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Emma Thompson Tells Trafficked Woman's Story in Art

TresSugar — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:00 -0800

Academy-award winning actress Emma Thompson was so moved by the plight of a Moldovan woman who survived being trafficked for sex, she decided to create an art installation that would help viewers to put themselves in Elena's shoes and bring attention to this growing problem.

"Journey," which will be exhibited in New York City Nov. 10 to 16 in Washington Square Park, tells the story of Elena, a woman from the Eastern European republic of Moldova who, at age 18, was promised a secretarial job in England. Instead, once she got there, her passport was confiscated and she was forced into prostitution.

"Journey" consists of seven shipping containers. Each has a keyhole through which the viewer can peer to see a chronology of Elena's story. The first shipping container depicts Elena's childhood and the loss of her father. In another, the viewer can see Elena approached in a Moldovan marketplace and offered work.

Thompson personally curated one of the more disturbing of the shipping containers which depicts Elena's forced prostitution in England. She had Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell design the clothes she was forced to wear, and when the viewer looks into the keyhole, she sees her face superimposed onto the body of a woman in prostitute's clothing. They wanted the viewer to have an experience of what it meant to lose one's identity. Thompson said that even men "didn't laugh or find it funny. They understood absolutely what it meant."

Thompson met Elena while doing work with UNODC (United Nations Office on Drug and Crime) to help raise awareness about the practice of trafficking women, and it sounds as if she's not only telling her plight, she's giving Elena the voice that was taken away from her. In the last shipping container, Elena tells her story on tape.

Michael Jackson Art Exhibit - Love It or Leave It?

TresSugar — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0700

The King of Pop would have been halfway through his comeback concert series in London right now if not for his sudden passing, but his presence is still being felt in that city. Michael Jackson: The Official Exhibition is showing right now at London's O2 Arena, the site of Michael's ill-fated comeback tour. Personal belongings from the superstar's Neverland Ranch are featured, along with costumes, props, and other memorabilia from his epic career. Would you ever check it out, or does it freak you out?

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Oh Snap! Larger Than Life Love

TresSugar — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:00:00 -0700

Two statues kiss at South Korea's outdoor sex-themed sculpture park, which sits on an island often visited by local honeymooners. The park displays 140 sculptures depicting people in a variety of sexual positions, and visitors can also watch films on sex education. Check out some of the more PG exhibits.

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Legendary Comic Book Artist Takes On the Book of Genesis

TresSugar — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:14:40 -0700

Widely regarded as the father of underground comics, the famously T & A-obsessed R. Crumb surprised many by deciding to take on the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis.

How to reconcile the sacred with the profane? The Book of Genesis Illustrated, which contains all 50 chapters, comes with a warning: "Adult Supervision Recommended For Minors." And it's not because R. Crumb changes or adds words to the original, but rather because his art graphically depicts what he calls the the Book of Genesis's inherent violence:

"[It's about] ruling elites, victimizing people in sadistic ways, which is human beings at their nastiest. They have power over others, and they derive pleasure from inflecting pain on other humans. That's about as nasty as people get."

Crumb's French publisher, Jean-Luc Fromental, thought Crumb might be able to achieve an interpretation of Genesis only through "blasphemy." Now? He thinks that he was trying to "[r]eread the whole text from a humanistic point of view . . ."

In a press conference for The Book of Genesis Illustrated, Crumb said that although he "seeks knowledge" of God and believes that there is a force ruling us, we can't ever truly understand it. As for regarding the Bible as a sacred truth? He thinks it's crazy, adding, "But the human race is crazy if nothing else." (If you're interested in R. Crumb, check out the amazing documentary about him and his crazy family, titled, simply enough, Crumb.)

Oh Snap! Berlin Lightens Up

TresSugar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Berlin's Festival of Lights, which runs October 14-25, features the illumination of about 50 landmarks across the city. Lighting artists set their sights and lights on Berlin's Cathedral Church, Schloss Charlottenburg Palace and trees along Unter Den Linden Avenue, just to name a few lucky spots.

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Love: The Key to Creativity

TresSugar — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:00:00 -0700

Love has been the driving theme of artistic creations stretching over generations. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam recently decided to verify that love can change the way we think. The study found that love makes us more creative, while sexual desire makes us more logical.

Subjects who thought about a romantic walk with the person they loved performed better on tasks that required creative thinking. When asked to think about a sexual encounter with someone they didn't love, the subjects performed worse on the creative tasks, but better on logical puzzles. Scientists reasoned that romantic love makes us see things from a long-term perspective (which is good for creativity), while sex makes us think short term (which is good for logical thinking).

So now we know that love makes us creative, while lust might have the opposite effect. I'd like to add heartbreak to the list of creative forces. Without that we wouldn't have Shakespearean tragedies or Kanye's amazing song "Heartless."

Does love make you more creative?

The Significant Objects Project, Or, How to Sell Stuff on eBay

TresSugar — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0700

What makes an object significant, and possibly valuable? Some writers wagered that it's the story behind the object, and they set out to test their theory.

The Significant Objects Project pairs writers with an object and asks them to write a fictional story about it, with the belief it will then become significant to someone. Significance, in this case, means that someone would be moved to buy the object on eBay.

If you'd like to read the ~~description~~ story that accompanied the smiley face mug's auction on eBay and to find out its final price (it started at one dollar), read more.

The auction for this smiley face mug significant object started at $2 and ended at $32.08. Perhaps the price went up because of Ben Greenman's story, excerpted below?

"This object is best known from its appearance in the 1939 film No News From The Navy, a comedy starring James Wilton as a hapless midshipman who cannot set aside his seafaring ways, even when he is confined to dry land as a result of an injury. Wilton’s character (who is called, simply, “Sailor”) competes for the affection of a young woman named Evelyn (Mary Hannan) despite the opposition of her father (Gordon Howard) and a larger, determined suitor (Kenneth Lopp). The film is a second-tier comedy, but there is one classic scene. in which Sailor shaves before taking Evelyn out on a date. He is clearly accustomed to shaving aboard his ship, and as a result, he is constantly attempting to regain his balance, despite the fact the floor is level and stable. The critic Leonard Folsom has written that “The unheralded Wilton has a scene that combines the physical complexity of a Chaplin solo with close-ups of inexpressive expression that rival the finest moments of Keaton.” At the beginning of that scene, Wilton uses this smiling mug as his shaving mug, and while he sets it on the shelf above the washbasin midway through, it remains, as Folsom writes, 'an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer.' "

To find out how other significant objects fared on eBay, click here.

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Are You a Fan of the Surreal? It May Make You Smarter

TresSugar — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:00:00 -0700

Franz Kafka, David Lynch, and Rene Magritte were my Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas as a teenager. (Yeah, I was a weirdo.) So imagine my delight when I read a study that claims that surrealism may be good for the brain.

Research psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia concluded that exposure to surrealist art, film or literature, because it puts you in worlds whose elements don't make sense, drives you to look for structure and sense elsewhere, hence raising "the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions." Want to hear the details of this study? Then read more.

To reach this finding, they had two groups of people read Kafka. One group was given Kafka's story "The Country Doctor," which in typical Kafkaesque fashion, goes from normal to weird in no time at all. The other group was given a rewritten version so that nothing was odd about the plot or narrative. After they finished their respective Kafkas, they were asked to find patterns hidden in strings of letters. Those who read the original Kafka stories were both more motivated to find patterns and more accurate in their findings than those who read the normalized Kafka.

It's their second experiment that is almost more interesting to me - they divided groups between those who felt alienated by things they'd done in the past and those who didn't. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

So, basically, feeling alienated and consuming alienating art and literature drives you to make sense of things, giving your brain a workout. That would finally explain my motivation to find meaning in the world after watching The Hills, a surrealist masterpiece if I ever saw one!

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40 Years Later: Woman in Famous Photo Recognizes Herself

TresSugar — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:00:00 -0700

I love this story! The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting Robert Frank's photographs from his landmark 1959 work The Americans, widely viewed as the photographic analogue to Jack Kerouac's beat classic On the Road. Frank and Kerouac both had similar sensibilities, wanting to show the sprawling, diverse, and melancholy side of postwar America. Kerouac, in fact, wrote the introduction to The Americans. Regarding the above photograph, "Elevator - Miami Beach, 1955," Kerouac asks, "That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

Turns out, "lonely elevator girl" turned 50-something Sharon Collins saw an exhibit of "The Americans" a few years ago and recognized herself as the 15-year-old in the photograph: "When San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art first opened, I think it was more than 10 years ago . . . I stood in front of this particular photograph for probably a full five minutes, not knowing why I was staring at it, and then it really dawned on me that the girl in the picture was me." To hear what Collins has to say about the photograph, read more

An NPR reporter asked Collins what made her come forward as the elevator girl now and not ten years ago when she recognized herself. She said that a recent San Francisco Chronicle review of the exhibit used this photo on the front page of the entertainment section, and when she told her husband and sons about it, they urged her to call the paper.

Sharon Collins was then 15-year-old Sharon Goldstein, living in Miami Beach and working as an elevator girl at the Sherry Frontenac Hotel in 1955. Her mother was single, so instead of being able to go to Summer camp, Sharon worked to help out. Asked what she thought of the photo, Collins explains what it was she thinks Frank was able to capture in his image and Kerouac in his words:

"I think he saw in me something that most people didn't see. You know, I have a big smile and a big laugh. So people see . . . one thing in me. And I suspect that somehow Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac saw something that was deeper that only people who were really close to me can see, and it's not necessarily loneliness, it's, I don't know, dreaminess."

I've always wondered whether people in documentary photos ever know that they're in museum exhibits. It's fascinating to hear about one woman who discovered that a wistful expression from her teenage years became an iconic photograph in the oeuvre of a major American artist!

Robert Frank/Courtesy National Gallery of Art

The Love Letter Project Embraces the City of Brotherly Love

TresSugar — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:00:00 -0700

What is it with Philadelphia and quirky outdoor art? On the heels of the new documentary In a Dream, about one man's giant mosaic memoir, comes Love Letter, a massive mural project by artist Steve Powers and the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.

The visual love letter plays out across 50 painted walls along Philly's Market Street elevated train. Through the month of August, 40 artists are creating their masterpieces for all to see starting around Labor Day. You can check out the progress so far on the official Love Letter mural. I can't help but love art that loves me back; what do you think?