Category: Creativity

2008 National Professional Visual Artist Study

Dear Professional Visual Artist or Arts Community Supporter, (I’m terribly sorry about the impersonal greeting…)

I’m working with Alyson Stanfield, leading art business coach and author of the new book I’d Rather Be In The Studio: The Artist’s No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion on a fun project – an international study of the state of the professional art business from the view of the artist.

We’re conducting an on-line study so all you need to do is click the link below and spend about 5 minutes completing the survey. Your information is confidential and we will only use your OPTIONAL contact information to notify you if you win either a FREE copy of Alyson’s book (several will be given), or 2 free hours of my legal consulting time.

Click here to participate in the study.

We would love your participation in this exciting project and encourage you to forward this message on to your professional artist friends. The more artists that respond, the better (and more interesting) the data.

My sincere thanks in advance for your participation.

Innovation Month at CSU

CSU Ventures is putting on a series of programs in February that should be valuable for anyone interested in the start-up and tech-transfer projects happening at CSU.

The Web site for CSU Ventures has the details: http://www.csuventures.org/

I’ll be participating in two programs:

1. A discussion on Trademarks and Copyrights on February 7th.

2. A presentation on Naming issues and Trademarks on February 18th.

It should be a great program.

3rd Annual Building Creative Business Expo

I’m planning to present again at the 3rd Annual Building Creative Business Expo in Denver. The Event is Saturday, March 8th in downtown Denver.

I’ll probably be presenting a session on copyright law and a different session on naming your product, service, or business (No Lame Names). I might even get a chance to do a Strange Fire presentation.
From their page:

What is the BCBE?
The BCBE is a free, day-long event that provides creative individuals and businesses a “one-stop” opportunity to learn and gain awareness of the various services and programs that can help them to stabilize their creative businesses and plan for the future. Workshops are lead by experts in the fields of marketing, personal and business finance, media relations, music and film production, and public art.

The BCBE format includes:

  • Approx. 25 exhibitors in the atrium of the Webb Building
  • Workshops and panel discussions in 4th floor classrooms
  • 15-minute sales pitch in the atrium (organizations will be required to provide a giveaway item)
  • Special activities (i.e., fashion show, music performance, etc.)

www.changethis.com SUCCESS!

I just found out that my manifesto proposal for No Lame Names has been accepted by www.changethis.com!

Thanks to everyone that voted for it.

Now I just have to adapt my ebook of the same title for publication. It’ll take me a little time, and take them a couple months, but sometime soon that information about the interplay between branding and trademark law will be in a far more visible place than just my Web sites.

Since the email to friends and family worked so well for the No Lame Names proposal, I’m now asking you to do it again. I’ve submitted a proposal for Strange Fire: 5 Guiding Values.

Please do me another HUGE favor and click this link and vote for Strange Fire too!

http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1121

(yes, I see the “artists” typo in my bio on the page, but I can’t get back in to correct that… Oh well.)

Thanks everyone.

I’d love to see Strange Fire get some wider circulation. It’s already available for free at www.guidingvalue.com, but there are a lot more people that visit www.changethis.com. Here’s to a great start in 2008.

the business of creativity

I’ve had several conversations with friends and clients over the last few days specifically addressing how to frame the discussion of law, business/art, creativity and spirit in some understandable form. The phrase that keeps coming up and helping people understand what this is about seems to be “The Business of Creativity” where the law element is included in the business/art discussion and the spirit element is rolled into the creativity discussion. I don’t know yet if this really works for me yet because I don’t know if I want to down-play the spirit discussion at all. Maybe I won’t have to short-change the spirit, but I’m not seeing how “the business of creativity” captures everything I want to say. It definitely captures a sub-set VERY well. I pay the bill by helping people with the business of creativity, but there’s more to it.

I’ve been thinking about negative space – the space between objects and classifications. If you think about the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc a little bit, it’s easy to see that these numbers that we think of as “whole” are really an infintesimally small point along the number line. There is an individual infinity between 1 and 2, another between 2 and 3. So, when we think about the “whole” numbers, we’re missing a very great deal of good stuff in the spaces between. I don’t want to make that mistake when discussing spirit, creativity, business/art, and law.

I don’t want to get so focused on the labels or “poles” that the relationships between the poles are not given full attention. It’s the overlap that’s interesting. Perhaps it’s the overlap that gets closest to “real.”

In effect, these poles are only “real” when they are relating to each other, and relating to a whole host of other concepts that are outside of my focus. You could say they are in relation to each other, but maybe the “relation” should be spelled “realation” in this discussion. How about “inrealation” as a unifying label for the discussion? I like that. Inrealation.

What do you think?  Post a comment…