The Short Life of Some Pasadena Street Art

The artist is named Cali Killa.  Probably not his birth name.  I had never heard of him.  He's a street artist whose work was briefly displayed here in Pasadena.

I have heard of Banksy.  Banksy is also a street artist.  I've never seen any Banksys in Pasadena.   I've noticed other art on my walks around town.  The boy trying to catch a missile with a baseball glove was probably the best.   The huge mural of the old woman's face was pretty neat but that was in Los Angeles.

I discovered Cali Killer's piece on Raymond Avenue, just around the corner from the Fillmore Gold Line station.  The date was May 29.  The low brick building looks abandoned.  There are sometimes people sitting nearby who I suspect might be homeless.  The land is probably pretty valuable considering its proximity to the light rail and to the hospital.  Commuters can pay to park in the adjacent lot.

(Click on any picture to enlarge it.)

The wording on the book held by the young lady in the hoodie is "How to make it in Los Angeles by Cali Killa".   She's also holding what looks like a rifle.  Great art naturally lends itself to many different interpretations.  My first thought was that the artist was telling us that one needs lethal weapons to make it in L.A.

Here's the wider view so you can see the piece in context.

On June 12, two weeks later, I passed the same spot.  Cali Killa's piece had been covered in black paint.

Also interesting: someone had made a little sculpture on the bus bench out of an old rug and a pair of crutches.

I wonder why the art was blacked out.  Maybe Cali considers his works temporary and he himself returned to Pasadena to paint it over.  Maybe the building actually does get minimal maintenance.  Maybe someone was offended by the notion that you need a weapon to succeed in Los Angeles.  Maybe another street artist considers that building his turf and wanted to send Cali Killa a message to stay away.  We'll never know for sure.

If you want to hear Cali Killa talk about his work, there's this video.

Where you find it

While walking at night I've noticed this bus stop advertisement twice.  Both times I saw it indistinctly from some distance.

Each time I thought to myself "that reminds me of a Mark Rothko painting."  Here's a real Rothko for comparison.

Alas, when I got close enough to distinguish the details I was disappointed to discover that I was not looking at excellent modern art.  Or even a knock-off modern art.  Instead I was looking at a picture of a newfangled tablet computer.  And not just any computer, but one sold by Microsoft, a company I've resolved never to patronize ever again.  (I'll spare you the rant.)

My point is that for a few moments, before I learned the truth, I enjoyed thoughts about the art of Mark Rothko.  Walking down the street I took pleasure in the memory of Rothko's works.  I've found his work meaningful since I first encountered it in the 70s.  I offer thanks to the advertising executives of the Microsoft Corporation for triggering these positive experiences in my mind right there on a Pasadena street.  I'm sure that's what they had in mind all along.

My point here is that the experience of art is where you find it.   It could happen any old place.

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One thing I saw online recently was Seat Assignment, a series of pictures by artist Nina Katchadourian.  Apparently she was bored on a long airplane flight and began excusing herself to the toilet to take selfies with her cellphone in the style of old Flemish portraits using items from the plane as costume materials.  For example:

Here's an actual 15th-century painting for comparison:

Katchadourian has taken my Rothko experience up a step.  She imitated an ancient artistic portrait style using materials that existed where she happened to be at that moment, in a bathroom 5 miles high.

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Occasionally I pick up random pieces of paper on my walks. Often it turns out to be just trash (which, in a small gesture of civic-mindedness, I carry to a proper receptacle.)  Being near a high school I find a lot of discarded school work this way.

One day I noticed a folded piece of paper which I assumed was going to be more high school homework.  I was surprised to find a printed poem on it.

   Gloves Off

Today I will have salsa
      and wear loud socks.
My tie will clash, a bit,
      with my shirt,
and the watch I choose
      will be seven minutes slow.

One of my pencils
      will be shorter than the others.
I will say "Hello"
      in a louder tone of voice,
read the second section
      of the newspaper first,

and, tonight, approach you
      from the other side,
do that
      before this,

for today
      I have finally discovered
how the mime
      gets out
                  of that box.

Pretty obviously not high school level work.  A surprisingly good poem for a piece of trash.  It seems to be in the voice of a young man making his first very very tentative forays into non-conformity.  Maybe not so young, since the third paragraph reveals him speaking to a significant other and suggests that their lovemaking has been very repetitive.  There was no author mentioned or copyright asserted.  No Google hits.

Later I figured out the source of this poem.

I remembered that several blocks away, on a fence in front of a house, is a small box offering free poetry.  I checked the current offering.  I found the identical page, albeit uncrumpled, with the identical poem.

POETRY
Is Good For You

Fresh Every Friday.

I'm not too happy with being told that poetry is good for me.  That's a bit too preachy for my tastes.  (I'll spare you the rant.)  What I do like is living in a neighborhood where any little piece of paper I find on the ground might turn out to be a thought-provoking work of art.

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Noticing "art" in unexpected places happens to me quite a lot.  I'll often stop to take a picture of whatever catches my eye, often because it reminds me of painting.  I post these shots on my photo blog Mixed Messages.

Rothko paintings have come up in this Mixed Meters post: Cool and Warm, Dylan and Waldo at SFMOMA  (the Rothko is in an animated GIF)

An imitation Rothko came up in this post: The New Yorker and the Hero Composer in Los Angeles (there's also an imitation Jackson Pollock)

MM post: The Plastic Bag as Hat - another modern take on medieval portraiture.

Found objects come up a lot on Mixed Meters - you will see many glove pictures.

Here are some posts which feature found pieces of paper:
Found Cartoon - It Looks at the Atom
Found Cartoon - Fink
Found Cartoon - She's Not a Christian
Old Medical Catalog Scrap
30 Second Spots - A Newspaper in Traffic

Click any picture in this post for an enlargement.

Che's Image

If you're a person who gets livid when confronted with pictures of Che Guevara, please, by all means, leave immediately. Possibly you'd prefer to read about a different murderer.

Mixed Meters has little interest in armed revolution, but I am very interested in THAT photo of Che Guevara, the one originally taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda and now used for just about any purpose imaginable, many of them completely, cravenly capitalistic.

Two previous Mixed Meters' posts have shown variations on the image.  First there was Che's Brand, a review of a book about the picture.  You can see Cherry Guevara candy and Che bubble bath.  Then there was A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale which is the name of a piece I wrote which combines those two themes.  There you can check out the Che credit card and the Che Guevara Rolex ad.

I've been saving more Che images as I come across them.  A few good recent finds have prompted this post.

You can see two famous faces combined with the Che image, one is a composer and the other a muppet.  (I'm pretty sure Frank would not have been pleased but I don't really know what Oscar would say.  Probably that he's just trying to protect Big Bird from Mitt Romney.)

Korda's image seems to inspire artists.  Here are a couple of statuettes and a colorful vintage poster.  Then there's one done with nothing but dice.  It is so low-resolution that the star on the beret doesn't show.  (That would be a good one to click in order to view an enlargement.)

Che Guevara grew up in a middle-class background.  He gave up his privilege to fight for the poor, eventually accomplishing nothing and getting himself killed.  Still, curiously, he seems to speak to a a small slice of middle-class America.  Why else would they display this image?

Here's a cartoon which shows an Occupy protester, probably middle class, wearing the Korda image on a T-shirt as he is being confronted by real poverty right on Wall Street.  Chances are good that the protester is not going to give up his gadget, or much of anything, certainly not his life, to help this panhandler.

I took the last three pictures at random spots around Pasadena.  One shows Che on the back of a prosperous looking Nissan mini-van.  The others are of a small announcement pasted illegally in public spaces promoting a political meeting.  That was back in February 2011.

Remember, it's just an image, a graphic.  But it's one which can still push people's buttons.  The image has a meaning of its own, which, for most people, has long since been divorced from the actual story of the person shown or what he did or why.

Of course in this political silly season, many images (and countless words) are used repeatedly with no relationship to the original meanings.  The origins have been forgotten.  Only the emotions remain.  To bring them out all you have to do is push the button.

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I found the two Occupy related images on Facebook.  The cartoon is by Glenn McCoy.  Most of the others came to my attention through the blog This Isn't Happiness although they originally came from here, here, here or here.  I got the Zappa/Che image from here (starting at 2'26").  You might be able to buy a Zappa/Che t-shirt here.  Find out about the organization behind the red and green stickers here.

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Button Pushing Tags: Che Guevara. . . Occupy Wall Street. . . Alberto Korda

Cool and Warm, Dylan and Waldo at SFMOMA

Early this month I spent an afternoon wandering on my own through downtown San Francisco.   I started with Bánh mì in Little Saigon where I happened upon this stone monster.

Then I walked to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  I was pleased to encounter a large Mark Rothko painting entitled No. 14, 1960.  It was hung in a very appropriate cathedral-like setting.  Rothko's work had been inspirational for me at one time, as had many painters and composers from 1950s New York.

When I resolved to take a picture of the Rothko, however, I encountered a problem: there were lots of people standing in front of the painting, looking at it and at the other works of art.  I waited for a clear shot.  I wanted to capture the work together with the vaulted ceiling.  I never got that chance - but I took lots of snaps anyway.  Here are all of them concatenated into an animated gif.  Pick your favorite.

Next to the canvas was a small sign identifying the work and providing a paragraph of description written by an anonymous art expert.  Quite rightly the author discussed how the considerable interaction of the color fields and varieties of surface texture combine to form a "doorway into another, transcendant reality".  Yes, that seems about right.

The title of the painting, like, say, the title "Symphony No. 5", neither contributes nor detracts from the transference of meaning.  It merely gives an ordinal position in a series of presumably similar works.

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Another painting also caught my attention.  It turned out to be less meaningful and, thanks to its title and its own paragraph of description, considerably funnier.  Here's the picture I took of it.

Using the evaluative scales of "unity and variety" or "repetition and variation", this piece racks up nearly perfect scores of both unity and repetition.  There's not much going on.  People were not paying it much attention.  Getting a clear picture was easy, focusing was hard.

The point-'n-shoot in my pocket couldn't focus because the painting is completely covered in (to my eye) perfectly even flat battleship gray.  Well, there is a small strip at the bottom which is only partially painted in the same flat battleship gray.  Here's a closeup of the small strip at the bottom.

An artist named Brice Marden, someone new to me, painted this work in 1966 or possibly 1986.  He called it The Dylan Painting after Bob Dylan.  A video of him discussing this painting is here.   In the video he talks about the variations in the surface.  Although I got very close to the canvas, I did not notice variations.  He calls the strip at the bottom a "history" of the painting, apparently created with the drips from the top section.  Ah, I hear the merest, faintest echo of an action painting.

This is different from the Rothko in that the title apparently conveys some important aspect of the meaning.  To be perfectly honest, I can't see what a monochromatic canvas has to do with Bob Dylan.  Mixed Meters' three readers know that I don't much like Dylan's music, although I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as a poet.

Here's the little paragraph of description posted next to The Dylan Painting.  (You can see my reflection in the plastic.  Clicking on it might make it easier to read.)

I burst out laughing when I read:

Its mauve-gray surface is simultaneously cool and warm, paralleling Dylan's tough yet soulful music.

In other words we are supposed to accept that this canvas, one with virtually no distinguishing variations whatsoever, is intended to encompass the polar opposite qualities of coolness and warmth at exactly the same time and also that we, following the suggestion of the title, are supposed to understand this as a reference to qualities in the music of a particular popular singer/songwriter (as identified not by the artist but by a commentator), which might be true enough descriptions of the music but because these qualities are subjective and imprecise they are in no way opposites of one another and hence, are not analogues of coolness and warmth in the painting.

In other words, maybe the person writing the description was making a joke for us musicians to enjoy.

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Later I visited a trendient coffee shop on the top floor of the museum.  While waiting in line I casually snapped a picture of the San Francisco skyline out the window.

I was intrigued with the mass of air conditioning equipment on the opposite roof so I zoomed in for a couple shots just of that.  Remember that the point and shoot in my pocket has a very small screen.  Also I was getting mildly annoyed that the line was moving so slowly.

It wasn't until I got home and looked at these pictures on the large computer screen that I realized who I must have been seeing subconsciously in the picture ... Waldo, a famous reclusive character who is neither tough nor soulful.  His face is shaded by a real hat.  That's probably why I didn't recognize him.

These three pictures are uncropped just as I shot them.  And I honestly had no idea at the time that I was taking a picture of anything besides an interesting jumble of pipes and ductwork - a found, functional sculpture by an anonymous artist.

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This post describes just three encounters I had with visual images during my visit to the museum.  My comments reveal certain things about my personal perceptions, preconceptions and expectations of art and art institutions.  When visiting museums, I try to linger in front of the most promising pieces and occasionally break up my tour by finding a comfortable seat for people watching.  Those people, of course, see different things, react in different ways.

I saw plenty of other artworks as well - probably too many.  Some will stick around in my memory until I finally absorb whatever meaning they might have for me.  Others struck me as just witless or stupid headscratchers.

I left with a certain mental confusion.  I had seen and considered jumbles of images and junkyards of ideas, a visual cacophony.   In each new gallery some voice screamed for my attention, shouting yet more ideas and concepts.  These were then swallowed by another din of yet more artworks in the next room.

Outside, I felt relieved by the simplicity of a bustling city street with a stiff breeze and clear blue sky.  I felt no desire to visit an art museum again any time soon.

Dylan Tags: SFMOMA. . . Mark Rothko. . . Brice Marden. . . Bob Dylan. . . Where's Waldo. . . meaning of art

The Plastic Bag As Hat

Sunday I loaded up the car with several decades of old computers, monitors and printer cartridges because I had read online about a monthly Pasadena City College FREE Electronic Waste Collection Event.  NOT!  I guess you can't believe everything you read on the Internet.

At the last moment another, better site steered me to a place that would take my useless electronics (but not the cartridges).  Luckily I did not have to unload all that crap back into the garage.  And I can feel better because, supposedly, it will get recycled.

Also on Sunday the city of Pasadena's ban on plastic bags at grocery stores kicked in. It's amazing how charging me an insignificant dime for a paper bag can change my behavior more quickly than years of appeals to my sense of environmental responsibility. But that's just me. You're probably a better person than I am.

I looked up the text of the law to find out who gets the dime.  I learned that a reusable bag must be capable "of carrying a minimum of 22 pounds 125 times over a distance of at least 175 feet."  21,875 feet is over four miles total.

The bag ban is is the perfect excuse to post this cool picture.  It does make you wonder what other interesting uses people might find for those evil plastic bags.

The photographer is Henrik Kerstens.  Check out his other pictures of the same woman wearing various modern artifacts repurposed as Renaissance headgear.  Definite cleverness.

Compare the plastic bag hat to the one worn by a young lady in this painting by Barthel Bruyn done nearly 500 years ago.

I guess that such a hat would be called a wimple.  Click here for lots of pictures of medieval wimples.

Do you need instructions for making a bonnet out of a bunch of plastic bags?

Other stuff, including a bass guitar, made from plastic bags.

A previous Mixed Meters post about women's clothing in Elizabethan England.  Also dog penises.

Wimple Tags: plastic bags. . . laws. . . recycling. . . Henrik Kerstens. . .

A Brief History of John Baldessari

John Baldessari is a famous artist.  He taught at Cal Arts while I was a student there in the seventies.  Of course I never met him.  Nor do I even remember seeing his works back then ... although I must have, of course.  He is now respected, super successful and much honored - so the works I can't remember must have been pretty damn good.

A couple days ago I encountered an LA Times webpage entitled Tom Waits talks up artist John Baldessari in six-minute video.  As I happened to have six extra minutes at that moment, I watched it.   Fun stuff. Here's the YouTube link:  A Brief History of John Baldessari .

Waits was apparently chosen because Baldessari likes his voice (and also possibly because the two came from the same hometown.)  More than the voice, it's Waits' dry, wry delivery style that contributes so much.  The video itself is a high energy assemblage: the artist as a talking head in his studio, pictures of the artist, his artworks, his stuff, places he's been and lots of moving text and graphic effects.

One quick bit of text (30 seconds in) says that Baldessari has been called "the Godfather of Conceptual Art" but with a telling, sophomoric, hysterical extra on-screen letter F which is conspicuously crossed out.  Guy humor.  Blink and you'll miss it.

(Go ahead, search Google for the phrase "Godfather of Conceptual Fart" to find out if anyone ever really said that about John Baldessari.)

The people who produced this video, no one I've heard of, are credited on the YouTube page.

directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (http://gosupermarche.com/)

edited by Max Joseph (http://www.maxjoseph.com/)

written by Gabriel Nussbaum (http://www.bankstreetfilms.com)

cinematography by Magdalena Gorka (http://magdalenagorka.com/) and Henry Joost

produced by Mandy Yaeger & Erin Wright

These people are really the reason I enjoyed it so much.  The bouncy pacing, witty writing and irreverant attitude combine to be lots more interesting than John Baldessari's art or Tom Waits' voice.   Rossini and Bizet don't hurt either.  I especially like a great new cadential chord in William Tell (at 1'50").

There's also an apparent reason for the Clint Eastwood reference: this video was produced for a LACMA gala where Baldessari and Eastwood were both feted by rich and famous people, possibly ones with short attention spans.

Later in the film we learn that "John Baldessari believes that every young artist should know three things":

1. Talent is cheap.
2. You have to be possessed which you can't will.
3. Being at the right place at the right time.

That sounds to me like damn good advice, although not great grammar.  All three points ring true in my ears today.  In fact, I wish I had heard that advice as a young composer, like, you know, back when I was studying at Cal Arts.

Of course, maybe I did hear it.  And I just can't remember now.

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A recent MM post about another LACMA art project: Floating Rocks.

If you prefer your art in the streets rather than in the museums by artists who don't allow their picture to be taken, here are two MM posts: Street Art Now and Then and Banksy Speaks.

Conceptual Fart Tags: John Baldessari. . . Tom Waits. . . video biography. . . LACMA

Floating Rocks

Los Angeles has been witnessing the movements of a large rock.  A boulder which is supposed to weigh 340 tons.  I wonder how they weighed it, not that it matters.

At a reported cost of $10,000,000 (I calculate that's roughly $1 per ounce, considerably more than first class postage) the boulder just finished a very slow, very public journey through urban Los Angeles, picking up not moss but publicity as it moved towards the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Public relations-wise the museum must figure the ten mil is money well spent.  We are told this is one of the largest objects ever moved.  A feat of engineering to be sure.  Lots of good pictures of the moving rock here.

Once at its destination, the boulder will be suspended in mid-air.

No, not really.  It will be installed above a trench through which people can walk.  The rock will only seem to be float.  Giving it the appearance of floating is, I guess, what makes this project art.  It will be called Levitated Mass and it is the concept of artist Michael Heizer.

Here's some real art in which a large rock actually does float high in the air.  It's the painting by Rene Magritte entitled The Castle in the Pyrenees.  (click it for an enlargement)

I saw this painting in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.  I was there in 1987 with my Aunt Marion and Uncle Ben.  In spite of rules against doing just that, they photographed me standing next to it.   I would love to post that picture here but, alas, I can't find it.  It is lost in the decades of my accumulated crap.  Maybe the snapshot will turn up someday.

Here is another floating rock in the Middle East.  It seems that some people in that part of the world believe that large boulders can float in midair.  It's probably a Photoshop trick, don't you know.  Still, the mother and child speaking in this video seem pretty much convinced.

The best example of gravity defying stonework, however, comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the original 1980 BBC radio version.

This happens in the fourth episode of the "secondary" phase of programs.  Arthur Dent and his companions Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android land their probability-propelled spaceship in a mysterious white cave with smooth walls.  The cave turns out to be the Nutramatic cup.

Arthur falls from the cave and finds out about its origin from a bird-person on whose back he very improbably falls.  Here's the passage:

Arthur: "It looks like … like … just like a plastic cup hanging in the sky.  It's about a mile long."
Bird: "Looks like plastic.  Carved from solid marble there."
Arthur: "But the weight of it.  What's supporting it?  What keeps it there?"
Bird: "Art."
Arthur: "Art?"
Bird: "It's only part of the main statue.  Fifteen miles high. It's directly behind us but I'll circle round in a moment."
Arthur: "Fifteen miles high?"
Bird: "Very impressive from up here with the morning sun gleaming on it."
Arthur: "But what is it.  What's worth a statue 15 miles high?"
Bird: "It was of great symbolic importance to our ancestors.  It's called Arthur Dent Throwing the Nutramatic Cup."
Arthur: "Sorry, what did you say?"
Bird: "There.  What do you think of it?"

Not enough space or time in this post to explain the entire origin story of the statue of Arthur throwing the cup.  It's quality Douglas Adams.  There's the "Shoe Event Horizon", the Lintilla clones and the Dolmansaxlil Galactic Shoe Corporation publicity film.  Great stuff.

Meanwhile, back here in Los Angeles we will soon have our own floating rock, Levitated Mass.  As mentioned, the rock will be held up by a contraption of concrete and steel. Here's a video showing the trench in its early stages:

The Los Angeles rock will, clearly, not be held up by "art" as Magritte's castle or the Nutramatic cup are. Nor will it float because of any sort of religious faith. It will appear to float by virtue of some sort of optical illusion.  Shortly Los Angeles will discover just how good that illusion is.

It is fair to wonder what the illusion will mean.  I assume that like most art this piece is supposed to have some sort of meaning.  The word monumental is used quite a lot.  Levitated Mass is a monument, I guess.  Monuments are supposed to memorialize things.  And Levitated Mass does.  Here's a quote from a LACMA press release:

It is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Daly, former chair of LACMA’s board of trustees and an influential advocate for children and the arts in Los Angeles.

Nancy died in 2010 and Levitated Mass was conceived of in 1968.  So Nancy Daly is not an intrinsic part of the artistic experience.  She's someone important to the funding.  That's arts reality.

The press release also informs us:

Taken whole, Levitated Mass speaks to the expanse of art history—from ancient traditions of creating artworks from monolithic stones, to modern forms of abstract geometries and cutting-edge feats of engineering.

Ah! So maybe Levitated Mass is a modern day Stonehenge or  Chichen Itza - but one without any astronomical relationship.  That's because you can't see many stars from the Wilshire district.

Maybe it's an abstract geometric work - one which will inspire onlookers to consider its aesthetic form and artistic composition.  Probably not.  It's mostly just a found object - a random, if very large, rock that the artist convinced certain powerful people would look good from underneath.

If nothing else, Levitated Mass will cause us to wonder what we might have done with an extra $10,000,000.

Mostly it will become a conundrum for passers-by who will ask "What's that rock doing there?"  Maybe rock climbers will use it for practice.  It will also be a great target for taggers.

Maybe someday, hundred of years from now, when the steel and concrete under the rock have crumbled, and the people of LA have forgotten the spectacle of moving it through the streets and no one even remembers that LACMA ever existed, and if it hasn't sunk into the tar pits, someone will rediscover the art of stone sculpture and carve faces in the rock.

Those faces could be recognizable ones from late 20th and early 21st century Los Angeles:  faces most likely to survive in popular culture for generation after generation.  I suggest Mickey Mouse, Michael Jackson, Kim Kardashian and O.J. Simpson.

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Here's Eagle Rock, an inspiring natural fixture quite near to Pasadena.  The rock doesn't float in the air - but it reminds us of animals who do.  It would cost much more than $10 mil to move.

The picture came from here.

Rolling Rock Tags: Levitated Mass. . . Michael Heizer. . . LACMA. . . Rene Magritte. . . Douglas Adams. . . big money art. . . Los Angeles monuments

Designer Drug Jewelry by Susan Braig

Saturday afternoon Leslie and I headed north from Pasadena to an event called Art on Millionaire's Row - an arts and crafts show at the Altadena Library. At one time Altadena, nestled into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, was a gathering place for the wealthy, back when a million was real money.

We knew about the show because our friend Susan Braig, decked out in a white lab coat, was showing her jewelry designs. Susan makes decorative jewelry using discarded drugs. Here's her own description:

My jewelry was inspired after paying nearly $500 for my first chemo-therapy anti-nausea pills, which seemed more like precious gems!

My breast cancer is in remission (5 years), but my debts metastasized because my insurance policy did not cover many of my treatments. Now I have to peddle drugs to pay my medical bills.

The metaphor, "Health care in this country has become a luxury item" evolved into this collection of conceptual jewelry.

The picture is of Leslie and Susan.  The small print on the sign reads:

I have to sell drugs to pay my medical bills!  Health Care should not be a luxury item!

In fact, as Leslie was paying, Susan said "Now I can pay for my last office visit with my Internist."

Last March the L.A. Times ran an article about Susan.  Better yet, they made a video about her.  I recommend watching - you can see Susan at work while she tells her story and get a real sense of the joy she takes from this work.

Here are pictures of Susan's designs which Leslie purchased. The first earrings are Ducolax stool softener, the second are 10 mg. diazapam and the little green pill in the pendant is 2.5 mg. Coumadin.  (Click on pictures for enlargements.)

More from Susan's brochure:

Patient Information

Warnings: Keep out of reach of children!

Directions: All items are wearable and denatured (sealed, glued and no longer usable as drugs or medical supplies)

FRAGILE: Treat with care. Store in a dark cool place, preferably in pill bottle. Avoid prolong sun, heat and moisture.

Dosage: Do not ingest orally, only aesthetically and conceptually.

Side Effects: May induce irony.

Susan may be reached at ssbraig "at" earthlink.net

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Another Mixed Meters post about a creative friend's brush with cancer: Skying with Tom Broadhead

Drug Tags: Susan Braig. . . designer jewelry. . . drugs. . . high cost health care

Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments

Here's a quote I read a long time ago in a musician's union newspaper.  To me it seemed obviously true.

Play for the masses, eat with the classes.  Play for the classes, eat with the masses.

In other words, a musician who creates for an elite audience (the classes) should not expect to get rich.  But a musician with millions of listeners (the masses) could earn a lot of money.  Here's a list of the 10 richest musicians.  (Number one was a Beatle once, number two is a Country and Western star.)

These days even the richest musician doesn't have a Billion Dollars.  Few creative types accumulate that much wealth - J.K. Rowling just barely makes the billionaire list.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg qualify.  (Here's a list of ALL the world's billionaires.)

A fundamental tenant of capitalism is that the people with the talent and passion for making money are allowed to gather as much of it as they can.  Once they have it, they're free to do anything they want with it.  Some choose to support arts institutions.  Museums (a category which includes orchestras and opera companies), even the ones nominally supported by public money, would perish without big chunks of private cash from people with money to burn.  Nothing new here.  This has been going on since the invention of rich people.  Top down funding of the arts is a fact of life.

Here in Los Angeles, one name dominates art philanthropy - Eli Broad.  In his career he has made not one but two piles of money, first in real estate and then in finance.  He's number 173 on that list of the world's richest humans.  These days Eli spends his time giving his money away in the realms of science and education as well as art.

Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money.  Here's a New York Times interactive map showing locations of his munificence in L.A.

• He gave millions to rescue MOCA.  
• He was instrumental in getting Disney Hall built.   
• His dollars seeded the now largely forgotten L.A. Opera Ring cycle and festival.  
• He donated money for a building at LACMA which is named after him.
• He funded a performance space in Santa Monica which is also named after him.   
• The ultimate Broad art museum is planned for Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.  

Last year the New York Times described Eli Broad:

Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad. Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Recently the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Eli Broad in which he discussed his art patronage.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Eli Broad is not known for being effusive, not even when talking about one of his greatest passions: collecting contemporary art. The billionaire philanthropist generally seems more comfortable talking about museum buildings than about the artworks that go inside them.

Since the arts community in Los Angeles will undoubtedly feel the effect of Eli Broad's money for generations to come, I feel like it's a good idea to pay some heed to what he talks about.  (Remember, at Mixed Meters quotes are always in purple.  All the following quotes in this post are directly from Eli Broad.) 

His stated motivations for collecting art and building museums surprise me.  I guess I expected him to mouth nostrums about the transformative power of art or pablum about making great art accessible to everyone.  I couldn't find anything like that, although it's doubtful he would actually disagree with such common wisdom.  Instead he talks a lot about hanging out with artists. Here's a quote from an interview with Charlie Rose:

I enjoy contemporary art because it's the art of our times.  I love the artists.  I find it invigorating to spend time with artists.  They have a different view of society than most business people do.

The next three quotes are from the Times article.  

My first career was in public accounting, ... so if I look at a spreadsheet I understand it quickly.  Numbers are hard and fast.  But it's a very different process looking at a work of art or visiting with an artist.  It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

The reliance on numbers makes me wonder why Eli doesn't seem to have much interest in contemporary music - which, of course, is also "the art of our times".  Music is constructed largely out of numbers - rhythms, intervals, scales are all reducible to numbers.  But understanding a spreadsheet (i.e. money) and understanding a symphony (i.e. art) require different forms of perception.   I also wonder whether he finds it invigorating to hang out with composers.

He's clearly a practical man.  When asked how much he has spent on his art collection, he replied:

I don't know the exact number, whether it's $200 or $400 million, but it's probably closer to the latter.  If you ask me what it's worth, I've heard numbers that approach $2 billion, which blows my mind because I'm seeing all that happens then is that our insurance costs go up.

By any measure, he's a great success.  Here's how he described what it means to be a "successful" collector:

If I had to do it over again, I would buy some of the great work that I saw people like David Geffen buy several years ago for what I thought was an awful lot of money - like the Johns 'Target' he had.  I was too disciplined then.  I didn't have the money. ... Well, I had the money, but I wasn't prepared to spend $10 million for a great painting. ... To be a successful bidder means you're willing to pay more than anyone else in the world.  I don't know if I would call that a success.

This L.A. Times article gave impressions of what Eli Broad's vision for art in Los Angeles really is.  Clearly it involves two things: the actual monetary value of the objects which he has acquired combined with placing those objects on display for others to envy and enjoy.  The fact that these valuable objects of art might be culturally meaningful in some non-monetary sense, if indeed they are, doesn't seem terribly important to him. 

Eli Broad has used his money to serve the community of Los Angeles according to this vision.  Los Angeles ought to honor him in some way for that service.  In olden days great men, generally war heroes, were honored with statues astride a horse.  These days government doesn't have money to commission statues - even if there were artists who could recognizably execute such a piece.  Instead of art, governments have resorted to renaming streets or intersections after deserving gentlemen.  Los Angeles could honor Eli Broad by renaming Broadway, all twenty-some miles of it, after him.  It wouldn't cost a penny.  We would just start pronouncing the street name differently.

But great men of contemporary Los Angeles, those with sinful quantities of money, want more than a street name.  They want art museums with their names attached.  These days hardly anyone would remember Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, J. Paul Getty or Henry Huntington were it not for their eponymous galleries.  Decades hence who will remember Eli Broad except as just another one of those old rich guys who could afford to buy himself an art museum?

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Here's an article listing other living billionaires who own their own art museums.

Here's an L.A.Times article about similarities between Norton Simon and Eli Broad.

Here's a timeline of art history - mostly museums - in Los Angeles, 1927-1999.  It contains this fascinating tidbit:  

1951 The Los Angeles City Council decrees that modern art is Communist propaganda and bans its public display, but the ordinance has little effect.

A related MM post about art collecting: Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things

Related MM posts about rich people:

• House and Wooster and Income Disparity
• Prostitution, Obscenity and California Politics
• In Which Wealth Has Its Privileges

The one previous MM reference to Eli Broad which also mentions monuments.

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Here's a tribute to Eli Broad which I found on YouTube.  It's a music video which features a singing Eli Broad lookalike.  There are no credits or any indication of exactly what the reasons for this particular encomium for Mr. Broad might be.  The tune is hackneyed and repetitive but still somewhat Randy Newman-esque.  Watch for yourself.

Here's a Flickr page with still shots from this production.

There are other related videos: an invite to Eli's birthday party and a behind the scenes video from same:

Enjoy.


Broad Tags: Eli Broad. . . art collectors. . . art museums. . . monuments