The Texas Sculpture Association show at the Aloft Hotel Dallas is underway.  The artists’ reception was yesterday evening. Great time had by all.  It was fun meeting people and looking at a wide spectrum of styles.  I am proud to be displaying my work alongside these other artists’ work.

Some Observations:

• Out of 90+ works in the show, there was only one that had anything directly to do with technology in subject matter or substance;  MyFavoriteMachine
• Multiple people commented to me, not just that they liked MFM, but that they enjoyed watching other people engaging with it. Hmmm.
• There were a few people who expressed absolute ecstatic excitement over MFM.  They happened to be the youngest people in the place.  They were Twenty-ish while most of the art crowd appeared to be in the age bracket of between fifty and a hundred years old.  Whadja say, sonny?
• One young man told me he came to the show just to see MFM.  Thanks Justin.  It was great meeting you.  More important than my being flattered, it tells me something about the appeal of this art motif that I have invented.  Maybe anyone could have guessed it, but I like the way the evidence is stacking up.

Conclusions:

• All Young people get it.
• Some older Tech savvy people get it.
• People who are basically outside the box thinkers get it.

This is consistent with the response I have gotten so far already as it has appeared in various locations.

Who I don’t expect to get it:

• People who are not current with technology, not that you must know how to operate it, but this art is about technology from an up-close personal and social/cultural point of view.   Art connecting to an expereince that they do not share would naturally be a like a dance to music they cannot hear.
• Some Art establishment people. The reason is interesting and I am still figuring it out.  Ironically, while we think of artists as outside the box thinkers, the fact is they have their own boxes.   There are plenty of rules and conventions that must be adhered to in order to fit into the art world as we know it today.  MFM violates some of those rules.  I may elaborate on that later, but for now I’ll compare it to a Seattle grunge band playing at a swing / big band recital.  That Art world is about to change and MFM will help change it.  I clearly recall a similar thing happening in the tech world when the world wide web happened.  There were plenty of reasonably smart tech people that said it was “just a fad” and would quickly fade. I being a youthful analyst at the time got extremely excited as I brainstormed endless things that the web could be used to do. One of my collegues who I choose not to embarrass told me, “Roger, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  Well, today, virtually everything is a nail.  In fact, there are far more nails in the world than ever I could have imagined.

What to do with this?  My experiment:

• Where to go from here seems very clear.  In the words of my twenty-ish daughter, “Play to the young crowd”.
• So, I will be looking for opportunities to display works from the MyFavoriteMachine series on college campuses and other locations where young people gather, any place where creativity is fostered.  Art and or technology departments of course would be targets, but also cultural anthropology, sociology, and really anywhere the cross-over between sciences and humanities is contempleted. If you have suggestions and contacts for such places that would be interested in hosting MFM, please let me know.  They can contact me at contact@belveal.com

“Timothy Leary is Dead” indeed and his legacy is a negative one.  Still, I’d like to latch on to the idea that he had of encouraging young people to expand their thinking, but take it in a positive direction.  I’ll reuse the first step, ‘tune In”  which now refers (not reefers)  to the technology culture and add my own second and third steps.

Tune in, Get Creative, and Share something good with others.

- roger

A great tune with a little time and age introspection built in by the Moody Blues