Project 3

I used Airelle's posting. I originally attempted Karishma's, but was not able to get the results I wanted, so I went with something simpler.

Homework 6

"Write what you know" often leads to terrible stories because it doesn't necessarily mean there's a correlation between how much you know it and how much you like it. If you're not 100% engaged and enthusiastic about the topic at hand, the more you write about it/work on it, the more it will begin to feel like a tedious chore. The best stories are the ones from a place of love, not the ones that are simply the most technically efficient. Being a COMM Major can help lead to good forms of storytelling because many of the required classes have a form of leeway into what you are able to write about. The English classes in particular are good at this.

I'm actually surprised at the fact that I agree to a degree with Kleon about utilizing non-digital mediums to help expedite the creative process. On the surface I didn't find myself aligning with it, but I was able to draw on past experiences and find an example that works in that favor: I've written music review on the side for fun for many years, but over the past few years, the number of them have been far less frequent. I figured out that a large reason for that was because when I sit down to write them in a Word doc, they're so long that they often amount to a five+ page paper equivalent, and subsequently in a Pavlovian manner, my mind began to disassociate the fun aspect of why I did them in the first place and instead mold them in with college essays that I put off and generally dread writing.

Which leads nicely into the subject of procrastination. The Jessica Hische quote at the beginning of chapter 6 is exactly what I've long said about myself: I can do anything in the world as long as I'm avoiding school work. I to this day procrastinate most school work, and it's something that I try to work on but I am rarely able to quell.

Project 3.5 (Template)

So here's my template, a black and white version of the Los Angeles Lakers alternate logo. I... tried.

Here's the template I used if you want a better sense of what it looks like.

Homework 5

For the first batch of questions, I'll give short answers to each of them.
1) I decide if something is worth "stealing" if I know I can make it different enough to call my own, and good enough to justify that feeling.
2) Seeing as how postmodernism tends to reject the notion of old rules of art from previous generations, the first two chapters seemed to buck the notion that art must be fully original. Kleon is saying the opposite; the since that's impossible, embrace taking from others.
3) "No idea's original" is actually freeing to think about it, especially since I have always worried far too much about being original in that regard. It's good to understand and accept the natural limitations that come with that mindset, and instead to feel compelled to study those I admire.
4) As Kleon stated in the text, hoarders collect a variety of junk because they feel they have to, while artists collect only those things that interest them.
5) Duchamp meant that it is easier to study and model after one person who you admire and find intriguing rather than try to take on that person's form of art as a whole all at once. It will be far too overwhelming to be successful at.
6) Smith and Mapplethorpe were friends who decided to move to New York, and became artists by simply pretending to be artists. "Fake it 'till you make it" certainly worked for them because their efforts to succeed by merely acting as if they already had garnered them successful results.
7) Practice is to observe something, learn from it, and re-apply it in your own voice. Plagiarism is blatantly stealing someone else's work and claiming it to be your own.
8) Much like #7, imitation is directly copying something/someone you saw, while emulating is taking what you have seen and putting your own unique spin on it. ("Remixing" is another way to describe it as Kleon referenced many times throughout the first two chapters.

One of my favorite creative heroes is Conan O'Brien, and the biggest reason I have enjoyed his work so much over the years is because he manages to do very dumb, absurd comedy brilliantly and without a trace of intellectual superiority. One of my favorite examples of this is when doing audio commentary for a documentary about him, and they see a shot of his sidekick Andy Richter wearing a white cowboy hat, O'Brien quips that Richter looks like the guy who failed to protect Lee Harvey Oswald from getting shot by Jack Ruby. It's such a silly joke, but it takes a creative genius to be able to think of that on the spot, and to do so while laughing with someone rather than use it to displaying their mental prowess. O'Brien has talked about many of his comedy idols growing up including Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Groucho Marx. Marx's sensibilities rub off on O'Brien because he often acts very vaudevillian or physical in his routine, and interestingly enough, Kleon specifically referenced O'Brien's relations to Carson and Letterman in the book.

Being a COMM major at GMU lends itself to being lost in the field, as I'm willing to guess that a solid 90% of the student body is doing the same thing (Kidding...I think.) But the key for me has been trying to find my own voice out of that group, and try to take my angle on it (Broadcasting, preferably sports broadcasting) and carve my own niche out of it. I also have to learn to not be afraid to fail as Kleon mentions in the book, because if I don't, then I'll get nowhere in life.

Homework 4

For the record, I generally find myself siding with appropriation and fair use. I find the relatively recent trend of over-litigiousness from certain major corporations (Looking at you, Disney), or many record companies to be burdensome, and frankly annoying. When certain YouTubers are being forced to edit audio because a song playing in the background, or even properly licensed to play in a video game, might cause the site's auto-detector to shut it down, it's gone too far. When creators of The Simpsons mentioned that it is much harder to get the go-ahead from Fox on song parodies, which have long been established as an exception to copyright, due to concerns over legal battles from the originators, it's gone too far.

Having said that, Richard Prince absolutely sucks. To the nth degree. What he does is not only plagiarism thinly veiled as art, but he's potentially jeopardizing the future for those who have legitimate connections to the concept of Fair Use. Prince doesn't even try (Relatively speaking). Taking well-crafted photographs from a photographer and putting a silly blue guitar over it is not original art. At best, it's lazy, and at worst, it's stealing, and in neither case should it be considered art. None of the pictures shown in the various articles (The New York Times one specifically) showed any sort of legitimate effort to change Cariou's original photography, nor is there any real artistic merit to it. Neither is taking somebody else's Instagram posts that you left a creepy comment on and hanging it on a damn wall.

To me, Prince is doing nothing but hurting concept of Fair Use by selfishly profiting from others hard work. Going back to Disney, if you wanted to take the copyrighted image of Mickey Mouse, and demonstrate that you feel Disney is evil by creatively incorporating it into a poster or a background, then I am in full support of it. In fact, I encourage it. But pretending to make the same point by taking a copyrighted image of Mickey Mouse, going into Photoshop, drawing a vaudevillian mustache on him and then saying "Give me money" is a slap in the face of  anyone who considers themselves an artist (Which, for the record, I absolutely do not). I'm willing to bet that at least half of the people in this class could do what Prince did to those Cariou photos in about ten minutes. Leaving a creepy comment on a woman's Instagram page? Hell, I could do that. And it doesn't help that Prince behaves like an ass. If you're going to be a dismissive dickwad in court when asked a simple question of how you changed someone else's and subsequently banking millions of dollars by doing so, then you should absolutely lose your right to claim Fair Use. So to summarize my position on Richard Prince, in case I hadn't made it clear, he's a tool.

Also, this is why I often don't understand art. Who the hell's paying $90,000 for a blown up picture of someone's Instagram photo with a creeper in his mid-60's leaving a cringy comment? How about saving yourself that money by just leaving the comment yourself and bringing the screenshot to Kinko's for a substantially lower rate?

Project 2

During the blizzard back in January, my friend Brandon took a picture of me and my friend Michael as we walked down an empty street going to Brandon's house. I loved the picture, and made it my cover photo on Facebook, in part because it struck me as similar to the cover for Eminem's Recovery, one of my favorite albums of all time. So when this project came up, those two photos immediately sprang to mind.
Initially, I considered editing out Michael from the picture, but then I realized that his presence actually helped the concept of the photo, as he symbolized family and friendship that I value dearly. I already had the Eminem photo, which symbolized my love of music (And he is my favorite music artist). I then looked for a picture of Shaquille O'Neal to symbolize my love of sports, but alas, there were no good full body shots of him from behind, so I instead went with Barry Bonds, my favorite baseball player of all time. I finished it out with a picture of Conan O'Brien, who symbolizes my love of comedy (I haven't missed a show of his since early-2008, for some perspective). It also helped that the picture takes place during a massive snowstorm, something I genuinely love the same now at 23 that I did when I was 13. I faded the three additions out a bit to show that their presence resides within me on a spiritual/mental basis, whereas Michael is fully filled because he symbolizes who and what I value physically.
Notes:
I struggled to shortcut and add snow to the layers, so I decided to simply add the snow manually through the brush tool. That was more tedious than anything.
I really struggled to add shadows. I sort of got one for Bonds, and I got a teensy bit for Eminem, but the copy tool was not cooperating with me.
O'Brien's source picture cut off most of his feet, so I compromised by placing him near where the snow banks on the road had built up.
In the original picture, I was carrying Brandon's cooler. I figured it would be too distracting (And I don't drink anyway), so I edited it out.

Overall, I'm actually pleasantly surprised with how this turned out, since I have no experience/am awful with Photoshop, but I felt that this worked conceptually the way I envisioned it. And if nothing else, I can be proud of the amount of hours of work I put into this.