A video montage of SMART ILLUMINATION YOKOHAMA 2012, a lighting festival whose projects derived power almost entirely independent of the electricity grid.

As it would be insensitive for an event to use up so much electricity in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquake, kinetically powered sculptures, glow in the dark playgrounds and installations that manipulated existing urban lighting were introduced to the Yokohama bay area. The organisers wanted to convey to the public, possible ways forward in spite of the limitations of their present reality. 

I think this project has successfully gone beyond the rhetoric of community-oriented art practice and is a compelling case of public participation in the arts.

EDIT: So cool, this project was in it too: http://nvaspeedoflight.org.uk/page/2/Overview 

During the Dutch Golden Age, works of art were created for sale on the market as well as being commissioned. The significance of this demand was that is had nothing to do with the court or aristocratic patronage.

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Debunking some common perceptions about arts patronage in the past:

The art market flourished in the Low Countries as the increasingly wealthy middle class of the seventeenth-century ‘golden age’ bought paintings and etchings, hand-painted tiles and books with engravings for their homes. Some artists were very entrepreneurial and not only ran workshops producing a huge output of works of art but also were dealers in other artists’ works. Rembrandt ran a workshop and was an art dealer, as was Rubens. Rubens also built his studio so that the public could view him at work – a privilege for which he charged.

Ruth Towse (2010) A Textbook of Cultural Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p. 66

Ryoji Ikeda Installation (2008) at Paris Nuit Blanche

We should be asking researchers to spend less time generating new research and more time critically evaluating other people’s research. That’s the only way it’s going to enter the public consciousness.

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Arts policy commentator Ian David Moss talks about how there is almost no meaningful connection between the academic research infrastructure and the professional arts ecosystem because lots of research relevant to the arts is published in academic journals each year and are typically behind a pay firewall, which most arts organizations don’t have subscriptions to.

Academics are accused of self-serving behaviour, always trying to reinvent the wheel instead of building on and critiquing the work of their peers. Moss laments that the fragmentation of research in the arts policy field results in a concentration of research serving narrow interests that are discipline-specific, organization-specific, methodology-specific.

(Source: createquity.com)

Wanna know what kick-ass arts advocacy looks like? 

Americans for the Arts presents Yo-Yo Ma as key note speaker for their annual Arts Advocacy Day at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He discusses how the currency of culture is trust, and that artistic participation of every citizen can contribute greatly to this fundamental societal asset.

“Arts, culture and the humanities give us perspective and the capacity for empathy and humility.”

Theory and positions are important, but they often lead to dogmatic thinking, obscure writing, and rigid taste.

—Jerry Saltz (2002) Learning on the Job: Anticipating the New Season, the Critic Reflects on His Role, Village Voice, Tuesday, Sep 10 2002

Future generations will peruse today’s art magazines and suppose ours was an age where almost everything that was made was universally admired.

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Like James Elkins, Jerry Saltz expresses the sentiment that art criticism has largely given up judging artworks in favour of describing them.

 Jerry Saltz (2002) Learning on the Job: Anticipating the New Season, the Critic Reflects on His Role, Village Voice, Tuesday, Sep 10 2002

Denying the content of art and its social responsibility, moving in the direction of art for art’s sake, these are the fundamental symptoms of bourgeois art’s decline.

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Jiang Feng (~1956) “Impressionism is not Realism - 印象主义不是现实主义” 

Jiang Feng was the vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts before being ironically and wrongly persecuted by the Communist Party during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 being sympathetic to western painters. 

Original source: Melissa Chu & Zheng Shengtian (2009) Art and China’s Revolution, New York: Asia Society in association with New Haven: Yale University Press p. 26