SEA SHOW Blog – Seattle Emerging Arts

Its all Relative : Art. Travel. Thoughts.

I run from social obligations all the time, despite my foray into art producing and attending a copious amount of art events. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say that the past two weekends have ended pretty pitifully. I can’t even work up enough courage to attend a party for the sake of a show. I did make it as far as the front door of Equinox this past Saturday. There were a ton of people, a binfire outside, and it looked pretty cool.

I noticed some of the exhibit was indoor/outdoor. I’m not sure what I was expecting, I definitely wasn’t dressed for it. I still dress like a Californian after living in Seattle for 4+ years. What can I say, I like to dress up. I wouldn’t dream of wearing jeans and fleece to an art opening. But that’s just me. The fact that it was snowing and I wasn’t dressed for it and the exhibit was going to close in 30 minutes convinced me to get home. Its 18 degrees today and still icy out there, but I should have taken one for the team and just went in. I’m just not used to the partying/socializing. The cameras and crew have become somewhat of a crutch of mine. Next week, it will be a top hat in addition to the Canon.

The public phase of this daily blog was launched on November 24, 2008. I’d been blogging for the previous year on the show’s myspace page. I also integreated a previous blog into this to show how much my life has changed since embarking upon the art journey. Its a big part of my world, and the new face of the show. So we hope you will subscribe to our blog.

This is in fact, a daily blog. It is trying to be, anyhow. This week I missed my first day since starting it.  A cold this week hindered my writing efforts this week. Don’t believe anyone when they tell you that blogging isn’t a full time job. If you have a daily blog, and you haven’t updated it, you think about it all day.

The travails of con-artists is not a topic I think my discerning audience would be interested in, but I would say 20% of the artists alerts I get are breaking news stories on notorious deceivers. Why is it that deceit is an adjective which can only be exclusively attached to the word art. I’m just being silly. :->

I’d like to do more of the vlog (video log) but I don’t want to start releasing a bunch of unproduced 1 camera hand held video, compelling as the artist or your Humble Host may be. A lot of the footage I shoot is incorporated into into future pieces. Every shoot builds on a large peice, so these are mini documentaries in the making. A lot of work, but  a lot of fun.

Village Savant is one of those blogs that I stumble onto while doing an image search or through some other random avenue. It looks like a nifty blog.  Other blog entries I read, and I can’t say that it helps me understand art better. It doesn’t mean that the authors’ personal opinion isn’t valid, its just that sometimes too much conjecture can muddle things a bit. We’re not all art history major, so we have to give our audience something they can understand. I’ll explain more on how Dr. JohnnyWOW! successfully broke through a barrier to the audience. Granted, their attention spans didn’t hold longer than a few minutes, but they were engaged and reacting while they were there. I wish I had a second camera to record the audience while I was busy filming the doctor.

Even if I don’t have time to look at the story, I do look at most of the alerts I get. One of the things I find so interesting is about all the different topics people choose to blog on. The art blogs interest me of course, and the more niche they are, the more novel I find them. There’s some pretty cool stuff out there, like this blog on Obama Art. I’ve seen Barack Obama poster but a blog actually devoted to the realm of art about the President Elect definitely got my attention.

Joanne Mattera had a blog post with some reflections on Miami Art Basel, and I got a chuckle out of her blog. I find her art commentary to be to the point and humorous. Check it out if you haven’t already. The Huffington Post published an article with few words and a lot of photos called, :Reflections of Art Basel:. I’m sure it was an exhausting week, but it would have nice to include a snippet of some interesting conversation or something. The pics are cool but I’m not clear what the reflections were of, there’s not much commentary.I’m ok with just photo blog entries, but I like to see either just pics or some informational commentary to go with the pics. This is another blog that fell short on its art basel reporting. It seems like a strange trend, but it definitely illustrates the range of coverage on a given topic.

On the MarketWatch website of all places, I found information on the first public art project to use solar energy. I like little offbeat tidbits like that.  California isn’t the only state where Art is intersecting with public life, Arizona too, is learning that there are ways to integrate art into the community.

It’ll be interesting when I compile the list of blogs I link back to for my own records. I would say at least a third aren’t art blogs. Hope you enjoy the variety of info, I do. I wasn’t sure whether to tweet or to blog about this strange art project, in which messages are sent to twitter when the baby kicks. Strange, isn’t it?

If I were in England,I should very much like to attend this event, a discussion on the value of Contemporary Art. With all the speculation that went on about sales at Art Basel Miami Beach, any collector or artist would find listening to this discussion worthwhile.

This blog, Grinding, is totally out there and I completely love it. The pics, how I wasn’t sure if it was an art blog in the first place, its all very cool. Culture Soak is another fun Art & Design website. Today they posted an article on a book about Emerging Contemporary Artists. It would be nice to get my hands on one.

I blogged about Macao and the Contemporary Art there, and noticed some other articles about Indian Art that I wanted to include. Art Market Monitor also posted some interesting comments regarding an Indian Artist and the collectors of his work. I might have a slighty sour tone in some of my art reporting, but its nothing like this scathing commentary on an Indian Art exhibit. Ouch. Does it really help an artist to be so cruel?

Street Art was a hitherto unknown art form upon starting this new segment of the blog. In Vallejo, California, a store selling graffiti supplies next to a graffiti art gallery is evidence that Street Art is definitely on the radar. There’s this discussion about whether or not Street Art is accepted in the larger art community. I would say that as much as I have read about it in the past three weeks that street art has nothing to worry about.