Pink Dot wasn’t the only solidarity event that took place today. Over at Queen Street, street artists are having one, too, called, erm, Solidarity.

Make that Solidarity 21, an ongoing initiative by art collective RSCLS to document and bring together the different street art scenes in the region. They’ve kicked it off with the Philippines. Early this year, RSCLS founder Zero went to check out the scene there and they’ve invited members of the Katipunan Street Team (KST) for a three-day artist jam that kicked off yesterday and wraps up tomorrow with a barbecue over at the public wall of the former Dbl O from 2pm to 10pm.

Did I mention the barbecue?

It’s free to the public, so you might want to drop by. Over at the 2nd floor’s a pop up exhibition featuring canvas works made by members of both collectives (or crews or posse or…).

I popped by this afternoon for an artist talk session with KST members. It made for an interesting contrast with what we know of the local street art scene: Singapore’s structured, clinical order versus what Zero described as the “visual pollution” of Manila (its billboard madness, the sheer vehicular chaos, etc), the draconian environment of the former versus the free-for-all-but-on-your-guard scenario of the latter.

Pretty interesting chaps, too. Didn’t know any of them until today, but there’s a mutual friend in artist Mark Salvatus, who was in the previous Singapore Biennale (the “wrapped” drawings over at SAM).

It’s really easy to do the whole stereotyping of street artists. But that’s exactly one of the reasons why RSCLS is doing Solidarity 21 — to make sure you don’t. With future plans to link up with fellow artists in other countries, the Manila tie-up was a wonderful taste of things to come. For one, the art form is contextualised — compared to the Singapore scene, the Filipino one is apparently relatively young, only exploding in 2006. But that’s the punchline — it’s an explosion, with around 300 to 400 “writers” now.

You’re also introduced to a pretty eclectic group: One’s an ex-activist-turned-social worker (who does graffiti!), couple of them have their own t-shirt company (while doing street art!). There’s Egg Fiasco, who’s managed to balance street cred with commercial success, and Graver — who’s a legend in both Indonesia (where he was born) and the Philippines, said Zero, and who has a metal plate on his head after falling two storeys in an accident. And he’s still active.

Now that’s dedication.

***

If these guys were taking on walls, others were things on something smaller flat surface — the tablet.

I’m talking about Samsung’s Masterpieces digital art gallery (http://www.masterpiecesart.com/), which has been up and running for slightly over a week and features works by artists and students created with the Galaxy Note 10.1 LTE.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly keen about the whole thing. For one, the interface isn’t really user-friendly.

It’s probably better on laptops or desktops, but it wasn’t very good on my iPad (which is kind of ironic considering it’s extolling the virtues of a tablet). You can’t pinch-zoom (or even zoom), and it’s somehow presented like a greeting card thing, for you to share with friends (which means you’ve got a distracting message portion).

Basically, it’s not the Google Art Project, and even deviantART seems better.

So, okay, the website’s not really a good platform to check out the works — but what about the art?

Erm, Masterpieces they definitely aren’t. Who came up with the website’s pretentious name in the first place? Not really what you’d call many of the sketches, squiggles and whatnot passing off as works when they’re really more exercises.

The thing is, the whole tablet art thing has been around for a while. And if you’ve got someone like David Hockney already fooling around on his iPad (and showing it at the Royal Academy), surely there’s a bar somewhere?

Perhaps I’m really just annoyed by the website’s name, because, actually, there are some slightly interesting pieces (among lots of blah and bad).

Let’s wait and see — there are apparently more works coming in.

In the meantime, can we just skip the greeting card bit? We’d like to see more of the art please.