Last week my friend and co-diarist Eddie C wrote the first Happy Story Monday edition. I certainly hope our Friday regulars will still join us but we're also excited to have other uids join us.
According to LEGO.com The LEGO company was named in 1934. The first plastic LEGO bricks were formed in 1949. In 1954, the LEGO name was registered as a trademark in Denmark.
The name 'LEGO' is an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". It’s our name and it’s our ideal...The world's children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.
LEGO has put together activities for teachers to use in classrooms. This uses LEGO and accessory packs to build solar powered ferris wheels and cars for units on energy. This uses LEGO and accessories to build a dancing robot.
The brick masters at Legoland often create Lego scenes for special occasions. Here is their rendering of Obama's inauguration.
photo by francefive
Nathan Sawaya Brick Artist
Natan Sawaya is a LEGO certified brick master. He used to be a Wall Street attorney who built LEGO art projects for stress relief in his off hours. A profile last August detailed his transition from attorney to brick master.
One of Sawaya's first hobbyist projects with Legos was an eight-foot-tall pencil. Friends would come over to gawk at it, and Sawaya eventually set up a website, brickartist.com, to post photos of his creations. Visitors to the site sent in requests, such as Lego renderings of portraits of their children...
The hobby became the real thing in 2004 after he won a competition sponsored by Lego to find the best builder in the U.S. He quit his job and became one of Lego's "master model builders," creating sculptures for its theme park in San Diego. They paid him just $13 an hour, but it gave him good training for when he returned to New York to create his own Lego works full-time...
Ironically, Sawaya says he now works more hours per week than he ever did as a corporate lawyer, although he also makes more money than he did then. Most important to him, though, is the artistic gratification he gets out of his Lego creations, particularly when he gets feedback from children who are inspired by his projects. "There are 400 million children out there playing with Legos," he says. "Who am I to say that they aren't artists too?"
Stephen Colbert
Brooklyn Bridge
Sean Kenney is also a Lego certified brick master.
Empire State Building
Google
Eric Harshbarger is a mathematician and a computer programmer who changed careers to become a LEGO sculpturist and mosaicist. His career change is all the more impressive because he's never been a LEGO employee.
Double Helix
Fully Functional LEGO Clock
Images and details about this working clock including internal gears
Golden Gate Bridge
For those interested in historical representations here is a travel photo by Leif Petterson from LEGOland in California.
One year during Lent I found a very cool and bizarre book The Brick Testament. It's the Book of Genesis illustrated with LEGOs. It's also available online but with a few extra racy scenes. At the website there are also depictions of Jesus' teachings on forgiveness and money, which are pretty cool. They aren't available in book form though.
Controversy
There has been some small controversy in the world of LEGO hobbyists as to whether LEGO can be an art form. LEGO pieces range from copies of sculptures and paintings to original designs conceived and executed in LEGO form. Roy T. Cook argues that in order to be considered a work of art a LEGO design must evidence at least some building skill, express an emotion or message, and needs to be "situated in a larger historical or traditional context." He wrote an article arguing the point after his mosaic of Johnny Cash won a Best Artwork over an original design depicting a house of nightmares. Cook says that his mosaic is not artwork because it fails the second criteria for LEGO art--it doesn't express a message or an emotion. He states, "At best, it is a technical achievement showing off a new method for creating mosaics. This doesn’t mean it was bad, or that it had no value – it just means that is wasn’t art."
Cook argues strongly against the notion that great LEGO artworks are "flat-out forgeries" of masterpieces.
After all, what better way to display the potential of LEGO as an artistic medium than by using it to copy a masterpiece in another medium (insert sarcasm here)? Of course, I am not denying the value of having simple, hands-on activities that engage the museum-going public, and it is likely that this sort of consideration, and not philosophically deep considerations about the aesthetic status of LEGO, motivated choosing this particular activity to be part of the exhibit. Nevertheless, identifying LEGO art with LEGO creations that resemble artworks in other media does little to advance appreciation of LEGO as a unique art form...
What we have yet to grasp, as a group (and as a society as a whole), is that LEGO is an artistic medium unto itself. LEGO creations need to resemble neither great paintings nor great sculptures in order to be great artworks. Of course, there are strong analogies between creating with LEGO and sculpting (thus, Nannan’s creations can often be fairly characterized as ‘sculptural’), but there are also differences. We should not make the mistake, however, of thinking that the more sculpture-like or painting-like a creation is, the more artistic it is.
I will conclude this essay with a call to arms. Instead of mindlessly categorizing particular LEGO creations as artworks merely because they vaguely resemble masterpieces in other art forms, we need to begin to think hard about what makes a LEGO creation a great work of art, or a work of art at all. There is little reason to think that the criteria we discover will be the same, or even all that similar to, the criteria for being a great painting or great sculpture. At any rate, we won’t find out what the similarities, if any, are unless we spend some time thinking about these issues.
Of course, all of this depends on the assumption that LEGO is not only fun, but can also be a medium for creating works of artistic value. At LEGO events I often run into builders who are antagonistic to this idea, typically for one of two reasons: First, some builders seem to think that thinking hard about LEGO as an art form will somehow take the fun out of building. This line of thought seems mistaken to me, since there would appear to be no reason to think that one cannot both enjoy doing something and think hard about how it is, or should be, done. Second, I get the "But it’s just LEGO! It’s just a toy! You’re taking this all way too seriously!" reaction. Of course, on one level this reaction is correct: If no one begins to take it seriously, then it will remain just a toy, and neither we nor the public will have any right to treating it as anything more. On the other hand, if we do begin thinking about the status of LEGO as a medium for the creation of art, and we develop the critical tools for evaluating and critiquing LEGO models in virtue of their artistic qualities (and not merely in terms of how complicated the SNOT techniques are, or how swooshable they are, or how cool they are), then eventually we will accumulate the theoretical ammunition necessary to convince the rest of the world that what we do is (sometimes) serious and worthy of their attention. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?
To see what he is describing I'll show 2 designs by Sawaya and Kenney in each of the forms.
Copies of art
Sawaya
Kenney
Original Art
Kenney
From seankenney.com
In the stock market, big time investors can place what's called a "short order" to make money off falling prices. They profit when everyone else is losing. It's symbolic of the entire investment banking industry: a way for the rich and powerful to make tons of money off all of the hard working people in the world.
Sawaya
From CNN
All of my pieces have special meaning to me, but I am particularly happy with a sculpture I did for the New Orleans Public Library. After the Katrina devastation, I was commissioned to build a permanent work of art for the library that would focus on the rebuilding of New Orleans. As part of the project, thousands of drawings by children from across the country were collected in which the children were asked to draw what they thought would be important for the rebuilding of the city. I then interpreted these drawings to create the sculpture.
For job hunters, here is a list of US LEGO open positions.
What is your happy story this week?