Est hoc verum?

Dear Graphic Designers at Chipotle,

I got some burritos in this bag the other day. Y’all are either hilarious, or something went hilariously wrong between the initial bag design and the trip to the printers.  Thank you for the few minutes of confusion/amusement that this gave me.  Also, thank you for selling reasonably priced burritos downtown.

Yours, Ryan

It was as if one of us slipped casually out of the art-opening like Clark Kent, donned a small mask and cape, and returned to delight us with super-caddy commentary.

“Where’s Jeff?” asks one of us.

“I don’t know, but $40 is too much for an entry fee!”

While I didn’t always agree with the site’s apparent skill-fetish, or its occasional forays into self-pity, it was funny. It also allowed us to recognize one another and our common frustrations- rallied around the site’s “about” line: Your art show exhausts me.

Thanks FTAS, Here are a couple of my favorites…

When your artist statement uses the word FECUNDITY,

When your interest in my work vanishes after I donate a piece to your auction.

Oh, you’re experimenting with video now?

Ryan Finnerty & Anne Petty

New Work by Anne Petty

Selected Portraits by Ryan Finnerty

This show is a knockout and I’m proud to have 18 selected portraits sharing space with Anne Petty’s drawings. Bonus: Find the 19th portrait (of the artist) on site. You might be amused.

Hand-set letterpress print, 2010

The above print is based on a medieval framework for contemplation.  This four-tiered structure is mirrored in the four-part sections of Gothic cathedrals wherein Victoria and his contemporaries wrote music structured in four overlapping parts. The “thinking-architecture” connection is still only speculative, however, and the four-part polyphony probably has more to do with the acoustics of the buildings than any philosophical venture. But it seems worthy of contemplation…  Merry Christmas.

The Artist Encounters the Sublime... by proxy.

This one goes out to anyone who has endured my 19th Century Art lectures, or is otherwise interested in my recent trip to Cleveland.  Made with assistance from Frederic Edwin Church and Carolyn Reddy’s phone.  I also feel indebted to this gentleman.

For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

This has real implications for our culture in the digital age, but I think speaks to some interesting questions about observation and knowing.

Opening reception: Saturday, 8 December 6pm-9pm, Georgetown’s Art Attack

I'll have BRAND NEW WORK up in this show.

And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
“What do you want Brick?”
And Brick says to you
“I like an Arch.”
And if you say to Brick
“Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?”
“Brick?”
Brick says:
“… I like an Arch””

Mr. Kahn is alluding to two important design concepts: Medium Specificity and Object Language. Object Language is dramatized above by a talking brick, but we can apply the concept to any designed system when we ask the question, “What is this thing designed to say to me?”

Examples:

"I was built carefully. I'll be here a long time."

"I've been adapted over my long, useful lifetime."

"I'm required to occupy a rectangular space. Also, I hate you."

Architect 1: So we should minimize the windows on the western face to cut glare and solar gain. How about a blank steel wall?

Architect 2: Sure, sure. Everybody loves those. But should we maybe design something useful for that side of the building?

#1: Like a series of arbitrarily placed rectangles painted onto the steel?

#2: YES. That was JUST what this building needed.  High five, licensed architect!