Module 1: initial questions & responses

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1. The advent of technology has forced the artistic community to broaden its definition of what constitutes art. Through avenues of publication such as Youtube or Funny or Die, anyone with a camera and an idea can be a filmmaker. Today we must face the question of whether or not the videos posted by aspiring actors or musicians online constitute art. According to the Institutional Theory outlined (and disagreed with) by Becker, aestheticians or critics are the ones deemed worthy of deciding what makes something art within a given art world. If Youtube videos are to be classified as art, regardless of whether that designation was sought after by their creators, what art world do they fall into? Who are the aestheticians or critics who determine which videos or posts are worthy of the label art?

   During my very brief stint as an actor in Los Angeles, I met many other aspiring actors who attempted to further their own careers through recording their own web series with friends and posting them on the internet. Instead of having to find an agent who submits them for roles and then going out on auditions, these performers were taking matters into their own hands and creating their own opportunities to perform and be seen. Online there is no artistic or casting director deciding who is worthy of being an actor (or artist) and who isn’t. Some actors and musicians have even managed to build careers out of marketing themselves online. It is easy to go see a play or a concert and label that endeavor art. However, when we are searching the web for entertaining videos, where is the cutoff between art and nonart? Who determines that cutoff? Is it even important for there to be a cutoff?

2. After a full day (and a full brain) at the Oregon Arts Summit, I had expected to see much more participatory activities happening throughout the convention. Besides the occasional Q&A after a break-out group (which rarely happened due to robust presentations), and the rare glimpse of an attendee posting to Facebook or Twitter, the Table Talk during the opening remarks of the day was the only true sense of collective conversing that I witnessed. I say this because some of us were not assigned a seat at one of the tables and therefore were seated in a row at the back of the ballroom next to the I.T. department. If this was due to an organizational or some other oversight, I was not sure. I digress…..

   I did enjoy “cornering” some of the speakers such as Steve Rosenbaum from Pop Art on how organizations can track users search paths through intermediary websites to better align their organization’s content with more relevant information to facilitate a streamlined user experience. He described things like Google Analytics and something marketing companies call Behavioral Tracking. I would imagine that having access to this sort of information would be vital when determining things like web design and content for nonprofits, not to mention strategic programming and marketing. The notion of an art world seemed to fit the bill at the summit as there were a plethora of arts and culture organizations from around the state, from Chris Beck and the USDA division of rural development to a wonderful lady named Carolyne, a tribal woman from Warm Springs who had just started her nonprofit to pawn and sell Native American artifacts and was looking for knowledge on how to increase her engagement with the communities outside of her homeland. Even all of the ancillary activities happening in the background (audio/visual, caterers, volunteers, convention employees) clearly testify to Becker’s description of “Support” individuals revolving around an art world.

3. In the break out session creative place making at the Oregon Arts Summit a question was put forth to the panel “Is art necessary in creative place making?” Both panel members did not hesitate and at the same time stated “no.” This began a wonderful back and forth with organizations that argued art is a foundation in place making and the panel who felt commerce was the most integral role. It reminded me of Becker and his continual revolve around what is the value of art and how to identify art. Creative place-making to me involves both participatory practices and collective intelligences in order to be authentic. I continually struggled with the way the speakers were addressing art as this stereotypical physicality and not a means of “creative process.” If collective intelligence is being used to design a space for community it inherently will involve participatory practice. I consider this conscious practice art. Place makers are curating a space in order for certain aesthetics to be established and a specific culture to take form. This is not made an actuality by the creative intelligence but instead by the participates in transmedia who document the space with photos and filters, use it as a means tell stories to friends and become temporary sculpture by just sitting. When these participants critique a space and decide its uses they have then become artists and the content produced art. If I apply the methodology Becker stated about museums with the idea of photography (if they say it is art and exhibit it as so, it is art) to the content produced and the culture dictated through participatory practice then it is unavoidable to see that art is necessary in creative place making.

   At the Oregon Arts Summit I felt there was a mixture of people who looked at social media and accepted it as apart of their world and how they engage their audience. But I also sat at a table with a generation less familiar with the vocabulary of twitter, live-posts and the like. For them re-thinking engagement was not just a natural change their organization was going through as they adapted to their environment but instead a vital means of survival to stay relevant in the “arts world.” I never really understood what it meant to oversaturate a market beyond the simplistic view that a product is launched in a market that doesn’t have the space for it. But what does over saturation mean when it’s applied to “collective intelligences?” At the summit I sat with people trying to remain vital by bringing out their wireless keyboards, looking at their phones, pausing furtively to think of catchy hashtags and find ways to whittle down a speakers sentence to fit into a character limits. “Collective Intelligence” is defined as “shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making.” I question if a room full of people trying to accomplish the same thing, within the same means independently on their screens can still be a collective intelligence? I wonder if the conference would have been more successful in engaging if it had gone back to the root of collective intelligence and banned the new means of engagement we were trying to use and instead reminded people of the foundations we must remember and apply to these new avenues. If instead it had forced people to accomplish communication in their own means in lieu of applying a template they were told was keeping them vital, but quite actually homogenized transmedia communication within the conference and made it lose its value. The foundations that your audience is not a 140 character sentence but instead an individual who can discern and see a a market saturated with people utilizing the same means of communication and story telling strategies to engage them.

4. When I think about a unique representation of ‘art world’ as defined by Becker’s chapter in conjunction with my experience at the Oregon Arts Summit, I recall details from the break out session I attended titled, “Advocacy 101”. Now, politics is an art world I am not all that familiar or comfortable with for that matter, however, the speakers/lobbyists Craig Campbell and Kevin Campbell from The Victory Group provided a humorous breakdown of their experiences working with members of the Cultural Arts Coalition. The Campbell brothers spoke on their methods for first deciding whether or not to accept a client; they boldly stated that under the guidance of their father (who started the company) that they first make it a point to investigate the mission of a prospective client organization in order to make sure their personal business values align with those of the organization’s. It is important for them to identify with the motives of their clients and to make sure that the organization represents something that they honestly believe in and feel passionate about as well. This business practice reflects Becker’s point of view that “aesthetic value rises from the consensus of the art world participants”. The Campbell brothers suggested that their most successful work as lobbyists can only be realized if they truly understand the values, motives, and basis for judgement embodied by their clients. Lobbyists that serve as advocates for art organizations are employing participatory practices in that they must communicate values, exchange ideas with clients, incorporate organizational examples into their campaigns, preserve core mission components throughout their work, and share multiple perspectives.

5. I found the theme itself of the Oregon Arts Summit “rethinking engagement” the most intriguing subject of the day. I had originally thought that this theme would allow for many integrations of the arts and would create an engaging topic for the breakout sessions to address. As I interviewed participants throughout the day as part of my volunteer responsibilities, the common idea that individuals were there to gain insight, connect to new organizations and people, and learn marketing skills that would help their organizations engage to a new kind of public, continued to arise. However, after the day was almost through, many people lamented on how unconnected they felt and wondered were the “engagement” piece would factor in. I sometimes feel that in a collective art world, we are trying so hard to stay relevant, current, technologically forward and so full of information, that we miss the engagement of simple connections. I value time that I can converse with others in my field to truly understand what is working for their organizations, or as individual artists, and I, along with others interviewed, didn’t feel that I was allowed that connection time at this particular summit. I value engagement and participatory practices in all forms, but also like to focus on human collectiveness.

   I thoroughly enjoyed the breakout sessions and the individual art worlds created even by topic of interest. There is something invigorating about a room full of like-minded people for the subject being discussed. Everyone in the room was digesting the suggestions and experiences of those that were chosen to speak and who exemplified a certain “mastery” of their craft. The support of each classroom, or art world, even for just an hour at a time, was refreshing and inspiring.

6. To connect the question to the recently posted audio of Duchamp’s lecture, I want to offer an example of a work that Duchamp produced “in the raw.” Although I’m somewhat familiar with his role in Dada, I am more familiar with Duchamp’s affair with chess. Although Duchamp is among the more famous chess players, he was never a serious contender for the international title; however, he was a rather advanced level player and composed one of the most interesting chess puzzles to date. Chess puzzles are usually presented with a figure of a chessboard with a select number of specifically placed pieces. Following the figure is a caption that instructs the participant (such as “Black to move, mate in 3). The caption explains that the correct move (often called “the key”) will force a certain outcome. It is the participant’s job to discover the correct move and the forced sequence of following moves.

   Duchamp’s famous puzzle (below) exploits the conventions of this media form and challenges the participants to find “the key.” The board position demonstrates obvious positional advantages for white. Duchamp’s instructions read, “White to Play and Win.” Duchamp’s expertise in chess puzzle composition is such that he is not likely to have made a mistake; and yet, chess players have been unable to successfully identify a key move that necessarily leads to a forced conclusion other than a draw. There are no certain winning positions for white… So what is Duchamp making the participants do? First, you should note that the puzzle is a work with an informed audience. Chess players of varying levels of skill and devotion see the image below as a dynamic–rather than static–image. It is a sequence of incomplete ideas formed from strategic and tactical positions. A seventh rank rook defending a nearly-promoted pawn, doubled pawns, a series of passed pawns, king tension, open files—these conventions are subtexts that affirm Duchamp’s message that a spectator may move to participant and ensure a victory for white. But he can’t, right? As far as chess puzzles go, it is among the most famous because it is considered both masterful and invalid. It is masterful because of the fervor with which some of the world’s top competitors have, throughout the decades, attempted to solve an unsolvable puzzle. While the chess world produces and solves thousands of puzzles every year, this is among those consecrated by posterity. What makes puzzles a different sort of art? What did people do upon abandoning Duchamp’s instruction, “White to Move and Win?” Let’s consider consider what this puzzle does that easily solvable chess puzzles don’t do. Do we abandon the puzzle? Do we share it with others and admit ourselves duped? Do we share it with others and join Duchamp in the deception? Or do we commission other and continue to dig for an answer that we become increasingly convinced we’d never find?

7. In the interview with Fletcher he talks about how he is invested in the participants. He says “I search for the things I can get from a community. I believe a community has something to offer me. I’m not going to teach them – they are going to teach me.” We can learn so much from our audience. If we listen to the people or the viewers, they will tell us what they want to see. In turn the result of an art project or piece is something they like. Thinking about this I wonder, does art have to be seen for it to be considered art?

   The song “Truckload of Art” by Terry Allen addresses this issue. A truck full of art rolls off the road, burns to the ground, and no one sees it. Since there was no viewer and no one saw it, is it art? I think the viewer or audience is an important aspect in art-making and art worlds. How do we get the viewer involved or engaged with the art?

   Oregon Art Summit’s theme this year was Re-Think Engagement. “Upon arriving at the conference I found out that I would not receive a seat at a table but rather I would be sitting in a row of chairs placed in the back of the room. We did not get programs on our seats and there were no activity sheets in our area either. One of my peers described it like “being at your cousins wedding where your attendance was important, but you weren’t allowed to eat.” Immediately we felt a sense of exclusion. Despite this we did our best to participate and feel a part of the whole.” I think the organizers of the event need to re-think engagement. Despite this critique I was able to gain insight and see examples of people working in the field of arts and healthcare. The “art-ternative medicine” breakout group was most valuable to me because I got to hear about the people working in the field and their experiences.