Snow!

After a delightful snow fall, it's time to pay tribute to the season. New Design! Just in time for winter.

Design*Sponge

Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge is one of my heroines. She has grown her blog from a tradition of truthful writing and basic aesthetics to this nationally (if not, internationally!)recognized authority in the design community. I think my favorite part of her is the personality of her blog, the community, and especially the content.

Most recently she posted an blog entry to a Documentary Herb & Dorothy. While working at the Milwaukee Art Museum I have been fortunate enough to be a part of the Herb & Dorothy donation. Last fall, the MAM exhibited some of the 50 works. It was a very sweet exhibition and the Vogel's story is a compelling story.

If you have a chance to watch this Documentary, please do it!

The Jealous Curator

A long-time friend moved to Oregon for graduate school nearly two years ago. The two of us were inseparable during our undergraduate years, until I graduated college and moved to Milwaukee, WI. It's not that I moved so far from college that it became impossible to meet frequently; it is the plain boring fact that life got in the way. I was always too poor and the fact that I didn't own a car didn't help either. She was busy with a full course load and work. Thus, our daily meetings came to an end. To make a long story short our correspondence has been limited due to my work schedule and lack of social life and her graduate studies and her social life. Most of our correspondences have been through facebook. This is not a bad thing, though facebook does not lend to a deeper conversation about life, love, or in this instance aesthetics. I submit to this fact of social media based correspondence. We are meant to store these short conversational tid-bits and wait until we can discuss these wall posts in great detail. Today, I received a little message that was simply this link, which led me to a much greater discovery.

Art thought...

There is a new thought that I have just had the time to explore, or rather synthesize. I think that in Art we, the artists and viewers, are moving into a new season in which we embrace memory and connections. This is something that I have been trying to talk about, but I have been at a lack of words until now, I think. Anther thought, not wholly separate from this is that idea that art is a communicative tool. Although this is not a new thought I think that we are moving into a state where this will be embraced. I think that this needs to be embraced because there is a recent return to explanation. The artist explaining what is in their 'real' minds and not in what they speak. Even better now is that the Art World, as a necessary phenomena, is excepting these ideas and supporting them. We are in a paradigm shift now where the artist will begin to talk to the viewer, the art will become more ecesable, and the artists will not simply create, but 'speak' to the viewer directly. This stems from a renewed sense of identity, which I think has always been there, but has been ignored. This is a slow shift, but a shift none the less. I do not think that it will be long before others notice, if they have not already, and someone will write more conclusively on this topic. (If anyone does wirte on this I want to be the first to name it: Memorium.)