On the Web: August 2005 Archives

Arts Journal missed the boat and linked to a third party summary press release of a RAND report on the visual arts. Luckily, RAND has published the full report (100+ pages!) for your subway reading pleasure. Or displeasure. The report isn't all that positive. A summary of findings: (even more digestable than the press release.)

• Increases in museum attendance are the result of broad demographic changes, not anything done by the institutions themselves. And the shift is done, so things are likely to get tough real quick.
  
• Most artists don't make much money selling art. (Duh.)
  
• The art market is increasingly controlled by a few influential buyers, not dealers or critics. Investment value is the king criteria. (Which reminds me of the mid-90s comicbook speculation bubble.)
  
• Powerhouse institutions are sucking up all the available money, people and objects, leaving small museums gasping for air.
  

Honestly, it looks like the art world is rich with opportunity to make some sense of this mess. But who'd have thought we'd get this kind of research out of an Air Force think tank? (Interestingly, RAND used blogs as a source of information on the state of the arts. I imagine hundreds of bloggers going back to their log files to find RAND.org footprints.)

UPDATE: Edward Winkleman has posted his initial commentary about this report.

One way of making a photograph unique is to find a subject that is rare and no other photographer can duplicate without significant effort. From the earliest days of photography, cameras have been hauled around the world in search of that special something that no one has seen before.

Posts have been infrequent as I'm on a business trip to Helsinki, Finland. Today's my first day "off-duty" so planning a trip to the Kiasma, Helsinki's contemporary art museum, and the Museum of Finnish Photography. I'll post reports next week. In the mean time, the online magazine Clandestina has an impressive range of photography from around the world if not necessarily travel photography. Current issue covers Berlin, Asuncion, Barranca, Madurai, and Riga.

A few intersting links:

Edward Winkleman's new blog has shot out of the gate with blazing speed. Today he's posted some great pics from Kim Keever, (seen previously on Gallery Hopper) and some thoughts about whether seeing behind the Wizard's curtain lessens the impact of the Wizard's magic.

Gizmodo's interviewed Jonathon Keats about his plans to make a 100-year-long exposure of a San Fran hotel room. Interesting idea, in a similar vein to the long-exposure shots of the MoMA rennovation done by Michael Wesely. Wesely's images were only 4 years long and had something like a 50% success rate, so I'm afraid Keat's project really falls in the category of conceptual art - not real photography.

The third issue of SeeSaw has arrived. Interview with Stephen Shore, a project called "Insecurity" by Christoper Stewart which is meta-commentary on being watched, and some rather eerie landscapes by Edgar Martins.