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NEW YORK, Nov. 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — “There is at least an 80% profit margin difference in farmers growing coca rather than coffee.” “Water is not a commodity.” “The average American produces over 1,500 pounds of garbage per year.” These were just some of the thought-provoking presentations at the Ninth Annual Dare to Dream Conference held on November 17th in New York City. The theme of this year’s conference, hosted by The Institute for Civic Leadership (ICL) and The Dwight School (an IB World School), was “Human Rights: The Next Generation.”

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091123/DC16211)

As part of the conference, thirteen groups of students presented on topics ranging from music censorship to the political ramifications of using Twitter. “The Dare to Dream Conference received over 2,000 hits from students and schools during our first hour of live-streaming the presentations over the Internet,” said Daren Khairule, ICL Executive Director. “That is an excellent sign, indicating that many others are interested in learning about and, hopefully, advocating for human rights.”

Following is a brief description of some of the more popular presentations:

Water Warlords

Humans need water to survive. Should water cost money? This presentation delves into how profit-driven corporations use the world’s water, a natural resource, as a means to gain wealth. With your cooperation and support, we can help put an end to this practice.

Myoo­Zik: Right or Frivolous Activity?

In many cultures, music is associated with negative connotations or even banned, which raises the question: “Is music a human right?” This presentation addresses music’s value in today’s society, as well as the different presence it has outside of the United States.

Trick or Tweet?

Is Twitter a positive social force, or is it causing conflict between countries? While many argue it is a positive development, some governments do not share this opinion.

Milk and Sugar with Your Cocaine?

Have you ever thought how coffee made its way from the farmland to your cup? Today, many farmers have only two options: They can either grow various coffee beans for a small profit or grow coca plants to produce cocaine, which yields a higher profit margin. Which one would you choose?

Mafia Today

Was the Mafia always an evil organization full of corruption and imbalance? How were mobs started, and how popular do they remain today? Does organized crime infringe on human rights?

Please visit www.iclny.org to watch all of the student­led presentations and learn about the human rights challenges facing the next generation. The Institute for Civic Leadership is an international non­profit organization whose mission is to inspire and to educate students to be global leaders and to provide take action opportunities in educational development, public health service, poverty alleviation, peace initiatives, and environmental protection, and, in so doing, produce engaged global citizens.

SOURCE The Institute for Civic Leadership

Progress has changed. The Jet Age, the Petro-Chemical & Computer Age are not the drivers. Now perhaps it is, the Creative Age.

It is, the artists’ turn.

Daniel Pink posited it in Harvard Business Review, in saying that the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) is the new MBA. Well judging by enrolments, we’re not quite there yet. So Pink is ahead of the curve.

When Financial analysis frameworks are taught everywhere – and after (or during) a global financial mess – perhaps the true Innovation source is Arts & Culture. This is likely to be a hindsight observation for many.

Design is one aspect of arts. As a former Graphic designer, I see design everywhere. Everything you buy has been intentionally designed. And Sustainable design is emerging as the big challenge & big opportunity.

And it is Opportunity that will lift us out of Economic Crisis.

Not massive top-down thinking. Not more Wal-Marts. No. Wal-Mart was once Sam Walton, and the next Wal-Mart will be another Sam Walton. Or Jobs & Wozniak. Or Hewlett & Packard.

It’s 2 guys or gals in a garage building the next Apple, HP, maybe. But ever more insidiously, maybe not.

Decentralized Studios.

Maybe it’s a series of decentralized nodes. A small series of studios, all inter-linked collaborating & ideas & connected from Budapest to Bucharest to Curitiba to Paris to Johannesburg to Adelaide to Detroit to Winnipeg.

It is not where you are, it is what you see, what you share & how creative you are.

Keep innovating,

Christopher Hire
Executive Director

RSVP now for FREE transportation to 70 art galleries in hip Brooklyn “gallery districts”

Initiative supports Brooklyn’s creative economy; Art experts on hand to discuss “how-to’s” of art buying for everything from holiday gifts to investment collections

NEW YORK, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — On Saturday, November 21 and Sunday, November 22, 70 participating Brooklyn art galleries will offer visitors outstanding exhibitions and refreshments as well as a unique opportunity to learn more about Brooklyn’s expanding art scene and galleries during the second annual smART Brooklyn Gallery Hop, an initiative of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Brooklyn Tourism.

Exciting galleries participating include The Boiler, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Chassidic Art Institute, DUMBO Arts Center, Kentler International Drawing Space, MoCADA, Momenta Art, Proteus Gowanus and Skylight Gallery (complete list below).

“Brooklyn is the Creative Capital of New York City, and contributing to that creative canvas are our neighborhood galleries and lively arts scene,” said BP Markowitz. “There’s no better time to get ‘art smart’ — and maybe even find that perfect gift for the art lover on your holiday list!”

Bus loops depart from hubs every hour on the hour from 1 pm-5 pm and run through four different gallery districts, allowing participants to hop on and off the bus within each line’s loop. Additionally, a “Tour of Four” bus tour (not a loop) will link four unique art galleries “off the beaten path”:

• Williamsburg, Bushwick, Greenpoint — BLUE LOOP (Saturday). Hub: Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, 135 Broadway (at Bedford)
• Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene — RED LOOP (Saturday). Hub: MoCADA, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, 80 Hanson Place (at South Portland)
• Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Red Hook — GOLD LOOP (Sunday). Hub: Brooklyn Borough Hall/Tourism Visitors Center, 209 Joralemon (Between Court and Adams)
• Boerum Hill, Gowanus, Park Slope — GREEN LOOP (Sunday). Hub: Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Ave. (at President)
• Bay Ridge, Crown Heights, Sunset Park — TOUR OF FOUR Galleries (Sunday). Hub: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway (at Washington)

Buses will be staffed with expert art docents offering smART tip sheets about collecting and buying art.

The smART Brooklyn Gallery Hop is a public/private partnership working to advance local economic development and increase awareness and support of the arts.

RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED. For more information, visit www.visitbrooklyn.org.

For photos of art visit our flickr page at www.flickr.com/photos/smartgalleryhop.

SOURCE Best of Brooklyn Inc.

Be inspired by these slides, thanks to DIOGYU on Slideshare.

The Trends. 2thinknow view.

Handmade, hand-painted, decorating mass-objects are key trends of the 21st century.

This is a nascent trend of modifying mass-produced objects.

Decoration & personalisation by hand, not machine, will be a strong dominant theme of the 21st century.

Once we were impressed by the modernist metallic sameness of airplanes. Now we are impressed by their uniqueness.

The mass-produced object is losing it’s 1960s gloss, at the cutting-edge. And has been replaced by artisan, hand-crafted.

That’s the 2thinknow view.

Your view? Any neat examples of these trends?

But the design of such a basic item, is a design challenge. Especially a design that has to be practical (at least for 10 minutes walking!). And also entice women to spend money.

What’s the Trend?

Shoes, especially hand-crafted, hand-decorated.

National Gallery of Victoria had a hand-decorated sneaker exhibition. There’s a ’scene’ in Melbourne.

Handmade/decorated will be important in days of sustainability & local sourcing. We’ll need to transition to craft, trends suggest it will be the new local service economy.

The folks at Handmade Nation are doing some interesting work.

You may just like the shoes, of course.

That’s the 2thinknow view. What’s your view?

The magnificent and exciting Stuttgart StaatsGalerie was holding an extensive Pop Art Exhibition at the time of my visit. It was a well curated exhibition of the Pop Art movement in the USA and UK primarily, in the 1950s & 1960s mainly.

Here is my journey through that exhibition, and an increasing realisation that modern art of a time period is often a window on the future, or one possible future.

Prominent Pop Artists

Peter Philips, For Men only-starring MM and BB – was an interesting work preceding the sexiness of the 60s, as so often art was a precursor to what was to come. 1961 preceded Carnaby St, San Francisco and the swinging sixties.

Lichtensteins 63 Crying Girl captured the fear of the age. A fear that we were all dots in a system and did not matter. And, yet, we still felt human in an age when even our image and stories were just a collection of dots.

Likewise, Lichtenstein’s 1965 screenprint captured themes of feminism, violence and the change from male dominated patriarchal societies to the start of a more soft and female age. Well, soft and female, even hip baby, in amongst all the thrusting machinery images he also created at that time.

Wesselman’s nudes and works captured the sensuousness of a latent consumerism that has now in the early years of the 20th century reached its zenith.

Presciently, Wesselmann foresaw the rise of collective sexualisation of food, consumption and automobiles before this theme reached its current mass penetration.

There is something artificial and self-serving in the media images of sexuality, often linked to product sales, that Wesselmann foresaw. It is more than slightly disturbing the ways in which media now sexualise youth, and turn sex into something that wallpapers our experience of driving a road.

Outside my apartment in Melbourne there is a single billboard in the distance that rather pessimistically declares ‘Sex’ to all comers (pardon the pun) and then offers to help me with it.

Its glaring red and yellow writing is the first thing I see in the morning. Not good for the appetitite on an otherwise beautiful skyline.

Wesselman’s 1965 posterized Nude foresaw this flat, lifelessness of sex, and continual state of low-grade arousal. A flat image that is somehow strangely titillating. Always great art foresees the future to come.

Degrees of Prescience.

Allen Jones also had foresight, but less presciently than Wesselman.

Mel Ramos’ Hunt for the Best, reflects how a bottle is a Freudian phallic symbol in the hands of the media. I’ll have blood red ketchup with my sex thanks, or is that mustard and ketchup on my Weiner?

Sorry, too hard a pun to resist.

Warhol’s Self Portrait was somehow the most commercial, flat and lifeless and yet it sees beyond the commercial flat surface to foresee how variation is always introduced into the mechnical.

Warhol sees the flat and the commercial and beyond it again, into a world where individual artistic variation is somehow greater than process. a world beyond 2010.

Lichtenstein, has In the Car. This 1963 work (used as the base image for this post) I have never seen in the flesh, captures the automobile with its promise of affluent wealth, sex and male driving power. Read that as you will.

We are a collage of consumption and media

Warhol’s films are disturbing. Rauschenberg, among my favourite artists, captured a de-constructed American male, is he the sum of his products and media images?

Rauschenberg’s ambiguous Jasper Johns dedication however says more about the relationship between the two artists and interplay between their ideas, than it does culture.

Rauschenberg’s screen images captured man as aLa descrizione proviene dal fatto che il giocatore del gioco di casino online puo’ disegnare sempre un’altra scheda ad un totale morbido senza pericolo “di rompersi” superando 21. sum of media, a sense that cubist deconstruction had reached its artistic climax when reassembled as a series of disposable images. A world not round but flat, operating on a flat plane.

Domenica Rotella’s 1962 work Marilyn Monroe a collage of poster and lacerations captured the disposability of this American Age, at least lived outside America. Images, once of the highest value in Medieval times, were now cheaply printed, yet in full color, and were at the same time disposable.

This work too, I had never seen before hanging.

Allan D’Archelangelo’s Marilyn of 1962 was however too obvious. DIY Barbie perhaps lacks layers and subtlety.

Less Future Relevant, Relevant to the Times

Some works captured momentary obsessions of film, like the monster movie, beach movie, Elvis movie and even fears of communism triumphing over the free world. fear was a big word.

Richard Hamilton’s 1962 Kennedy space portrait, with the title too long to print, captured the optimism and threats of the age. A seminal sense of the Kennedy promise.

Warhol’s Double Elvis hinted at the cheapness, the disposability and the falseness of celebrity. Cowboy, singer, menace and sex symbol for females to fantasize over, all in one image. Perhaps a false world, and a false symbol, seen later as one cheeseburger and soda too many zipped into an imploding white jumpsuit.

Warhol, Rauschenberg & Lichtenstein: the farsighted

Elvis, and Warhol, in many ways stood for the age, and fired a shot into the century beyond. Peter Blake’s Got a girl had similar themes, but it Warhol’s simplicity that better captures themes.

In the 21^st century, our mirror of self is now constructed as media images of unreal people. Unreal celebrities who do not lead the lives described, yet are depicted in tall tales of their exploits.

At the same time as we have ‘reality TV’ based on a hyper-reality, not a real reality.

A 21st century where reality is the first casualty of the gun of the image.

Warhol and the other ‘Pop Artists’ foresaw the lot.

It’s too late to come to Stuttgart and see the past, future and yourself; as it finished June 6^th. Fortunately Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg are prolifically represented internationally.

German art is a window into the Saxons, Prussians, Bavarians and other Germanic tribes.

People forget that the German nation is a modern construct, stitched together by Bismarck as a Greater Prussia. Prior to this, Germany was a collection of largely independent kingdoms.

Accordingly, major German regions and cities with links to art and design throughout European history are hardly surprising.

I find much to like in the art of Saxony, including Leipzig, and the so-called Leipzig School (an early indicator of a trend of the return to the figurative.)

Also, the inspirational Weimar, seed of the Bauhaus and watering hole for Goethe.

Art in Frankfurt: who are we Germans?

As I wrote this earlier this year I sat in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, a repository of much great German art, including extensive print and drawing holdings.

What strikes me most about German art from the rise of a German nation is a search for identity. Who are we Germans? Their art seems to say.

There is a sense of questioning. This is a positive trend for any nation, it is a sign of a creative period ahead, it is America in the earlier half of the twentieth century, or an expansive 19th century Britain.

Conversely, when a nation knows with it’s heart ‘what it is’, the nation ceases to create afresh and anew. A state of becoming is always more creative.

German Symbols

The cult of naturalism and fascination the viscerally muscular and mechanically physical also permeate German art.

Cult of nature works are particularly noteworthy in the pre-Hitler phase of the twentieth century.

German expressionist works in the first half of the twentieth century are the most interesting. There is a harshness to their treatment of humans, that is oddly prescient.

It’s as if this Germany, the Germany of its art, has not one identity, but a series of regional identities. Germany, not Prussia, was really an identity forged in war, and divided afterwards.

Leipzig and Weimar and that region of modern Germany,Die Auswahl der Startblätter poker eine so große Rolle, dass Geduld die vielleicht wichtigste Eigenschaft beim Spiel ist. with ties to Prussia, Bohemia (now Czechs) and Berlin, predate Germany. Leipzig was important in the Enlightenment, Goethe and others were involved in much development there.

Leipzig ranked equal 5th as an Innovation City in the Global Innovation Review 2007.

Frankfurt, too, is an older Germany.

So this old and new Germany, one driven by a sense of avoiding the decades recently past and strong materialism, still seeks its soul.

This modern Germany still appropriates others cultures, beyond the redoubtable engineering and design triumphs of the Germans, their fine art lacks something.

The French are French, the British the British – although Scotland has its own unique identity. But the Germans they are not their past – not Communism, not fascism, they cannot be.

So, there is a sense this is a Germany of the becoming.

I like this Germany.

The Germany of inquiry.

Standing on level 5 of Georges Pompidou, you can see the whole of Old Paris, laid out before you. I did this last in April 2007, and was mesmerized.

And New Paris: Office district on the other side of Paris; La Défense. This modern office block tower district, is really an additional side to the old Paris not a central part of Paris.

The new 300 metre tower by Jean Nouvel is part of a bold ambitious plan to change this. The plan is to make La Défense, Manhattan-sur-Seine. A 24 hour, modern office district on the outside of Paris, potentially an alternate centre as an adjunct to the ‘old Paris’ of the Left Bank, Invalides and Notre Dame.

M. Nouvel is famed all over the world as an architect, since his 1987 project for the Institut du Monde Arabe and is the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate.

There is some concern over how this may effect Paris, and perhaps lead to an exodus of office rentals in Paris proper. But I believe the French will resolve this, as the competing forces and interests in Paris often negotiate compromise outcomes.

Modern French architecture in France has recently been eclipsed by some London, German and Catalan designs. This seems part of a practical plan to preserve the centre, yet modernize Paris.

Some related plans by the Mayor of Paris, include spreading the ‘mini-Manhattan’ theme, but given French activism and an entrenched coalition of opposition, these seem less likely.

In the end, a positive development for Paris, the city of Paris is ranked #3 in the world for innovation in the Global Innovation Review 2007, by 2thinknow.

I like to think of it as a way of watching a variety of cultures, and their attitudes to themselves. At 2thinknow, we study cultures, and globalism, so it is home-work!

Eurovision Song Contest – Belgrade 2008 Preview Player

Essentially a singing contest, with one representative of each nation, often controversially selected. The most interesting part is the voting, where neighboring countries often vote for or against each other, depending on the politics. the Balkan foxtrot, and UK vote, are always enlightening.

It’s significant of the youth of all countries in Europe creating a trans-national identity, which often starts in arts or music.

In Europe, the semi-finals have run, and finalists been selected. the final is in countdown mode.

If you are not in Europe, they may not screen Eurovision, or not yet. If you would like a preview, and to learn a little about the ‘extremes’ of European culture, as well as silliness, then visit the Eurovision site here. You can watch much of the coverage online.

And also this year, you can learn about Serbia and the Balkans, as it is this year, Belgrade calling.

Light-hearted sure, but culturally enlightening, because the 2thinknow view is that even when people rebel against their culture they reinforce it.

Enjoy.

Eurovision News:

(Scroll down… spoiler alert!)