So I have to tell you people about Kickstarter. Kickstarter enables fundraising for "creative projects" in categories like art, film, music, photography, writing, etc in a fun online venue. The funds are all-or-nothing. You set a goal for your project, and if you meet the goal, you get the cash. If you do not meet the goal, you get nothing.

You describe your project, hopefully upload a video or at least some photos to help give voice to what you're trying to raise funds for, and set "rewards" in money increments for your donors. Kickstarter really encourages creative rewards - so it usually relates back to the project in some way, or are more personal kinds of things - limited editions, one of a kind handmade stuff, and experiences like private parties and the like.

We've launched a kickstarter for PLUG and its been a great tool for getting the word out on what we're doing while trying to create a programming budget for the year. We've also had a lot of fun just kind of "cruising" kickstarter for fun projects going on in kansas city and around the world. I'm going to links to ours and some others here. In general I would say this is just a super resource and is so empowering at a time when funding for the arts is really in trouble at a government level. What's great about this is the real people- friends and even total strangers, displaying faith in the things you're trying to make happen.

Youth and Art by Jerry Saltz and 51 comments of readers all worth reading

Jerry Saltz from New York Mag

I really want to pass this along to all people. I found its ideological soil to be ripe and fertile. The perfect place to incubate ideas and grow conclusions. So please read it and make up your own mind whether you agree or disagree. I know for sure that for me to make art I needed my "real" life. The art I produced during an unfinished graduate program and early in my BFA was okay but not true. My professors always told me to graduate and then get the hell away from school. I didn't know what they meant. I do now.

From New York Mag and Jerry Saltz:

Generation Blank. The beautiful, cerebral, ultimately content-free creations of art's well-schooled young lions.

Without meaning, but understood.

Anthony Dobovsky's paintings are small in scale - mere inches. However, the moments, lived experience, thoughts and poetry that the works embody and evoke seem to be massive. The paintings are fragile in way that is rarely found in today's art. It's worth reading any of the artist's blogs - for the writing is lucid and uncluttered, just like the paintings.

Here's a little quote from one of his entries: "To describe a painting, to return to that moment—where the off-gray will coalesce into a kind of mist—an atmosphere—without meaning, but understood…"

Wayne White

Pee-Wee's playhouse was very influential television programming for young man in the 80's. Saturday morning found me avoiding cutting the grass in half hour increments as I moved seamlessly through the Ed Grimly Show, Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Saved by the Bell. So it is no surprise that I find Wayne White plays the banjo of my heart with great skill.

But beyond just mere nostalgia, White's rustic Americana influence is deeper, grittier and more heavy than what it seems. Although PWPH always did have a touch of darkness and whiff of subversion to it. No matter, the new show of White's (now closing next week if you happen to be in LA) at Western Projects is filled with appropriated rubbish. Discarded materials strung together to form strangely familiar puppets/sculptures that describe a history both unique to Wayne and universal to our country. A skewed type of folk story telling that exaggerates and pokes fun at maybe where we are as a country or where the artist is in life. The paintings remind me Guston or early Pollack. Perhaps they serve as backdrops for his characters. Either way, the artist's work is one of history and failed dreams. Of irony and he-haw. Of love and country.

Find more of Wayne here.