A Curious Eye

From crystal legs to arms covered in feathers, a pioneering designer is reinventing the way we see artificial limbs.

Recommended donations and admission fees help patrons see art, not crowds.

queeryouthspace:

New Perspectives of Queer Youth Artists

Seattle, WA—December 26^th, 2012. Views From the Closet Door is an art show unlike any other. Local queer youth artists are coming together to share and sell their art at the first show of its kind in Seattle. From 4-7pm on February 23^rd at Queer Youth…

Judith and Richard Lang have been combing their local beach in Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California since 1999, collecting the plastic debris of our daily lives: cheese spreaders form those packaged lunches, milk jug lids, disposable lighters. They cart home this junk, clean and categorize it, and finally transform it into gorgeous assemblages. It’s meticulous, artisanal up-cycling and it’s both beautiful and sad. The Langs have an exhibit running currently at the San Francisco Public Library and GOOD caught up with Judith recently to talk about her process and where all those plastic cigar tips come from. 

Read the interview at Good.is

“Demand” is an inherently tricky concept to measure when it comes to the arts. How can a museum know, for instance, that a million new visitors will surely come through if it opens a new gallery? Or how can a theater accurately gauge that its community has the capacity to support a new stage, if it can just find the money to build one? There is no neat way to count a city’s untapped demand for museums, cultural centers and performing arts spaces.

That being said, it’s becoming pretty clear that during the boom years, American cities built too many of them, surpassing demand with a supply that would come to weigh down arts institutions that had no business chasing after their own Guggenheim Bilbao. A massive new study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago reaches this conclusion after surveying 725 new arts facilities and expansions that sprang up in American cities between 1994 and 2008, at a collective cost of more than $15 billion.

Here are a pair of maps from the final report of the metropolitan statistical areas with cultural projects under way in 1994 (at left) and with projects begun between 1994 and 2008.

Keep reading at TheAtlanticCities.com

“Borne out of the gay club scene, the singer has never forgotten where she’s come from or the fact that the queer community was the first to champion her music. But viewing her relationship with her LGBT fans as little more than repayment for their devotion — as might be appropriate with many other pop stars — is as unfair as it is inaccurate.”

Is the image worthy of being censored? I don’t think so.

Infrastructure can look good and be artistic. Really!

Infrastructure CAN be aesthetically pleasing!