Michael Sedano
This year especially, Chicanarte makes an ideal "big gift" to yourself, to one's spouse, lover, or other deserving recipient. Y sabes que? Everyone's a deserving recipient, especially this year, and especially you.
Especially 2022?
It's the only year we have. And 2022's been a doozy as we enter the 40th week of a year when The GOPlague didn't end, Russia invaded Ukraine, wildfire swept across the land, drought screams global disaster, Congress and the DOJ are still looking into the insurrection, what year was that? Dang, gente, what feeds your Soul when time does what it's going to do to us these next 12 weeks of 2022?
Arte does it every time, feeds your Soul when times are sour. You give art, most likely, as stocking stuffer novels, poetry collections, Frida refrigerator magnets, stuff like this of immense value but small price. Make a plan to go all-out this year. Buy to your limit; have a limit, use it.
The day arrives when a couple no longer hangs posters and museum prints; they want original art. They visit museums, galleries, browse the internet enjoying the rich variety of styles and materials artists employ. Galleries and holiday sales abound this time of year, offering surprisingly affordable price tags. Affordability exists only when you have a limit to compare prices.
This is the year to put your first red dot on an exhibition wall. Other visitors will love the piece, too. They'll admire it, then look at the artist's name, the affordable price, then spot the red dot. That's your red dot.
This is a time of year when raza art grows plentiful. DDLM kicks off arte sale season that goes until year's end. For example, in Los Angeles, seminal arte incubator Self Help Graphics (link), holds its 49th Día de los Muertos exhibition. And SHG isn't the only one, not in Califas nor across the nation.
(Órale, planners. Send La Bloga datos on your holiday sales and events. Link.)
I've enjoyed many a "garage sale" at Self Help Graphics. These are events with dozens of folding tables arrayed with stacks of serigraphs, some in plastic sleeves, others white glove inspection. Forty-nine years ago, I bought a Gronk serigraph for $150. Over the years, I acquired numerous silkscreens monoprints or series, for under $300.
These sales are wondrous avenues to covering your walls with original work and not break the bank. If mercenary thoughts just flashed through your mind, cochino! Arte is not an investment. I don't want to hear about money.
Some people consider art to be investments. There was a couple flipping through a stack of silkscreens at SHG one visit. I heard them discussing not the graphic but the signature. One fellow knew names, pullled out a couple of prints, coaching his friend. I turned away when the knowledgeable guy started talking about buying out a series to enhance the "value" of one.
Barbara and I applied a single standard: we had to fall immediately in love with something, so long as it was priced under $3500. That was our limit when I was working an executive jale and she was a high school English Department head. We had money in the bank, you could do that in the 80s.
We learned a hard lesson: Love it and don't leave it.
Barbara fell in love with a realist painter exhibiting at Avenue 50 Studios (link)in Highland Park. The gallery wanted more than our limit so we went home and Barbara yearned. And yearned. And we decided to spring for the extra cash.
The piece sold already. Worse, the artist changed representation, moved to a gallery way the hell down in Laguna Beach. Lesson learned. If you love it, and it's close to your top limit, up the limit.
Artists have mixed experiences with collector behavior. It's really nice to shake a hand, pat a back, pocket the check at asking price. I hope for artists they don't run into collectors who want to hondle. At any rate, a collector holds the work, "best 1200 bucks I ever spent" they tell people, adding how it's worth at least 2000 today. That's not money the artist sees.
Guests in my home like my Chicanarte. Some, innocently, wonder idly about the value. I tell them my collection has Zero Value.
In order for my walls to be "worth" something, I'd have to sell them. Then, the arte wouldn't be mine anymore. That's no way to treat something you said you loved, dump them when someone waves a dollar under your nose.
It's time, gente. Time to pull down those twenty dollar prints of Johnny Depp and give your child a $150 serigraph by someone you never heard of, but when you saw that print, it screamed your kid! And the kid loves it, already a collector at 15. 16. 17. 31. 41. How old are you?
How to Appreciate Arte & Collect It:
Set a limit, $150, $200, $1000.
Fall in love.
Buy it.
Subatomic Particle Behavior Is A Paper Ball, & Other Instinctive Insights
I admit, when Jesus Salvador Treviño showed me a documentary delving deeply into a challenging theory that weaves art and hard science into a metaphor, I was intrigued because I was dumbfounded.
Instantly I understood the theory but as soon as everything started falling into ordered meaning, to my thinking, I turned blank. My brain couldn't hold onto the flood of connections between what I know instinctively as human, and what becomes, to me, an enigma wrapped in a polyhedron. Maybe you'll see what else is here.
It's intriguing to have a conclusion at the tip of your synapse only to have it stay just out of comprehension, like a hazy memory a face without a name that your mind's eye sees sharply. But that's my response to the videos Treviño and his associates share on this site (link). I tell myself, just because I can't explain what I know doesn't make that man's theory useless to others. It's fun just to get perplexed at connections between quantuum mechanics, particle wave theory, and balls made of paper strips.
Here's the first of three videos dissecting the inexplainable. A few will find the material sensible, but like Linus Pauling, Isaac Asimov, or Richard Feynmann, they see the metaphor don't know what to make of it.
Artists, órale. Check out the polyhedron bells and their shape-shifting properties. Imagine a toy made from recylable, reused materials. First it's a ball, push the sides, it's a star and all the colors changed.
The video says when you put these strips of paper together in a certain way, then alter "the amplitude and phase" of the places the strips of paper cross, you get the different shape, like from a five-sided bell to a seven-sided from the same object. Some artists have quantuum mechanics in their fingers, instinctively folding plaiting forming. Not that such an artist lacks for ideas, but mira nomás at the ideas.
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