I sent an email to Arthouse accepting the invitation to participate in 5x7, but registered my complaints. I received this email from Jennifer Gardner:

Cinque, Thanks for your email. And yes, we've been getting feedback, but for the most part when people hear the reasoning behind this decision, they understand. However, the only way we can explain ourselves and correct potential misinformation, is when people ask, so I again, thanks for your email.

Because of the huge popularity of the event, and the limited space in the gallery, we've had to make a few changes this year. Our space can comfortably accommodate about 300 people, and last year about 200 artists rsvp'd, which doesn't leave a lot of room We certainly recognize the generosity of the artists, and of course want them to be able to attend the party. But the event is an important fund-raiser for Arthouse, and we need to be able to cover our costs, so after much debate and discussion, we made the decision to charge artists $25. (Regular ticket prices also were increased). Artists still continue to receive the complimentary artist level membership to Arthouse.

Ticket prices for the general public are $125, with a $25 credit towards the purchase of 1 5x7.
Artist tickets are $25 with a $25 credit towards the purchase of one 5x7.
Artist Guest tickets are $60 with a $25 credit towards the purchase of one 5x7.
(basically, the first 5x7 that anyone buys at the opening party is $75, each additional 5x7 is $100)

Thank you for your support of Arthouse and its mission, and for participating in 5x7.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
Jenn Gardner

Jennifer Gardner
Development Associate & Operations Manager

Jenn,

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I know first-hand how difficult fundraising is, so I'm not under the delusion that any of this was an easy decision.

That said, I still find Arthouse's reasoning to be a little suspect.

It seems to me that overcrowding is a self-correcting problem. If there's not enough room, people will leave, and I'm sure that the folks who have pre-paid $125 to be there will outstay those who are there for free. I have never been at an Arthouse event where I've been crowded out, even when it was free for everyone.

If that's still unsatisfactory, how about allowing donating artists free entry only after the buying has begun? (with the option to pay $25 earlier.) Or limit the number of drinks for nonpaying guests. That would still raise some eyebrows, but far fewer I think and less high. That would have the added advantage of being transparent about what the real concern is here, rather than how it looks to artists now which is either a) you want the artwork, but would just as soon not deal with the artists or b) you are taking the opportunity to squeeze more from artists who have already given so much.

I do NOT think either of those is the case, but you wouldn't know it simply reading the terms of the invitation.

Thanks for the opportunity to dialog about this. I'm sure you know that I make these comments in the spirit of cooperation and not in a spirit of persecution. I won't go on about this. As I said, I'll participate and will do so happily, but again, just some food for thought for the future.

Sincerely,
ch

Cinque,
Thanks for the suggestions. Some of them were in fact debated, but the Board and Staff decided, for this year, that we would try the $25 ticket, rather than creating different rules for different people at one party. Of course, this will be re-evaluated after the event and may change next year.

Again, I appreciate your support of Arthouse - and thanks again for participating.
Jennifer Gardner

Weeks ago, prompted by some posts on some blogs somewhere (that would be all but impossible to track down now), I started to write a post about artists donating work to charity functions. The general feeling out in the blogosphere was that galleries and museums are ripping off artists by taking their work in exchange for nothing.

I took exception to this; after all, I don't know of any case in which an artist was forced to participate in a charity event.

I do, however, think Arthouse ought to rethink its policy on the 5x7 show. In the past, artists (including myself) have donated work in exchange for...well not much really, but at least you got free admission to the chi-chi opening event (normally over $100 dollars). This year, artists are being asked to pay $25 admission to go to the party, which as I read it back on screen seems like even more of an outrage than I thought it was this morning when I found out.

I told the organizer I'd participate this year, and will do so cheerfully since I believe in Arthouse's mission. But $25 is a shitload of money, especially for an artist who has already donated $200, $300, or $400 dollars worth of work. $25 will keep a lot of artists away. And I happen to know that a lot of the moneyed types that attend these galas love the keep-it-real artisty types who hang around giving the whole event a gloss of legitimacy and vitality.

I know how arts budgets are and I know first hand how fucking impossible fundraising can be. But to set up barriers in front of the very people who make the event possible seems a miscalculation at best and an outright insult at worst.

Grokster found itself before the US Supreme Court today responding to MGM's foul-cry that peer-to-peer file swapping will spell the end of American music. Predictably, the recording industry spin doctors are busy shaking the lifeless bodies of recording artists in our faces and screaming, "Please think of the artists!!" before shoving said bodies back into the coal furnace of upper management profiteering. Haven't you ever wondered how Richard Branson heats his private island?

Where was all this high moral posturing when LaFace was busy bankrupting Toni Braxton?

Now I'm on pins and needles waiting to hear the outcome of the case. But I take some sort of weird solace in the fact that the American Conservative Union and the ACLU both filed amicus briefs in support of Grokster.

Meanwhile this story about Chicago's "Bean" (pictured above) caught my eye in the Christian Science Monitor. I had heard that professional photographers were being harassed when trying to photograph Kapoor's sculpture, which after all is sitting in the middle of a public park.

Let me be brief: Copyright was invented to stimulate creativity, not to stifle it. It was designed so that artists, inventors and the like would be assured of some profit from their creations, so they wouldn't just throw up their hands and say, "Why bother? Someone's just going to steal it anyway."

Now does anyone honestly believe that masses of sculptors are out there saying, "Forget it! I'm not going to accept any major public commissions because people are just going to come along and photograph it anyway." If the thought of someone photographing your work--even selling that photograph for profit--makes you stop sculpting, then you needed to find another line of work to begin with.

I started Electric Skin 14 months ago because I couldn't find anything like it online. I built the resource I myself needed at the time. After a lot of thinking, I've decided I've done all I can do with it and it's time to hang it up.

I've been simplifying my life for the past 4 or 5 months now, and this is part of that continuing trend. I loved ES and I think it's done some good in the world. Now I'm trimming down the peripheral interests so I can focus in more on the artmaking I'm most interested in.

I wouldn't turn anyone away if they wanted to pick up where I left off, but either way my last update is April 1. Thanks for all the support.

current music: Minnie Riperton, Petals

I joined the rest of the western world yesterday and got a DVD player. Also I don't know how I ever got by without this before.

The big news is AMOA's studio visit today, which went swimmingly, though whether it was swimming enough is a matter for time to decide. All five jurors came, including museum director Dana Friis-Hansen. I enjoyed talking to him and he seemed to be getting into it, even though I basically accused his institution of racism at last year's art symposium.

But I mostly loved Joan Davidow who said my work was all a little "too Chuck Close" for her taste. Dammit! There's no getting out from under that! But then she later got really into the whole time machine concept. I loved her because she exudes that "I can say whatever the fuck I want" aura that all cool old people sport.

Anyway, they peppered me with questions, 90% of which I've answered a hundred times before. So even if I wasn't brilliant, I was at least composed. I liked that there were no awkward pauses. I liked that I could barely get the answer to one question out before someone else had a question. I liked that I never trailed off or ended a sentence with "so..." as a lot of artists do. I liked going a round or two with the opinionated Joan Davidow.

Now we wait. But we don't wait too much.

Mostly we make art.

If you haven't already, read Franklin Einspruch's moving attempt to integrate his friend's suicide with a life of practicing art. My thoughts are with you, F.

Went down to Ventana del Soul tonight, the community center coffee house on Oltorf. Every time I go there I remember how I don't go often enough, even though they don't have beer, which was a near fatal blow tonight.

I read through some more of the Cosmic Wormholes book. Even though it's ponderous and heavy-handed it has the best explanation of black holes I've read so far. (Hint: think of them as distortions in space-time so extreme that all straight lines curve inward toward their center.) I also picked up this art-friendly idea of redshifting, the principle that everything changes colors as it approaches the event horizon of a black hole.

So after that mind stretch, I headed over to Fresh Up Club's closing party for the Richie Budd and Michael Velliquette show, "Transcendental Damn." I was afraid it was going to be another David Altmejd knock-off of the "cram a bunch of gothy looking stuff in a room" variety that we've seen so much of lately. And it was a little bit, but it was still executed with its own decorum, finesse, and even exuberance. It would have been very easy for this to go very, very wrong, but it didn't.(left, glue gun stuff from "Transcendental Damn," 2005)

It was nice to see Dave B., though he looked kind of spooked and basically sketched out. I asked him what the problem was. He said he was just tired, but I didn't believe him and said we'd catch up some time and maybe actually talk turkey.

So I asked him more about the show and it turned out that I liked all the Richie Budd components much more than the Velliquette parts, which seemed as underdeveloped as I've seen much of his work in the past.

Then some guy hit my car in the parking lot, but didn't cause any damage.

current music: Taj Mahal, In Progress & In Motion

I brought a bottle of cheap, yet vaguely respectable wine over to Cauleen's and we had an impromptu dinner and hung out for some nice conversation. She's excited by this whole support group slash salon slash study group I proposed.

We talked about how neither of us does work that squarely fits into the Afrofuturist paradigm, but that for so long that was really the only label available to us. Now there's more talk of "Afrogeeks" and "Black Nerds" and such, the former with more emphasis on technophilia, the latter as a more broadly cultural designation. But neither of these has really emerged with the same kind of resonance as Afrofuturism. So there's a real opportunity to carve out a new cultural space. That's what we'd like to work toward.

For now we are dubbing our fledgling group the "Black Unpopular Culture Salon."

I talked to Cauleen about our getting together to talk about this Afrofuturism stuff and she brought up something interesting. Most of the top Google hits on the term Afrofuturism are 3 years old or older. Could Afrofuturism be an obsolete idea? The thought never occurred to me. But of course it would have to happen sooner or later. If it is obsolete, what's next?

So Alex sent me an email today. He's back in the US now temporarily from business school in Singapore. Alex has always been a great inspiration for me; someone who bites off life in big, voracious chunks.

Me, I'm a planner. Which has its benefits, but the downside of too much planning is that you tend to live in the future. Everything is about all the stuff you're "gonna do" someday. And even once I'm doing it, it almost doesn't matter because my attention shifts forward to whatever I'm gonna do next. The result is this constant feeling of holding my breath, of waiting until some magical future time arrives.

This is why I'm obsessed with time travel. I'm always trying to find ways to get to now. It's why I can't recognize anything I've already achieved; my attention is always on stuff I haven't done yet.

So now I feel like I'm at a little bit of a turning point, that I'm taking my life off "hold" status, learning to be a little more present right here, right now. I think they call it stopping to smell the roses. This lesson has been a long time coming.

current music: Sunday quiet

My dad always told me I had a one-track mind. Case in point: the drama around finding a replacement for me at work has been piled on a little thick and I didn't have enough brain power left to remember to take part of the day off to attend the "Blogging While Black" panel at South By Southwest.

Nevertheless, I'm getting to the point where I'm jonesing to show off some of the time machine design work I've been doing (in a start-and-stop kind of way). So I've decided to put together a little group open house type show in September, if I can get Cauleen and maybe a couple of others interested in joining.

After 2 weeks of wrangling video cards, operating system patches, reconfigured USB cables and hourlong calls to Hewlett-Packard tech support, I'm happy to announce that I've finally got a fully operational OS X Mac G4 running dual monitors and a high-speed duplexing printer. Woohoo! I'm almost like...a real production person.

I've tried to get in the habit of formally thanking people for things they've done, and since I know the HP tech support guy's name (Pat), I'll call him in the morning to say thanks and let him know his patch suggestion worked. It's cheesy, I know, but I also wrote a thank you card to my dental hygienist last week to say thanks for letting me know 6 months ago that it's "not too late."

current music: Rufus Wainwright, Poses

I've been holding back making it public that the Austin Museum of Art has tapped me for their triennial "20 to Watch" show, which I wrote about here. The short list stands at 33 now and the curators will be doing studio visits later this month to narrow down the list to 20 (or so).

I approach this coming studio visit with a potent mix of anticipation, dread, resignation, apathy and excitement. As unfocused as I've been over the last year, now is the worst possible time for a studio visit. At the same time, I've made lots of noise about how I'm going with the flow these days and not being all cunning and careerist, but instead just taking pleasure in making art and in day-to-day being.

I realized this was the right attitude to take when I saw the name of a good college buddy of mine listed in a New York Metro arts article as a "major collector." Holy Jesus... He's a great guy, I love him to death, but honestly, he's just some dude from La Jolla with who happens to have access to a ton of money. And yet artists will treat people like him as though they are some magical gods who possess all the keys to their self-worth.

I read blog posts like this one in which artist flog themselves, wondering why the high quality of their work doesn't get them noticed, and I have to say what I always say: it's because the art world is TOTALLY RANDOM. Finding success by producing quality work is not impossible, but it's a much, much harder way to go and you'd better only take that route if you genuinely enjoy the act of artmaking and would do it the same way even if no one paid attention, which in all likelihood is what will happen. Because most people don't give a shit about art. If, on the other hand, your goal is to make it big in your lifetime, then fuck quality and instead suck the right dicks or find some other way to blow smoke up someone's ass. You will be a big star. Unfortunately, you'll also be known as a whore sellout and you'll still have no guarantee of making it into the art books, which will be just as randomly curated as the current art world.

current music: Juana Molina, Tres Cosas