Graffitti

I like the idea of street art. Graffiti is an awful word, It screams criminal, vandalism, lack of artistry. I like the kind of street artists who have some respect for peoples property. If there's a building that's about to be demolished, they'll do a piece on it. If it's obvious that the owners won't appreciate it, they'll leave it. It's common sense to me. Why spend your time on something that'll be painted over in a couple of days? I don't understand why some get such a perverse pleasure out of scrawling their illegible tags in a toilet cubicle or scratching it into the side of a bus. Nothing is going to result from that. But I suppose they aren't really worried about that. They aren't artists in the least. I'd love to see the street art in Melbourne some day. It's now a major attraction I hear. The artists kind of have this etiquette or code. They won't do a work over something they can't beat for example. I love the spontaneity of street-art. The anonymity of it. I'd love to start a conversation on a wall and watch it grow. Or maybe a visual conversation.

Was the shirt intentionally ironic?

ha ha ha!

I think it's those exciting attributes (spontaneity, adventurousness, liberty, free-thinking) that attract me to that kind of art. Not just street-art but installations, public works, projects. I have this three part documentary that was aired on ABC on my iPod. It's called 'not quite art' and it's about all of the types of art that, well, aren't quite art as most people know it. Interesting things like abandoned warehouses that are used as gallery spaces and a secret room behind a bookcase inside a commercial building where people can come and hang out and have drinks. Things like that really excite me. There was this project started by an australian girl (melbourne It think) named gabrielle de vietri called 'the ideas catalogue'. She collected ideas from people all over the world for artistic projects, social experiments and the like. People who buy the catalogue can have a blast reading the ideas and if they wish to carry one out, they can buy it as intellectual property. There was one idea suggesting that you could get as many friends as it would take to rent out every book in a chosen library at the same time. For that week they could use the empty library as a social space and at the end of the week, return all the books.

Ideas catalogue

The host interviewed one of the creators of of a bubblegum trading card series called "uncollectable art". Each card featured a project or work that was 'uncollectable'.  They each had rankings based on different stats such as difficulty, interest, illegality, ugliness (this actually improved the ranking) and so forth. One I can remember off the top of my head is a kind-of guided tour about weeds. This couple set up an unmaintained park area to showcase the various species of weeds growing there. When you arrive they hand you a cassette player with headphones, a glass of champagne and off you go learning about weeds. It made me think that maybe they were trying to point out how much diversity and variety there is in something as insignificant as an overgrown field. Either that or they were just enthusiastic botanists.