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I was finishing off some artwork when I came across a clipping from a newspaper I picked up on my travels in America. After a bit of researching I found out it was an article written by from the California Herald. Here’s an extract:

It’s painfully obvious it’s not about talent anymore, in the one place an individual could take refuge, in art and music. It’s about effortless attempts of self validation through promotion. This is now branching out though, into a national phenomena. Thanks to media and reality shows like American Idol, easy-to-use computer graphics, widely available electronics equipment replicating instruments that could fool even the most trained of ears and build- your-own webpage online communities like myspace, we’re nothing more than the time we spend typing or what our image invokes. Notoriety has never been more desirable or promising.

The rest of the article can be read here.

One thing that’s stood out to me a lot recently is that a lot of art that I see isn’t really driven by it being fun. It’s all about the CV and exposure and whatnot. OK, so I’m not totally innocent, but a lot of the work I do with other people is because it’s fun. The CV can wait.

Good artists make good art, not great CV’s

I was at the pub today with Vickie Wood of CECI, discussing the next performance, when I thought I’d bring up the question about how to mention the previous performance on my CV. Do I say that I worked with CECI, as part of CECI, collaborated with, performed with or as part of or some other terminology? I only asked this because I don’t want to take credit for work that I’ve had minimal input in.

I’ll put it into a perspective bit more. When I first performed with Insectoid and CECI I didn’t have any input other than my performing of their piece. So, for that I’d just say I performed with them. However, as I’ve gotten to know the work more I’m at the point where I’m helping make decisions about future work. So, what do I say then? Have I collaborated with them, worked with them or performed with them?

What does everyone else in arty/blogging land think? I may be being a tad bit over cautious, but I really don’t want it to seem like I’m taking credit for anyone elses work.

On Wednesday I was asked by CECI to help out with the FluxFeast performance at VIVID. From the VIVID website:

FluxFeast is an attempt to undermine the monumentality of art through the use of food

Myself, along with other members of CECI, were slightly sinister, yet at times playful waiters. My favourite part of the night involved the waiters swapping and changing dishes with other diners whilst they were blindfolded!

H4NUM4N has a few more photos of the event

I’ve been in the freelancing game for about 7 months now and one of the major problems I’ve found is in managing my time effectively. It’s so easy to just do nothing all day and frantically rush around trying to do too much in the evening. This is why I’m attempting to map out how each day could be spent. So far it looks a little like this:

09:00 - Do some digital artwork 11:30 - Check e-mails, blogs, twitter etc 12:00 - lunch 13:00 - Do some traditional artwork 15:30 - Read magazines and blogs - 4Talent, Computer Arts etc 16:30 - End of the day!

I know that I haven’t allowed much time for checking and responding to e-mails, but I don’t get many (yet!), so that’s more than enough time.

Am I being overly optimistic with my time allowances?

I’m going to be moving into exclusively using open source software to create artwork in the near future*. More on why once I get my head around some of the software.

*that is unless it’s completely necessary that I use a piece of commercial software e.g. GMIP doesn’t support CMYK, yet Photoshop does.