City Hostel, in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, features 54 rooms, each designed and decorated by 47 Seattle artists. The hostel also features a 20 seat movie theatre, with frequent art events, screenings and openings. In 2008, City Hostel was voted the top hostel in the United States by Hostelworld.com.

Artists were asked to volunteer their efforts instead of being paid outright, which caused some controversy in the Seattle art community. As some artists pointed out, when artists work on spec or for free, it devalues all artist’s work, making it likely future jobs to any artist will be for free as well. Hostels are however usually operated less for profit than passion. Hopefully in the future artists will be paid for their work. If the capital isn’t there for up front payment, then give them a royalty – 1% of the proceeds from each room stay goes to the artist who designed it.

Even without payment, the artists are largely excited about the project and the exposure it has actually brought after the hostel opened. The artists were uncensored and allowed free reign to the final outcome of each room, and have formed a community from the experience. Several reported commissions and buyers from the exposure even before the hostel opened.

Like other Art accommodations, this one is a unique, creative place to stay, celebrating local artists.

Read more

• City Hostel site
• Hostel Art Collective, a blog by the hostel’s artists
• A list of all City Hostel artists
• Hostel Art Collective Flickr Photostream
• Lynn Shirmer’s Blog, thoughts on her experience working on her room
• It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times, The Stranger Slog. Includes comments by many artists who argue the benefits they received from working on the project, even though for free
• City Hostel Seattle – Some Actual Information, from Belltown People
• Hostel in Seattle Voted Best in US from ABC News

Related posts:

1. Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space
2. David Byrne’s Perfect City

Here is a timelapse video of cheesy art posted by Eclectic Asylum Art. The portrait is made from 4 varieties of Cheetos (much like this more traditional agriculture art is made from 4 varieties of rice), using 2,000 individual Cheeto.

Related posts:

1. An elephant paints a self portrait
2. Paintings from Living Rice – Inakadate, Japan

Artist Charles Clary creates organic sculptures from deep layers of cut colored paper.

From Wired:

Artist Charles Clary says he wants his constructions to appear ever-expanding — overwhelming exhibition spaces like replicating viruses or reverberating sound waves. Inspired by microorganisms, anthills, and auditory phenomena, he layers colored paper to build up the variegated textures and sinewy shapes of his room-sized installations.

Read more

• Charles Clary’s Massive Paper Cuts, image gallery from Wired
• Charles Clary’s blog Percusive Art
• Interview with Charles Clary from Design Milk

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five as his own science fiction take on his experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II. Letters of Note prints his letters home after being released from his German camp, Schlachthof Fünf – Slaughterhouse Five.

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month – February – the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Now interviews Kurt Vonnegut about his experience in World War II. “People always fail to recognize when they are happy.”

HowardFair goes to Germany and visits the site of Slaughterhouse Five.

I had no idea what Vonnegut had gone through. The letters are amazing and touching.

Read scans of Kurt Vonnegut’s original letters at Letters of Note.

Get the books of Kurt Vonnegut.

Related posts:

1. Medici Bank Minister Pleads “No More Art, Please” in Newly Discovered Letters

Musicians, filmmakers and performing artists all invest a lot of time and money into writing, rehearsal, design, and sometimes character development and technology innovation. This investment can include hard costs and the time of dozens, or even hundreds, of people. For musicians and filmmakers, the fruits of their investment live on. The films and music can be copied and distributed, allowing their work to spread and even earn them a living. If the work is innovative or challenging, the places an audience can find it grow even narrower.

For performing artists, whose investments in time and money are similar, the art only lasts until the end of the show. You have to physically be there with the artists to experience it, and it’s not easily copied. This severely limits who can see the art – usually to sizable cities with performance venues. It also limits the artists ability to earn a living, or even recoup the investment they’ve made in creating the work.

On the Boards in Seattle has presented contemporary performance artists from around the world for over 30 years. Last week, it launched OnTheBoards.tv to present contemporary performances to wherever the audience might be. This is the first site of it’s kind to present complete, sometimes challenging, contemporary performances.

A trailer for Transition by Reggie Watts and Tommy Smith

Several years ago, On the Boards began documenting work in HD using five cameras. The final edit is performed with the cooperation of the artists. These HD videos are available for $5 rental (for 48 hours), or $15 to buy. There are also several subscription packages for the site, starting at $50 for a year of unlimited streaming, up to the educational subscription, allowing an entire institution unlimited streaming for $250. The earnings are split 50/50 with the artists. This is not as generous as other online splits (Apple’s is 30/70 in favor of artists), but On the Boards has been footing the $10,000 bill required to film and edit each performance. Having their shows professionally documented is also a huge benefit to artists. They can provide the online video as worksamples to other venues and funders, without the expense of filming, editing and producing DVDs.

So far there are eight artists represented at OnTheBoards.tv. Seven artists have full performances available, and one artist, Michelle Ellsworth, is delivering video directly online during a one year residency. On the Boards hopes to add 7-8 artists per year, and also hopes to partner with other organizations. PS-122 in New York is already a partner.

Alaska by Diana Szeinblums, shot at PS-122 in New York.

Documentation of many contemporary performances exists only in arts org archives and libraries with very restricted access. Even professional researchers and scholars have trouble accessing these videos and recordings. Especially for well-known and historically significant artists (e.g., Meridith Monk, John Cage, Laurie Anderson), opening this material up to a much wider audience is another goal of OnTheBoards.tv.

The site is new, so currently has a small sampling of work. Hopefully On the Boards will attract funding and partners to add more than 8 artists a year. Music rights remain a tricky obstacle to adding more work, as they are for many online video projects. Artists may clear rights for performances, but don’t have rights for online distribution. On the Boards has to clear music for each production, or the work can’t be included on the site. The bios, performance credits and other artist information is provided in PDF, which is helpful but would be better as a fully integrated part of the site.

Hi There by Melissa Ellsworth, a piece made available directly through the site, part of an OnTheBoards.tv artist in residence.

The basics behind this idea aren’t new. Similar projects have been tried, using DVD and VHS as distribution, and for other types of performance. The cheaper costs of internet delivery and it’s easier access for audiences now makes the idea much more feasible.

Many performing artists believe their art should only exist in the moment, that it’s somehow cheapened or made worse by capturing it, and creating the definitive performance of record. But audiences of the world will get more and more of their art on demand. TV, film and music all move this direction, and audiences will likely not go back. Expanding their audiences, and being able to earn a living so they can continue making work, is a new, amazing opportunity for artists. It doesn’t diminish the power of seeing the artist and the work in person. It just exponentially expands the possibility that someone will be able to see an artist’s work at all. Cumulatively, efforts like this will also give us a historical memory of contemporary performances, that all to often fade away completely.

The site was created with funding from the Wallace Foundation and Dance USA, to test new successful models for sustainably expanding audiences.

Artists on the Site

• Troubleyn | Jan Fabre
• Tanja Liedtke
• Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company
• Temporary Distortion
• Diana Szeinblum
• Reggie Watts | Tommy Smith
• Allen Johnson
• Michelle Ellsworth

Learn more

• OnTheBoards.tv
• Recording Staged Works for All the World to See – The New York Times
• PS-122
• Digital Theatre
• Metropolitan Opera, Live in HD

The artist Blue Sky came to national attention with his illusion artworks, starting with Tunnelvision, a trompe l’oeil painting on the side of a building which appears to be pierced by a long tunnel, overlooking the setting sun. (The sun actually sets at the time of the real one. The artist is tight-lipped about how this is achieved.) His other well-known illusion works include:

• Night Train, where a train appears to be coming out of a tunnel in the side of a building
• Overflow Parking and Wall Grabbers, where parking lots continue in gravity defying directions, and
• Levitating Dumpseter, a sculpture where people who pass by encounter a freestanding levitating dumpster with no visible means of levitation.

Even sober drivers blink and often screech to a halt as the familiar old Federal Land Bank in downtown Columbia, South Carolina comes into view. There before astonished eyes is a veritable mirage: a Tunnel hewn out of mountain rock, through which a clearly marked highway curves off to a brilliant orange sunset… The reaction to “TUNNELVISION” ranges from cheers to puzzlement. No one has tried to detour through the tunnel — yet. But there have been near crashes as motorists gawk at the phantasmagoria — apparently transfixed by the prospect of driving off into Blue Sky’s wild blue yonder.
People Magazine
February 9, 1976

Learn more about Blue Sky
Visit his official site, Blue Sky Art

Learn more about the art of trompe l’oeil and artistic illusions

Related posts:

1. Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space

Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn based artist, illustrator of numerous books, who recently began illustrating Craigslist Missed Connections. One example:

m4w (Harlem)
Remember? Uptown A train. Sunday at around 9pm. I was the black dude reading Bukowski’s Post Office. You were reading the Arts and Leisure section. You passed wind rather loudly and started chuckling. I’d like to see you again. The flatulence wasn’t a turn-off.

View Sophie’s Missed Connections illustrations.
Visit Sophie Blackall’s website.

Buy Sophie Blackall’s illustrated books.

As a fan of Haikyo photography (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin), this photo essay by Ransom Riggs excites me at the same time it creeps me out.

Last year, while scouting for a short film that never came to fruition, some friends and I talked our way inside an empty, run-down hospital in Boyle Heights. The short was supposed to take place in a hospital, but after a few minutes wandering the halls of Linda Vista — alone and decidedly creeped-out — it became obvious that there was no way the place would work… there was dirt caked in layers on walls and mysteriously wet floors; windows were broken and doors hung off their hinges; ceiling tiles had fallen victim to moisture and gravity, and rats had chewed through the walls. We didn’t have the money to make Linda Vista look like anything more than a horror movie…

Read more at mental_floss: Linda Vista Revisited: East LA’s Abandoned Hospital

Related posts:

1. Haikyo (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin) – Japan Photography of Ruins
2. Nichitsu Ghost Town, Haikyo of a Mining Town

In all the news reports of record-breaking crowds gathering to recreate Thriller’s signature dance sequence from beginning to end, I’ve heard no mention of Michael Peters, who choreographed Thriller with Michael Jackson.

Michael Peters was an award winning choreographer, winning Tonys and Emmys for his work, including choreography for Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, Michael Jackson’s Beat It, Pat Benatar’s Love is a Battlefield, Lionel Richie’s Hello, the film What’s Love Got to do With It?, and the original stage choreography for Dreamgirls. Michael Peters died in 1994.

People magazine did a story on him in 1984,
Michael Peters Is the Hot New Choreographer Who Makes Dancers Out of Video’s Rock Stars

Below is some of his well known choreography.

Thriller:

What’s Love Got to do With It?

Love is a Battlefield:

Beat It (Peters is the one in white):

Michael Peters and Michael Bennett win the Tony for Best Choreographer

Some other people you might not know about:
John Landis director, and his wife Deborah Landis, who designed the iconic red jacket for the video.

Buy the work of Michael Peters, Michael Jackson, John Landis, Dreamgirls, Lionel Richie, Pat Benatar, Donna Summer and Victor/Victoria.

Related posts:

1. Constanza Macras, Dorky Park – Back to the Present
2. The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein

This isn’t intended to be a partisan blog… I wanted to link to each of the candidate’s positions on The Arts. I could only find a position on Barack Obama’s site, so that’s what I’m linking to. If anyone has links to information about Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s positions on the arts, please post in the comments. (At this point Hillary is now supporting Barack Obama, but feel free to post this info anyway – it was my own fault for not posting this sooner.)

Barack Obama’s plan for the arts.

On The Muppet Show, Animal battles Buddy Rich. Until I saw this clip, I didn’t know the musician who performed Animal’s drumming was Ronnie Verrell. This is some amazing drumming.

Get The Muppets.

When you do your own work, it’s your own point of view. It’s how you see the world, your own perspective on things reflected in the artwork. But with advertising or marketing, you’re helping other people get their points of view across. You’re just an interpreter.

To me, that’s the fundamental difference between designers and artists. You speak for yourself, or you speak for someone else. They’re separate things, but I think I can do both. They don’t really conflict, as long as you know what’s right and wrong!

Read more…

I was born after the 1960s. What I know is only from stories and grainy video, comprised of many heroic and striking moments, modern stories not unlike King Arthur’s Court or Hamlet. The difference is, these are modern stories from not that long ago, and you can see their effects clearly all around us.

When I think of the ’60s, I see beaded curtains opening onto a California beach. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan play to smoky, turtle-necked fans creaking in wooden chairs. I hear Janis Joplin and Odetta. And I see violence, bombs off our shores, great leaders slain one after another, causing uprising until the Golden Gate summer, where before it ends, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement and much more are finally planted to take slow root.

The problem is, that’s not how it happened. It’s no more what happened than Shakespeare’s Richard II. There is some element of truth to it, but the characters and plots were refined to tell a story and teach great lessons. Joseph Campbell said that we don’t have modern myths to hold onto. The myth of 1967 tells otherwise.

The biggest cultural reflection of this budding myth bloomed as The Beatles. They obviously influenced lots of people, and helped carry the message right into now.

Across the Universe attempts to bring the totality of this starry eyed story into one place and tell it in the language of the myth itself — as a multicolored, trippy, musical journey about love and war from Liverpool to the East Village. It attempts to bring all these different people and places into one archetypal legend.

Julie Taymor has a long and respected history of creating experimental, very original works of art in many disciplines. She gained greater notoriety directing The Lion King on Broadway, and later the films Titus and Frida. You can see hints of some daring and beautiful ideas in Across the Universe, and I can only imagine what would have happened if the film took an even more experimental direction (not that it looks at all like a typical Hollywood film). But this ever pressing need to compromise between experimental daring and loosely knit clichéd myth ends up making a pretty bad movie. I can also only imagine the endless boardroom, film executive and Beatles meetings that destined it to compromise from the beginning.

Despite that, I’m very glad she made it.

I would rather an artist strive for something spectacular and fail than simply try something mediocre and succeed with no lasting affect.

Beyond the movie itself, there is a larger current – building art that looks at this hugely influential time beyond the bounds of history, in the language of archetypes and legend. The Beatles are beginning to appear frequently in strange places they would have never appeared before, like Cirque Du Soleil’s Love. It hints at what inventive combinations and new stories will be created as modern music reaches the end of its copyright, moves out of heavily controlled, money-motivated restrictions and into the culture’s hands, into the public domain. It’s one step of a giant cultural mash up that’s only just starting.

Learn more:
The Beats, Summer of Love, Joseph Campbell, Julie Taymor, NYT – Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s

Buy something related:
work by Julie Taymor, Joseph Campbell, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Odetta or This Book is Free (Beneath the Diamond Sky)

Related posts:

1. The Rare Director’s Cut – Alan Smithee, Across the Universe, Blade Runner
2. Endurance Art – Six Hours is Too Long
3. Thank you Richard Florida for giving The Bohemians so much power. Now please tell us – when will we ever benefit from it?

Over the past few weeks, Elevator Repair Service has been in Portland and Seattle performing Gatz, their performance which involves the complete six hour reading of The Great Gatsby. I intended to go. But I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I’m up for any strange art thing, I mean I’m one of the odd kinds of people who would even hear “six hour performance” and seriously think about it. But you know, I have things to do. Laundry, walking in the park, making art, writing this blog, seeing other art, eating, etc. If I can’t bring myself to go to this thing, who does go to it? If I had gone, maybe I could have interviewed people in the audience and asked them.

There are other ridiculously long performances out there, like Philadelphia’s Brat Productions, which tours with a 24 hour marathon performance of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. The play isn’t 24 hours long, they just finish and start over again and again for 24 hours straight. I almost saw that one too (a long time ago), but I just couldn’t do it.

There are also abnormally long films. I love Peter Greenaway but have never brought myself to sit and watch The Falls because of it’s mere 3 hours 5 minutes running time, which really isn’t that long. (There’s a legend that the original cut and showing of the film was 6 hours long, but I can find no record of that online.) There are other truly long films, like The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World, running at 48 hours long. This seems more like ambiance and you could come and go if you wanted, drink heavily, take a nap, go clubbing with friends, then return where you left off.

And of course, opera is notoriously long. Get there at 6, leave at 11:30.

Certainly it is an amazing feat for performers, and acts to strengthen and train their focus and abilities. You could say the same for audiences, that it allows them to test their endurance, after which a three hour movie doesn’t seem so bad. For the ambient work, where you can come and go, eat, drink, talk with friends, the endurance isn’t really there. It’s incidental art that doesn’t require your full focus, and if a performer messes up or needs a break, nothing is broken.

In a time where most people find it hard enough to go see a two hour performance, busy with other things in their life, and someone like me won’t go who isn’t that busy and has devoted their life to art of various strange sorts — who and how many show up for a six hour performance? Why do they go?

Read more: Peter Greenaway’s The Falls, interview with Brat Productions about the 24 hour Bald Soprano, and a review of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz.

Get: the work of Peter Greenaway, The Great Gatsby, long operas by Richard Wagner, great strange plays by Eugene Ionesco

Related posts:

1. Constanza Macras, Dorky Park – Back to the Present

Montreal artist Cesar Saez is creating a 300 meter banana, with a bamboo skeleton and helium bladders, which he intends to launch into geostationary orbit over Texas. It is launching from Baja, Mexico. It will appear in the sky 10-20% the size of the moon.

Just to be clear, 300 meters is over twice as long as an American football field, and 30 meters longer than the Titanic.

More at the project site: Geostationary Banana Over Texas