The first couple of hip-hop with a bottle of Ace of Spades.

Artist-designer Tahir Hemphill is gathering quirky facts about popular culture via Hip-Hop Word Count, his searchable directory of over 40,000 hip-hop songs. If you’ve ever wanted to know the education level needed to comprehend Lupe Fiasco’s track “Superstar” or the number of polysyllabic words used by 50 Cent in “I Get Money,” Hemphill has the answers. And those burning questions you’ve had about rappers and bubbly? He can give certain insight into that too. At the recent Talk to Me symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hemphill presented his latest data set on the subject of champagne.

Tahir Hemphill. "Champagne Always Stains My Silk," 2011.

Tahir Hemphill. "Champagne Always Stains My Silk," 2011.

Created in collaboration with Steve Varga, Champagne Always Stains My Silk consists of three infographics that give us “a visual history” of champagne brand-mentions spanning thirty years of hip-hop music. What do we learn from this survey? For one thing, in the years following Jay-Z’s boycott of Cristal, the brand’s mention by other rappers declined. (One wonders how this tastemaker’s newfound interest in contemporary art will impact others in the industry.) Hemphill has also found that brand names are most commonly heard in East Coast lyrics; Cristal ranks highest followed by Dom Perignon, Moet, Asti, Chandon, and Ace of Spades. At first listen, this data is about as stimulating as rappers’ fascination with bottle poppin. How is any of this meaningful? Hemphill gives us some food for thought: “When you consider champagne as an aspirational product, this infographic tells a nuanced story of rappers’ relationship to the American Dream.”

Studying the food and drinks that cultures consume will often bring us back to a national ethos, in this case, the supposed ability to achieve prosperity through social and economic participation. When we talk about reaching the American Dream, we often think of — or want to hear about — hard work, sacrifice, and one’s steadfast resolve to rise above whatever circumstances. It seems many rappers have such a story, though it can be hard to hear through all the intemperance and foolery portrayed in hip-hop. The genre’s emphasis on material wealth, extreme celebration, and what artist Kehinde Wiley has called the “heroic desire for cash and domination that hip-hop is so defined by,” has garnered criticisms familiar in contemporary art. Take for example “pop-star” artist Jeff Koons, whose work critics have dismissed, calling it garish, empty, and all about “self-merchandising.” If these ideas have not been Koons’ very point, they have helped propel him to mainstream success. You might say the same for artists of hip-hop for whom gross consumption is part of the game.

P. Diddy just doing his thang.

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Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery." Installation view: Sculpture Center, Long Island, New York, 2009.

In this week’s roundup Mike Kelly navigates the Burning Man, Mark Dion reimagines the humanities, Krzysztof Wodiczko interviews anonymous war veterans, and more.

• Mike Kelley and longtime friend Michael Smith collaborated on A Voyage of Growth and Discovery at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead Quays, UK).  The installation features “man-child Baby IKKI,” a character developed by Smith who navigates the infamous Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. IKKI negotiates the primal elements of fire, water, earth and wind. A six-channel video installation replaying IKKI’s “voyage” is enveloped by a fantasy environment evoking that of the festival. This work is on view through January 15.

• Mark Dion has a new site-specific installation at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (Ann Arbor).  For Waiting for the Extraordinary Dion took Michigan Chief Justice Augustus Woodward’s 1817 categories for human knowledge and invented 13 visual symbols crafted through the U-M Duderstadt Center’s high-tech three-dimensional rapid imaging technology laboratory to illustrate each category.  This exhibition will continue through November 5.

• Ann Hamilton was one of ten artists selected to receive an Anonymous Was A Woman grant on October 17. The “no strings” grant of $25,000 enables women over the age of 45 to continue to grow and pursue their work. The awards are synonymous with important recognition in artists’ personal and artistic development.  The grant’s name refers to a line in Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own. As the name implies, the nominators and those associated with the program are unnamed.

• Alfredo Jaar will be featured in Oregon College of Art and Craft’s (OCAC) inaugural lecture series, Connection: Intersecting Tradition and Innovation.  His lecture, “It is Difficult,” provides a framework for considering the complexity of current social and cultural issues around the world.  The Alfredo Jaar Connection lecture takes place on November 14 from 7:00–8:30pm at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. The event is free and open to the public.

• Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, John Baldesssari, William Wegman and several other artists have work on view in State of Mind: New California Art 1970, the current show at the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach). The exhibition includes Nauman’s never before exhibited Yellow Room, McCarthy’s May 1, 1971, and Baldessari’s California Map Piece.  For the latter piece the artist drove the length of the state to carve letters forming the word California into the actual environment to replicate what was pictured on a map.  The show closes January 22.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko has a new show called The Abolition of War at the Work Gallery (London). The two projects featured in this exhibition, The Flame and War Veteran Vehicle, bring into focus the post-traumatic condition experienced by returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both projects are based on a set of interviews conducted by the artist with anonymous war veterans and their families, which reveal the difficulties of re-integration and the impossibility of re-connecting with their previous lives.  This show is on view until January 14.

• Cai Guo-Qiang was commissioned to create monumental gunpowder drawings by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Ad Doha, Qatar for a solo exhibition opening in December.  Guo-Qiang is collaborating with local volunteers to produce a series of drawings rendered by igniting gunpowder.  The entire process is open for public viewing from October 22 – October 26 at Al Riwaq, the special exhibitions hall located next to the Museum of Islamic Art.
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Jenny Marketou at her studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY.

Jenny Marketou was born and raised in Athens, Greece and educated in the United States. She lives and works in New York. Marketou earned a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC, and an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She also studied photography with Duane Michaels at the International Center of Photography in New York and has participated in numerous workshops during the summer breaks as well as residency programs in the United States.

One of the most important residencies that gave a new direction to Marketou’s life and work was a three-month program at Banff, Canada in 1998.  That experience fed her practice through continuous collaborations at Banff and with some of the residents through 2002.  At Banff, she had the opportunity to meet and later collaborate with international artists as well as some of the hackers and anarchists who initiated the net art movement–Heath Bunting, Alex Shulgin, the Yes Men, Critical Art Assemble, Vuc Gosic, Natalie Bookchin, Fran Ilich and others under the mentorship of people like Sara Diamond, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Weibel, Kathleen Hayles, Bruno Latour, Lev Manovich, and Tom Levine. The friendships that developed during that program have had an enormous influence on Marketou’s subsequent practice.

Earlier this month, Paperophanies was commissioned by the Praxis Project Gallery at Atrium Art Museum in Vitoria, in collaboration with local communities, artists, universities, and foundations as well as the Guggenheim in Bilbao. The project was inaugurated in the Basque Country in Spain and was curated by Blanca de la Torre. According to the exhibition description, Paperophanies “offers new kinds of mechanisms to explore collaboration, social relations, identity, fashion, action and the commons. Marketou has transformed the PRAXIS gallery into a fashion atelier where workshops take place daily, which after two months culminates into a public event in the form of a public protest ending in the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca.”

Marketou taught for many years at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City and has lectured world-wide as a visiting artist at colleges and universities such as Parsons/the New School in New York City; Rutgers, NJ; Harvard, Cambridge; Montclair University; University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, among others. Her work can be found in public and private collections from the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece to Museo Reina Sophia, Madrid, Spain, and has been featured in numerous publications including Flash Art, Art Forum and Spiegel.

She is the epitome of a “busy-bee,” with the energy and critical insight that today’s art world requires.  Marketou’s studio is located in DUMBO, Brooklyn, by the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge. I have followed her work since 2005, yet I rarely have the opportunity to indulge in a good art conversation with her due to the ocean that separates us. When we do talk, Marketou makes every word and every minute count. I’ve made a job out of hunting down good art conversations, and it’s not often that I come across an artist who can play art ping-pong with words, without necessarily referring to their work or mine. I am a devoted fan of artists who can think and speak about issues taking place outside of the limits of their studio walls. Marketou is certainly one of them.

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We thought the Art21 Blog’s readers might be interested in this international conference taking place in in Santiago de Compostela, Spain: the I International Forum on Spaces for Culture. Art21′s Executive Director Susan Sollins will be a featured speaker at this event, which will explore the topic of “Cultural Infrastructures: sustainability and challenges for the future.” Luckily for those of us who can’t attend in person, the Forum will be live-streamed: click here to follow the events via the Internet. Further details shared with us by the Forum’s organizers follow:

The City of Culture of Galicia, the cultural complex designed by the North-American architect Peter Eisenman in Santiago de Compostela, will assemble World-class prestigious cultural institutions on the 8th, 9th and 10th of November to the “I International Forum on Spaces for Culture,” where representatives from the MoMA of New York, IRCAM-Pompidou of Paris, the London Barbican Centre and the Library of Alexandria, among others, will meet. With the title “Cultural infrastructures: sustainability and challenges for the future,” the first edition of this forum will analyze the role of cultural infrastructures as factors for economic development, as poles to attract business projects or as platforms to project the image of a community abroad.The inaugural lecture will be delivered by Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria.

Other participants are Allegra Burnette, responsible for MoMa.org; Natalio Grueso, director of the Centro Niemeyer; José Guirao, director of “La Casa Encendida;” Louise Jereys, Programming director of the London Barbican Centre; Frank Madlener, director of the IRCAM-Pompidou; Rui Vieira Nery, director of Education for Culture of the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon; Sheryl Kolasinski, director of Operations and Infrastructures of the Smithsonian (USA); Josep Ramoneda, director of the CCCB-Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona; Bruno Assami, managing director of the MASP-Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; and Susan Sollins, executive director and curator of Art21.

• The first edition of this forum, which will take place on the 8th, 9th and 10th of November in Santiago de Compostela, will also see the presence of renowned cultural centers in Spain, such as the Niemeyer, “La Casa Encendida” and the CCCB-Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; as well as international institutions such as the Smithsonian and or the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo.

• This meeting will analyze the role of cultural infrastructures as factors for economic development, as poles to attract business projects or as platforms to project the image of a community.

• The capacity is 100 places for professionals in cultural management and for students. The lectures may be followed via streaming at www.fiec-cidadedacultura.org.

Porkchop pounds a T-Stake into the desert floor, helping to build the fence that surrounds the perimeter of Burning Man's temporary metropolis, Black Rock City. Via The Burning Blog. Courtesy John Curley.

When I first found out about the Black Rock City Department of Public Works, it was like finding out that Santa Claus did not exist. I was disappointed, and a little bit embarrassed by my own naivete. Of course I loved Burning Man for the limitless expanse of art, but I also felt in awe of its total DIY spirit. The Black Rock Desert, known affectionately as the playa, is one of the largest mud flats on the planet, spanning 1,000 miles.  The alkaline quality of the canvas-colored dust is inhospitable to almost any life form, a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa alienscape upon which Burning Man’s Black Rock City develops and disappears each year. Since there is no vending allowed at the event, one has to bring enough food and water.  Although there are porta potties, camps must also minimize their footprint by engineering some sort of greywater system for their makeshift kitchens.  The sun is merciless, and wind gusts can exceed 50 mph, so you can’t just bring any old pop-up tent and call it a day.  Shelter and shade structures must be built with creativity and ingenuity.  Geodesic domes, yurts, and wigwams often dominate the architecture of Black Rock City—not just out of some countercultural fetishization of Buckminster Fuller or nomadic indigenous people, but because they are the most practical structures for that environment.

The Sign Shop spends much of July painstakingly creating over 1,000 signs. In August, they install them along the freshly-surveyed roads of Black Rock City. Via The Burning Blog. Courtesy John Curley.

So here I was, thinking that myself and the tens of thousands of other participants at Burning Man were building this whole thing from scratch year after year, without any help from The Man.  Our own metropolis, culture, and living art museum all in the span of six days.  And on the seventh day, we burned it.  Leaving no trace.  Whatsoever.  End of story.

And for the first 10 years of Burning Man’s existence, that was the end of story.  But while the pervasive Leave No Trace ethic of Burning Man stems mostly from an interest in preserving the exquisite public land of the Black Rock Desert, the whole shebang hinges on meeting strict permit stipulations imposed by the Bureau of Land Management.  Incidentally, most proceeds from those high ticket prices go directly toward the cost of said land use permits.

The Arctica Crew works on one of the sites where participants can purchase ice--essentially the only vending allowed on the playa. Proceeds from ice sales benefit local schools. Via The Burning Blog. Courtesy John Curley.

As Black Rock City’s population grew each year, it became increasingly difficult to meet the permit stipulations.  So in 1997, the Department of Public Works was formed to plan the city, help implement those plans, and make sure that, while most participants pack everything out, no trace whatsoever is left – no tiny feathers, no big dunes, no soot.  The original DPW was founded by four individuals: Will Roger Peterson aka Mr. Klean, Flynn Mauthe aka Bobby Wayne, Rod Garrett aka Ramrod, and Tony Perez aka Coyote. (Many Burners have “playa names” for the event, and DPW all but requires it.  My alias is Struggles.)

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I wake up surprisingly refreshed this morning with enough time to make my usual breakfast, browse the Internet, and watch Academy Award-winner Whoopi Goldberg moderate the ladies on The View. Every morning I fry three pieces of bacon and one egg and put it on a baked cinnamon-raisin English muffin. I couple it with a giant glass of orange juice with pulp, which my best friend says, “is a meal in itself.” Whoopi is hilarious and I love her view but the news is already too “yesterday” for me as I’m on Pacific Standard Time and anything noteworthy has already been highlighted on the entertainment blogs I read while my bacon is frying.

Google image search results for "The View," from kara.allthingsd.com.

After breakfast, with the television off, the dishes clean, and my tummy full, I turn on some streaming progressive trance music and hit the Web for a job hunt. Every morning I try to find a few companies to send my resume to. The Bay Area is saturated with start-up companies, so I tend to look for community manager positions. With Facebook and Twitter giving users access to praise, and the ability to criticize and question any product with the ease and grace of an angry twelve-year-old, many companies have hired social media gurus to act like really smart babysitters. When I lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I took headshots and made websites for actors. There aren’t many actors in San Francisco, period, so my photography and design skill-set has been pushed aside so that I could focus on honing my social media skill-set. Plus, I got held up at knifepoint outside my apartment this summer and the dude took my camera, so I can’t do that for a while anyway.

After my job hunt, it’s studio time. It’s basically time for another meal, so I make some ramen noodles and go back to surfing the Web. As of late, I’ve been fixated on Peace Poles—tall skinny wooden posts with the inscription “May Peace Prevail on Earth” planted outside churches, homes, or sites of recent conflict—so I do some research on the objects. For me, everything religious has a gay twist to it, so the aesthetic of the pointy wooden post nudges me to research The Herndon Climb. At the US Naval Academy in Annapolis there stands a 21-foot grey obelisk called the Herndon Monument which is the site of year-end event known as The Herndon Climb. One thousand young academy plebes attempt to climb the lard-covered monument to replace a plebe hat sitting atop it with an upperclassman’s hat. By the end of the two-hour-ish event, the scene formally looks like last call at a gay dance club—shirtless teens soaked in water and covered in grease, tired from all the shouting, grunting, and physical activity.

Google image search results for "The Herndon Climb," from wikimedia.org.

Now that I’ve overloaded my brain with wikis and JPEGs, I venture out of my apartment into the real world and walk to the local lumberyard to check the prices of material for this project. I’m planning on making my own gay Peace Poles. Two hours later, after I look at every piece of wood, twice, I decide to make a left outside the lumberyard instead of a right and I end up walking around the city. I’m a flâneur and this is my dérive for the day. One of the most important concepts I learned in grad school was the French Situationist idea of the dérive. Simply put, it’s a “purposeful wandering.” Academically put, it’s a revolutionary means to navigate away from urban capitalism. A great first baby-step (pun intended) is to journey around San Francisco with a map of New York City. Regardless of what percent you are during these trying Occupying times, a simple dérive can help make your day a little better.*

*You would think a cliché graffiti artist or homeless person would know the streets of a city like the back of their hand, but it’s also the 1%, like Bruce Wayne, who can navigate the streets with just as much rigor. Dandies perusing the pavement in Prada have the disposable income to perform this time-consuming and seemingly useless act. More importantly, my asterisk was put here to say, “be cautious.” Sure, a dérive can make you feel better knowing that you walked a totally new and exciting way home and discovered a video-rental store that you never knew existed, but if you wander into a precarious area without caution, you’ll get mugged and die.

Google image search results for "Batman," from blogs.setonhill.edu.

With the gorgeous San Francisco sun setting behind the Kink Palace in the Mission, I return home and fry some pork chops for dinner. While the meat is defrosting, I remember that my favorite Los Angeles-based interior decorator, Jeffrey Alan Marks from the hit Bravo reality-television show Million Dollar Decorators, will be in SF this week for a major fall antiques show. I hop onto Twitter and send a blind tweet asking him if he would be up for a studio visit with an artist and by the time I’m done eating my dinner he’s blindly responded “yes” with an exclamation point. My last artwork sale was to a local interior designer so I hope that this is a financially fruitful meeting. It can also be a nice anecdote to the Bravo production team when I audition for next year’s season of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

I have the hardest time falling asleep. My mind races with too many thoughts. I’ve thought about taking Klonopin but there are too many studies that link creativity to madness and why would I want to live a life where the relationship between Peace Poles and Batman didn’t resolve within three simple paragraphs? Tossing and turning in my bed, I wonder what the hell I’m going to do tomorrow morning when I wake up. I know I have The View to watch and some cover letters to write and some studio time and some Web surfing and some tweeting and some blogging and some dériving and some eating to do, but really, what do I really have to do?

Blood cells. Image: mrbarlow.files.wordpress.com

Recently, a colleague and I were having a lovely conversation about what makes a good interdisciplinary lesson. We each had very different opinions and I was eager to make my co-worker understand that interdisciplinary teaching is not a one-way street. She seemed convinced that if a visual arts teacher somehow incorporated another subject or discipline into their work, this would constitute interdisciplinary teaching. I maintained that the “inter” in interdisciplinary means that two or more teachers from different disciplines plan and shape their lessons together, and that each teacher incorporates themes and learning objectives from both courses.

For example, if a science teacher says to a visual arts teacher, Hey Larry, I’m teaching about the parts of a blood cell next week. Would you mind if the kids made diagrams of blood cells in your art class? This does not translate into interdisciplinary teaching. As a matter of fact, it’s insulting to Larry because it insinuates that his art curriculum can be put on hold to make diagrams for a science class.

On the other hand, if the same science teacher says, Hey Larry, can we compare what we’re teaching over the next few weeks? I would love to collaborate with you and talk about ways our students can better understand the parts of a cell through art. At the same time, maybe I can help with teaching students about that metamorphosis lesson you described and even about abstraction through looking at blood cells. Well… now we’re talking!

Good interdisciplinary teaching doesn’t get done on the fly and doesn’t come packaged as “Here’s what you can do for me.” When I try to come up with artists that lend themselves to interdisciplinary teaching I visualize:

• Learning about biology through examining the work of Mark Dion
• Learning to reconsider American history through the photos of Carrie Mae Weems
• Learning to love mathematics through deconstructing the work of Sol LeWitt
• Learning about the dissolution of apartheid through the drawings and films of William Kentridge
• Learning about race and colonialism by discussing works by Yinka Shonibare MBE

I also think about:

• Learning about symmetry and asymmetry in math
• Learning about color and light in science
• Learning about artists who protest with and through art in social studies
• Learning about how words are designed in order to convey specific meaning in a literature class

Maybe you have an experience you’d like to share? Feel free to post your thoughts on what good interdisciplinary teaching looks and sounds like!

Cyrus Tilton. "Lovers," 2011. Steel, muslin, nylon, beeswax, damar. 11' L 6'W x 5'H.

If you saw the science fiction movie Starship Troopers a few years ago, you have already seen Oakland sculptor Cyrus Tilton’s handiwork—both literally and figuratively: the hands mangled in that alien-bug movie were made from molds on his hands. The exploding brains were also his concoction: Karo syrup and red food coloring (Tinseltown’s traditional recipe), plus breadcrumbs and scrambled eggs from Tilton’s catered lunch. That film’s director, Berkeley’s special-effect wizard, Phil Tippett (The Empire Strikes Back, Dragonslayer, Jurassic Park, Dinosaur!), gave Tilton his first job when he moved to the Bay Area after art school in Seattle; his current employer is Ron Holthausen, a scientifically-inclined artist whose design/display company, Scientific Art Studio (SAS) in Richmond, north of Berkeley, has adopted the apt motto, Natura artis magistra docet, Nature is the teacher of art.

SAS does work for museums (dioramas, architectural models, reconstructed extinct animals and plants), fine-art collectors (murals, sculptures, tiles, paintings and installations) and films and television (scale models, creature design, special effects, paintings, and props). Tilton once wanted to work in sci-fi/horror movies (and still confesses to a love of the “lowbrow”), but his work as SAS’ Art Director and Lead Artist has given him invaluable scientific and technical experience—perhaps exceeding what he could have learned in computer-graphics-driven Hollywood genre films. When I visited the artist at his workplace recently, Tilton, surrounded by SAS props, maquettes, and tools, looked around the vast warehouse, and reflected on the relationship between his job and his fine-art work: “It’s very cause-and-effect. It [the exchange of ideas] becomes second nature, and you get paid for it.”

Cyrus Tilton at his work bench at Scientific Art Studio.

Prop/work in progress from Scientific Art Studio.

Prop/work in progress from Scientific Art Studio.

That day-job creative flow is evident in his surreal, mysterious sculptures of humans and animals. In 2010, his show at Oakland’s Vessel Gallery, A Place In-Between, featured human-machine hybrids that elicited from this writer a comparison with Guillermo del Toro’s disturbing and enchanting film, Pan’s Labyrinth. For a show last spring, Tilton created sculptures of animal protagonists—ant and grasshopper, fox and grapes—taken from fables and folklore. Tilton’s current show, The Cycle, is no less suggestive in its satirizing of humankind’s conformist and consumerist instincts: we’re like locusts, grasshoppers that overbreed when conditions are right and, at a certain level of tactile stimulation from overcrowding, mutate from solitary feeders to billion-bug superorganisms that devastate crops wherever they land—the entomological equivalent of slash-and-burn Third-World agriculturalists or their technologically but not morally advanced First-World analogues.

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Thanks to last week’s guest blogger Tricia Van Eck for her inspiring series of posts on the Occupy movement and the political and aesthetics implications of happiness, which suggested that a concern with “being happy” may not only be vital to the world of art, but to the future of this country as well. Keep up with Tricia’s ongoing “Happiness Project” at 6018 NORTH by visiting her website here.

Next up, we have San Francisco Bay Area art writer DeWitt Cheng, who will focus on several under-recognized Bay Area artists during his two-week blogger-in-residence stint, beginning with this afternoon’s post on artist and “creature designer” Cyrus Tilton. DeWitt contributes regularly to Art Ltd., Artillery, East Bay Express and VisualArtSource.com, and occasionally to Sculpture and ArtBusiness.com. He has degrees in art history and studio art, with experience in curating, teaching, and freelance writing. You can find his personal blog at DeWittCheng.com.

It is difficult to believe that only a year ago, I was beginning my MA in Art History at The Courtauld. In 2010, to inaugurate my beginnings on the British Isles and my time in London, I bought a mug inscribed with the words “Curiouser and curiouser,” a quote from Alice in Wonderland, printed alongside an image of the protagonist staring at her flamingo-turned-croquet-mallet. As the year progressed, and I journeyed through the next step of my education, the mug’s decoration seemed only fitting. The lessons and experiences I had felt a bit like a wonderland, and, in nine short months, it also felt like a quick-lived dream. Now, a year later, I’ve written my dissertation, graduated and moved into the real world. And here I am on the other side.

"Curiouser and curiouser," cried Alice.

In Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to her first journey, Alice adventures once again, this time moving across the chess board of a parallel world from pawn to queen. And once again Alice’s story seems to fit just right.

Journeying through the looking glass.

Strangely, I now feel that I am somehow back at square one. I pursued a Master’s degree to further my study of the arts, yet I also believed that it would get me closer to getting an art-world job that would bring together my language, writing and research skills.  Yet, facing the realities of today’s economy, I have often fallen short because I lack the exact job experience required.

Once again, back at square one.

I now find myself working a full-time unpaid internship at an auction house in London, an opportunity I have been eager to undertake. I aim to gain insight into a more commercial art world, apply my skills, and evolve my previous understandings of the worlds of art. While I’m still only three-and-a-half weeks into the process, the internship has had its highs and lows. I seek to complete tasks set before me with professionalism and tact, but also hunger to learn more and put more of my intellect to work. The internship itself seems to be without structure. I still hope to find a mentor who will recognize my abilities and talents and put me to task. There are moments of frustration and moments of fulfillment in new beginnings. Tension stretches between knowing my intelligence and my capabilities, and completing the more simple jobs at hand. I am ripe for a challenge. There are times when I step back and look at my credentials and wonder what an education is worth. As many of the people who now work in the department started as interns, I wonder if the unpaid internship is simply a rite of passage into this art world.

The process thus far has been frustrating and challenging, humbling and instructive. While I like to think that the world is at my fingertips, many times it feels that it is just out of reach. Yet, as I move ahead, I have decided to face all challenges with equal enthusiasm and determination, and to seek out chances to learn and prove myself.

Part of me wonders if, like Alice, I will ascend in rank, or, at the end of it all, I’ll wake up and realize that it was all just a dream….

Will I ascend? Or wake up?