Artist / Capitalist

Todays post: is about Rene Lalique, a guy who started, lived and finished his life as an artist. In fact, not only did he make a living at it - he also built a (so far) permanent family financial empire on it. I say: cut me a big slice of whatever he was having.

Along the way, he created magnificent jewelry like this:

Dragonfly Woman Corsage Ornament (ca. 1898)
[original image HERE]

and this:

Opal and Enamel Pendant Earrings
[original image HERE]

and, later, incredible perfume bottles, vases and other mass-produced art-piece glassware, as well as a beautiful series of luxury car "mascots" (hood ornaments):

Cinq Chevaux (Five Horses) - Rene Lalique, 1925
Clear glass, 6" high
[original photo from secondchancegarage.com: HERE;
See this REALLY COOL SLIDESHOW of these pieces under this NYTimes story]

Born in the rural champagne region of Northeastern France in 1860, Lalique was apprenticed at age 16 (due to his father's death) to a goldsmith in Paris. He began as a freelance designer for acclaimed design houses like Cartier and Boucheron at 21, and opened his own shop at 25. He rode the early-20th-century Art Nouveau movement to fame and more fortune, and went on to become one of France's leading jewelers, turning exclusively to glassware in about 1908 and adapting industrial production methods. Unfortunately, Lalique saw his workshop and entire inventory seized by the rising Nazis in 1939, but his work is still in demand by collectors and investors - a complete set of 30 hood ornaments recently sold at auction for $805,000 [there's a really good full bio HERE.]

So, to the obvious question: HOW did he DO it? He was born in an agrarian district, not (by all accounts) into privilege; won his first award - for drawing - at age 12; studied abroad; did freelance design, from which the quality of his work was obviously recognized; changed from jewelry to glass as his major medium; and then: got really rich and famous. How did he make that last major jump? Apparently, by creating - and then dominating - a mass market. In fact:

"he turned from creating unique jewelry and objects d'art, to the mass production of innovative and usable art glass. He brought glass into the home of everyday people where it had never been before, and he worked out the industrial techniques to mass produce his useful art glass objects on a scale and cost to complement the spreading industrial revolution and resulting worldwide appetite for his products."

[emphasis added; source is good professional bio HERE]. 

In short, he was a Capitalist - at precisely the right time in history: the "glory days" of the Industrial Revolution.  He was apparently gifted in the core artistic skills (unlike the later "Visionary" Steve Jobs who, it seems, was not much of an engineer - Bill Gates has said Jobs "never really understood much about technology" - though he was clearly a genius at recognizing and/or creating markets), but that wasn't enough. He was apparently successful in the  creative-productivity sense, having been hired to do work for Paris' major design houses and embraced by the Art Nouveau movement, but that wasn't enough. He was prolific in both the range and amount of his creative output (an impressive overview of the media, techniques, clientele and sales outlets which he mastered and pioneered over his career is HERE), but ...

None of these attributes, though, seem to explain his ultimate financial success; he didn't "Hit It Fat" until he started using emerging industrial manufacturing techniques to (1) create and (2) fill the newfound (maybe "invented" is a better word) needs of consumers for "useable art glass." He made stuff they didn't know they needed until he gave it to them. Sounds kinda like the iPod story to me. The guy was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs.

How to match this up with the "starving artist" model many of us (okay, by that I mean "me") carry around? Why did Van Gogh supposedly only sell one painting during his lifetime while his works regularly sell in the hundreds-of-millions today? Why, as the joke goes, are the first four words you hear from an Art School Grad: "(w)ant fries with that?" Based on the success of Lalique, the answer is "Capitalism", I guess.

Something to ponder the next time you're buying Art from a card table at a flea market. Please go ahead and buy it, by all means; just think about this as you hand over the cash.

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Today's Creation is: these two half-sheet flyers for courses Kristin's planning to offer at a friend's pediatric clinic:

[© me, today]

and:

[©me, today]

I did 'em in InDesign/Photoshop. Not thrilled with the 2nd one yet; the text is kind of busy for a half-sheet size because the class times/requirements have gotten complex since the first drafts. I hate to go to a full-page spread just to accommodate the new amount of text, but it might be the only solution. Both look fine as an 8 1/2" X 11" wall poster; I'd just rather use a smaller-scale flyer so people might be more inclined to grab one off the desk than if it were a full page. We'll see what happens.
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Art by machine

Todays post is: about a creative genre called "Generative Art", which - in the foofy right-brain tradition of ArtSpeak ("can't be labelled; words too restrictive; blah blah blah") - translates roughly as "art created by use of non-human autonomous systems" (wiki is HERE). Right now it generally means that a computer is one of the tools. Actually, as I argue below, the term isn't really very clear-cut at all. Maybe ArtSpeak ain't really so foofy? You can decide when you're done reading this posting.

The art can be music, literature or architecture design; it can also be "interactive" art (like the environmental pieces I wrote about earlier - read it HERE). It can even be sculpted in 3D form like these:

Generative Sculpture by Tom Beddard
(original image from butdoesitfloat.com HERE)

by Eva Schindlin - original image from butdoesitfloat.com HERE)
(Eva's process is described HERE)

In fact, it can actually be physically produced by a machine, using the recently-emerged plastic extrusion technology called "3D printing" (see: Empire State Building time lapse on YouTube).

The meaning I'm using here, though, is: 2D visual art. The person in this field I find REALLY interesting right now is a photographer named Jason Salavon; he presents large scale images (and some video pieces) generated pixel-by-pixel by computer software that processes large bodies of data and presents it in visual form. Some of the cooler examples are:

Emblem: Apocalypse Now (2004)
Digital C-Print by Jason Salavon
(original image HERE)
[the film was sampled frame-by-frame; results printed in concentric circles]

and:

from: Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades (normalized) - 2002
Digital C-prints by Jason Salavon
(original image HERE)
[every Playboy centerfold was mean-averaged pixel-by-pixel;
results summarized and printed for each decade, 1960-1999]

I find the digital techniques used in this work to be interesting as well; I guess that makes it "conceptual art" since the ideas behind these artists' methods are very important, and they also relate to my experience of the actual image. They're beautiful, AND they make me think about a bigger idea while I'm viewing them.

What this all brings up for me is: how much "non-human intervention" is required before we can call the final result "Generative Art"? You and I use VERY sopisticated computer technology every time we snap a cellphone photo or point a digital camera at a kid blowing out birthday candles. Believe me, there's WAAAYYY more computing power at work than just a light-sensing chip that records how much light is hitting it.

Before the shutter ever clicks, at a minimum: some software measures the light, averages it across the frame, finds contrasty edges or faces (yes, it knows what a "face" looks like in pixels) on which to focus the lens, balances the color data to match the scene's lighting, decides how much data it'll have to record, picks a place to store the data, and reboots everything before you click the shutter again. If that ain't "computer technology" at work, nothing is. And, of course, producing the image after it's stored takes another whole bunch of processing power. PhotoShop? Making a print? Uploading it to Flickr or Facebook or a website? HuMONgous computer power at work.

So, how can anyone draw the line on what's "Generative Art" and what isn't? You tell ME. I just like to throw rocks and make people think a bit. Hopefully, that gets us both out of the 24-hour-newscycle brain numbness for a while.

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Today's creation is: these images of a couple of rocks I've carried around with me for a few weeks. I recently used them in an 11-day meditation process and they've brought up some useful insights for me.

Citrine and Pipestone
(photo © me)

Citrine and Pipestone - detail
(photo © me)

They also spurred me to get moving (FINALLY!) on a photo series about Transcendant Objects; physical objects that people use to connect with Spirit, or the Divine, or whatever larger world there may be beyond our physical plane. Minerals/crystals are one set; objects of worship (e.g., the Sacred Pipe used in Native American ceremonies) another; literary devices (e.g., a Bible, the Torah, stone tablets) yet another. Anyway, the textures of these rocks seems important, so I took these photos as studies for an acrylic painting, probably mixing in mediums like sand, fiber and gel with the paints, to let me use textures as well as colors and shapes. I'll post more as this stuff comes out.

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[SideNote]:

I quit Blogging for a while, mostly because I got bummed out that the pageviews were dropping way off. Basically, after my first few weeks, almost NOBODY was reading this blog. I got discouraged.To say the least. And I quit.

The need to start up again has come up for me three times in the last 24 hours. The first one was a good friend (he's by FAR the most action-biased person I know) who eMailed me to say "DO IT TODAY!" He's a mentor and pest of the best possible kind for me. Thanks, Jay.

The second was an article by Neil Patel I read on the web this morning ("12 Things That Will Kill Your Blog Posting Every Time") that says: it takes about TWO YEARS for a blogger to get found on the web, and one sure way to kill your blog off completely is to give up and QUIT POSTING on it. Like I had done. Okay - that's two.

The third was another good friend (thanks, Greg - I really appreciated it) who called this morning and basically said "Hey! I check your blog every morning, and you've been off the air for almost TWO MONTHS! What's UP with THAT?" Message received.

I think it's some Buddhist tradition that if something comes up for you three times you'd better listen, because the Universe is trying to get your attention. Also, in my experience, those unheeded messages get louder and louder until you hear 'em - and I never like how loud they get after I ignore them. So here I am.