A Joint Project with Sarah Kavage http://www.gogoweb.com/kavage/index.htm Statement: In the two-year process of funding, planning and creating the Living Barge Project, we learned a great deal about the business of funding and planning public art. One thing that struck us as rather funny or odd in our grant applications was asking us to measure our success, which lead to a whole discussion of what is successful in art? Since art is a subjective medium, how does one know when they are successful? It made us wonder how people value art and what factors figure into that assessment. In our parallel lives, we both have experience trying to assess subjective things using scientific means and have often had to assign a value of some sort or another to things like a view of the mountains, quality of life, or the inherent value of an ecosystem. It’s rather absurd that we have to quantify these things too in order to protect them. So, we applied much the same thinking to art. We conducted a survey on art in general to three different audiences, Seattle’s Pioneer Square Art Walk (outside of SOIL), the Bremerton ferry which connects Seattle to the military town of Bremerton, and at Aviation High School where we had been teaching a high school class. In addition, we created two images, one of a painting in a museum, and a photoshop’d image of the same painting sitting in the art section of a thrift store. We asked different people at the Fremont Sunday Market to value each painting and tell us why they placed that value on the art. http://www.sarahkavageshapeimage_1_link_0
Public Art Survey
Survey takers at the Fremont Sunday Market
Display at Crawlspace Gallery
Opening Night
Survey takers outside Soil Gallery