Items Tagged With Michelle Haimoff

Not yet a book, not quite a website, it is difficult to pin down the Artist as Citizen project into any particular media. It is equally difficult to pin down its creator, Richard Reiss. Off the bat, he asks me not to make this review about him. He also refuses to state his opinion. About anything. “Us having opinions isn’t interesting, it’s exploring people’s opinions and beliefs in a way that will give you a fresh take on the issue that’s interesting."

But let’s backup.

The Artist as Citizen project is a collaboration of a guest editor, a donor and an art student with the end goal of creating something that makes people think. The students are generally design-minded undergrads, interested in fields that relate to popular commercial media. When they graduate, they will become the image-makers of the world, likely doing gigs as fashion photographers, graphic designers and ad agency creatives. The guest editors are prominent members of the art community who want to see a concept executed from its inception, and the donors are the kind of art collectors that are as interested in the process as the finished product.

Photo:Amareschal, Creative Commons, Flickr

Bright Leaves, a documentary of North Carolina’s tobacco legacy, is a personal project of filmmaker Ross McElwee. As such, it is part documentary, part home video, part miscellaneous. One’s enjoyment of the film depends largely on the one’s tolerance of McElwee himself, who ranges from moderately funny to distractedly self-absorbed.