I recently came across this, writtin by John Stoehr in the Charleston City Paper, on the topic of the arts and the way they have changed since we all got linked up online:
"These have characteristics that challenge the old guard of established arts professionals... These characteristics include participation over presentation, collaboration over competition, amateurism (in the best sense of the word) over professionalism, and process over product."
That's as good a definition of guerrilla painting as I've heard anywhere...and since "amateurism" means doing something for the love of it rather than for the money, that's as sound a reason as any. You want to learn something, enjoy the colors, do justice to your subject and to your own perceptions & feelings, but it doesn't have anything to do with making money.
He continues:
"Grassroots creativity is an old idea (Walt Whitman exulted the inventive potential of diversity), but the difference now is scale.
Ninety-five million Americans are applying the ideals of Web 2.0 to the real world, including their approach to the arts."
Hmmm...makes you wonder what that might look like.
Probably something quite different from what we grew up with...
"This can be troubling to institutions like art museums, says Nina Simon, a consultant and author of Museum 2.0 (www.museumtwo.blogspot.com). In trying to serve what MIT media professor Henry Jenkins has aptly called the emergence of "convergence culture," museums are increasingly afraid of "losing control."
John Stoehr
Charleston City Paper
Charleston South Carolina
I like to think it will bring more beauty. Like the lamplighters in The Little Prince, lighting their lamps as dusk falls in different parts of the world. Like a dance.
