along with the ice-skaters in the rink just below. Heading back downtown, I popped into a church (St. Patrick's, which I'd never been inside of before--quite nice), browsed a few boutiques, suddenly found myself more than a little tired (getting up at 4am is still a relatively new thing, for me), and took the subway the rest of the way back down to Soho, where I stopped by the Open Center to pick up a new catalogue (5-day intensive on Aromatherapy--think I'm going to quite enjoy that one). So, yes, still to come, on my next Art Day next week:

-- David LaChapelle's "Pictures for Italian Vogue 2001 - 2005" at Staley Wise, 560 Broadway and Prince

-- Richard Tuttle at the Whitney, 945 Madison and 75th

-- Fra Angelico at the Met, 1000 5th Ave and 82nd

-- Klimt at the Neue Galerie, 1048 5th Ave and 86th Str

(Oh, and speaking of Art--do I have the most fantastic surprise for Polina on her birthday this coming Friday evening...!! Can hardly wait myself, but of course, I wouldn't think to spoil the mystery here just yet. Never fear, tireless Readers, a full report will come first thing Saturday morning...)