MAeX Art Blog

Interview: How Cellphones Change the Way People (students) Learn

Interview: How Cellphones Change the Way People Learn:

"Rich Ling argues that cellphones strengthen ties with users’ close friends and family, but might also narrow people’s understanding of the world by limiting interactions with strangers. Mr. Ling is an adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan and a research scientist for Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company. He’s author of a new book, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (MIT Press, 2008).

Q. How are cellphones reshaping social connections?

A. If you think about social networks, there can be strong ties and there can be weak ties. The mobile phone is really an instrument for the intimate sphere — your closest family and your closest friends. But weak ties are also extremely important because that’s where you get information about important things. If you only spoke with your strong ties, you just hear the same things being echoed back and forth.

Q. What does that mean for a college setting?

A. It raises questions about emancipation. I grew up in Colorado and went to college in Boulder. It wasn’t that far away from home, but I hardly ever called home. I would come home every other weekend just to do my laundry or something like that. It was only like an hour’s drive. But I understand that college students now call their parents quite often, several times a day. So how is the child’s emancipation from their parents going? Are they establishing themselves as independent individuals that are ready to go out into the world on their own?

Q. Does text messaging have a different impact?

A. It’s sort of under the radar. Quite often when I’m lecturing, halfway through the class I’ll say, ‘How many of you guys have gotten a text message since you’ve been here?’ And a third of the class or something raises their hand. It’s kind of interesting that their social world is going on in the background while they’re more or less paying attention to the lecture.

Q. More or less?

A. Yeah, hopefully more. They kind of sort of zone in and out. And that’s sort of an interesting aspect of it. It’s not very interruptive; it goes on in the background.

Q. Can that be disruptive though?

A: There are all kinds of awkward social dynamics associated with having to deal with the mobile phone."—Jeffrey R. Young

(Via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog.)

In my classes students mostly have their phones off and very little disruption takes place. That's because it's a studio/ lab and students can go outside to talk on the phone. We have, at various times, talked about the phone's influence but, I think it's only one of many things that allow the student to be unengaged with the learning process unless, of course, that student is really interested in learning. Just that fact reduces the number of serious students dramatically compared with those who are just floating by.

A Director With an Eye for the Fresh and the Local

I cannot deny that Bonnie and Jim Clearwater were part of the reason I moved back to Miami after having moved away for a few years. Ms. Clearwater has been very supportive of a number of my projects including, my art. And, although Miami Art Museum has fought longer for a new buidling, MoCA's efforts seemed, in the public view, a smoother journey.

My only disappointment has been that the attempts to create an art zone around the museum hasn't had the same success as Wynwood. Some of Wynwood's galleries moved from the MoCA area. In spite of those moves, MoCA has always been and, will remain a prime destination for some of the best of South Florida's art.

Cindy Karp for The New York Times

"Bonnie Clearwater, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, which is about to double in size."

BONNIE CLEARWATER recognized Miami’s potential to become an important arts center as far back as 1990, on a visit from Los Angeles. At the time, South Beach was a somewhat desolate spot on the cusp of revitalization, and a local collector and developer enticed Ms. Clearwater to work her magic discovering new talent in Miami as she had done on the West Coast.

“Craig Robins, who was just starting to develop the area, encouraged me to move to Miami Beach with the idea that my husband and I would help be catalysts to develop an art scene here,” said Ms. Clearwater, who with her husband, Jim Clearwater, had started the art-book publishing company Grassfield Press, which he still operates.

They made the move, and nearly two decades later, as the director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Ms. Clearwater continues to animate the scene in this eclectic area, capitalizing on a lively community of artists and collectors as well as the crowds that the Art Basel fair brings every December.

Via: NYTimes.
(Also Via: Critical Miami.)

Museums are swamped by kids

Although most of us are busy working during the day, are our local museums filled with kids? In some ways it seems like a good idea to introduce young people to art and culture but, has this idea turned into a giant joke? Do certain age groups produce better benefits to the museum than others? Does having all these kids around really enhance the mission of the museum or, are we just making a ton more museum party goers?

Museums are swamped by kids:

"Museums [in Britian] have Disneyfied culture and turned our institutions into playgrounds. Forget children, what about the adults?"

(Via Guardian Unlimited Art.)

Great Art for the Greatest Numbers

Great Art for the Greatest Numbers:

"In his career, Dana Gioia has worn many hats, which helped equip him for his current gig. 'I never knew it, but all my life I had been preparing to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,' he says to Julia M. Klein."

(Via WSJ.com: Arts & Entertainment.)

Was Cubism A Dead End?

Was Cubism A Dead End?:

"'Cubism didn't just change what pictures after it looked like. It changed almost everything about the way an artist could come at the world. And here's what makes that cubist watershed even more notable: A century later, and it's hard to find a clearly cubist touch in much of anything young artists are making. Can there truly be a watershed that doesn't water what's downstream?'

Could cubism's true greatness lie in being the most glorious, ambitious failure art has ever known? Did it set the model for the modern artist as impossible dreamer?"

According to Karmel, all the fractures and disjunctures that we're used to in modern media were first hinted at in Picasso's Montmartre studio a century ago.

At the end of the day, cubism's revolution, Hoptman says, "happened on a conceptual rather than a perceptual level."

(Via Washington Post.)

Is cubism THAT much part of our world today? I don't doubt some influence from the cubist past is still here, that's the way we humans are, carrying the familiar and comforting into the present. But, somebody needs to better explain how a computer usings 'windows' as a way to see various content is related to cubism.

Custodians of Culture: The Museum: Institutions of Market or Measure?

Custodians of Culture: The Museum: Institutions of Market or Measure?:

"A [podcast] discussion chaired by Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director, Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan and Curator of Special Exhibitions, New Museum, New York) examining the changing relationship between museums, artists, their sponsors and patrons."

(Via Frieze Art Fair Podcasts.)

An Aging Problem: Old Have Difficulty Ignoring Information

Interesting brain research is always happening. I bought a copy of Discover several months ago about the brain and have had no time to read it. sigh But, in shorter doses, I can read some. We are just so busy with making our way through the world...

An Aging Problem: Old Have Difficulty Ignoring Information:

"A "chart mapping the performance of older people at memory tests shows they didn't do as well. 'The old have a problem with this. They don't modulate as much ... they have a harder time ignoring information."..."
"One commenter says, 'I think what they are trying to imply here is that as we grow, our brain creates more electrical paths in our brain. As more paths are created for access to new information, the brain has trouble finding a fast path to gain access to the information....'"

(Via ArtsJournal: Daily Arts News.)

History of the Blog

How about this... history of the blog? When did you first start using a blog? Me? October, 2001.

History of the Blog:

"We all know that the modern concept of the blog developed from online diaries. The Wikipedia definition of blog is:

'A blog is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. 'Blog' can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.'

But do you know how the term blog actually came about? I was curious so I did some research. The term 'weblog' was actually coined by US blogger Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. Barger is best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger used the term to describe the new kind of website that was emerging at the time that was a sort of an annotated bookmarks list available for public viewing, a ‘log’ of journeys around the fledging web with links and commentaries.

The short form, 'blog,' was coined by his colleague Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase wee blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. You can actually see this in an archived version of the site from the Wayback Machine and he later discusses the impact his joke has had.

The word blog has now been adopted as both a noun and verb ('to blog,' meaning 'to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog'). But who is considered to be the world's first blogger? Ah that opens a different can of worms entirely and is a post for another day. Stay tuned!"

(Via SiteProNews Blog.)

Saying Good-Bye To A Hyphen-Obsessed Past

Saying Good-Bye To A Hyphen-Obsessed Past:

"'The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification... There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating.'..."

(Via ArtsJournal: Daily Arts News.)

Yes, I'm grading written papers. Punctuation is already a thing of the past. If its slow elimination is the necessity of the digital age, it certainly makes it more difficult to be clearly understood. But, as I hear so often, "Whatevah."

Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary - Art - Review - New York Times

Franklin wrote, "Holland Cotter, if he treated non-Western art the way he treats Western art." Although I'm not exactly sure what that means. I read the article for myself.

"Why, with such attractions [as the art being exhibited], is it a sleeper? Because exhibitions of African art almost always are. Even when museums give them the luxury treatment, as the Met does here, they remain on the fringes of our awareness, in a compartment labeled esoteric, as we make our beelines to Rembrandts and Rothkos. We are the sleepers, somnambulating past extraordinary things,"

"Anyone familiar with Western religious art, particularly art before the modern era, will recognize its basic theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in materials and images, coddling, counseling and chiding us every step of the way."

"Through much of the 20th century, African art was valued primarily as source material for a European avant-garde. You know the story: Picasso sees an African mask — it doesn’t matter which one — and, presto, there’s Cubism, an art that really counts."

"But Ms. LaGamma also makes it clear that “Eternal Ancestors” is based on a non-Eurocentric, postmodern model. It is intended, as far as is ever possible in a Western museum, especially one as staid as the Met, to offer a view of traditional African art as it might have been seen through African eyes."

I don't particularly like the writing of this article and, it is not an article I would recommend anyone to read. Writing about Arfican art in this climate of anti-religion, false acceptance of cultural diversity, dominance of financial valuations, total lack of recognition initial authorship, means much skepticism, disbelief and, dismissal. It's next to impossible to "see through African eyes" based on the fact that this work was created in a different time and context and, no effort was made to see the creators as worthy of being called artists nor authors. We, speaking as an African American artist, have spent so many years fighting for acceptance not only for our contemporary work but, the work of our unknown forebearers it is disappointing to see such writing.

via: Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary - Art - Review - New York Times.