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19 Nov 09

Project on Regional and Industrial Economics - U of MN Humphrey Institute

A listing of recently published and working papers by Ann Markusen, director of the Institute's Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (U of Minnesota). Her Areas of Expertise are:
Arts, culture and economic development; regional economics and planning; industrial organization; economic development, local, state, regional; industrial and occupational planning; economic impact of high technology, military spending.

Her current research "focuses on occupational approaches to regional development and on artists and cultural activity as regional economic stimulants."

Of special interest: http://www.hhh.umn.edu/projects/prie/aei.html ("The Arts Economy Initiative at the University’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs is midstream in a ten-year project on artists, their livelihoods, and their contributions, along with arts organizations and cultural industries, to regional and local economies.")

See also Markusen's bio page: http://www.hhh.umn.edu/people/amarkusen/index.html

www.hhh.umn.edu/...pub.html - Preview

references ann_markusen urbanism arts culture creative_cities resources urban_development

18 Jan 09

"Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait / current work" by Chris Jordan

Fascinating project:
QUOTE
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
UNQUOTE

www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php - Preview

photography visualization statistics consumerism culture environment chris_jordan art_projects

08 Feb 08

The Artful Manager: What's ''authentic''?

Read the entry, "What's 'authentic'?," by Andrew Taylor, but then read the first comment that follows, by Bill Ivey. Taylor, writing from an arts manager perspective, observes: "Since arts organizations are often perceived (or perceive themselves) as havens of authentic expression, it might be worth a moment to define, exactly, what that means." Ivey, donning his "folklorist" hat, contrasts the "authentic" barn-raising, say, with the construction of a pre-fab barn -- or "authentic" blue jeans and their history of being workwear, with the "brand" of "authentic" designer jeans. Apples & oranges, and the oranges, it seems, are watery -- or "thin," as Ivey puts it: they offer "the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few."

www.artsjournal.com/...079959.php - Preview

authenticity branding culture culture_industry folklore ideas ideology marketing

Since much of modern mass or popular culture is of the pre-fab barn variety, it's not difficult to identify a longing for heritage-defined, community-based products or performances as a significant element of our overarching ethos. There are many thousands of examples of the way th marketplace has exploited this idea. Blue jeans connect with the "authentic" idea of real men doing real work; a Ralph Lauren shooting jacket invokes the "authentic" world of entitled patrician ease; a faux-antique farm table links consumers with the sturdy values of an agrarian past.

This, to me, is the sense of authenticity that pervades mass culture today. It is an idea that is particularly potent in our "thin" consumerist society, offering, as it does, the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few.

08 Jan 08

Arts study a culture shock (Toronto Star)

I read something about this study last week, can't recall where, and generally think it's a bit silly anyway. But what catches my attention in this Toronto Star article by Peter Goddard is how it brings out that visual art is currently at the very bottom of the totem pole. I see that in my own habits, too, and wonder why it's so. Is it because too much of the art being produced is uninteresting?, can't compete with other media or arts (like theatre, music, etc.)? Has visual art become somehow irrelevant, and if so, when did this happen and why? Does it have to do with time, with speed? Or simply relevance -- and format?

www.thestar.com/...290794 - Preview

arts cultural_support culture popular_opinion socialtheory studies surveys trends

Forget class versus trash, the elite versus the masses.
Divide culture consumers into four new groups, says an international study Oxford University researchers released late last month that will have far-reaching results for arts support everywhere.
"Univores," "Omnivores," "Paucivores" and "Inactives" are the new categories we can all find ourselves in. Which one depends on whether we believe Britney is a huge tabloid star or an area in northwestern France where Impressionist painters spent their summers.
But no matter what group is discussed, the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone's to-do list.
"When it comes to the visual arts, you find there's a sizeable part of the adult population that doesn't participate at all."
9 more annotations...
- "Univores," the largest of the four groups, consume great quantities of pop culture – TV, pop music and Hollywood flicks – and little else. "But there are no truly popular forms in the visual arts that have as wide a media exposure as does pop music," says Goldthorpe. Tak Wing Chan was his colleague in the study for the Economic and Social Research Council in England.
- "Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.
  For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.
- Only "Paucivores," a decidedly small group, may be found at a blockbuster museum opening. But that's about the extent of it. Paucivores don't care much for contemporary art.
- The "Inactives," are the Goldthorpe-Chan version of couch potatoes, hunkered down in front of the television day and night. They're found in every culture. Along with the U.K., data was assembled in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, Chile and the United States and analyzed by 13 researchers.
- In England, the report has caused something of a stir because it blew holes in the idea of an upper class forming a cultural elite.
- "We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.
  Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.
  In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.
  There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.
- "Status is now attached to material consumption, not cultural consumption," Goldthorpe tells me. "People with status show who they are though expensive cars and houses rather than by going to museums and the like."
  Indeed, the report itself hammers home the blunt truth that "income has no effect on determining" the kind of culture being consumed. The bottom line? People who could help symphonies survive or back the arts don't want to.
  They are "self-excluded," says the report, "rather than socially excluded."
  - - sounds grim (for arts).... - on 2008-01-08
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- Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says
  Why?
  "The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.
- Unfortunately, the Chan-Goldthorpe report will play into the hands of reactionary politicians who question whether the arts should be funded at all, since no one gives a hoot about them.
  Already the Labour government in Britain is showing signs of cutting back its cultural support as a way of funneling money to "the demands of the Olympic Games," Goldthorpe says.
  - - yes, the old libertarian argument, in action again... - on 2008-01-08
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28 Dec 07

The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

- discussion of Starbucks coffee house culture as locative networked culture where people "camp" with their media (laptop etc) to work, network, inform themselves -- but they're not by a long shot isolating themselves from other people. In fact, they choose these locations b/c of what they offer in terms of ambience, connection with others, feel, and culture. Calls into question Habermas's bleak assessment of the death of coffee house culture...

www.themobilecity.nl/...towards-a-starbucks-urbanism - Preview

culture locative_media media mobility sociability socialtheory society starbucks urbanism

Over Christmas I reviewed some literature on locative media, and came across a handful of texts that addressed the changing role of the coffee house in our urban culture. Perhaps we are seeing a paradigm shift here: away from a BLVD-urbanism of public culture and towards a Starbucks Urbanism of a networked culture?
This is not your great-grandfather’s coffeehouse, found on a tree-lined European Boulevard with an outside terrace. It is no longer the coffeehouses that functioned as the proverbial meeting place or ‘public sphere’ where citizens irrespective of their background (as long as they wern’t women or other excluded groups that Habermas in his theory on the emerging public sphere overlooked) could engage in discussion with one another.
5 more annotations...
- the public sphere was not primarily a physical place, rather it was a discursive site where a literate public could conduct rational and critical debate. The assembly and dialogue that constituted this emerging public sphere occurred as much within the pages of newly circulated printed materials as it did within the walls of the coffeehouse.
  - - "then" - on 2007-12-28
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- In Starbucks people congregate not so much to communicate with one another. Rather they use it as a comfortable semi-public base from which they keep in touch with their personal friends or collegues through the 3 and 4-letter acronyms that make up our network society: GSM, SMS, UMTS, WIFI. As Marc Tuters writes in another key essay on locative media, this emerging Starbucks culture has often been described as antithetical to the public culture of the coffeehouses.
  - - "now" - on 2007-12-28
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- Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted pay-access locations under the operative logic of ‘risk aversion’. Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary literature on public space
- Yet other more empirical research studies, such as Portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places by Ito, Anderson and Okabe show that this binary opposition is too simplistic. In the article they describe a number of tactics through which people appropriate urban space. One of them is camping:
  
  One brings a personal media device and works with it in a public space. Yet the goal is not to completely shut off public space, the public space is especially chosen because one finds it an agreeable location to work from. Like reading a paper in a café rather than at home. … They put down roots that have temporal limits, but are more extended than commuters who are simply passing through.
  
  Camping is not so much about shutting out the environment: ‘people saw value in residing for a period of time in a desirable location. Just as people seek out beautiful campsites to set out there gear and reside for short periods of time, urbanites find attractive public places to temporarily set up camp with the help of their information technologies.’ For campers Starbucks is not a proverbial non-place, but a local place they engage with, where they perform their identity, yet at the same time keep in touch with absent others, still being part of their ‘full-time intimate communities’
  - - think about the difference btw "camping" and old coffee house culture... - on 2007-12-28
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- We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.
  
  Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism parochial rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly parochial, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks-urbanism?

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Yule Heibel's Library tagged culture → View Popular

Project on Regional and Industrial Economics - U of MN Humphrey Institute

"Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait / current work" by Chris Jordan

The Artful Manager: What's ''authentic''?

Arts study a culture shock (Toronto Star)

The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

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Media & Culture @ HM

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Race, Culture, and Politics in the "New South"

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