Hasta La Ideas

We’ve always sort of liked actor James Franco, despite this writer’s distrust for people more handsome than himself (see: 99% of the population). He seems like a genuinely likable guy, friendly and maybe not as apt to flaunt his status. And though we have never thought much about him before, now we have a certifiable crush. Found by way of Murketing (who doesn’t entirely buy the whole thing) is Franco’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about his deciding to take a temporarily reoccurring role on the long-running soap opera, “General Hospital,” as a form of performance art, something he’s apparently long been a fan of. Most of the piece is spent talking about his favorite pieces of performance art, with your usual suspects, Yoko Ono and Allan Kaprow, but the great bits are when he talks about why he decided to play “bad-boy artist ‘Franco, just Franco'” on the soap:

I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain — and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

No matter if his motives are this pure and artsy or not, we agree with him when he says “If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird” and it makes us like him all the more for it.

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We don’t get to talk about something we love often enough: music videos. But today’s the day. Last week, you may have caught the release of a video for a collaboration between musicians Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, directed by one of our favorites, Keith Schofield (here’s his much better director’s cut). We enjoyed the heck out of it, not having any clue what any of it was about and enjoying it all the more because of we didn’t get it. As we regularly do, we checked in over at Antville, the popular music video forum, to read any comments about it. Turns out there were dozens upon dozens. And the issue wasn’t over whether or not the video was any good, or talking about how something was shot, but instead over intellectual property. Turns out the video does make sense if you’re familiar with particularly odd photos that have made their way around the internet. From a man in a SpongeBob costume running from the police to a skateboard resting each of its wheels on hamburgers, each are minor internet memes and were recreated by Schofield for the video. The latter example became one of the main focal points of the Antville discussion, given that the original source material came from photographer/artist William Hundley who posted to Flickr “Someone is using my ideas…look familiar?” And it wasn’t just that one image of Hundley’s that were recreated without permission — other copies of different pieces of his work appear throughout. As follows, one can guess that possibly a large number of the shots used in the video were recreating without searching for the original creators. Schofield recently told Boards that the concept came from his holding on to random images he’d stumbled across on sites like FFFFfound:

“I basically have this huge folder of all these found photos and when I get a song in, I’ll play the track and I’ll look through these pictures and see if any thing sticks,” he says. “I’ll be reading something randomly and see a funny picture and throw it in the folder. The whole thing with found photos is that they’re funny because there’s no context to them. You look at a funny picture and go, ‘what’s the scene about?’ And you draw your own conclusions.”

The discussion on Antville goes into a million different directions, arguing that Schofield is a thief, that he shouldn’t be blamed because he thought they were completely random images, or that Hundley should just be happy for the uncredited exposure, and lots in between. In the end, we have to say that, like with what’s recently gone on with with Shepard Fairey, no matter how much you enjoy a work of appropriation, there’s still a lot of discomfort in there when one artist is so directly “borrowing” from another.

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A little bird has told us that Debbie Millman (who just got this nice plug in New York for her latest book) is working together with director Hillman Cutis in creating a TV pilot for her long-running radio/podcast series, “Design Matters.” We’ve learned that Stefan Sagmeister and Milton Glaser will be the first guests for the two episodes that will be shot with Curtis (a third episode is also planned, but the guest is apparently not yet confirmed). The tapings will take place in New York over two days, Dec 11 & 12, and we understand will involve a live studio audience. So we recommend keeping your eyes peeled on both Millman’s and Curtis’ sites for any announcements calling for a crowd. Once the invitation is extended, we’re imagining the space will fill up pretty quickly, considering the names involved.

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A little heads up about tonight’s Project Runway, particularly for those of you in Los Angeles. The episode airing tonight of the popular designing/sewing reality show was not only shot at the Getty Center, but apparently the whole competition centers around designing outfits “inspired by the museum’s architecture and artwork.” Should be a fun time, considering all the sprawling, swirling bits spread across the gardens and the design of the buildings themselves. If you’re in Los Angeles, the Getty has decided to host a screening of the episode in their Harold M. Williams Auditorium, with an added bonus at the end:

After the screening, the museum will hold a panel discussion featuring three speakers from the world of art and fashion, including a former curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; an editor from Marie Claire magazine; and an L.A.-based fashion designer.

Update: If you don’t already have your space booked, it looks like you’ve missed your shot. The event is already all full.

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In 2004, Merle Becker quit her corporate television job at MTV to pursue a growing fascination with rock posters. Soon, she was traveling across the country interviewing artists such as Stanley Mouse, Art Chantry, and Tara McPherson. “My initial intent was to find out why so many artists are drawn to doing rock posters,” says Becker. “I also wanted to tell a clear story of the history of the art form.” The result is American Artifact, a documentary that has been making the festival rounds and premieres tonight in New York at the Royal Flush Festival.

The film chronicles the rise of American rock poster art, from the skeleton and roses posters created for the Grateful Dead and the birth of silk-screening to grunge and the off-kilter whimsy associated with contemporary bands. “It is my hope that this film causes people to see ‘lowbrow’ art in a different way,” notes Becker, “as beautiful pieces of art that are also valid statements about the cultural changes that America has seen throughout the years.”

Always a huge music fan, Becker was inspired to make American Artifact after encountering Paul Grushkin and Dennis King‘s coffee table tome Art of Modern Rock. “I was not only blown away by the artwork, but I was also surprised that nobody had done a film about its history and the current rock poster art movement,” Becker tells us. “I really had no idea that modern rock posters were being done, and until that book, I thought that the ’60s rock poster art had marked the end of that medium.” She soon found her way to GigPosters.com, “and the rest is history.”

Read on for more from our interview with Becker.

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