I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Chicago is no longer the City of Big Shoulders. It is the City of Vines. There are vines everywhere, up the sides of buildings, covering poles, forming bat wings over 
power lines (check the one out on Ashland as you approach Clybourn from the south. It’s magnificent.) Not only are there more vines,the leaves on the ivy that has now made its way half-way up the ash tree outside my window are much bigger than I ever remember them being, when they merely slithered around on the ground lo these many years I’ve stared out that same window. They never even made it a few feet up the tree before. Now they are thirty feet up in the air. In fact, the Virginia Creeper is now duking it out with the ivy for the right to cover the entire north side of my building, and it has even deigned to crawl up the side of the hideous condominiums of a mere decade vintage to my south.
power lines (check the one out on Ashland as you approach Clybourn from the south. It’s magnificent.) Not only are there more vines,the leaves on the ivy that has now made its way half-way up the ash tree outside my window are much bigger than I ever remember them being, when they merely slithered around on the ground lo these many years I’ve stared out that same window. They never even made it a few feet up the tree before. Now they are thirty feet up in the air. In fact, the Virginia Creeper is now duking it out with the ivy for the right to cover the entire north side of my building, and it has even deigned to crawl up the side of the hideous condominiums of a mere decade vintage to my south.
Hmmm, “City of Vines.” I’m wondering if the City of Vines™ might be appealing to those who ‘brand’ things in order to market them. Like “Artropolis™,” the name of all the festivities around the new, improved art fair which I believe is still actually named Art Chicago. Maybe I’m just getting really old and weary, but I can’t quite figure it out. All I know is there is a bright, striped “theme” that identifies the mailings that are emanating from the art fair people over there at the Merchandise Mart, and that bright, striped graphic identifier 
is a really great thing, and makes me think that while I might find Artropolis™ unhelpful, someone over there really has put on his/her thinking cap. I’m reconstructing the marketing meeting in my mind’s-eye. Marketing Person #1: “You know, people get so much mail, so much junk mail these days.” Marketing Person #2 “Yes, that is why we’re going to make our mailings really distinctive. How about brightly colored stripes. Say, in greens and oranges and pinks?” Marketing Executive (who has been listening attentively and nodding during the preceding exchange): “Sounds great, let’s do it.”
But what about this Artropolis™ business? Recently my good friend Jeffrey sent me an article about the Virginia Beach, Virginia Symphony changing its name to Symphonicity. (Don’t know if it’s trademarked or not, sorry.) He was made quite anxious by this bald marketing ploy, as well he should be. What could they have been thinking? That young people would now flock to hear classical music because the guys playing the music were identified as Symphonicitoids? (Actually, I just made this Symphonicitoids thing up, but what I should be doing is asking the newly-renamed orchestra for some remuneration for such a brilliant idea.)
But I wasn’t especially disturbed. I had already processed Artropolis™ as attached to the art fair here, as well as “Looptopia” for a downtown street festival/open house-thing scheduled for the City of Vines™ on May 11. Relax, I advised him. They’re just showing their hipness, and a-fore ya know it, they’ll be that orchestra with that quaint name that pegs them back in the two-thousand and oughts as sure as trumpet bell-bottoms worn by Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up Doc” peg her as being well into her maturity in 1970, the year of the film’s release. Call it the Lollapalooza syndrome. Just relax. How long can people keep feeding off the variations of Lollapalooza as a concert organizing theme and still be considered “with it?”
But lately I have to confess I haven’t been very relaxed. I had put off opening the deluges of mail I receive at my job for a while and finally got around to it. Being diligent, I examined the dispatches carefully, noting many brightly-colored striped items that I could instantly identify as missives from Artropolis™. I stacked them in their own pile for later reference. And made a pile of another sort, those that featured artist quotes or blurbs that were enough to make a grown curator cry, viz “Artist X uses drawing, painting and collage to make art that is personal and ambiguous. The heavily layered imagery and disjointed narratives allow for any number of interpretations.” Or “Artist Y locates sites within culture’s representational flow, carving out designated points of focus. Recognizing that contemporary culture moves not as a linear narrative, but rather as a string of analogies, Artist Y proposes intersections between seemingly unrelated images and objects.”
That’s a lot of layered/seemingly unrelated imagery that is allowing for a lot of interpretations and intersections. And I began to realize the boundaries of Artropolis™ were more far-flung than I’d imagined from reading Art Chicago’s p.r. I realized out there somewhere in Artropolis™ there was an intersection of Images Avenue and Object Street. And off Images Avenue lay Narratives Lane and Analogies Boulevard. And God forbid if I should find myself in Ambiguous Alley, which is probably not far from The Alley up there on Clark and Belmont where yute from all over (the Midwest anyway) flock for treatments of the needle variety so that they can become so hip frat boys are made fun of in The Alley's marketing (that apparently is confined to bus stop benches, which I would like to point out are the absolute antithesis of hipness, guys).
Marketing, marketing, marketing. Say it with the bored yet exasperated tones of someone imitating the famous “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” mantra of the Brady Bunch. It’s all about marketing, isn’t it? I just caught the Jerry “Late of the Village-Voice-Newly-of-New-York-magazine” Saltz lecture at MCA wherein he said the art market is perfectly fine, and that in fact it makes us all free, even the 99 percent of us who will never make more than a rude dime off art. I didn’t quite understand that point, but I noticed Duncan of Bad at Sports in the audience, his attentive and sober profile looking even more Grecian-tragic mask than usual due to the harsh lighting of the first row in which he was sitting, so maybe he’ll explain it all on the next BAS podcast. Or maybe some marketing genius will come up with a really clever name to make it so super-palliative and ultra in-sync-with-the-times (like “Artmarketacular” or “Marketronic”) that it’ll go down smooth in even the largest of gullets (like that shark featured in the Sharkstock II poster).
In the meantime I’ll wander past those funny-shaped buildings called Marina City and somewhere off Object Street or is it Images Avenue find that gigantic building with all those exceeding bizarre busts lined up on the riverfront side of it called, very appropriately and I’m sure not to be taken at all ironically, The Merchandise Mart, and check out Art Chicago.
Hope to see you there!
More later,
Lynne.
is a really great thing, and makes me think that while I might find Artropolis™ unhelpful, someone over there really has put on his/her thinking cap. I’m reconstructing the marketing meeting in my mind’s-eye. Marketing Person #1: “You know, people get so much mail, so much junk mail these days.” Marketing Person #2 “Yes, that is why we’re going to make our mailings really distinctive. How about brightly colored stripes. Say, in greens and oranges and pinks?” Marketing Executive (who has been listening attentively and nodding during the preceding exchange): “Sounds great, let’s do it.”
But what about this Artropolis™ business? Recently my good friend Jeffrey sent me an article about the Virginia Beach, Virginia Symphony changing its name to Symphonicity. (Don’t know if it’s trademarked or not, sorry.) He was made quite anxious by this bald marketing ploy, as well he should be. What could they have been thinking? That young people would now flock to hear classical music because the guys playing the music were identified as Symphonicitoids? (Actually, I just made this Symphonicitoids thing up, but what I should be doing is asking the newly-renamed orchestra for some remuneration for such a brilliant idea.)
But I wasn’t especially disturbed. I had already processed Artropolis™ as attached to the art fair here, as well as “Looptopia” for a downtown street festival/open house-thing scheduled for the City of Vines™ on May 11. Relax, I advised him. They’re just showing their hipness, and a-fore ya know it, they’ll be that orchestra with that quaint name that pegs them back in the two-thousand and oughts as sure as trumpet bell-bottoms worn by Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up Doc” peg her as being well into her maturity in 1970, the year of the film’s release. Call it the Lollapalooza syndrome. Just relax. How long can people keep feeding off the variations of Lollapalooza as a concert organizing theme and still be considered “with it?”
But lately I have to confess I haven’t been very relaxed. I had put off opening the deluges of mail I receive at my job for a while and finally got around to it. Being diligent, I examined the dispatches carefully, noting many brightly-colored striped items that I could instantly identify as missives from Artropolis™. I stacked them in their own pile for later reference. And made a pile of another sort, those that featured artist quotes or blurbs that were enough to make a grown curator cry, viz “Artist X uses drawing, painting and collage to make art that is personal and ambiguous. The heavily layered imagery and disjointed narratives allow for any number of interpretations.” Or “Artist Y locates sites within culture’s representational flow, carving out designated points of focus. Recognizing that contemporary culture moves not as a linear narrative, but rather as a string of analogies, Artist Y proposes intersections between seemingly unrelated images and objects.”
That’s a lot of layered/seemingly unrelated imagery that is allowing for a lot of interpretations and intersections. And I began to realize the boundaries of Artropolis™ were more far-flung than I’d imagined from reading Art Chicago’s p.r. I realized out there somewhere in Artropolis™ there was an intersection of Images Avenue and Object Street. And off Images Avenue lay Narratives Lane and Analogies Boulevard. And God forbid if I should find myself in Ambiguous Alley, which is probably not far from The Alley up there on Clark and Belmont where yute from all over (the Midwest anyway) flock for treatments of the needle variety so that they can become so hip frat boys are made fun of in The Alley's marketing (that apparently is confined to bus stop benches, which I would like to point out are the absolute antithesis of hipness, guys).
Marketing, marketing, marketing. Say it with the bored yet exasperated tones of someone imitating the famous “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” mantra of the Brady Bunch. It’s all about marketing, isn’t it? I just caught the Jerry “Late of the Village-Voice-Newly-of-New-York-magazine” Saltz lecture at MCA wherein he said the art market is perfectly fine, and that in fact it makes us all free, even the 99 percent of us who will never make more than a rude dime off art. I didn’t quite understand that point, but I noticed Duncan of Bad at Sports in the audience, his attentive and sober profile looking even more Grecian-tragic mask than usual due to the harsh lighting of the first row in which he was sitting, so maybe he’ll explain it all on the next BAS podcast. Or maybe some marketing genius will come up with a really clever name to make it so super-palliative and ultra in-sync-with-the-times (like “Artmarketacular” or “Marketronic”) that it’ll go down smooth in even the largest of gullets (like that shark featured in the Sharkstock II poster).
In the meantime I’ll wander past those funny-shaped buildings called Marina City and somewhere off Object Street or is it Images Avenue find that gigantic building with all those exceeding bizarre busts lined up on the riverfront side of it called, very appropriately and I’m sure not to be taken at all ironically, The Merchandise Mart, and check out Art Chicago. Hope to see you there!
More later,
Lynne.
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