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A friend of mine was kidding me for saying I liked Dragonball Z, a much serialized, much butchered anime series that runs infinitely on the Cartoon Network on cable. I was trying to think what possible justification I had. Then I remembered King Kai. He's a sort of Yoda character that teaches battle tactics. He lives on a tiny planet in another dimension, which you get to by traversing Snake Way, which looks like the Great Wall of China on the back of a snake hundreds of miles long, twisting through the clouds. See the three people standing on the grass in the center of the planet? Each weighs 700 pounds in its enormous gravity. That's why it's such a good training place: if you can move at all you get stronger. Kai himself has blue skin, catfish whiskers, cockroach antennae, and dresses in priestly garb--with little hipster shades. He talks like a cross between Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd, and constantly tells terrible jokes, like "You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish." He's just the greatest!--and reason enough in my book to tune into the series. He's the type of "what the hell were they thinking?" character that pops up only in anime.
The apparent lethargy of the New York art world has less to do with 9/11, or even the Bush economy, than the shift of galleries from Soho to Chelsea, which, as I wrote in the New Art Examiner in 1997, was a calculated move to create an artist-free Brasilia for collectors (among other things, of course). The dealers are now reaping what they sowed in the form of an overall diminished sense of energy. Chelsea is a giant outlet mall, with huge spaces all apparently designed by the same person, providing festival-circuit artists with a place to strut their stuff in NY before moving to the next Biennale.
Increasingly I'm convinced that the action--yes, it's come down to this--is in artists' studios. You get to see a lot of work and hear the best explanation of it, before the ideas get turned to hash by a condescending or airheaded Manhattan gallerist. True, you don't get always get the nice white box, but c'mon, we're pros here! These, then, are notes from a few recent visits I did. Coming soon: the rest of this post, where I discuss recent visits to four NY studios. I'm still working on it, and I confess, the only reason I'm putting in this teaser is because I wanted some text between the images in the preceding and following posts, for layout reasons. That's the freedom I have, here in the blogosphere.
Check out these designs showing you how to make the entire Pokémon menagerie out of beads. The artist is Jason. (Above: Magneton.) The drawings are great, lo-fi patternmaking, and the site is a fine example of Dirt Style design. While the above image's suggestion of computer pixelation is largely unintentional, artist/musician/programmer Joe Beuckman pushes the connection explicitly in his beadworks. The image below, captioned "Karate Kicking Ensues," is from a series based on scenes from Datasoft Presents Bruce Lee, programmed by Ron J Fortier, 1983 (graphic design by Kelly Day).
As we near the end of the Web's First Decade of Widespread Use, it was only a matter of time before connoisseurship of bad web pages really got off the ground. Herewith I recommend Dirt Style 101, a vicious, take no prisoners critique hilariously masquerading as a home design course. Sample hint: "Dirt style projects must be nasty. Think 4th generation VHS dubs, Xerox copies made with a cartridge low on toner, post rap Vanilla Ice, or any car made in the '80s that ran on diesel. Now translate that into Web Design." I said the critique is vicious, but Professor C. Dirt also obviously has affection for the maimed, moronic, or just slightly off web pages he links to. If you've ever designed a web page, look at your peril! You'll probably find an example that looks like something you've done.