From Susan B. Komen to Kony, public discourse is the art “Happening,” taking to the streets and Twitter to affect global change and re-invention. Fortified with OWS, riots, performances, street art and viral social media campaigns, our public policy as well as our public lives are shaped by this expanding discourse. Art for social exchange and change is vital to this discourse. With spring madness upon us, I continue my interest in how art can be shared by the community as part of the envisioning and evolution of the species. Too much to ask for?

Art that lights a sudden, crackling fire in the haze, skews one’s head so it hurts a bit and awakens and puzzles unexpectedly in the night. Yes?

It’s been 99 years since the fiery and radical 1913 debut of the Armory Show in New York, where modern masters such as Marcel Duchamp’s’ nude descended a staircase and blasted open Victorian attitudes and created dialogue. Honoring that legacy in name, New York’s Armory fine art trade show traditionally opens the spring season. Thinking ahead to the 100^th anniversary next year of that seminal show, I visited the fair, the satellite shows around it, and three noteworthy art events of the season considering them my Petri dish, my crystal ball to see just where the art world is expressing and integrating community…can an Art Fair still rankle jaded New Yorkers’ perspective? The answer is Yes.

Signs of what I like to call “art off the cave walls” were present. This goes beyond the hallowed old model “art” made solely by artists in studios, or even art manufacturing teams in warehouses overseen by commodity traders such as Koons or Hirsch’s and sold to be quietly tucked away in a collector’s home or museum storage for investment. Instead there is art by modern-day shamans, for the intended purpose of public ritual experience and transcendence. Today, millions of the general public are directly engaged with “art,” scrapbooking away on Pinterest, or sharing Angelina Jolie memes on Facebook, fed with a steady fast food image diet streaming from YouTube and flat screens. Clearly 15 minutes of fame via 2D image bombardment alone does not change the world, albeit engagement with “art” has become a new kind of populist tool.

That’s the beauty of temporal art, from 15-minute fame viral art memes online to environment friendly performance art, anyone, not just the “1%,” can have direct experience of “being there,” in the midst of history as an art-maker and documenter.  If one says there is a “there” there, there is. Art establishment stalwarts, Christies’ storage experts at their Armory booth space, spoke cheerfully on the “storage of” temporal art, wherein for valuing and the posterity, only the paperwork, the documentation, must be preserved.  However, the truth is that paper’s own temporality cannot trump the art, craft, and validity of online documentation, now sourced from multiple media generators themselves, aka the general public, through Twitter and cell phone cameras. This determines newer distinguishing value factors and the question of art “ownership” now begins to be redefined—a very different model of society. The future we are building is here and it’s coming.

So how did the art world itself bring this change on? Did they build it this spring, and did the people come?

The “There” at an Art Fair
Ken Johnson of The New York Times has called the Armory Show a “maze of art shops” and this year the fair, in order to further personally engage its 60,000 visitors, actually cited a focus on “urban restoration,” via both the commissioned artist for the whole show, urban architect, performance artist, and art-world golden boy of the moment, Theaster Gates, to a re-design of the show floor by architects, Jane Stageberg, AIA, LEED AP of Bade Stageberg Cox.

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Jonny Robles

It was just another bright day in uptown Miami Beach, when the first art movers loaded in paintings to the 1950’s Morris Lapidus golden “Temple of Curves,” The Deauville Resort, for the Nada art show in preparation for Art Basel/Design Miami Beach. The neighborhood shop attendants at Rite Aid, Pizza Hut and bodegas, adorned with murals of neon flamingos that morphed into sexy girls, took their cigarette and mobile breaks and quietly watched the event unfold. Would they even enter the show?

Imagine your town. Imagine a gold dusting and buzzing of high stakes international art dealers, collectors and celebrities drawn to the honey of private dinners, streets teaming with pilgrims jumping from alcohol to car and fashion brand-sponsored events, mobile phone touring teens and hipsters running through former industrial areas where hooded and masked international graffiti writers sprayed their messages on 2- story cranes. Later, higher still, sunset cocktails were downed above the city lights at a private launch of BMW’s new electric car in an open-air conceptual parking lot, now an architectural icon. This, my fellow citizens of Anytown Earth, is what they call a community of global art.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2011 was 10 years old this year. And this year, I was in search of more than the highest quality debauchery or the million-dollar manse or sale of art. I was curious about the usual urban blight to might trajectory of the influx, beginning with artists, residents, galleries, small business, big business, big entertainment, tourist buses, sky-high real estate boom, and sometimes ending with monoculture. How has and how does this once-a-year party infuse its host community with art, culture and future? Does Better Art make for Better Living?

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Warm and exhibition-happy, the Brazilian art and design world is showing the rest of us that the moment is theirs now, a samba way past the Campanas and green and yellow T-shirts at H+M. A steady stream of art and design events plus the country’s booming economy are just two reasons Brazil is hot and visible now. These include the recent BOOMSPDESIGN;  CasaCor (at 25 is the world’s second largest architecture and decoration event, running through October); and the much anticipated 2012 Sao Paulo Art Bienniel, which will have, for the first time, an international curator based in New York City, Luis Perez-Oramas, the Latin American Art Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All this activity translates to the prominence of Brazilian talent. You can just imagine the multiple design confabs and collabs with brands being cooked up right now, anticipating the upcoming events of the World Cup 2014 and a proposed green, first-ever in South American Olympic Games in Rio, in 2016.

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We’ve flown over Italy’s verdant fields, their shapes determined by borders of rivers and forests, a random patchwork that brings to mind a conversation between the land and its artistic expressions. In Milan, we’re set out to explore the Salone through the eyes of local artisans, those involved in creating the new neighborhoods of Isola. Designers, crafts people, and gallerists gave us pointers on navigating the city, the furniture fair, and what’s happening in Isola, the Green Island cultural and artistic event, curated by Claudia Zanfi who described it as a “progetto sull ‘arte pubblica e la vita contemporanea,” or in the long form, “ an event which sets out to provide a moment of reflection, as well as giving space to planning energies addressing key themes such as sustainability, urban green areas, and the landscape as a whole.”

Among the neighborhood’s treasures of small shops, evidence of the “hand” is everywhere, in the old, traditional ateliers such as Lorenzo Lippi, (where we spy a hip young man learning to craft stringed instruments from a master) or come upon a modern window of boldly polished and rough, petrified wood garden gear. Many Isola designers have showrooms with working craft studios on site, picking up on the neighborhood’s tradition of open “backrooms,” showing everything in process, be it cooking in restaurant kitchens or the welding of furniture joints. Read more…

Like forgotten weedy islands, most neglected inner city neighborhoods adjacent to transport lines remain isolated, even as art, commerce, and design create vitality around them. One such industrial neighborhood in Milan, actually called Isola ( “Island”) Zona 9, once on “the wrong side of the railway tracks,” is now being touted as “an oasis in the city” by international architects like Cesar Pelli. It’s quickly becoming a visionary blueprint of new green thinking, creativity, and commerce. This “Island” is now a centerpiece in preparation for Milan’s hosting of the 2015 World Expo, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”.

Remember this is Italy, birthplace of Slow Food. And as a World Expo host, Milan is poised to become the hotbed for urban agriculture, demonstrating the power of slow, this time with integrated designs purposed to lead a green paradigm shift. Read more…