Found Magazine is a glorious aggregation of discovered things from the everyday world: to-do lists, photos, cards, ticket stubs, doodled napkins, and on and on. Public radio’s ‘To the Best of Our Knowledge’ featured an interview with Found’s editor Davy Rothbart, with some dark, funny, and sad examples read aloud in the audio stream.
Among the highlights now on-line:
A post-it reminding someone to ‘Make Dummy for grand prize.’A slowly devolving list of repeated written lines, obviously intended as punishment at school, saying ‘I will not throw during quiet time’.
A strange list of instructions found in Boulder, Colorado:
‘Beat up a pillow
Hide from yourself
brush hair wrong way
run into a wall
pretend you’re on a talk show
tape mouth
Spin
Clean up!’
The Found articles raise two thoughts in my head about arts and cultural management:
- First, how wonderful it is to have a thoughtful, creative, and observant curator to uncover what is strange and beautiful in the world…the editors of Found Magazine are clearly such people. Arts managers, when in the zone, can be this to their audiences, too.
- Second, there is so much art, elegance, oddity, discovery, expressive force, and personal meaning in the notes and photos we take everyday. When, along the line, did the experience of the more formal arts become so separated from daily life? We must have been working awfully hard to make it that way.
