Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Amazon's Mechanical Turk Review of My Art #60


This is a project where I pay workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to review my art and website and pay them $5 for 500 words. This is the 60th review I've received.

This is my review of the art on the website of Paul Shortt, a guy I have never heard of before, perhaps because i am somewhat art-illiterate, or because the guy might be too unique on his own to be widely know. Anyways, the young artist finished his BFA studies on Kansas City art Institute just about four years ago, and still he was able to participate on numerous group shows. While still studying, he has his signature written under many pieces worth mentioning and reviewing. Paul Shortt, in quite a few years of doing what you apparently love the most, you achieved interesting things. While I do not possess an expert eye for art, I am fond of interesting things and I do have sense fondness for uniqueness. So i tried to maintain my focus in a whole on his artistic portfolio and began to evaluate my feelings and thoughts, feeling more or less impressed with what I saw. So I went through numerous of his pictures and videos. Many of the pieces seen there look pretty much decent, while few others really stand out. There is not lack of humor there - right in the beginning, Please No Photo collection shows that. Shots of various indivudals or groups of people in the streets contain big no-photo icon covering quite a big part of photos. Interesting idea, pointing at the chance some people just did not want to approve the photo later and even the great shot is made for nothing. 

Another example for laughs can be found at The Business of Selling Yourself.. really nice business card, haha! From this and other works of Paul, I can see he focuses his artistic works on various connection between people, after his exploration of daily life. To me, perhaps because of my lack of artistic feel, they seem quite weird :) But i admit, they make a person think and feel. There is a specific message in each one of them. At first one may feel these pieces of work are arranged just like that, without a purpose, but no, nothing is random, you just need to take a closer look. There is a sophisticated message presented there, sometimes polished and sometimes not, delivered to a "consumer" through metaphorical artistic expressions. The author, trying to made a perfectly surprising delivery, does not hesitate to even use his very personal details, as in aforementioned Business Of Selling Yourself. These pieces of art are filled with delicate and bitter sarcasm. I will tell you what I like the most about the work of Paul Shortt. It is the fact he really does not use high amount of funds to do his work. It is because he uses quite simple yet very cool and effective ideas to make something out of nothing. with low budget, he is always able to create something of high value. This guy really uses his mind and can see there is so much around him he can use for his work. I find this really amazing.

For more info on this project please check out my website: http://paulshortt.com/Pay-For-An-Audience-5-Star-Ratings