I happened upon this inexplicably depressing website, These Americans.

(Okay, actually it’s perfectly explicable, the images are all very sad and creepy, at least to me.)

Here are some of the weird, lonely images from Detroit, mostly from the 20th century.

I found this article about a famous private art collection housed in Philadelphia to be a fascinating case – again involving the issues of art and private property. We had recently explored this topic in my post about Bansky’s art in Detroit, and this time the issue is no less complex and no less mired in legal and political battles.

A bit of background from the article,

The Barnes Foundation, founded in 1922 by the late multimillionaire Dr. Albert C. Barnes, is a rambling two-story granite structure centered on a plot of rolling, carefully sculpted arboretum grounds – and it is home to the most fantastically impressive collection of post-Impressionist and early Modern art masterpieces still in private hands.

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As the inventor of a medical compound useful in combating venereal disease, the Philadelphia-born Barnes amassed a staggering fortune and invested in artists that the city’s art and high society crowd, in the 1920s, regarded as vulgar and unworthy of serious critical attention. But as tastes changed, and Barnes’s Renoirs, Matisses, and Picassos accrued in value – his collection today is conservatively estimated as being worth $25 to $35 billion – the city’s elders began expressing interest in relocating his collection to a spot closer to the downtown Philadelphia Museum of Art. Barnes resisted such moves, and laid out specific wishes in his estate papers specifying that his collection should never be broken up or moved – unless it became financially unsustainable for the collection to remain in his house.

While it is clear what Dr. Barnes’ wishes were – what is unclear is how truly “financially unsustainble” the current state of the collection is in. Curiously, it does not seem that Philadelphia advocates of the move (both private and public “donors”) care much about a final verdict in the matter and have already begun breaking ground on a new site and are quick to assure those against the move that the new home of the artworks will be as true to Barnes’ intentions as possible.

A series of court battles, internal struggles, and public relations campaigns over the decades has resulted in the wheels being set in motion for the Barnes Foundation to relocate to a site within city limits. Amid a welter of claims and counter-claims, the original 1925 structure has been declared financially unsustainable, and the Barnes Foundation’s board of directors is now controlled by individuals who favor the relocation of its founder’s prized holdings. Groundbreaking has thus begun, and a concrete foundation has been laid, for a new Barnes Foundation building that will sit along the city’s tree-lined Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a short walk from the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Barnes detested.

A small but determined band of Lower Merion [the original city where the Barnes collection is located] activists, known as the Friends of Barnes, is still trying to halt the move, but a state court has already ruled that they lack “standing” to bring legal action to achieve their goal. Undaunted, they are exploring other legal avenues and hoping to draw attention to the multimillion-dollar costs of moving the Barnes collection to Philadelphia. Politicians, educators, art lovers and others influential in Philadelphia are meanwhile excited to see access to the collection expanded, and tourism revenues boosted. They have tapped an initial fund of roughly $200 million – some $30 million of which was provided by the state of Pennsylvania, the rest from private donations – to bankroll construction of the new facility, to complete the transfer of Barnes’s holdings, and to start an ongoing endowment. And they vow to preserve, in their new presentation of his artworks, the precise configuration and overall spirit of Barnes’s house.

While I do not know enough of the details about this case and there is a documentary, The Art of the Steal, which further describes how this situation has come to pass- it seems that moves like this do much to erode the perceived value of private property rights in the sense that there is a sense of celebration in destroying the original collector’s wishes as well as entitlement to the works he privately curated, which most ironically, many people found to be worthless and abhorrent at the time he collected them.

It should be clear why the issue of one’s art or one’s art collection and private property rights should be considered of utmost importance, but so many people are content with lazy “So what?” thinking. They say, “Uh, like, so what? Who cares if some old dude’s paintings are moved? It’s, like, probably good for the collection and good for the city and good so more people can see the art.” Sure, if you only consider what is happening in what might even be an arguable improvement in the situation. However, this simplistic rationale only considers what is seen.

What is unseen is the application of this kind of thinking to all art at all times. Think about it this way, when the intentions are not so magnanimous…you are a controversial artist. You made your art, own your art. Your government or some private individual believes your art is troublesome or just plain unworthy of being sold or displayed. They take your art and do what they please. In this case, they do not move it to a “better” location or build a “better” monument to the work – but they destroy it.

This type of scenario is also a logical outcome of the “so what” thinking above. This scenario is no less likely than the Barnes case. However, in both cases, the rights of the art owners should be protected above the interests of all other individuals. This is what artistic freedom is all about.

If you are interested in taking out any latent aggression you have over the passing of the HRC in an artistic way – or celebrate the home run for your team – you may want to check out MOCAD’s “Smash Art” event on Saturday night.

This wild, Duchamp-ian activity promises to be a rollicking experience for all participants. Artists, collectors and hangers-on are invited to come to MOCAD bearing at least one piece of original art each. Participants will then be encouraged to collectively smash, mutilate and destroy the works that they brought. Everyone will then be encouraged to work together to create a new and different, monumental art piece as a collective with all of the remnants of the smashed works. Art works and the tools to destroy them will not be provided by MOCAD. We request that no glass, dangerous materials or any hazardous products be used.

The event is free to anyone and takes place on March 27th at 6pm.

• The down side of being uber-talented: the sparkle and fade of a child prodigy violinist Patricia Travers who disappeared 60 years ago and recently died.
• Award winning gospel music family accused of selling fraudulent crude oil bonds to their church members. Just wrap your head around that one.
• We all know Detroit housing is cheap and artists need cheap rent, but can it live up to this Huffington Post prediction about being the next big arts metropolis by 2025? Laurie Lyons covers The Armory Show and more.
• What makes a novelist abandon his latest work for non-fiction? Economic meltdown. Author John Lancaster “wanted to write a book about finance and economics for a literate public that felt alienated.” To get a taste of what he’s got rattling around in his mind and in his new book,

To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings.

• Burning Man message board adds a topic devoted to Art and Economics, if you like that sort of thing.

Sometimes I just don’t get the time to blog about all the things I would like to. So I’m going to start doing what all the cool kids in the blogosphere do, just post the links and let you guys do the hard work.

• Most everyone has heard about how Detroit’s got this famous blighted house covered in ice. So, is this art because people who call themselves artists made it?
• In other news, Detroit is now the most affordable city for artists. Just ask this artist who bought his own blighted house for $100.
• The economic slowdown has negatively affect “art transactions,” but not as much as some expected,

…2005 was a peak of its own in the three-year trend coming out of the steep post-internet boom recession of 2002. If the art market can consolidate above the 2005 level at is trough, the hypothesis that the art market has entered a new, global phase that offers much greater expansion in terms of both volume and price has some value.

• High profile fair use fight over art. Images of the Korean war memorial depicted on a US stamp vs. the actual sculptures of the Korean war memorial.
• Even higher profile arts smackdown: China out-arts France. What could it be? Could it be…mmmm, Satan? Or just the associated evils of capitalism?
• And an interesting twist on the price elasticity of demand argument for luxury goods – turns out that art as mere luxury good may not be as accurate as art as alternative investment or store of long-term value.

“While outright global demand was weaker for luxury collectibles and consumables, there has also been a shift in luxury purchasing habits, as many HNWIs looked to secure their wealth in assets with long-term tangible value,” says the report. “This has worked strongly in favour of the art market, with art now recognized as a viable alternative investment asset.

For those of you who caught my original post about Jerry Paffendorf’s Loveland – he’s since been featured on NPR as well as announced he’s coming out with Loveland Season 2 Pre-Game: The Legend of the Ghost Inches which means, in plain english,

The second property hasn’t been purchased yet, so Jerry calls the investments “ghost inches.” When you purchase an inch, you get a nice little deed package containing a magnifying glass to better survey your territory. The little money from deed sales goes back into the project. He also hopes to use the “profits” to provide microgrants to other innovative urban development projects in the city.

Again, I’m a fan of this quirky idea. I only wish the property being inch-auctioned off was the glorious ruins of Michigan Central Station. Then again, would having tons of micro-investors help the historical site fare any better?

I’ll be curious to see how, and if, the micro-investing concept evolves. What kind of steps will micro-owners take to develop their tiny plots, if any? Or will it be just a novelty like when your high school boyfriend bought a star and named it after you? (Yes, there is a star out there with my name on it, I even have the coordinates.)

Living in Detroit, this story about a police raid at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit was not surprising, but one more in a long list of problems with the metro area I live in. Detroit was recently been named one of Forbes America’s Most Miserable Cities for at least the third year in a row (though we’re no longer No. 1) and it’s for reasons such as this:

Jason Leverette-Saunders said he thought he was being robbed when masked gunmen crashed a party at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit at about 2 a.m. May 31, 2008.

But the intruders were Detroit cops who stormed the gallery and ticketed more than 100 mostly young and suburban college students for loitering, seizing their vehicles, because they were attending a private, after-hours party where alcoholic beverages were served. Attendees each had to pay $900, plus towing and storage fees, to get their cars back, even though their loitering tickets later were dismissed.

I’m not familiar with the details of the evening, but at first glance, punishing a bunch of college-aged contemporary art gallery-goers seems like an outlandish activity for Detroit police, compared to other legitimate crimes that were likely being committed in Detroit that night.

I cannot say I entirely grasp the concept of so-called “micro real estate investing” but it sounds interesting and is the type of innovation-via-the-arts I enjoy hearing about.

According to the Associated Press,

A Web designer is hawking square inches of an empty lot in Detroit for a dollar each to show what can be done with vacant spaces.

Jerry Paffendorf says nearly 600 “inchvestors” have bought some of the 10,000 plots for sale in the “Loveland” art-and-real-estate project on Detroit’s east side.

The 28-year-old says he bought the lot for $500 and that profits are fed back into the project.

He says some inchvestors buy one plot while others have taken 1,000, and that they may do with the land as they wish. He says some plan to construct tiny buildings.

Paffendorf told The Detroit News that he is making a statement about what can be done with foreclosed property. He told the Detroit Free Press he will stream video of the site this spring.

The project is called Loveland and the first micro-colony has been cheekily dubbed Plymouth. While both the website and the idea may induce brainfever – I kind of want my own square inch. There is a page that shows the names of donors to date, and it made me feel like this thing has some legs.

Screenshot from Jerry Paffendorf's Loveland

Anyone else have some interesting ideas for Loveland?