Below are some resources about the “Chinese Painting Villages”, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, which employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings. The information below may be ‘of interest’ to arts educators and/or students, particularly those studying painting. I am grateful to Clement Valla for awakening me to this important trend.

For those not familiar with this phenomenon, here are the basic facts:

• About 8,000-10,000 “painting workers” are employed in a single village (actually, an urban district) to produce more than 60% of the world’s paintings. (And I’ll bet you thought the world’s largest population of artists was in Berlin or Brooklyn!)
• Some factories specialize in reproducing famous Western masterpieces; others specialize in creating literally thousands of identical units (for hotels, cruise ships, and retail outlets like WalMart, K-Mart, Ikea, etc.); and other factories specialize in painting custom reproductions of family portraits, pets, wedding photos, and the like.
• Commissioning a custom painting is done with digital images, via email attachments and PayPal, and takes about 10-14 days including shipping. Prices range from as little as $10 to as much as $1000 (for a high-quality forgery); cost factors include the size, thickness of paint, and presence of (for example) people and/or portrait faces. For a painting whose dimensions are 50cm x 40cm, one might expect to pay $30-100 US.

A painting speed competition in Dafen.

Newspaper articles and other journalism.
(Lots of good information here.)

• James Fallows, “Workshop of the world, fine arts division.” Atlantic Monthly, 12/19/2007.
• James Fallows, “A little more about the ‘art factory village’ of Dafen“. Atlantic Monthly, 12/20/2007.
• Le-Min Lim, “China’s Factory for Fake Art Tries to Beat Slump“. Bloomberg News, 9/24/2008.
• Evan Osnos, “Chinese village paints by incredible numbers“. Chicago Tribune, 2/13/2007.
• Martin Paetsch, “Van Gogh From the Sweatshop“. Spiegel Online, 08/23/2006.

This 7-minute YouTube video provides an excellent overview of the painting economy in Dafen village:

Example painting factories online.
(There are many others.)

• Book530
• Dafen Art
• Gold Apple Art

Western art approaches to the phenomenon.
(Interesting work which addresses this trend critically, conceptually, and/or politically.)

• Michael Mandiberg. In memory of the man in front of the tanks (Tiananmen 20 years later). 2005-2009 [More at Flickr]. Mandiberg commissioned paintings of the famous Tienanmen photograph, obtaining results which were censored or modified in a variety of ways.
• REGIONAL OFFICE design group. Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen. 2007. REGIONAL OFFICE commissioned self-portraits of the Dafen artists themselves.
• Alan Butler. The Image Factory, 2009.
  Butler commissioned a painting of the first photograph above (of a painting competition in Dafen village, from Spiegel Online).
• Clement Valla:
  • Paintings from Wushipu, 2009.
  • 100USD-90USD-65USD, 2008.
  • “Original Copies” (RISD MFA Thesis, PDF format), 2009, pp. 24-59.
    Valla commissioned a variety of experiments, including the creation of painted feedback loops, open-ended instructional paintings, and paintings corrupted by digital transmission errors. His thesis provides an excellent discussion of the aesthetic and ethical issues.

Outsourced oil painting is the new “digital output”.

I should perhaps briefly explain my interest in this phenomenon. Of course, there is some very provocative conceptual art which investigates and appropriates these painting resources, such as that by the artists linked above. This is challenging and (in my opinion) necessary work. From my standpoint as an arts educator, however, I do not believe it is adequate for students to be made aware of such clever projects in blogs like this one. Instead, I believe it is essential to directly expose students — particularly those who consider themselves to be painters — to the actual use of this inexpensive, new, internet-enabled “means of production”, and thereon to crucial aesthetic and ethical questions about authenticity, labor, and the cultural logic of mass customization in today’s global economy. They must cause one to be made, once, themselves. They must understand the implications, by being implicated in the process.

Most of my undergraduate students self-identify as painters. Many of them harbor charming ideas about the “aura” of original paintings, which allows them to distinguish their works from “banal”, machine-produced prints. But too few are aware of this extraordinary revolution in their own trade, in which the majority of the world’s paintings are now mass-produced by a superscaled “human machine”. And very few, if any, yet appreciate that the cost of having a JPEG image skillfully painted in China is roughly the same price as having it printed on the HP Designjet in our school’s Digital Print Lab — or that the process of commissioning such a painting over email, is barely more complicated than pressing Command-P. (Perl script, anyone?) I am convinced that our young painters must confront these facts directly. This coming September, in my introductory Electronic Media Studio class at Carnegie Mellon, I’ll be exposing my freshmen Art students to this, in their first week at university — when their Photoshop assignments (a “fiction or forgery” collage, or a “retouched self-portrait”, perhaps) are “printed out” (surprise!) in hand-applied Chinese oils. I’m hoping this will be an eye-opening introduction to art school, and one that makes them think hard about what it means to be a painter in 2009. Stay tuned!

“When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.” — Yoko Ono, ‘To the Wesleyan People’, 1966. [I'm grateful to Dawn Weleski for finding this quote].

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast between two particular works which are bookends for advanced uses of the professional orchestra.

Consider, first, the performance of John Cage’s famous silent piece, 4′33″, by the full BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London in January 2004. Cage’s work

“was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. Although commonly perceived as ‘four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence’, the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.” [Wikipedia].

[An additional copy can be found on YouTube here.]

In contrast to this is Sam Taylor-Wood’s video work, Sigh, in which a composition by Anne Dudley is performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Or, apparently performed, as the orchestra, minus their actual instruments, mime the piece precisely as their muscles remember it. In the video installation, which premiered in October 2008, the music is heard as a backdrop. A spokesperson for Taylor-Wood states:

“In a dark, rundown studio, the members of the orchestra sit in their everyday clothes. They start to play a piece of music, sawing and blowing the empty spaces where the instruments should be. Although the music is clear and audible, the absence of the instruments renders the sound oddly incorporeal. It’s a private, ghostly performance.” [London Evening-Standard]

Taylor-Wood’s work follows on the heels of her similar (and remarkable) project Prelude in Air, which focuses on the re-enactment of a solo cello work. Both videos evoke a form of sympathetic synaesthesia (or vicarious kinesthesia, if you will) in which the mind of the viewer fills in the missing instrument, an illusion which could only be made possible through the use of consummately professional performers.

And so we have two unusually intense works:

• Cage’s 4′33″ at the Barbican: All of the instruments, none of the sound; and
• Taylor-Wood’s Sigh: None of the instruments, all of the sound.

Dear friends, if you’re in the Pittsburgh area from June 4-6, come enjoy this exhibition I’ve curated as part of the NIME 2009 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. A brochure with more information is available here: nime2009_installations.pdf (3.4Mb).

INTERACTIVE SOUND INSTALLATIONS
An Exhibition at the Ninth Conference on
New Interfaces for Musical Expression
http://www.nime2009.org/directions.php

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
June 4-6, 2009, 12-6pm
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Purnell Center for the Arts, 5000 Forbes Ave.
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery/visit.php

As part of NIME2009, the Ninth Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, we invite the public to enjoy five interactive sound installations at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Come experience spatialized audio, musical pendulums, solar-powered sound synthesis, and mobile message mashups — in this short-term exhibition of new media sound works by leading artist/researchers.

Featuring the artworks:

• Elemental & Cyrene Reefs by Ivica Bukvic and Eric Standley;
• Cellphonia: 4′33″ by Steve Bull and Scot Gresham-Lancaster;
• Pendaphonics by Dan Overholt, Byron Lahey, Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen,
  Winslow Burleson, and Camilla N. Jensen;
• Sound Lanterns by Scott Smallwood; and
• Artificial Analog Neural Network (AANN) by Phillip Stearns.

Installation Selection Committee: R. Luke DuBois and Golan Levin. Installations Chair and Exhibition Coordinator: Golan Levin. This exhibition was made possible with support from the CMU School of Music; the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry; the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University; and the CMU Schools of Art and Architecture.

I’m grateful to Stewart Butterfield for making me aware of this quote by John Adams, which I here repost from his Sylloge blog, for the purposes of my own reference and safekeeping:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

As I lack a very substantial connection with tapestry and porcelain, I confess to admiring Stewart’s synopsis of this quote even more than the original quote itself: “some bloke who had to do something praxis-y so his sons could do something theoria-y so their kids could do something poesis-y.”

Criteria for a Music School Head Search.
In early 2006, our School of Music was about to conduct a Head Search. Although my appointment at Carnegie Mellon University is in the School of Art, and not within the School of Music, I was nonetheless concerned for the outcome of the search, and so I drafted the following letter to a friend of mine who teaches in the department, offering (or venting) my opinions. Recently I was reminded of this letter during a conversation with another friend at a different school, where a Head Search is underway, and so I have decided to share this letter with the public. What follows is a litmus test, of sorts, for the kind of hopefully progressive thinking I would expect from the Chair or Head of a contemporary music school or conservatory.

This article focuses specifically on the issue of tolerance for curricular content and does not address other aspects of a good department Head (management and fundraising skills, etc.). For that reason, this article could also be entitled “A partial curriculum for a 21st Century music school.“
- – - – - – - – - -

Dear Professor X_________,

When we bumped into each other in the hallway recently, you were extremely gracious in your openness regarding my suggestions for the Head Search in the School of Music.

To whatever extent it could be helpful, I thought I’d put some of my thoughts to paper and codify some criteria that I would apply to a Music School Head Search process, were I to be involved in it.

My criteria are organized in the form of a timeline of musical forms. My litmus test? The “ideal candidate”, in my opinion, would be comfortable having courses taught in ANY of these musical forms, ALL the way down the list.

My observation is that many people active in music academies tend to draw a line in the sand — a line which represents the division between musical forms which they believe are worthy of “serious” consideration, and those which are not. My prediction is that the following list will provoke a great deal of ire among people who draw such distinctions. For all of those forms that they consider to be music, they might say, “Pshaw! Of course that is a serious and worthy subject; how arrogant to assume that I would not consider it such.” Then they will hit their line, and for all of those forms that come after, they might say, “Pshaw! there’s no way that form is legitimate; it is a fad, a gimmick, it’s barely music. Teach it here over my dead body.” I think we need a 21st-century Music School; the question is, at what point in this list will the new Head’s tastes be “frozen in time”? My hope is that the final candidate is open-minded enough to make it all the way down the following gauntlet.
- – - – - – - – - -

1912. The ideal candidate would be comfortable with the changes to Western orchestral music coincident with the birth of Modernism: Serialism and atonal forms, such as in the works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern.

1913. The ideal candidate would be comfortable with the innovations introduced by Luigi Russolo in his “Art of Noises” manifesto nearly a hundred years ago, and implemented in his intonarumori (”noise instruments”). Beyond having students merely read this seminal text, would the candidate see value in having students invent and perform their own noise instruments?

1922. Music from the African Diaspora. In 1922, the first Jazz recordings became available, and the first commercial radio station in the USA opened in Pittsburgh. The success of each was linked to the other. Since that time, Afro-Caribbean and African-American musics (Jazz, R&B, Rock, Hip-Hop, etc) have had an incalculable influence on the shape of modern music, both in and out of the academy. The ideal candidate would have an open-minded approach to teaching African-American social music histories, aesthetics, performance techniques, and even composition classes.

1929-1948. The ideal candidate would be comfortable in educating students to recognize the permeable boundary between “noise” and “music”, as further articulated by Edgard Varèse (”The Liberation of Sound“, 1936), Henry Cowell (”The Joys of Noise“, 1929) and Pierre Schaeffer in the notion of “musique concrete”.

1933. Film sound was introduced in 1928, and the first movie with a complete orchestral score, King Kong, was released in 1933. The ideal candidate would be open to recognizing that film music is a serious discipline in its own right, with distinct aesthetic, economic, and theoretic concerns. It is also the predominant way in which most people now experience long-format orchestral compositions, and (additionally) one of the last remaining sources of regular employment for orchestral musicians. Would the ideal candidate see value in music composition courses for film and television?

1953. How does the candidate feel about the revolutions to contemporary musics initiated by John Cage? To take a few examples, how about the use of aleatoric (indeterminate) and generative compositional techniques? What about visual (graphic) scores? Or the incorporation of ambient and environmental sounds, through both ‘tape’ musics and in live contexts? Again, I’m not just advocating book-teaching theoretics or histories; I mean: how would the candidate feel about an actual course in (for example) reading, creating and performing graphic scores? Or does the candidate feel that John Cage spoiled everything, similar to the way some visual artists prefer to ignore the revolutions introduced by Marcel Duchamp?

1956. Electronic music has been with us now for fifty years and through several generations of composers (Stockhausen, Boulez, Roads, Eno, and beyond). Electronic media have changed nearly every aspect of how music is experienced, documented, and distributed. The music studio, moreover, is not just a tool for recording performances by traditional instruments, but is a musical instrument in its own right. The ideal candidate would have a vision for the incorporation of electric, electronic, electroacoustic and acousmatic musics into the curriculum, in both performance and compositional contexts.

1960. Improvised musics. Whether influenced by baroque performance modes, “free jazz” musicians like Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, or John Zorn, or by more modern ‘academic’ composers like John Cage, Anthony Braxton or George Lewis, improvisation is an absolutely essential component of a contemporary music education. The ideal candidate would take a firm stand on incorporating improvisation into the curriculum.

1965. Popular musical forms. When professor Z________ recently taught a course on the music of the Beatles, the College deemed it so noteworthy (or controversial?) as to require its own press release. Is rock music really news? The ideal candidate would recognize the significance of such popular forms as a legitimate field of study, now that they have histories forty to fifty years long.

1970. Computer music continues to be a field of active research for more than three decades. Outside the laboratory, serious tools for interactive computer audio programming, such as Max/MSP, are now readily available and widely adopted by an entire generation of laptop musicians. An ideal candidate would have a vision for how pedagogy, performance and research in computer music could take a serious place among the topics of the School of Music. This seems especially crucial because of the School’s situation within Carnegie Mellon, proximal to one of the finest technical universities in the world. It would be a travesty to willfully ignore the unique opportunity of creating deep relationships with the Computer Science department.

1980-85. Music in the age of digital reproduction. The introduction, more than twenty years ago, of inexpensive audio sampling hardware and turntablism techniques ushered in a fundamentally new way of creating music: that of repurposing fragments from prior musics. Practitioners like Afrika Bambaataa, Eno/Byrne, Public Enemy, John Oswald (Plunderphonics), Chris Cutler, Christian Marclay, Craig Baldwin and many others have developed serious musical investigations into its possibilities, while the theoretical dialogue about the aesthetics and ethics of the practice has kept a vigorous pace. The debate is not going away, and the form is slowly becoming a widespread mode of computer-enabled music production, despite the RIAA’s displeasure. The ideal candidate would recognize the significance of this shift. It is easy to imagine the School teaching a “Contemporary Topics” course, perhaps taught in collaboration with the Business School and the Computer Science department, which dealt with the ethics of sampling and digital reproduction. But how would the candidate feel about a composition class, built entirely around plunderphonic modes of creation, which treated the ethics of musical debt as a component of practical training in the medium?

2000. Short musical forms. Today, many composers make a living designing complete compositions under four seconds long, for applications like computer operating systems, user interfaces, voicemail and telephony systems, and public address systems. The composition and creation of custom telephone ringtones is now a $10-billion-per-year industry, growing at 20% per year. And of course, commercial music has relied on the thirty-second spot for decades. Are our music students well-prepared to understand the extremely demanding musical logic of such short forms? The ideal candidate would recognize that composing such forms is not as easy as one might suppose. What about courses in the composition of short forms?

Hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Golan

2009 UPDATE 1. This list unjustly omits the study of world musics, particularly in relation to post-colonial national identities, musical hybrids, and mass media — mostly because, when I was writing this, I couldn’t identify a good date for this. So there’s another one.

2009 UPDATE 2. With the eclipse, sometime in 2007 or so, of the film and television industries by the game industry, I would also add the study of generative musics to this curriculum — i.e., algorithmic or generative ‘program’ music for interactive systems.

Keywords: criteria, desiderata, music, school, conservatory, search, hiring, tenure, promotion, evaluation, metrics, head, chair, director, position, pedagogy, teaching, standards.

I’ve finally recovered from directing ART AND CODE, a conference about “programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us” that we held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from March 6-9th. The conference featured 26 workshops in 11 different arts-programming languages, and lecture presentations by fifteen or so of the key innovators leading massive revolutions in software-arts education.

I’m truly honored to share the stage, in the photo above, with the ART AND CODE presenters. From left to right they are: John Maloney (MIT/Scratch), Golan Levin (CMU/Flong), Tom McMail (Microsoft Research), Ira Greenberg (Miami U. Ohio), Hans-Christoph Steiner (NYU/Pure Data), Evelyn Eastmond (MIT/Scratch), Casey Reas (UCLA/Processing), Zachary Lieberman (Parsons/openFrameworks), Theodore Watson (openFrameworks), Ben Fry (Seed Visualization Lab/Processing), Arturo Castro (openFrameworks), Sebastian Oschatz (Meso/VVVV), Daniel Shiffman (NYU), Luke DuBois (NYU/Cycling74), Dr. Woohoo (ExtendScript), and Why the Lucky Stiff (Hackety Hack). Not pictured here, but also presenting at the conference were Don Slater (CMU/Alice) and Dr. Wanda Dann (CMU/Alice).

One of the most inspiring and unusual aspects of the conference was the diversity of its attendees, who came from all walks of life. There were about 250 registered participants, hailing from 6 countries and at least 25 states of the union. Their ages ranged from 11 to 71. There were middle-school teachers from an Indian reservation in Montana; university professors of Computer Science; cyberpunk European C++ hackers; graduate students in media arts and interaction design; and a bevy of high-school and undergraduate students from a large swath of the American Rust Belt. Above, a photo of the audience during the Sunday lecture by Why the Lucky Stiff.

(Above) A row of attendees in a Processing workshop taught by Casey Reas.

(Above) Attendees in a Scratch workshop taught by Evelyn Eastmond and John Maloney.

Above and below: a workshop in openFrameworks and C++ directed by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson and Arturo Castro.

ART AND CODE was made possible by a generous grant from Microsoft Research, with oversight by the Center for Computational Thinking at CMU. The conference was also my first major initiative as the newly-appointed director of the Carnegie Mellon STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and couldn’t have happened without the help of its amazing administrators and student volunteers. ART AND CODE was extensively documented in Twitter, blogs, and a pile of Flickr photo sets by various conference participants:

• Golan Levin
• AJ Starks
  
• Marty McGuire
• Eric Mill
• Ecin
  
• Everyplace
• Jon.Pliske

After ART AND CODE, I’ve got the conference bug, and am pondering the possibility of putting together another symposium… this time on the intersection of software studies and vernacular computing practices, including vernacular data-mining, vernacular visualization, vernacular data analysis….