While advertising and marketing are clearly an art of a sort, more for some than others, it is still an effort to sell a product to consumers. That being said there are certainly a small percentage of advertisements that, were they to exist without any voice over or end text you may see them for what they also are; art. These messages may present challenging social ideas or just beauty for the sake of beauty but they do manage to stir our emotions. The stirring of our emotions is what puts us into a mindframe for accepting the product being advertised but what if we had an opportunity to merely allow our emotions to be stirred and then draw our own conclusions about what that means, individually.

Sony is one of those companies which spends a good deal of money and effort in making art our of advertising. The most recent piece, Domino City, is a great example.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcnzam_R9c4&hl=en&fs=1]

You can also check out the making of the ad here.

Sadly it is advertising that provides the greatest connection to art and creativity to the general public. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing but for the fact that so much of advertising and marketing plays off of the cheapest sensitivities of humanity; fear and greed. As our schools and communities face deepening financial crisis we see deeper cuts in public arts funding, art classes and other creative endevours.

Juxtapose that with the fact that US cities are fighting to attract a global “creative class” as the way of sustaining the city and the culture, ultimately hoping that the creative’s will attract a greater diversity of tax base and eventual financial success.

I’m a fan of creating things, or enjoy other people’s creation as a way of filling my life. What if more people spent time doing this instead of trying to merely consume? What if advertisers spent more time crafting art for arts sake, instead of for product consumption?

Saturday was the Independents’ Day Festival in downtown Columbus. I hosted a discussion at the Ideas space about building community using online tools. There were about 10 of us engaged in the round table and I felt like several interesting points came to light.

• Location isn’t automatically removed from social media; in fact it is often a core component. In this way we can effectively engage our social media tools in local outreach.
• There is a real need for more community interaction on a face to face level. Using tools the way that the organizers of Independents’ Day can create opportunities for these face to face meetings to occur. Maximize tools such as Google Apps and interfacing social media so that volunteer efforts can be coordinated at a minimum expense of time and money.
• Lastly, it’s fun to predict the future; we did some of that too.

I really appreciate everyone who had a chance to come out and participate. I think this years Idea space afforded everyone involved an opportunity to get a feel for what can happen there in the future. I’ve mentioned that this event could and should be the foundation for the desires I’ve laid out in my Convergence Columbus idea. I beleive that this first event reassured me of the ability for that kind of conversion. A foundation has been laid so now we need to begin the building process.

Now if only I had had some spare duckets with me to buy art – god there was some great art going on there!

I just want to throw this out there and see if anyone with connections to COTA (or COTA themselves) are interested in the idea and want to run with it. As a member of UAArts.org I am challenged to find ways to raise funds for the arts; I also happen to be someone with a great love of public transit and realize increased ridership is the only way to bring better transit options to Central Ohio.

With that in mind I thought a great event would be something like this. All of the arts organizations (I’ve been told there are about 600) in Central Ohio sponsor artists to participate. An equivilant number of scale model COTA busses are distributed to the artists (think something along the size of 2 feet long – easily displayed and transported).

The artists paint these models in anyway they see fit with the understanding that the result has to be family friendly and flat – ie no art car type attachments that pose a service issue for actual busses. Once the artists have created their pieces then the art is transfered to the actual COTA busses. The effect being a higher attention to the busses and some beautiful art moving throughout the city day in and day out. Contests could take place to get people to try and get a picture of all of the different busses, etc. The visibility for COTA would be immense and this project should bring in tourists to see the busses.

The model busses then get auctioned off with the money going back to the arts organizations that sponsored the artist. This way these organizations can continue their mission of bringing public art to Central Ohio.

So what do you think?