The Lindens plan to become art patrons

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Lorenzo de Medici, Italian merchant prince and patron of the arts

Evidently, someone at the Lab has been reading Aristotle and Machiavelli. Today, Niko Linden made an announcement that LL would be starting "a Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) program which will help support, encourage, and highlight Second Life artists and their work."

So....the Lab is taking on the role of Renaissance prince: who knew that "M" stood for "Medici" Linden? Here's a key bit from Niko's blog post:

"The Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) program's goal is twofold:

To create an immersive space for artists to share their art, build connections, and prosper in the Second Life community

To provide a new way for artwork to live on within our ever-changing virtual world.

While still under design, this program will be a partnership between Linden Lab and Second Life artists, with the additional objective of gathering, displaying, and maintaining art at an inworld Arts Hub. We are currently building the LEA organizing committee, which will include members of the Second Life artist community and Linden Lab employees, to guide the program's management. Under the creative direction, organization and guidance of the LEA committee, we will hold biannual art exhibitions, highlighting the most creative artwork happening inworld."

It seems that the Lab is looking at two key strategies: to create a "hub" or concentration of Linden-supported artistic endeavor; and to have its employees--including M--take a direct role in managing the program.

Niko's blog has already generated some interesting comments (as well as the usual banalities). One of my favorites so far was posted by a resident named Escape Unplugged:

"Live music. Dance. Drama. Storytelling. Performance art. Machinima.

All arts that are happening in SL. Quite possibly they're all happening right now. The endowment HAS to include these other artistic expressions in SL if it truly to "create an immersive space for artists to share their art, build connections, and prosper in the Second Life community"

I'm fortunate enough to have an involvement in most of those creative and artistic mediums in SL (including rezable art) but to think that friends and/or artists I admire would be excluded simply because they don't create the "right type" of art is concerning.

Please can you clarify this Niko?"

Here's my own response, which builds on Escape's comment:

" Escape: Glad to see that you included storytelling in the list of art forms. As for your including "drama" in the list, my initial reaction was, "ah yes, we do have a number of residents who have raised their drama-making to the level of an art form."

But seriously, yes, I know what you meant, I just couldn't help but think of it the other way.

Niko, I do think this is an intriguing possibility, but your piece immediately brings up a couple questions:

What precisely is meant by creating "an immersive space for artists to share their art, build connections, and prosper in the Second Life community?"

Are you proposing a Linden-controlled arts venue that will in essence concentrate the Linden supported artistic endeavor in a ghetto? What about those artists and arts groups who wish to continue to carry out their activities in environments and venues over which they have more control, and which function in an organic way that is interconnected with one of the diverse communities that already are thriving on the grid?

Will the artists or groups who don't wish to confine themselves within the official Linden-supported arts "immersive space" still be eligible to apply for support of their projects and programming that they present in the independent, resident-controlled spaces?

Somewhat related to that, you also talk about "highlighting the most creative artwork happening inworld." That makes me really curious. So who will decide what qualifies as "the most creative artwork?"

There certainly have been serious disagreements in the past between Lindens and residents as to what constitutes "creative" as well as what is considered "quality" in the arts. I trust that you do realize that you are entering sensitive territory and that there will be issues that require careful consideration with genuine participation from a wide range of interested resident stakeholders, and not just the "usual suspects."

I am curious about what the larger goal is here: to keep artists from leaving SL for other platforms? To ensure that the diversity of artistic activity? To make more of the residents--and potential residents--aware of this aspect of life on the grid, and to encourage them to appreciate and support what is going on...or maybe even to encourage more residents to take their own shot at expressing themselves through art?

I sincerely hope it will take a more inclusive approach, rather than overly selective and elitist. After all, one of the beauties of the platform has always been that anyone and everyone can try to use it as a tool of artistic self-expression."

I really do wonder what the ultimate goal is here, because what Niko describes as "goals" arguably qualify more as "strategies" than underlying reasons for executing this plan.

They want to "create an immersive space to facilitate artists sharing their work (getting people to see it), building connections (With other artists? Or a broader audience? Not sure about that one), and prospering. They also want a way for "artwork to live on within our ever-changing virtual world. I assume what they mean by that is LL wants to develop a system to preserve Cool Stuff and make it so that someone's artwork doesn't just disappear when they can't afford to pay their rent or tier, or they decide to go to Blue Mars.

So why would do the Labsters want to do these things--to help artists build audiences and prosper and for their art to have more permanence?

One real good possibility is that they want to create greater awareness of the arts in SL as part of their new marketing efforts. A lot of folks do a lot of way cool creative stuff in-world, and one of the frustrations with all the half-assed articles that drip with the "SL is dead" meme is that they focus on the lurid, sexy stuff and not much else. That has got to be driving the Lab folks foam-at-the-mouth, whacko crazy as much as it pisses off those of us who are trying to do creative non-salacious things with the platform. Supporting--and highlighting--arts activities in-world would go a long way towards polishing up the image of SL as something that has more purpose than facilitating masturbatory fantasies.

Preserving in-world artisitic works would also help head off the embarrassment that happens when you tell some new guy, "hey you gotta see this artistically awesome amalgamation of utter awesomeness"...

...and they go to see it and it's gone because the artist/resident pulled up stakes and got the fuck out of Dodge. And then Disappointed New Guy thinks you're a eye-rolling idiot.

So yeah, if that is one of the goals, to make more people aware that we got something besides pixel-poking going on, and give some longevity to Cool Stuff in order to reinforce that positive impression, I'm on board.

And myabe I'm just a spit dribbling idealist, but I also hope another goal for this is to foster the idea that SL can enable artistic self-expression by everyone and anyone who wants to do so, then this becomes a powerful marketing tool for the lab. Promote the idea of SL as a place where anyone can make art happen, and it could conceivably draw in folks who haven't tried SL yet, but who will want to give it a shot when they realize what they do with it.

That is another goal that I heartily endorse. Unfortuantley I'm not so sure that is what the Labsters have in mind--people who want to actively create, rather than passivley consume, are not the massive Facebook-type demographic that the Lab seems to be hoping to attract. But hey, if the strategy draws in new creative blood as an unintended consequence of larger marketing plans, I won't be unhappy.

So, yes, I hope this works. And yeah, I do have a lot of concerns about the idea. I do worry that it could be an elitist clusterfuck with the usual suspects and sycophants getting all the benefits and the accolades--and the Linden largess--while other hard-working people get dissed or ignored. It isn't like it hasn't happened before--one example that leaps to mind was the situation when "Shakespeare in SL" was looked upon by certain Lindens as not sufficiently hip, or forward-thinking, or innovative or something, in order for it to be included in one of those SL birthday things.

I find it intriguing that they call this new initiative the "Linden Endowment for the Arts." I assume they will not literally establish an "endowment" (a fund that is invested to generate income to be disbursed in the form of grants or to support a non-profit endeavor). I suspect why they picked the name was because they hope to emulate a system like the National Endowment for the Arts in which arts organizations and some individuals (in very restricted, specific categories) compete for grants and the applications are evaluated by peer review. It's supposed to fair and democratic, and ideally the LEA should be as well. To work in that fashion, it definitely will require participation by a diverse sampling of the grid's creative types. I think I'm going to encourage some of my artsy SL friends to apply for membership as resident representatives on the LEA committee.

There have to be some DaVincis on the team to balance out the Medicis if this thing is gonna fly.

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Do you love me? do you loathe me? do you even know I exist? -- our dichotomous relationship with Linden Lab

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I go back and forth between sometimes being incredibly disappointed with Linden Lab, and other times feelin’ kinda sorta positive about those folks: feeling like...well, at least they’re trying to get things right. So, in between saying mean and snarky things, and threatening to kick poor old Phillip Linden square in the balls if I ever meet him, I do make an effort to give them credit when I think it is due, and say encouraging things when they seem to be giving it the old college try.

Happily wallowing in Caledon's "courtesy and old-world charm"

Like this recent development in which the Lab is trying to come up with a means to address the problem of misappropriation of creative content in world.

I won’t go into the whole explanation of the process that they are experimenting with--suffice to say that as I understand it, the idea is that when it becomes established that someone’s texture or object design has been misappropriated and used to create other stuff in-world, LL will pretty much nuke the offending material, turning objects into plywood spheres, and textures into monochromatic disappointments.

Is this a perfect solution? No of course not. I am well past thinking there are perfect solutions to any issue, whether in SL or real life.

Does it have a lot of potential for things to go wrong and make people unhappy?.

Oh, you bet. I call your attention to Emilly Orr’s well thought-out post on this subject. Emilly is a hell of a lot smarter than I am, and has a mind that focuses in ways that I always find intriguing. And I think she has a lot of really good points in her post. But are the negative outcomes she envisions inevitable, rather than simply being possible?

Hecate’s drawers, y'all, I got no freakin’ idea.

It is entirely possible that things will turn out with the results Emilly suggests...or it could be something entirely different. One thing we do know for sure about the grid is that it is a festival of unintended consequences. Hell, it is even possible that this plan the Lab is working on could actually discourage the misappropriation of other people's content. There is a good chance that the nuking of content which is based on misappropriated materials would not happen all that often, so the collateral damage to unsuspecting buyers might not be all that dreadful. It’s hard to say. After all, I can never shake the sensation that we are in an extended beta phase here, and anything we customers or the folks at Lab do is still in the realm of mad scientist experimentation.

Hey, pretty much, both us and them, we’re all just making this shit up as we go along.

But whatever the outcome...whether it’s more positive than negative, or wallows somewhere in the vast range in between, I gotta hand it to the Lab with regards to one key aspect of this: they caught on that this issue is important to a lot of folks and they are trying to do something about it.

Look at this quote from Pink Linden’s Dec. 9 announcement about this concept:

“As we said in our recent Content Management Roadmap blog post, we believe that Resident-created content is the heart and soul of Second Life, and we want to help everyone continue to benefit from the amazing creativity that has been displayed by our Residents inworld. When content creators are successful, Second Life is a better world for all of us--more inspiring, more spontaneous, and more fun!

Today we are pleased to announce continued forward progress along this roadmap: a pilot program to test some early improvements to our intellectual property complaint process. The goal of this program is to make the process more convenient and streamlined for Residents, and to empower content creators to better control their content.”

Yeah, to some extent, she is saying “the content-making population is necessary for our product to remain appealing to the customers and is therefore necessary for us labbies to continue getting our paychecks.” But it is also a recognition that there is an issue here that makes residents’ stomachs churn and their angst to increase. "Content theft" as it is commonly known, is something that matters to a lot of us who create, who have friends who create, or who rely on the continued productivity and happiness of the creators in order to be able to do all the wacky nonsense we love to do in-world.

In the past, the Lab has been known to turn away from big issues like this, or even to cheerfully embrace the perpetrators who were making the trouble, rather than responding to the wishes and interests of the majority of residents. The Lab has been known to say when something was fucked up, “hey, it’s up to you residents to fix things that have gotten fucked up--remember, “your world, your imagination...your problem.” Linden Lab in the past has given many of us the impression of being laissez faire, lazy, and uninterested--they often used the excuse, “well, there just isn’t any way of making a technical fix for that problem," or "we just can't keep everybody happy, so we just can’t--or won’t--do anything at all...Have a nice Second Life, fuckers.”

But this time, they are actually trying to do something.

Yeah, it may blow up in the their faces, it may do bizarre things we’ll all regret. But it’s something. It suggests to us that, hey, maybe there is someone on the other side of the equation that actually cares enough to try.

And I think they deserve some credit for that.

Because, after all, one of the other things many of us have felt for a long time is that the Labsters doesn't really understand us or really want to know who we are and what we want and need. It has seemed to many of us that who we are and what we do makes them...uncomfortable.

It has been a long time since they used the old tag line, “Your World, Your Imagination.” But it often seemed that if your imagination wasn’t focused on some largely human-centric, shiny futurist utopia or standard post-apocalyptic dystopia, sexy-youthful contemporary shopaholicism, or hippy-dippy Burning Man-style artistic range of visions, they just didn’t fucking get it. And more to the point, they didn’t seem to want to. If what you were doing was focused on something like exploring the historical past (or an imagined alternative past), or pursuing neo-traditional literary and artistic interests, or something that was non-human-centric or that they found embarrassing like furries, tinies, Gor, elves and so on--they seemed to try to ignore it as much as possible.

This impression was reinforced by situations like what happened back at the time of SL6B, when Ina Centaur’s Shakespeare in SL project was rejected for inclusion in the SL birthday exhibits as not fitting in with the theme of “the future of the Metaverse.” I know that whole situation was incredibly complex and confusing, but at the heart of it, it simply seems that there was a major difference of opinion within the Lab about what should be seen as representative of the “future,” as Ina’s Skin Encyclopedia was accepted, but Shakespeare was not.

Well, dammit, the “future” is not just about new stuff: it also can be about continuity with the past and the present, and a re-imagining of the framework in which we explore our existing cultural, artistic and intellectual heritage. It can be about sharing our diverse histories with each other in new and creative ways though the medium of the continually evolving technology.

And--again, trying to be fair to the Lab--maybe there ARE some people in the organization who do get it...who in effect, get us. I found it interesting that yes, Shakespeare in SL wasn’t deemed appropriate for SL6B, but does show up in the new SL promos about “what is SL?"

In the slideshow, under the category "Start Exploring," there is a screen entitled "Get Cultured" which features this text:

"Looking for culture? Second Life is full of museums, art exhibits, book clubs and theater. A virtual Shakespeare acting troop routinely presents the best of the Bard, while the Smithsonian recently launched the Latino Virtual Museum." (my bolding)

Actually I think looking through this whole new promotional explanation of SL is quite illuminating. I believe it can be seen as being suggestive of how the company generally understands it's customer base and their interests--as well as how they perhaps would like it to be.

The presentation is still primarily human-centric. In the machinama portion of "What is SL?" the avatars shown are primarily young, contemporary-looking humans. There's even a guy in a suit with a briefcase (he really doesn't look like he's much fun to hang around with, and if I was going to be really coarse about it, I would suggest that he appears to desperately need to get laid). At the very end, you see some tinies and some furries, but damn, you better look fast or you'll miss em. Some people are shown in period clothing, but they obviously are just going to dress-up costume parties--not roleplaying.

In fact, nowhere in all of this is there anything about combat-oriented sims, or roleplaying of any sort, or storytelling or the virtual literature movement in any of its manifestations. Well...maybe there is something implied by captions such as "free yourself" and "free your mind," while other captions suggest you can "change your look" and "change your mind." But it's hard to say. And I certainly don't think the casual touron looking at this promotional peice is going to say, "Change my look? Free my mind? Whoa! dude! I could develop a persona as a lady cop in working-class Berlin of the Weimar Republic era, and interact with other people who are interested in that!"

It's like how in the "Showcase" category for "places" they include Caledon. And you go, "Wow, hey! Cool!" But here's the description:

"Step back in time to the 19th Century. Caledon is a vibrant Victorian-themed community within Second Life. If it’s courtesy and old world charm you’re seeking, look no further. Put on your best Victorian suit or dress, and join Caledonians at their annual Harvest Festival- or become a member of this ever-growing online community."

I don't think that really helps you understand the opportunities for roleplay...and yes, I know Caledon is not specifically an "rp community" but rp certainly does happen there. And no mention of steampunk...

It's great they highlight Caledon. But at the same time, you get the feeling that their understanding of that complex arrangement of communities is extremely superficial. Oh, I suppose if they really tried to explain it with any degree of accuracy, it might just confound and possibly frighten the average casual visitor, but it it does feel rather...weak.

But, still, I have to give them some credit..because it feels like they are trying. Another example is when Blue Linden's SL travel blog featured a post about the ironclad battles that are organized by Hotspur O'Toole and his fellow proponents of nautical mayhem. That suggests a certain open-mindedness. I thought it was pretty cool that a Linden seems to have actually gone and watched a battle and talked to the folks involved to get a sense of what the fuck was going on. Likewise, I have also seen a post in which Blue visited the tinies of Raglan Shire, AND put on a tiny av to fit in. Those kinds of things are really encouraging.

But you know...I have been in SL since late 2004. Dio has existed since May 2005. And the only time I ever met a Linden (that I knew was a Linden, anyway) was when a number of years ago I applied for a liaison job and got an interview. It didn't go all that well. Nothing really wrong with how they approached it--it just was obvious that they were looking for someone different from me...someone focused more on the technical side of helping people, rather than the social aspects. At the time I knew relatively little about building or trouble-shooting, and if that was what they wanted, then they were right not to hire me.

But otherwise, I really haven't experienced much contact with people from the company. And yes, I will freely admit that the lack of contact was a two-way street. Yeah, they never wander through the kinds of places that I live in, but it's also true that I have only gone to a few of their office hour things, and then I gave up on it after getting frustrated with the challenges of communication in that kind of situation. Nor have I posted on the SL forums (as is true for about 80% of the SL user base). I guess I got burned out on company sounding boards after dealing with the Electronic Arts TSO forums, which were dominated by the obnoxious, condescending lumptards who represented EA, and their witless sycophants.

Yeah...I know, I know, I just need to fuckin' get over that.

So anyhow, people like me probably could do a better job of trying to get our perspective across to LL. That's one thing that really struck me as I looked at the current "What is SL" promo. It can't ALL be LL's fault that they don't understand us, that they don't know who we are.

Maybe a lot of us have been too insular. For so long, I never bothered to connect with anyone from the Lab because they simply seemed irrelevant within the context of what I was doing. And the other thing that struck me, looking at the subtle hints and sub-texts within the promotional blurbs and the showcase: the people within LL must be a good bit less homogeneous in background and point of view than some of us have thought. Just like they seem to have not done a good job of comprehending the true diversity of the resident population, we haven't really understood how diverse they probably are as well.

I don't know if any of them will read this. The only time I know for sure that Linden Lab people have read this blog was when I did the spoof on their "economic model," comparing their leadership to the ancient Easter Islanders who committed the island population to building hundreds of giant stone heads. Statcounter data indicated that in fact a fair number of people from Linden Lab looked at that one...which I find a little frustrating as there certainly have been other things I have written that were not nearly so goddamn silly and self-indulgent. Sometimes I think I have written some stuff that might actually be of interest or value to the labbites, but... oh well, that's how life works sometimes.

When some of us were heavily involved in The Sims Online (TSO), Will Wright used to regularly wander around in the game (using an alt, of course) and he interacted directly with a lot of the people who were doing unexpected, wild and woolly things with his creation. Maybe the Lab could do well to have some more folks wandering in the same way, and not just to generate a "travel guide" like Blue's, but to actually develop a first-hand awareness of what is going on and what people want and need to do what they are doing. And on the other side of the equation, maybe I'll try again with going to some office hours.

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Sometimes the magic works -- museums in Second Life

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Visiting a not-so-great museum build in second life: the amphitheater in the Exploratorium sim. And yes, it is big enough to hold five times as many avatars as can actually fit in a sim at once. Wtf?

Having worked for a number of rl museums in the course of my rl career, I enjoy thinking about the potential for museums to utilize the Second Life platform. Sadly, while the thinking about the possibilities is lots of fun, actually looking at the experiments that museums carry out in SL tends to be much less pleasant. In fact, with some notable exceptions, SL museum projects usually just irritate the fuck out out of me.

But hey, you know me, ever the eternal goddam optimist, I thought I would do a search on “museum” tonight and see what turned up. And what came through actually proved to be pretty interesting in a number of ways.

Before I go any further, I want to remind you that as a rule, I am not going to write about people I utterly loathe or projects that simply blow. So if you don’t see a build get covered on this blog, it is either because I think the work itself is a total mass of petrified dog turds on dry white toast, or I think the people responsible for the build are peckerheads of epic proportions. Or it could be that I just haven’t heard about the build and haven't gotten around to seeing it yet. With that in mind, I might as well ask you right now to let me know if you have any suggestions for something you think I should look at. I'll be happy to check them out and if they are in fact just oozing with awesome goodness, you'll get to see me extol the virtues of said virtual exhibit or museum on this here ridiculous blog.

Anyhow, the first thing I noticed was that when I did a search for “museum” the top thing on the list of results was “Virtual Bucharest" with over 30K in traffic. Okey-doke, so I made a mental note to go look at that sometime. Never been to Romania, who knows, it could be cool. Then I started moving down the list looking to see if there were any projects by real life museums represented in the search results. Finally, at number 40, I finally found something that rang a bell -- a build presented by the Exploratorium, a well-known, hands-on science museum in San Francisco.

Now mind you, I generally hate science museums unless they have really, mega-cool shit, like in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. But the museums that offer nothing more than a glorified science fair exhibit of turn-the-crank and light-the-lightbulb bullshit that is supposed to foster a new generation of kiddies who are hopped up about someday being scientists--that crap pretty much bores me shitless and/or makes me insufferably grumpy.

Well, the Exploratorium is sort like the grandaddy of that kind of museum, and whoopity-doo they got a very large area in SL. Not really my cup of tea, but I figured, what the hell, I’ll go look--maybe they fired up their imaginations and did something really out-of-the-box.

Well...they didn't. But I gotta tell you, it was...not terrible.

Ok, I'll admit I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think it did a very good job of teaching anything of significance. But I didn’t hate it. And I wanted to talk about this build because I think its creators made a noble effort that mostly fails because they made the mistake that is most commonly made by rl museums in SL.

Instead of breaking new ground, the Exploratorium folks made what was essentially a virtual version of what they do in real life: a disjointed series of more or less unrelated push-the-button-and-something-happens kind of experience that might teach you something about...oh...stuff. The biggest difference between the SL Exploratorium and the real-life one was that unlike in the actual bricks and mortar museum, most of the virtual exhibits seemed to be working and did not have little "out of order” signs hung on them. That was kind of nice. And mind you, I really didn’t think the thing sucked. The main thing that was disappointing was that they really weren’t using the technology of the platform to do something genuinely innovative. It was their same old shtick, just made from pixels instead of laminate and rubber tubing and hose clamps. The other thing about it I should mention was that it was completely empty--I had the entire place to myself, which wasn’t surprising considering that its traffic was only 646.

An exhibit in the Exploratorium build--it teaches us that "gee it's a long way from the sun to Earth." Or something.

Even though my head was starting to hurt at that point, I decided to take a stab at one more build off that list of search results, and hoo-boy, am I glad I did.

The thing I decided to check out was a place slightly higher up on the list (1658 in traffic) called the “Primtings Museum.” I thought hey, that sounds different, so just for shits and giggles I popped over there. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is in fact an innovative and unique use of the technology to accomplish something that would not have been terribly practical in a bricks and mortar context. The organizers of the Primtings museum have invited SL artists such as AM Radio, to take real-life two-dimensional paintings by famous artists such as Dali, Van Gogh, David, and others, and translate them into three-dimensional presentations.

It was pretty much in the realm of fuckin’ awesome.

But sometimes, the magic works! Standing inside the 3-D interpretation of Van Gogh's "Vincent's Room," by SL artist Dekka Raymaker.

The build is the brainchild of Ina Centaur, an SL arts-entrepreneur, who describes the project on her blog thusly:

“Primtings Museum is a sim-sized “prim’ed paintings” gallery. Famous paintings in RL are interpreted by SL artists in a variety of ways via prims into 3d paintings. Built to “feel” like a RL museum, where visitors can take their time to explore and “stumble upon” an exhibit, visitors can also quickly “teleport” to a particular primting via Primtings.com’s search-able web directory of all primtings. Artists may also submit their primting for consideration as an exhibit in the museum. We will be exploring some notable Primtings in the interactive part of the tour.”

Ms. Centaur also explained that the project--like some others she is involved with--is "fiscally-sponsored by sLiterary, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the arts in virtual worlds. sLiterary.org offers a variety (from historical to modern to cozy!) of high quality inworld facilities, open to the public for events and other activities...”

You can go look at her blog, though she posts only periodically. Still it’s interesting reading for a number of reasoms, some of which we might go into at another time.

Anyhow, I really enjoyed the Primtings build. Not only can you go and interact with these art works that you have known and loved since Art History 101--and getting a new and fresh perspective on them in the process--but in many cases you also get information about the virtual artist who executed the 3-D interpretation of the 2-D work, along with a discussion of why they think that particular work is so freakin' cool, and even what kind of modeling software they used to create their version.

Ha! This is what happens when you click on the 3-D rendition of Dali's "Persistence of Memory," created by Voodoo Shilton--I think Dali would have appreciated this, being as he had a pretty wacky sense of humor.

This is what museums should be doing in SL: looking at the platform and saying, "hey, how can we do something we really couldn't do in meatspace?" And one thing that the platform is extremely good for, is the creation of three-dimensional environments and offering an immersion experience for the visitor. How bloody remarkable is it to be able to interact with a surreal Dali landscape or to sit in Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” diner?

The other remarkable thing about this project is that it that was initiated by an individual, not a real-life museum organization. But maybe that shouldn’t be surprising...too many museum people are locked into thinking about doing things a certain way. And that’s probably why so many of them are in so much fucking trouble these days.

Sitting in Edward Hopper's diner from "Nighthawks," created by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani--gotta come back with friends all dressed up in 40's clothing and see what the place feels like with more folks in it.

You can visit the Primtings museum at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Primtings/179/67/53

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