Save the Hot Dogs!

That's it, I take back all of my doubts and criticism - we must rescue GM at all costs!

Do it for the hot dogs!!!

Street Art for the Recession

Perhaps it is the same air of renewed commitment and creativity among artists that I blogged about last week that we have to thank for a whole new batch of fascinating and uniquely recession-era street art cropping up in New York.


Back in April, Brian Lehrer interviewed the founders of Wooster Collective, a group of street artists based in Manhattan, about street art given the listener reports of some fresh graffiti and stencils showing up all over the city New York with a distinct economic theme.

The WNYC website linked to a couple of great examples of these pieces, below:

1) a sarcastic bubble-letter sticker encouraging you to "enjoy subprime lending;"
2) a stencil of former treasury secretary Henry Paulsen, fed. chairman Ben Bernanke, and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox, below the caption "Axis of Evil."
3) spraypaint by the Holland Tunnel asking, "where's my f*cking bailout?

Marc and Sarah Schiller, the Wooster Collective founders, describe street art as a "mirror to society," and say that it allows the city itself to act as a canvas for any artist with something to say. But, what is most exciting to me about this is really true for anyone with something to say. For this medium more than most, it seems anyone with "something to say" (and with the guts to risk getting caught) can be an artist.
Street art is a subversive medium, but one with mass access and a huge audience. The combination gives it great potential to communicate ideas which aren't expressed in the mainstream media, and need to squeeze themselves into the spotlight through other means instead.

In addition to standard spray paint graffiti and stencils, the Schillers mentioned a few more elaborate street art "installations" that can be found around New York.
I found one such installation artist with some great pieces online at WebUrbanist. Brad Downey dresses himself as a city maintenance or construction worker so as to be essentially invisible as he goes about setting up his funky installations, like these (right.)

Phone booth installations are popular, according to the Schillings, because so many of the phone booths in New York are unused, defunct, and forgotten.

Artists replace the backlit ads with their own work, adding something interesting to the landscape while aggressively rejecting the world of advertising our consumer culture, as well as commenting on a wasted urban infrastructure.

So perk up your peripheral vision next time you're on the streets, and see what art you find.

No Food, Plenty of Food for Thought

You may be worried lately that New York's starving artists are becoming even more starving during this recession. You may even be afraid that they will become an endangered species! In fact, if you are like most of the country these days, you stay up at nights wondering, but what about art?!? What will the poor artists do?!? Well, don't fear, concerned patron! Artists are totally digging the recession.

A couple of recent articles suggest that artists are actually feeling more optimistic and creatively liberated since the recession hit. Why? Well, for one such artist, the economic downturn means freedom from the boring gigs that she endured to pay her rent (endless Gershwin and Porter requests, yuck); for another it's a break from creating commissioned (and therefore creatively limited) pieces. Of her newfound freedom, the latter said “Nobody wants me to do anything, so I’m just doing what I want." (Hmm, sounds like my high school social life.) Whatever the case, this New York Times article cited a whole population of artists who feel that the recession has, more than anything, strengthened their commitment to and concentration on their craft.

A songwriter interviewed indicated that more free time lets his thoughts flow more freely, saying “I walked through Central Park twice this week and emerged with songs ready to go.” One visual artist's optimism came partly from analysis of the market (she predicts a decrease in the production of “market-oriented art that is being churned out by the bulk," which is a tough competitor for original and independent works.)

So rest easy. Those artists aren't going anywhere. You can read the hundreds of reponses to the NYTimes question "What effect is the economy having on your life and work as an artist, writer, actor, or musician?" here.

Who Needs Money, Anyway?

Certainly not Lily Gold, a Brooklyn artist who says she is, "constantly looking for ways to eliminate hard currency from my life." She recently created a bartering event at a Park Slope art gallery. According to the internets, she is not alone in preferring to trade.
An e-commerce expert interviewed by am NY says that, "as the economy has nose-dived, the "free-trade" movement has skyrocketed." And he doesn't mean the kind of "free trade" that allows you to buy bargain blouses at Wal-Mart made in Pakistan or Bangladesh. He means swapping goods and services instead of paying for them

Due to a timely combination in the of generalized brokeness and increasing access to the internet, lately US consumers are returning to the good ol' days of bartering. For many, this means access to products or services that would be out of reach otherwise, because bartering opens up opportunities that don't exist in a classical economic system, where pricing is marked to the market.

A bartering system instead can give the economic edge in any given deal to unlikely and unexpected parties, as it simply benefits those who happen to have a particular item or service that is in demand at that particular time by a peer.

Can you feel the thrill???

For a while, Craigs List (with its "barter" section) had the corner on this market, but among the bartering websites that have cropped up lately are:
HomeExchange.com, where you can trade houses for a vacation (ooh, think anyone will want to trade a noisy, cramped apartment in Brooklyn for a thatch-roof beach house on an island??); MakeupAlley.com, a "beauty social network" which offers product reviews as well as the possibility to make trades;FrugalReader and PaperBackSwap, both book trading websites; TextSwap, which is for textbooks in particular, BarterBee.com, for movies, music, and games; and, finally, SwapThing and TargetBarter which are forums for trading and bartering all categories of things.

Kindergarten Lessons Come in Handy

Recent negotiations between Minnesota and Wisconsin suggest that the recession is creating some unlikely friendships at the same time that it sparks innovation in the world of commerce.

The two midwestern states are becoming mighty neighborly as they attempt to pinch pennies to work with shrinking budgets, turning towards the idea of sharing resources in a way that has never been considered before. The discussion started thanks to a fishy dilemma: Minnesota needed some of the tiny walleye fish, and Wisconsin needed some fingerlings; Minnesota had plenty of fingerlings and needed some walleyes.

Duh. It was a match made in heaven.
Some genius suggested the states share their resources, and now that idea has extended to everything from bullets for police use to sign language interpreters. A full report on the proposal can be found here. And all over the country, other states are acting in kind, sharing (everything from prison inmates to townships!) in order to cut costs instead of jobs.

It will be interesting to see how these deals pan out, and whether this will mark a smart new trend in trade or is just a temporary strategy borne of necessity.

Kids, Get That Guest Room Ready For Your Parents!

...to live in. Forever.

The Obama Administration announced on Tuesday that the program's reserves face depletion by 2037, four years earlier than last year's estimate. Meanwhile, the Medicare fund is predicted to exhaust itself in 2017.

Just in case you still took the phrase "Social Security" seriously.