After a weekend surrounded by high priced high fashion and high priced ‘Affordable Art’, I needed a low-priced respite. I needed to be among real people, real artisans, and real things I could afford. I’m a man in love with all extremes - I’ll chase my filet mignon with a bag of Cheetos, and I’ll relish both experiences.

New York City had chosen the weekend of June 14th to somehow exchange climates with the muggiest depths of Hell itself, so while Brooklyn’s Renegade Craft Fair was an awesome delight, the weather made viscous slugs of us all, sleepily oozing our way around the abandoned and emptied McCarren Park Pool. For such a vast collection of DIY-ers, recyclers, and use-every-part-ers, holding the Fair in an unused pool was an exceptional and clever use of space.

When I attended Renegade 2 years ago, I was charmed by the handmade feel of everything. Magazines and comics were stapled together, many cloth things had visible stitching, and loose ends were the norm. Signs were handpainted. It was an aesthetic that I learned to love, and even embraced in my own works - the hands deliver the heart and soul, as imperfect as they may be. It’s not that this year’s collection of vendors were off-putting, but there’s definitely a climate change in the crafting scene, if Renegade is any evidence. Gone were many of the smartly recycled items from the past - old books and scraps of wood and LPs turned into new things - and replaced by glossy, printed signs for many of the vendors, and mini-mass-produced items at almost every table.

What I’ve always loved about the young crafting scene is that you could look around, get some ideas, and with a little bit of ingenuity, make something similar to what you’ve seen - but with your own flair. It’s that kind of open source crafting that really builds the community into something strong. Pressing prints on your own small printing press is a completely different entity than sending them out to be digitally, professionally replicated, and while I can appreciate and see the merits of both things, the latter seems to be less in the spirit of a ‘Craft Fair’. It makes the process inaccessible, and even worse, costly. No, you can’t do it yourself anymore, and there’s no smart acronym for whatever the opposite of DIY is.

And maybe it’s the cost of living going berserk everywhere, but prices seemed to be twice as much as what they were 2 years ago. Crafters are finding it harder to survive while doing their art, and the cost of materials has also gone up. None of this is to say that any of the artists there were anything less than inspiring - I fell in love with everything, no matter where it came from - carefully-sewn, cartoonish trophy heads, a whole array of great t-shirts and art prints, squid things and robots everywhere, adorable dolls and crocheted monsters that I would have loved to take home with me, were it not for premium costs.

Still, in the true spirit of Do-It-Yourself, there was one girl set up in a tall, vending machine-shaped tent, advertised as a ‘Postcard Machine’. Insert $2 and you’d get a postcard fed back out to you - which would be drawn on the spot by the artist hidden inside of the mini-tent. Somehow, the entire heart and soul of the Fair were inside of that ‘device’ - everything that I loved form previous experiences, which felt absent from this year. An inexpensive, precious item, made by hand, accompanied by a personal experience - isn’t that at the core of crafting?

The heat made the day a sweaty blur, and while I was hesitant to touch too many things lest I leave a moist handprint on them, I felt the need to support my fellow creators. I purchased a small, felt squid doll-thing (which is holding a tray of sushi) for $19 from Cleo Dee, and a set of 10 ‘Presidential Facial Hair Hall of Fame’ buttons to add to my button collection. Plus, I secretly love Presidential trivia, not to mention how funny they looked, and my affection for the World Beard and Moustache Championships. The set of 10 was $20, and even though I own a button maker, I felt the moral need to perpetuate the crafting scene with my wallet. 1” buttons for $2 each, however, is just the climate of things. I miss the 4-for-a-dollar days. Man, I stocked up that year. So, after $40 spent, the rewards were in quality, not quantity.

Nonetheless, I won’t concern myself with having a pocket full of small bills next year, since everything cost over 20 dollars anyhow. I WILL be returning, of course - even the intense heat couldn’t keep me away from such a gathering of pale, dark-haired crafty girls. Oh, and they neat stuff they make.

On our way to Ayr, we stopped once again at one of my favorite roadside attractions. Literally situated on the side of the road in Buffalo, North Dakota, is a spectacular display of lawn ornaments. So grand, it is the sort of thing which makes me yell, “Oh my gawd - turn the van around now!”

Just as this is no ordinary lawn but a farm, this display is no ordinary lawn kitsch (or even a less typical lawn decoration scheme) but a huge collection of even larger cement animals, each weighing hundreds of pounds. The traditional Midwestern deer stand near their wolf predators, a rooster towers at the same height as a rhino. There are elk, cows, emu, bears… a giraffe. There’s even a boulder painted to look like a panda.

And then there are the vignettes: a chimp sits on a tombstone slab surrounded by squirrels & assorted poultry, a totem pole has all sorts of critters climbing on it, folks ride in wagons, make-shift riders on the horse and the donkey, and a family fishes in a small pond with even smaller polar bears in attendance.

Each animal is lined up to face the street, and bolted to stone or cement bases to secure them. At first this seemed rather silly to me — who could walk off with such heavy things? — but it’s winter, with it’s heavy snows and bulldozing winds, who is more likely to move or damage the mish-mosh herd.

This time, after we poured out of the van and once again marveled at the awesome display, the owner of the collection drove up on his riding lawn mower. He was only too happy to talk about his large collection of concrete animals.

Bud Beilke started buying the animals in 1993 or 1994, after his wife said ‘no’ to getting animals. His first purchase was the magnificent metallic gold painted lion. The polar bear is an international purchase, from Canada and weighs over 600 pounds — which makes me think the shipping was the real ‘bear’. His last purchase was the mountain lion prowling down the rocks, which cost about $750.

This is no cheap, fly-by-night collection, but rather an expensive, drive-by-and-see-it-at-night collection (via an elaborate system of floodlights), arranged with love and care by the collector.

Bud and his wife, Alta, are selling the farm and moving to Fargo, and so all 45 animal statues are going on the auction block on July 14th. We plan on going, if only to say goodbye to the giant collection. I’m going to miss it terribly.

But before then, we must get back and see it under the stars and floodlights one night.

After all, Bud went through a lot of trouble for folks to see it like that; the least we can do is give it — and Bud — their due.

I’ve joked before that I am collecting my hometown, a brick at a time. It’s not particularly serious, but I’ve got a couple loose bricks that came from demolishing jobs in downtown Fargo. My desire for the bricks comes from my admiration and memories of the buildings that the masonry came from. The AOUW Grand Lodge was where I worked for several years, and the Idelkope Building was where I bought my comics from a guy that looked kinda like Santa Claus. Everyone’s got their reasons, and I’ve got mine. It’s not like I’d ever be able to get an entire building, even in a full lifetime of brick-borrowing.

Keith Johnson has a personal reason to collect, too. In 1980, Keith’s son Lonnie passed away, and as a living tribute to his son Mr. Johnson began collecting and restoring his town.

Today, June 22nd 2008, Ayr, North Dakota celebrates the 125th anniversary of its establishment, shortly before statehood and shortly after the railroad arrived. At 2pm, a parade will crawl past Johnson’s collection. Adjoining the main street of town, a small dirt road passes between a number of small but nicely restored buildings. These are the objects of Keith Johnson’s collection.

The collection records more than just Lonnie’s life — Keith Johnson’s buildings are the core of his community’s history. The town’s original one-room schoolhouse is restored, including desks and a (mildly frightening) mannequin schoolteacher; outhouses are out back, but are sadly no longer available for public use. Those arriving to Ayr via rail would have disembarked at the Great Northern Depot, now no longer anywhere near the rail-line but still kept company by a Burlington Northern caboose. The Ayr Store Company was a place for provisions, but it is the ice cream shop and the barber that really made Ayr a modern ‘city’ hidden in central North Dakota (although I’m not sure these buildings are original to Ayr at all). The collection includes the original fire bell — a huge iron triangle, suitable for calling the cowpokes in for dinner, but far more purposeful to a remote rural community as a call for the fire volunteers. An Arthur (ND) firetruck sits nearby, not quite ready to leap into service if there were a fire. Our favorite was the gas station — a beautifully repaired and well-decorated canopy service station outfitted as a Mobil stop. You can see more pictures of Johnson’s buildings here.

The buildings are closed and locked (an appointment with Johnson can be arranged for a more detailed tour), but the windows give a good view of Johnson’s restoration. Each building is furnished inside and out with appropriate originals and replicas of period accountrements, from leaded shades on lamps to original signs and advertisements on the walls. While I wouldn’t call any of the vignettes a museum-quality display, that is hardly the purpose. Keith Johnson was one of the lucky few people with the resources and room to actually have a collection of buildings. There are real, functional small towns in North Dakota with fewer habitable buildings than Johnson’s collection contains, and the collection garnered a nomination from the North Dakota State Historical Society in 2007 for his work. Keith Johnson’s dedication and love for these old buildings makes his collection one of the funnest I’ve met, and his willingness to share it with visitors by eschewing fences and gates is a boon to people interested in the history of these rural communities.

Last weekend, I bravely made my way down to NYC’s trendy SoHo area to visit the annual Affordable Art Fair, being held in the Metropolitan Pavilion. I attended with the hope that I’d come away with some inspiration, or maybe some ‘affordable’ art. At the very least, I’d be able to shoot a watergun into a clown’s mouth, inflate a balloon, and win an flammable Spongebob doll, because really, how can you use the word ‘Fair’ without including that clown balloon pop game? It would be a travesty.

Being entrenched in the art world as a creator of moderate success, my perspective on art sales probably isn’t the purest, objective thing out there. I’m embittered by the sheer mess of confusion, luck, cronyism and coincidence that swirls at the core of the art world, giving me no clues about what to expect, what to produce, and where to show it off. As a result, many of my thoughts were dominated by ‘they’re charging HOW much for that junk?’, but the fact remains : as obvious, unaesthetic or pretentious as an artwork may be, THEY did it and I didn’t. I accept my defeat… but I retain my undying soul. I’m looking at YOU, poorly Photoshopped ‘art’ print of the Mad Tea Party. There’s no forgiving you. If there’s an art Hell, I damn thee to it.

Handsome, clean booths with moveable partitions and walls were erected by various galleries - every wall full of prints, paintings and photographs of every size and style - mostly traditional, framed, square stuff - with the occasional strange sculpture peppering the fair. There were a few paper works that seemed to be painted onto the walls themselves, or tattered to a point of absurd delicacy, leaving me wondering exactly HOW one would display these things in their home.

The purpose of the fair was to acquire - there was never any doubt about that. No one was there to show off things that they liked - they wanted to sell things. One can’t get around the word ‘Affordable’ without evoking the idea of collecting and purchasing - an act which (some would argue) cheapens the value of art itself, but remains an essential thing if the lowly artists want to survive. Let me just state early on that the word ‘affordable’ has never had a wider definition than at The Fair, with the median price for an artwork resting somewhere around $3000. Interestingly, that price didn’t apply to a single medium or size - original oil paintings of photorealistic pool balls, awkward collages and drawings on wood, photographic prints of underwear clinging to youthful female behinds, lithographic prints of squiggly lines - all were fair game for the multi-thousand dollar price tag.

Having heard of precisely none of these artists, one can only assume that even an ‘accessible’ art fair such as this involves a lot of insular self-referencing, and since ‘aesthetic quality’ is one of the most variable properties a thing can have, it would be impossible to price such works based on ‘how pretty they are’. Prices, I’d like to conjecture (and I say this as a painter), are usually based on how much money the artist has conned out of a previous client, thereby setting a standard price point for all subsequent similar artworks. Other points of relevance include previous gallery showings, other noted art collectors who might have this person’s work in their private collections, if this artist has been mentioned in an art journal of note, the astrological year, the color of socks you happen to be wearing, and how many leprechauns live in said artist’s yard.

To describe the incomprehensible pricing structure, one object of particular note was a series of simple, crocheted food items set into shadow boxes and under glass. These sold in the multi-thousand dollar range. The very next day, I saw a series of similarly themed and constructed items at the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, selling for about $20 each. I remain unable to identify the real disconnect.

One thing that does NOT seem to influence the price of an artwork is ‘effort’. The artist’s time-consuming layering of dozens of media and meticulous attention to their craft would easily cost the same as a bizarre pencil scrawl on an old wooden block, and there were many examples of this. Regardless, beauty is still in the eye of the beholder. I liked some of those wooden scrawls, darnit - but I also have a Home Depot and a pencil. See, that’s me being bitter.

Other reviews of the AAF have been far more critical than I could be, calling the work mediocre and the dealers ignorant. I’d have to disagree with those assessments. Let’s make an analogy.

Let’s say ‘art’ is a washing machine. When you go to Sears, the salesman (‘art dealer’) is going to sell you a washing machine, and he’s going to sell it based on the formal and superficial qualities of it - what it looks like, what it does, its efficiency, and maybe a little bit of its history. Still, he won’t begin to have a clue about what goes on inside the machine (‘art’) - which wires go where, how much power each component needs to run, which gear turns which belt. That’s the job of the mechanic (‘artist’), who knows the heart of the machine itself. The salesman does their job just fine, and their inherent distance from the truth behind the product is something that can never be completely bridged, and that’s something that us as artists, and collectors as collectors, need to understand. It’s an inefficient, frustrating system, but it works for some. Everything, even things as potentially pure as love and art, is a business.

I didn’t buy anything, but it wasn’t for lack of falling in love with some of the works there - a life-sized sculpture of a dog made entirely of toys, a series of astute oil portraits of twenty-something slackers on boards (by Ian Strawn), a wall of mini-robots (and larger oil paintings of other robot toys), a bizarre Superman painting by Steven Skollar, Amy Hill’s businessmonster portraits. There was genuinely something for everyone, no matter what your art preference might be - abstraction, figural, surreal, pop, landscape - The Fair brought together a staggering variety of works, which is a rarely seen thing. I came away with at least $17 worth of inspiration (as well as frustration and confusion) - so the $17 price of admission just about balanced itself out. Check out our community for a bunch of photos from the event!

Over the past decade or so, the world of comics has been grudgingly granted some measures of legitimacy, as it fights hard to move beyond the common misconception that it’s all ‘muscles and fights’ and guys punching things and girls with ridiculous proportions and non-costumes (obviously drawn as such to attract the arrested arousal of adolescents and other men trapped on a adolescent state). The whole ‘comics are for kids and losers’ stigma is fading, so I’m a fan of anything that takes comic fantasy seriously as a significant cultural phenomenon. Even if you’re not a fan of comics, you can’t deny the impact they’ve had.

So, when an institution as important as The Met says ‘hey, we’ve got superheroes!’, I listen. Using an array of well-known, super-heroic costumes as inspiration, a small gathering of ultra-famous designers and design studios were summoned to create their own versions of the costumes. The characters represented included Batman, Iron Man, Superman, The Incredible Hulk, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Mystique (and her mutant ilk), and Catwoman - movie versions all. Photography was not allowed, so please click around to see links to photos and videos elsewhere on the web, snapped by braver souls than I.

It was a little disappointing that the paper heart of comic culture was not tapped more heavily, and only the superficial movie costume designs were utilized. If the idea was to access the most popular aspects of the characters, the movie versions of them would be it - even if the ‘movie versions’ of all superhero costumes are much more practical and realistic than their truly fantastic comic counterparts. I can’t help but think that exploring the true depths of comic imagery would have yielded some even more wild and/or sexy results. Of course, the designers made it very apparent that the physical appearance of the costume was pretty much irrelevant - it was what the costume represents that they were exploring.

These weren’t redesigned superhero costumes at all, so don’t let the title of the show fool you into some false sense of familiarity. No one’s fighting anything in these, except for a possibly to-the-death battle with dignity. These ‘costumes’ were all super-manifestations of the essences of superpowers - from abstract, angular sports designs for the speed and aerodynamism of The Flash, to a simple, tremendously ugly brick-pattern-slash-football-outfit to symbolize the strength and endurance of the Hulk.

Being completely ignorant of the fashion world, I wasn’t exceptionally thrilled (or even conscious) of the fancy designer names, nor seeing original designs in the flesh. What I WAS excited about was seeing each original movie costume that the absurd ‘designer’ costumes were inspired by. These included Christopher Reeves’ screen-worn Superman costume (accompanied by an excellent hologram that switched it back and forth between his Clark Kent, civilian attire), the Iron Man Mark II armor, and the surprisingly tiny Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman costume. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman costume remains in one piece, though it bears the fading and loose threads of a costume ten times its age. The Batman costume of choice wasn’t a classic Adam West getup, or the acceptable Michael Keaton gear, or even the tragically-nippled Schumacher versions, but the Batman outfit from the upcoming Dark Knight film. The Met was so topical that it was showcasing costumes that no one had even seen yet.

If they really wanted to see something, The Met would have tossed out some classic villain costumes to reinterpret. Those guys are crazy, and they don’t care if their helmets have 9-foot tall fins on them, or that purple really doesn’t go with green. While heroes are about unity and coordination, the bad guys survive on discord and discomfort - which are two things that would be really fun to see in a ‘fashion’ sense. As it was, making a spider-webby dress to express Spider-Man is a disappointingly obvious decision, and green, inflatable Hulk muscle vests were a clever juxtaposition of form and function - even if they had zero aesthetic appeal.

It wasn’t unexpected that most of the the fashions were fairly pretentious (using one’s own initials instead of Superman’s trademark ‘S’), and had very little to do with superheroes. Every ‘fashion’ expressed very human qualities - things that heroes happen to occasionally represent when they’re not punching things. Sure, the show addressed the complexity of fictional heroism, but it could have very easily excluded the idea of heroes entirely and focused on the spectrum of human emotions. It might have made it feel a lot more coherent, but also far less appealing to a population that’s ready to embrace superheroes. And I wouldn’t have been able to see Rebecca Romijn’s mutant appliqués in person.

As a small bonus at the end of the show for real hardcore geeks, The Met assembled a collection of the most valuable comics in all of geekdom. We’re talkin’ Action Comics #1 with the first appearance of Superman, the first appearance of Iron Man in Tales of Suspense #39, and some astonishingly early Batman appearances, all in one place and under plexiglass. For people to tap on, apparently. Why one would tap on the glass in front of an inanimate object as if it were a sleepy kitten, I’m not entirely sure, but it was done. For the record, none of the comics seemed to notice.

The gift shop included some alarmingly (but appropriately) gaudy, $30 t-shirts, a super-glossy show catalogue paperback for $30, or a handsome tin-covered version for $50, among other more common items. The cost prevented me from partaking in the acquisition of new superhero items, as much as I like to extend my tangential superhero book collection.

The show is worth seeing, if only for the original super-costumes. While I came away with a new understanding of exactly what ‘fashion’ is and stands to represent, I’ll leave it to the experts, while I ponder how Wolverine gets his face-pointies to stand so straight. I’m willing to bet that it’s simple cardboard inserts. The show will be open through September 1st, 2008.