Wk 3: Arts Funding

Last Week: Instagram Day (Relational Aesthetics)

Above: a small, sublime moment from IG day by Kari Maehara.
Below: Jack Taylor posts the IG of the day!

Good Post Names

Almost everybody is using great post names! But a few of you are using “bad” post names that make my job really hard. For maximum points, please use good post names. There are examples in the syllabus:
• beacharts.ca/fall14-syllabus/#rubrics

Points on BeachBoard

All Wk1 & Wk2 points are now live on BeachBoard. Note that this isn’t really a “percentage” class, it’s a “points” class. Your goal is to get 900+ points and earn an “A”. There’s no way for me to turn off the percentage stuff on BeachBoard, but please don’t be confused by it. In fact, don’t even look at it! (yes, just like Nigel Tufnel’s guitar, don’t even look at it!)

After Wk2 it might say you have 100 points or 10% or something like that. That’s because it’s calculating your current points out of the entire course 1,000 possible. Mostly you should just be working your way to 900+. We had 58 points for Wk1 & 58 for Wk2 or 116 possible. 90% of 116 is 104, so if you’ve got 104 or better, then you’re on “A” pace. If you’ve got under 104 you either didn’t post some things, or if you did post everything then you probably lost a few points for bad names or missing photos or overly short / simple posts. I talk about all of these elements in the syllabus:
• beacharts.ca/fall14-syllabus/#rubrics

Diana Martinez

Diana Martinez with Conny Ramirez from Conny’s website

Velveth Alarcon

Speaking of #1 Students, after class on Thursday, like many of you, I wandered around Week of Welcome. OMG so many great groups and activities to participate in! And who should I run into Salsa Dancing in the middle of the sidewalk but Velveth Alarcon. This time last year she was a freshman psychology major on her way to finishing #1 in Art110. Like this semester it was 900 out of 1,000 for an “A,” and Velveth finished with 1,142. Now she’s on the CSULB Salsa Team! She might come visit our class some Tuesday and see if she can recruit a few of you to join the CSULB Salsa Club.

Michelle Morte

I think everyone knows that Michelle Morte was the keeper of the ID card envelope on Thursday. Great job Michelle! Thank You! Who will hold The Envelope this week? Stay tuned!

This Week: Kickstarter (Arts Funding)

From the Medici Family of Florence to America’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) we’ve always grappled with ways to fund The Arts. “Popular” artists like Katy Perry or Michael Bay can make bags of money, but we also like to see less “pop” work also be a part of our culture. There’s probably no Craft Beer alive that will ever do even a tiny fraction of the sales that Bud Light does (45 million barrels & 5.3 billion dollars in 2011) yet for many people, drinking a beer that not everybody else drinks is part of what they value in the experience.

What if you don’t have a rich patron like Lorenzo de Medici or Eli Broad or Charles Saatchi? Or an NEA Grant? Or a contract with Universal Studios or Sony Music or Condé Nast publishing? One solution, since April 28, 2009, has been Kickstarter. With Kickstarter you ask for enough money to do your project, say $5,000. When people pledge to your project, Kickstarter takes their credit card number, but it doesn’t charge them anything. When your campaign ends, if you made your goal, Kickstarter charges everyone’s cards and delivers your money to you. If you don’t meet your goal, say you only got $2,500 in support, then your project goes “unfunded” and no one’s credit card is charged anything.

This can make for a little stress on the artist, but it also encourages you to be serious & realistic. Kickstarter doesn’t want to take donor money, give you half of what you need, and then have a half finished project that doesn’t deliver what it promised. Sometimes the deliverables are physical things like an ice chest, or an iPhone accessory. The “deliverables” might also by intangible, like a dance performance. Overall, about 60% Kickstarter projects fail. Of the 40% that do reach their goal and get funded, a few get many times more than they asked for.

Lucky you, we’re not doing full Kickstarter projects for real, so you can skip the stress of meeting your goal. But it’d be pretty cool if sometime before you graduate from CSULB, you did. This week we’re just making hypothetical Kickstarter pitch videos. Even though this one is “only a rehearsal,” I urge you to take it seriously. If you do a “late night infomercial” you might get a couple of laughs out of it, but it’ll pretty much be pointless. If you use this as an opportunity to be in front of a camera and express yourself to people who might be interested in your work, you’ll gain something really valuable.

Full details for this Activity are on our Kickstarter Activity Page. There’s also a few sample Kickstarter Pitch Videos there, as well as many thousands more on the Kickstarter website. I’ll just post 1 here in our Art110 Weekly post to get you rolling. Since we’re all using WordPress, you might find it interesting to hear this pitch from John O’Nolan. He was a WordPress developer for a couple of years and then decided to launch a new blogging platform, Ghost. Here’s how he pitched it:

Kickstarter Film Festival

If you recall, we have 4 Extra Credit opportunities this semester, and the Kickstarter Film Festival this Friday is Opportunity #2. The event is in Griffith Park in LA. It runs from 6-11pm and is free. If you’d like the EC, just:
1. Go to the event
2. Take some pix
3. Do an extra (4th) post this week with a couple of pix and a few paragraphs about your experience

Do a nice job and I’ll add up to +30 of EC on top of your up to 30 points of Regular Activity for this week. 30+30=60!

Group or Solo

You’re welcome to do this project solo if you like. But what a great project to do with someone else in the class! It’d probably be more fun and you might wind up with a more compelling project.