• Learning To Love You More
• Harrell Fletcher
• Miranda July
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Assignment: "Take a picture of the sun"
• Assignment: "Write your life story in less than a day"
• World of Found

Art Together Now

Your dream: having your novel published and your art hung in galleries all over the world.

Your reality: a bunch of half-finished short stories you haven't touched since college and artwork that's mostly in the form of doodles in your date book.

Well, good news: It's possible to meld your reality and your dream. Thanks to several communal art projects online, your work - written or visual - could end up in a museum or book or on clothing.

Such is the case for those who've participated in the online art project, Learning To Love You More, launched in 2002 by artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July (writer/director of the recent film Me and You and Everyone We Know). Anyone is welcome to submit to the site. Work that it's generated has been featured in museums such as the Whitney in New York and also will be the focus of a book due out this fall.

How does it work? July and Fletcher periodically make up "assignments" that get posted on the site. Assignments are as simple as "take a picture of the sun" or as involved as "write your life story in less than a day." There's no contest; everything that's submitted gets posted.

"The assignments don't require a lot of cleverness," says the site's manager, Yuri Ono. "The whole point is that anyone can be an artist. Anyone can engage themselves in their community in an artistic way." Over 3,500 submissions have been logged to date from people of all ages in all parts of the world.

A similar project can be found at World of Found, a site that was born when two friends in Kobe, Japan, happened upon the discarded photo of a random young girl holding a bunny in 2000. Intrigued by the picture, they started to collect people's interpretations of the image.

People now get to see how dozens of different creative minds view and work with the same muse - the anonymous girl with a rabbit. Many of the pieces get turned into eye-catching T-shirts (which are available on the site).

Finally, closeted Picassos and Prousts are gaining some well-deserved recognition, without having to leave their day jobs.

"It's all about getting to be creative," says Ono, "and interacting with the world around you."

 

Posted on April 17, 2006