Monday, November 28, 2016

Deeper Art

BlouinArtinfo ran an article about avante-gard art pioneers Fathomers on November 8, 2016.  Led by peerless Executive Director Stacy Switzer, Fathomers is establishing itself as a locus in quo for perpetrating great art in Los Angeles and beyond.  The article also discusses Problems and Provocations, which chronicles Fathomers' influential 1995-2015 prehistory as Grand Arts through the works of visionary artists, such as Tavares Strahan, Mel Chin, and Michael Jones McKean, and to which I contributed a modest aukwardly-focused pensée entitled "Immortality".

For full disclosure, let me note that I am delighted to serve on the Fathomers board of directors.  In this capacity, I hope for ever more problematic and provocative art to shine through the prism of this wonderful, talented, and challenging organization.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

WIPO Hype O' SIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") released its World Intellectual Property Indicators 2016 report on November 23, 2016.  Among various intellectual property data, statistics, and trends, the WIPO report announced that the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office ("SIPO") had become the first national patent office to receive more than one million patent applications in a single year.  In 2015 alone, CIPO logged 1,101,864 distinct applications for patent protection, though these applications included not only applications for "invention patents" (akin to United States ("U.S." utility patents), but also "utility models" ("petit patents") and design patents (similar to U.S. design patents).  In addition, 2015 saw just over one million patent applications filed Chinese citizens.  A breezy overview of the report is available in this WIPO video:



Although it remains unclear whether patents are an accurate metric of innovation, China is on the verge of establishing itself as a patent superpower.