During the last lecture Kate Cuffari from The Philadelphia Museum of Art came to talk to us about art conservation. This concerns keeping art and materials around as long as possible but also honoring the artist's intentions concerning their work.

There are different kinds of conservation, such as treatment, which is when they must repair a damaged work, and restoration, which takes place when something is actually missing from the work. Often they use nondestructive analysis such as X-rays or taking very samples and looking at them under a microscope in order to repair a work according to its original condition.

Preventative conservation is also very important. It can involve monitoring humidity, heat, pest problems, and anything that can help them forestall any kind of damage to the work involving how the work is presented. There are several causes of decay in artwork: willful destruction, the intention of the artist to have the work decay or degrade in which the material's decay affects the meaning of the work, unintended degradation, and issues concerning how the work was stored or displayed.

Kate sited many interesting examples, including Man Ray's Object to be Destroyed, which some art appreciator took literally and shot the work with a pistol.

She also urged us to think about the kinds of materials and techniques we use, to do our research, and to consider whether we would like our work to last with its original condition intact or whether we would like the decay of our work to contribute to the meaning of it.

Overall, it was a very interesting lecture.

Philip Glahn

At the last lecture, Professor Glahn came to speak to us. He spoke of the theme of art and technology, as all of our lectures so far have, and of art as a theory.

Professor Glahn spoke of the inauthenticity of mass production versus the quality of being original and made by hand in art. While the greatest fear of people is to be like machines, our greatest desire is to be an individual. Relating to this, artists like Duchamp and his "Fountain" extend their authorship by in a sense collaborating with whoever made the fountain in the mass producing business. Allowing people other than artists into the process of making art, the labors of the artist and the factory worker are equated, and each form of labor comes to include more than original definition. In a sense, this both reskills and deskills the artist. It shows that the artist can view himself not at as complete genious, but a producer of meaning, just as anyone else who preforms the labor of mass production may also be seen as a producer of meaning.

It was actually a very interesting lecture and a thoroughly intriguing concept.

I read an inetesting article for class the other day. Apparently Ikea changed their font in their new catalog and the whole world is up in arms about it. Well, maybe not the whole world, but a lot of people.

Ikeas old font was their own special version of Futura, but they just switched to Verdana because they wanted a font that would be more effective in other languages and on the internet.

People are very upset about it, calling it repulsive, disgusting, and cheap. There's even an online petition going around and accumulating a lot of signatures.

Maybe I just don't really get it because I've never thought about the importance of a font. Apparently people like advertisers, logo designers, magazine and book publishers put a lot of time, money, and thought into choosing a font because it can really send an important message about their product. I think I'll start looking around at fonts on products and analyzing what kind of impression I get about the product just by the font they are using.

During the last lecture on Tuesday, we had Scott Rigby speak, and he is the cofounder and codirector of an organization called Basekamp, established in 1998. Originally, they functioned as an artsist group and opened their space so that they could work on largescale projects. Their projects usually have organizational, technological, and interdiciplinary focuses and are also about art itself. Their projects are sometimes theoretical and often highly researched. They usually only do about four to six of them a year.

Now, they have potluck dinners weekly. They are free to everyone to come, although everyone is supposed to bring something to eat. They are also very interested in fusing old and new concepts in their art and also here. Using skype, people in the country and internationally can attend the potlucks. There are often more people online than people physically attending the potlucks. The potlucks started as a joke and without a focus. They are still very informal and have no formal adgenda, but they do have topics to talk about. The artist group is very interested in collaberating with people outside their group, and through the potlucks, collaberations often take place. It also serves as a way to meet people.

Anyone can attend the meetings and skye is free. You can also text message and use audio only to be a part of the potluck. If I had a laptop here at Temple, I think I would definitely be interested in dropping in via skye sometime.

Here's the slideshow of all my pictures, found items, and sketches.

For the walk/bike/ride assignment I look pictures around campus. I took the pictures of places that I usually go around campus as I as walking around. They're mostly of stairways and sidewalks, since I've been walking up a lot of stairs and walking on lots of sidewalks since I've been here. My impression of the city has only really been formed by where I walk around campus. For my found objects, I picked up things that were trash on the sidewalks or dropped in the stairwells. Then I sketched some of the places that I also photographed, so they're of stairs and sidewalks as well.

Today we had our first foundation lecture, not counting the orientation one.

We had Peter Hanley talk about art and the internet. He told us about how after art school we have to be found as artists, and having the internet make it a lot easier now. Online, your audience can find you. Social media and networking sites as well as online artist galleries are a great way to do this. He stressed the importance of having a personal website with strong online presence or being involved with an online gallery with presence on the internet. He also talked about art communities, reproduction services, and making sales online. Although selling actual work online is the ideal, artists often sell art cards or books of their work to make money.

Peter also told us how to keep ourselves fresh on the internet. We should stay in touch with what other networking site people are using and collect email addresses. On an artists personal blog, we should keep a journal of our own work, thinkings, and techniques.

And then somewhere after he talked about selling services, he ran out of time.