As was true with the hippie, another contemporary archetype that’s proven to be here for the long haul, there’s obviously plenty of cultural baggage that accompanies the hipster. All of which, of course, has been thoroughly and exhaustively mocked. Apathy. Trust funds and entitlement. Nihilism. Gentrification. Celebrity worship. Lack of originality. Naiveté. Random stupidity. None of these annoyances is essential to the DNA of the hipster, but all too often, well, you meet some self-absorbed, entitled moron in a panda suit.

But let’s get real. For every cynical slacker sitting around “ironically” watching The Real Housewives of Orange County and turning his beard orange with Sparks spittle, there’s a legitimate artist who’s working his/her ass off, dare I say it, doing something cool. There’s no contrived lack of aesthetic to the films of Michel Gondry. He’s an artist, and yes, he’s cool. There’s no artificial, ironic detachment to the music that TV on the Radio produce. They’re artists too, and yes, they’re cool. And perhaps it should go without saying, but hipster profiling is about as effective as racial profiling. Owning a pair of skinny jeans and living in Bushwick doesn’t make someone cool. But it doesn’t make them a hipster douchebag either.

That’s why the knee-jerk hipster rage, perhaps best exemplified by Douglas Haddow in the Adbusters article,“Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization,” seems so overblown. “The hipster represents the end of Western civilization,” writes Haddow. “[A] culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.”

I hate to call bullshit, but a quick Google search of the author reveals an article about hipsters who paint graffiti murals in their bedrooms and an author photo that looks suspiciously like something you’d find on Look at This Fucking Hipster.

Which reinforces my point. The rage and self-loathing associated with hipsters has become more annoying, more naive, and more artificial than hipsters could ever hope to be.

After all, in the rubble of this fury, what remains for artists and bohemians who are legitimately trying to be part of a counterculture? You get the sense that if Jimi Hendrix were to show up in Echo Park today, he’d be publicly mocked in a style section piece on blipsters for wearing a feathered fedora. Duchamp would have given up as soon as he appeared on dadaist-or-douchebag.com. And Warhol would be demonized as a hipster gentrifier for setting up his factory in a Brooklyn warehouse. Critics continue to complain that we live in an era where all art is derivative and devoid of substance. But if Hendrix, Duchamp, or Warhol were alive today, we’d be doing our damnedest to derail their self-expression, dismissing them as fucking hipsters.

As Pandamonium illustrates, there’s no shortage of hipsters worthy of our mocking. But our challenge is to make the distinction between the artists and the pandas. Otherwise, when the next generation finds its own Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, or Dorothy Parker, we’re likely to stifle their talents with our misappropriated cynicism. Or worse, we’ll turn them into a joke.

Lanham points out the worst side of adbusters, and similar publications, which often have quite intelligent commentary: they can also border on shock jock style outrage, instead of complex reporting. It should be obvious that “hipster,” just like “suit” or any other coded social placement, isn’t a satisfactory way of understanding a person. One can hope that we’d be a little beyond pointing fingers and spouting lines like “the dead end of western civilization” for something so frivolious and undefinable.

I could go on for a long time about this, but the article mostly speaks for itself.

Irony is healthy, to an extent, and commentators like Carles use pop culture as a launching point for sometimes poignant and sometimes hilarious questioning. However, hate, and self hate, is not productive in the long run, and blogs like Look At This Fucking Hipster, while good for a quick laugh at times, aren’t really any different than hypothetical albums of white trash and rednecks, or fat businessmen. Laughing at other people because we think we are better than them is nothing new and will never disappear.

Now, if you desire to laugh because the human race in general is insane, please do so. We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.

What do you think y’all? Should I get the Pearlized Mix & March package? It’s only 199.95 for 3 8×10s, 10 5×7s and 3 sheets of 8 Wallets! What a steal!

Speaking of stealing, do you think they mind if I screen shot these images from their website? Probably not, right, since I’m basically advertising their buisiness with those huge as fuck ugly watermarks. It’s a shame they get in the way of these stunningly beauituful captures. I was totally planning on printing that shit wall size from their tiny jpgs too. Maybe I’ll pay 75 bucks so I can download a jpg.

Anyways, sorry for not posting that calls for entry list for this month yet. Cody made a surprise visit just as Rin was getting out of here and we decided we had to spend the time zooming around in a golf cart in the middle of ass nowhere georgia instead of getting our house in order and finishing up all our computer work. Good decision. It’s more fun than it sounds. Beth and I shot a lot of film (which I haven’t done in a while, since I’ve been focusing on electronic and performance work.)

Hopefully my lack of posting didn’t cause you to miss out on the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, if you’re a student.  I’ll let you know if I hear of an extended deadline, since it’s one of the best contests, if you’re looking for bang for your buck ($1000, $850 of software, a flight out to NYC and Hotel, plus exposure and bragging rights, all for no entry fee. And that’s just for making it as a finalist, which rocked last year, let me tell you.)

I’m still working freelance for the next few weeks, so I’m setting some 9-5 work hours for myself to finish my website work and writing gigs, but I’m putting the blog in that category too. It’s important to stay on top of things without forced deadlines. I’m going to see if setting hours works.

I think that’s everything for now. Stay in touch, y’all!

]]> http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/some-blatantly-stolen-images-and-a-quick-apology/feed/ http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/john-michael-mike-fulton/ http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/john-michael-mike-fulton/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:28:47 +0000 Ian Aleksander Adams http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/?p=2260 Fulton is a friend of mine (he’s even got a cameo in a piece of fiction I recently published, more on that later) and he’s spent a significant chunk of his life listening to me ramble on, complaining about the fashion industry, vapid girl shots, horrible retouching, and all manner of other banal topics. And he listens, and responds, and then goes and shoots pretty girl fashion, because he likes it. And that’s good, because Fulton is good at fashion photography and I’d much rather he do it than some asshole guy I don’t know.

Check out these images he just sent me. Look at that color! That’s some good color. Look at that girl’s face! There’s actually skin texture there, thank god. Like I said, I’m glad Fulton is shooting fashion and not that other guy, because that other guy would be too busy staring at breasts to notice the shape of the rest of that girl’s body or bother thinking about color schemes.

While I’m still not really interested in fashion photography, I’m glad Fulton didn’t lend too much weight to my tirades against it and I’m glad he’s playing with the medium. Next, I just want him to approach a larger variety of subject.

More of John Michael Fulton’s work at his Website.

Desktop Dump images are unattributed, unfortunately. If you know where they are from, let me know. I’ve usually gotten them through several layers of filtration and reposting already.

The June Calls for Entries list will be posted tomorrow.

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via Word of Command

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via Big Fat Whale

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THE GAME OF WAR

GUY DEBORD is celebrated as the leader of the Situationist International and as the author of the searing critique of the media-saturated society of consumer capitalism: The Society of the Spectacle.

What is much less well known is that after the May ‘68 Revolution, Debord and his partner - Alice Becker-Ho - quit Paris and went to live in a remote French village. Over the next two decades, Debord devoted much of the rest of his life to inventing, refining and promoting what he came to regard as his most important project: The Game of War.

via Absent Without Leave

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via Mikael Kennedy

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In Samantha Peale’s debut novel, The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel, the narrator is the studio assistant for fictitious NYC painter Michael Freiburg. NY Times reviewer Deborah Solomon reports that the novel has a based-on-experience directness that tends to stray from sharp-eyed observation into the mush of unfiltered whining. Not surprisingly, Peale herself spent four years as a studio assistant to uber-artist Jeff Koons.

via Two Coats of Paint

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I was sitting in the back of Megan’s Pontiac driving through downtown Topeka, Kansas. We passed by every suburban fast food chain and mega store you’ve ever seen. Her cousin Jacob was next to me pounding a store brand version of Mountain Dew explaining how he’s tired of paying the big bucks for the name brands, and amusing us with anecdotes about his job at the local Target distribution center.

Megan’s younger sister, Rebekah, was in the front passenger seat asking me if I listen to Akon, Young Jeezy and T.I.

“It’s such a shame that their music is so good, but they’re going to hell because they don’t use their talents to serve God”, Megan chimed in.

Rebekah turned around to show me some funny videos on her cell phone. Past the glow of her Motorola I saw the courthouse on the corner. Their grandmother stood on the sidewalk waiting for us as she clutched her brightly colored sign that read, “Thank God For IEDs”.

via Maxim Ryazansky

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I Am Legend Original Ending. Hm.

via FirstShowing.Net

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Debunkers Collective

In terms of advertising, billboards constitute the greatest and oldest aggression and one that no one can avoid. We are free to watch or not to watch TV, to listen or not to listen to the radio, to buy or not to buy a newspaper, but not to move freely without being confronted with a never-ending show of images and slogans. This visual debauchery impairs our view and our perception of traffic signals. It dirties our living space, reduces our freedom of thought and limits our capacity to dream. The confiscation of public space and its commercial exploitation are all the more inadmissible as the landscapes are by law considered “public goods of the nation” and the rules concerning advertising are part of the 5th chapter of the French “Code de l’environnement”, entitled : “Prevention of pollution, risk and nuisance”. Regarding billboards, the advertising system enters our daily lives in the most obvious fashion. By attacking billboard advertising using non-violent direct action, we are making a first inroad into the advertising system and responding to its aggression. All the more as advertising posters are in easy reach !

via Public Ad Campaign

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The Making of Zach Galifianakis

via The New York Times

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There are many types of slime mold, and they come in a variety of lurid colors. You can see several examples, photographed by Russian researchers, in this gallery. You can see the two forms of slime mold in these pictures - the gooey collective form (the yellow grid/blob) and the more commonly-seen individuated form that looks like a stalk with a small sphere or lozenge on top.

via io9

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The most distributed image ever is being phased out. What remains is a hill in Sonoma Valley, California. In the context of this project we have re-visited the hill. “After Microsoft” tells the story of a January day in the late 90’s when the hill came to coincide with a global branding strategy.

After Microsoft has been exhibited as an installation piece, including a projection of the re-photographed view together with a voice-over.

via Rhizome

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via John Lehr

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http://iamchriscollins.com/ and http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/

via Jon Rafman

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Michael Johansson

via The Silver Lining

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Interview with Daniel Shea

By Andrea Bakacs

via Photography for a Greener Planet

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via Hrag Vartanian

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Dirk Skreber, Installation view, Friedrich Petzel Gallery

This week at The L Magazine I discuss the Dirk Skreber and Alex Katz shows in Chelsea.  Teaser below.

The erroneous belief that gallery art has a higher, more profound purpose often gets in the way of properly assessing it. So too does the authority of the exhibition space, which can intimidate even the most seasoned viewer. Gallerygoers tend to excuse bad art, especially if it’s controversial. Maybe the work has greater rationality behind it than is immediately apparent; maybe the art isn’t challenged by the liberal politics of the artist; or perhaps the art is even transcendental!

This came to mind recently when viewing Dirk Skreber’s exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea. Featuring two vagina-shaped crashed cars impaled on penile poles and bare-breasted paintings of super heroes, the show is the closest thing I’ve seen to pornography lately. I hoped there was more to it than appeared, until I read the press release, which described Skreber’s sculptures as “begging ambivalence.” In other words, they are to be read at face value. One might conclude the vehicle’s fastidiously clean surfaces mean to sanitize the sexual references, which might have some merit were it not such an obvious appeal to a notoriously conservative collectors’ market.

Read the full review here.

via Art Fag City

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via C-Monster

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Science Fiction’s Baddest Women

via io9

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http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com

(via blessthismess)

via CPB Tumblr

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Ian Aleksander Adams, Alumnus, Savannah College of Art and Design

Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, Summa Cum Laude, Outstanding Achievement Award

This blog will return to posting as soon as the family has gone home.

Upcoming topics:

Curatorial Vs. Ideational Projects. MFA Show Reviews.

Time’s Arrow. Crisis for Infinite Nerds. Alternative Media Class Featured Work.

Calls for Entry and Deadlines List for June. Repost Megapost for May.

Stay Tuned Space Fans

Bryan Formhals, over at La Pura Vida where he has a history of featuring interesting and relevant commentary, made a post responding to a quote by Blake Andrews, which I’m reprinting here:

“The photography-integrated-into-life method is decidedly unfashionable. The huge majority of photographers I saw at Photolucida were more project oriented. The prevailing model is to develop a concept of something that has photographic potential —often of personal interest but not always— and then methodically take photographs of that project until a body of work is created, with the ultimate goal of showing the work at Photolucida or similar venue.

The potential pitfall of this method is that the resulting photographs can seem secondary to the project. Often the artist statement conveys all the information required and you needn’t look at more than a few photos to get the gist of it. Such projects may be appropriate for the idea-centric art world but they enslave photography as a tool, not a lifestyle.

I think photographs should come first.  Arrange them in projects later if you must or else leave them as is in a big loose stack. Either way, photography that is integral to life seems to me to be the strongest because it comes from purest motivation: the very simple need to translate the world into photographs. Of course I am biased because this how I approach my own work, but it’s what I like to see in others too.”

This is something I have run into while reviewing portfolios myself, as well as being the subject of portfolio reviews. I think it may be considered obvious by some, but it’s important that it is still pointed out. It’s almost like no one talks about it because it’s so obvious. It’s just “the way things are.”

Bryan responds:

“Put simply, I don’t think the fine art photography establishment has much respect for [the non-project based] photographic philosophy or method (look at the general derision toward street photography and family photography for example).  I know plenty of studious, intelligent photographers out there who treat photography as a way of life  and don’t have any sort of fine art ambition.

Maybe that’s what it comes down to: ambition.  I have this feeling, one I certainly can’t prove scientifically, but somehow I think having an ambition to make it in the fine art world interferes with your photographic intuition to some degree.  There’s a danger that the conceptual part of your brain and eye will smother the intuitive part.  Is there a way to find a balance?  Of course.  Do I have any idea how? Nope, but I do think mixing the vernacular, “integrated-into-life method” with the project method can lead to some very exciting photography.  But will the fine art world pay attention?”

While there is an extensive history of recognized fine artists working with a diarist approach to photography, Bryan is referring specifically to our current commercial art world, dominated by photography contests and portfolio reviews.

It’s a fair question and one I felt warranted response. I left a comment there, but I’m reprinting it here as a way of inviting you to keep the discussion ongoing.

I’m sure it’s not goodbye forever, but it feels like an important moment.

Tonight was my last shift in Bergen Hall as a workstudy building monitor. Since I don’t  have a photography class this quarter, I probably won’t step back into this building as a student. Next time I enter I’ll be an alumni, as I get six months of access to the facilities, for which I am very thankful.

Overall the workstudy job has been enjoyable. I have to say I won’t miss smelling like photo chemicals when I make it home at 12:30 in the morning, but I did enjoy helping people with their inkjet printing and the freedom I had to work on my own reading and writing while on duty.

My last tutoring shift was this past Friday.  I decided to do it in the inkjet labs,  instead of on the first floor where I usually teach, since everyone was scrambling to finish their finals before Monday classes. It was a whirlwind of paper jams, photoshop crashes, corrupted hard drives, incorrect file sizes, and aesthetic calamity. Somehow most people seemed to pull everything together at the last minute though, which I saw as I covered inkjet monitor shifts through the rest of the weekend. Luckily, the ink stores held.

At least till Sunday,  when we ran out of photo-magenta for  the entire canon lab. I feel bad for everyone who left their printing till last minute.

Anyway, it’s been four years here and I do feel ready to move on. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever print in the dark room again. Some people are doing interesting work about it, but I’m content to let it be a pleasurable past memory.

I’ve really been enjoying the epsilon printer here, since my film scans come out looking like film again and the cell phone camera murals we printed were delightful, but I always felt like all the paper and chemicals I used in the traditional gangs were sort of wasteful, not to mention the time. Great learning experiences, but not something I need to keep in my workflow. It’s probable that the next time I see the interior of a darkroom it will be as an instructor.

It was meditative and enlightening, but I’m ready to do different things. I’m keeping my film though - I invested in a film scanner a couple years ago and I think it was one of the best moves I’ve ever made.

So, that’s it for Bergen, for now. I’ll miss the fish in the basement the most.

Starland Cafe and Art Gallery, 11 East 41st Street, Savannah, GA

Right around the corner from Desoto Row, so see all the shows there too, get free food and drinks and listen to great music!

Prelude’s closing reception is this Friday. The show’s been a great success so far, thanks to everyone who’s sent me kind words about it or bought a piece. Michael, at Starland, has been wonderful, and the opening featured great food (which should be no surprise to anyone who’s ever eaten at the starland) and this awesome rum drink he mixed up.

I’m graduating the next day after this, so lets forget about quiet introspection and have a real good time, alright?

My parents will even be there, probably drunk since they’re divorced. You should be too! Not divorced, I mean. Or drunk necessarily. Just be there.

Let me know if you have any questions!

RSVP at Facebook. Larger flyer available on Flickr.

It’s possible there are still some kinks to work out, but Google’s Similar Image Search is already pretty amusing.

It is not, of course, going to make surf clubs obsolete. How can something like that ever become obsolete?