1. Broken umbrella in Paris

2. Time of the Month Tiger

'Craft is an embarrassment for the construction of modern art'
- Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 2009.

What would Frida think?

Image: Frida Kahlo handmade pillow on Etsy here

Amateur Hour is a showcase for exciting new learning, skills,
entertainment and public actions. Submissions in any form welcome
to selfinterestandsympathy@ gmail.com.

Unhappy Birthday, by Dan Fox

Tate – hardly a stranger to controversy – has this week come under attack from two artist groups, their criticisms centered around Tate Modern’s tenth anniversary celebration No Soul for Sale, which was held over the weekend of 14–16 May.

Making A Living, an anonymous organisation describing itself as ‘a discussion group of arts professionals currently active across the UK’, issued an open letter to the Tate challenging the museum’s treatment of artists during the ‘No Soul for Sale’ event.

The group write: ‘It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?’

Arguing that ‘it is complacent for Tate to believe that their position is comparable to ground level arts activity’ and that it is ‘disingenuous’ for the museum to claim that this ‘spirit of reciprocal generosity’ is ‘somehow altruistic or philanthropic’, Making A Living go on to accuse Tate of not having paid artists ‘for some exhibitions, workshops and events, including last year’s Tate Triennial’, although no specific details are given in the letter.

They end their letter by calling on Tate ‘to make public its policy in regard to artists’ fees’.

A group calling itself Liberate Tate have also confronted the museum, distributing a communiqué during the anniversary weekend calling for the Tate to drop its sponsorship agreement with BP, whom they say are ‘creating the largest oil painting in the world’ following the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In their communiqué Liberate Tate argue that ‘every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade’. Josephine Buoys, a spokesperson for the group quoted in a press release publicizing Liberate Tate’s activities, says that ‘Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool progressive art’. The group state that ‘In March 2010, Tate Modern ran an eco-symposium, Rising to the Climate Change Challenge: Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World on the same day that Tate Britain was celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP Saturdays’. Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the symposium called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship be dropped by 2012’. Liberate Tate call on the museum ‘to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies.’

Liberate Tate’s communiqué can be read in full here and Making A Living’s open letter can be found here

Unto This Last

Deller’s exhibition at Void Local Artist, will showcase new work which has never been seen before, alongside a film he made for the 2008 Sydney Biennale. The exhibition will run until 5 June 2010.

Address:
Void, Patrick Street, Derry, Northern Ireland

www.jeremydeller.org
www.manchesterprocession.com

My interview is below and full article is here. Other interviewees are the blogs/ online magazines Some Blind Alleys, SuperMassiveBlackHole, Blackletter, Fieldwork, and Paper Visual Art Journal.

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What made you start your blog/online magazine?

My blog started as a curiosity, a kind of experimental, public notebook. 
That’s still its main function really, it’s more an artist’s blog than
a blog about art. I have a portfolio website and a blog/ RSS news
feed attached to that, so it’s not about promoting my professional
practice and I don’t link the two together explicitly.

What reasons do you think are contributing to the apparent lack
of Irish art blogs?

I imagine the proportion of art writing to sport, politics and music
correlates to mainstream print media (ie. not strongly)?

Though traditional print media is increasingly dying out due to freely
available content online, critical art writing has been comparatively
slow to move in this direction. Do you agree? What are the reasons
for this?

The decline of traditional print media due to the ‘democracy’ of
blogging is pretty bad news for most serious journalists, both in terms
of earning a living and developing in-depth researched pieces. The
quality of writing on blogs is a very mixed bag indeed, and the act of
reading from a screen, scrolling through text, is a completely different
engagement with a text than the sensory experience of reading a paper.
It imposes a different form and structure.

Art writers usually work freelance, and it’s not terribly well paid,
so I’m not sure I’d see how serious art writers would have the time or
energy to maintain a blog – the majority of bloggers are hobbyists. 
Also, it doesn’t have the prestige of being published in print.

Art is everywhere on the internet (everywhere!) Yet the significance
of blogs in the industry pales in comparison to music/sport/politics/etc.
Why is this? 

I guess this relates partly to the above question, in that art still
relies pretty heavily on traditional cultural gatekeepers and
arbiters of value. There are cultural institutions that use Facebook
for publicity purposes, but that’s mainly a communication/ marketing tool,
I doubt it’s effected the programming! There isn’t a visual art equivalent
of MySpace where artists yearn to be 'discovered': there isn’t the same
“fanbase” – a more appropriate word to use here than “audience”.

On most of the blogs that do exist, there is a noticeable lack of debate
and/or discussion amongst the readers. Why has this not taken off,
when you consider so many of the heated debates that occur in
colleges, galleries and other social situations?

Commenting on blogs, or websites in general, does not typically bring
out the best of discursive skills (see: misogynistic, racist, homophobic
bile on YouTube for example). So that might be one reason people in
general are circumspect about participating. Also such comments may
have a wider or potentially more embarrassing public than a discussion
in a gallery or a college – you do have to put your name to such
comments, even if it’s only an alias. And everyone knows everyone
else in Ireland…

Above: Chanel shop, London, 2009.
Below: Stepanova's Constructivist dress, 1924.