Dan Perjovschi, one postcard from Postcards from the World (North America), 2009, ink and marker on paper, 4 × 6 inches, via Lombard-Freid Projects
This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of postcards from Dan Perjovschi’s show at Lombard-Freid Projects, closing February 20. Don’t miss it.
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The show is closed, but I wanted to put up a couple of photos I took on the last day of the installation Drippy by Ben Godward and Famous Accountants (Ellen Letcher and Kevin Regan), all of whom I met via the wonder that was/is Pocket Utopia. The “dripping blood” on the walls is by Famous Accountants, and the site-specific sculpture in the middle is by Ben Godward.
Visit my flickr set for more images.
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Henry Cowell as a young man, from Wikipedia
For all of America’s celebration of its own love of invention and innovation, there has been a dark side to American cultural life: an enormous pressure to conform, the rule of a marketplace that is intolerant of genuine individuality and dissent, and a risk-averse anti-intellectualism derived from mistrust, isolationism, and commercial interest.
— From Leon Botstein’s essay on Henry Cowell for the American Symphony Orchestra
We attended the amazing all-Cowell concert, conducted by Botstein, last Friday.
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I, along with a few other people you have probably already heard of, will be participating in a panel on blogs and contemporary art organized and moderated by Robin White for ArtTable. Full details below. I recommend RSVP-ing right away, as seating is limited.
WHEN
Friday, January 15, 6:30 pm
Please note that the Gallery is open 12 – 6 pm so arrive early if you want to view the final phase of exhibitions at X.
WHERE
X Initiative
548 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011
Moderator: Robin White
Panelists:
Barry Hoggard, Bloggy, ArtCat, Culture Pundits: blogger, collector, entrepreneur
Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City: news and opinion blogger, writer
William Powhida: artist, blogger
Kelly Shindler, Art21: educational blogger
Edward Winkleman: gallery owner, blogger
Blogs about contemporary arts and the art world play an increasingly important role by providing multiple viewpoints, information and commentaries about the art market, the gallery scene, artists and their work on a daily basis. As the number of printed newspaper and culture journals decreases, some blogs are becoming a source for substantial art journalism and art criticism. By pairing the 5-most read, and hotly debated, bloggers of New York City, we want to touch on a topic that is timely and relevant, and offer a dynamic and lively conversation at the X-Initiative.
We have curated the panel to incorporate a wide spectrum of practicing bloggers: from art news to art education, from the perspective of the art market including both the point of view of an artist and a gallerist, and those who are taking the online art world to a whole new-networked level.
About the Panelists:
Barry Hoggard writes about art and politics on bloggy.com. He is the editor, along with James Wagner, of the arts calendar ArtCat, and proprietor of CulturePundits.com, a curated network of today’s leading cultural websites and blogs. He recently began publishing Idiom, an online publication of urban artistic practice. He is also a software developer.
http://www.culturepundits.com/
Paddy Johnson aka ArtFagCity blogger, has been published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and many others. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet and in 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.
William Powhida’s blog has covered controversial topics including creating an “enemies” list as well as letters addressed to famous contemporary curators, collectors and critics, requesting recognition. According to Wikipedia as an artist he constructs work deliberately about growing his own fame, addressing the major obstacles facing emerging contemporary artists.
http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/
Kelly Shindler, Art 21 Blog Founder and Editor, has worked at Art21 since 2003, where she is presently Director of Special Projects. She is also a curator and writer, as well as a dual Master’s candidate in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism/Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Edward Winkleman is an art dealer and a blogger. He started his eponymous blog about the art world and politics in 2005 and is a contributing editor to the international blog Art World Salon. He began his career in the art world with a series of guerilla-style exhibitions organized in New York and London under the name ‘hit & run’. In 2001 he co-founded the Plus Ultra Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Moving into Manhattan’s art district Chelsea in 2006, he changed the name of the gallery to Winkleman Gallery.
http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/
About the organizers:
Robin White Owen is a principal at MediaCombo, an award winning multimedia production company that specializes in working with culture, science and environmental organizations. As a blogger, she writes about culture, social media and multimedia in and out of the gallery and museum. Robin has worked on productions for the The Jewish Museum, and the British Museum, in addition to working with VIART, View Magazine, and ArtForum.
Heather Darcy Bhandari is the director of artist relations at Mixed Greens. Since joining the gallery in 2000, she has curated over forty-five exhibitions while managing and advising a roster of nearly two-dozen artists. She curates independent shows, sits on the board of NURTUREart, and co-authored the professional development guide for artists, ART/WORK, published by Simon and Schuster in 2009. Heather majored in visual arts and anthropology at Brown University and received an MFA in painting from Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Mixed Greens, she worked at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin in New York City.
Lauren Pearson is a contemporary art historian and is currently Assistant Director at ArtCycle, a contemporary art consignment gallery. She recently received her Master’s degree in contemporary art and cultural theory from the University College London, UK. Her thesis was titled, “The Spectacular is the Obvious: Negotiating Place in Postcolonial, War-torn and Embodied Geographies” and explored notions of contemporary art and geography. She received her undergraduate degree in art history from New York University in 2001, and has worked for the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art, Milton Glaser Inc., Peter Halley Studio, and FRED [London/Leipzig], LLC. A native of San Francisco, she currently lives in New York City.
About X Initiative
X is a not-for-profit initiative of the global contemporary art community founded to exist for one year at 548 West 22nd Street to present exhibitions and programming. Advised by a 50+ advisory board comprised of artists, curators, museum professionals, gallerists, collectors, art historians and critics, X reaches across traditional boundaries to form a consortium interested in responding quickly to the major philosophical and economic shifts impacting culture. Questions posed in the form of programming address relevant and pressing issues pertaining to the changing landscape of contemporary art.
I dropped by Cheryl McGinnis Gallery (at West 38th and 8th Avenue) last week to see Susan Hamburger’s show with the delicious title Moral Hazard. The Economist has a definition but the meaning in this sense is primarily that powerful individuals and institutions take more risks when they know their failures will be bailed out by another party — often the taxpayers.
Detail of The Low Road with Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Vito Fosella, and John Ensign.
The exquisitely-crafted works, using acrylic on paper and collage, contain aspects of Roman wall painting but according to the artist’s web site are inspired by self-made ancien régime wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon.
Detail from The Con and The Nine with Charles Ponzi
Susan uses her beautiful technique to reflect on the financial and sexual rogues of our current era, ranging from GOP Senator John Ensign to Wall Street bankers.
Detail from The Nine with John Mack (Morgan Stanley), John Thain (Merrill Lynch) and Henry Paulson (Former Secretary of the Treasury)
The show is up through December 18. Highly recommended as a response to the beautiful objects vs. serious issues “dichotomy” in the art world. Susan gives us both.
[All images are courtesy of Cheryl McGinnis Gallery.]
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On this date in 2004, James and I launched the first version of the ArtCat Calendar (then called ArtCal). The first version just listed shows and dates by neighborhood, with the main innovation being the listing of Chelsea shows by street.
Some history:
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All decent people should run away from home. — Fritz Lang, 1975
I heard this quote in a fascinating interview with Fritz Lang by William Friedkin last night, from the bonus disc to The Criterion Collection’s excellent release of “M.”
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Gentrification pushing out artists has a long history in New York. Via the New York Times:
A 1921 cartoon, courtesy of Duke University, shows a displaced artist walking past Vincent Pepe, an Italian-born real estate entrepreneur, and two rich clients in search of a Village home.
James and I visited the New Museum three times during Nikhil Chopra’s performance. For more background, and images of the first day, see James’s post. We had been told by the curator, Eungie Joo, that we should expect a rather surprising transformation on the last day, and we were not disappointed. Below are few of my photos of the last hours of the performance. When we met him afterward, the artist told us that he had insisted that the museum allow photography of his performance. After all, he said, “it’s a visual medium” and that photography is one of the ways people in our contemporary world engage with and process images.
I felt dazed, as if I had just left a moving ritual in a temple in a strange land, as I walked out onto the Bowery that day.
There will be performances and lectures related to the project this weekend, starting tonight (Friday, November 13) at 7pm. James and I will definitely be there.
getting made up
3 images of his final pose, held for about 45 minutes
We missed this Jack the Ripper-esque costume. See it in action here.
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A set of scattered thoughts on the New Museum’s plans to show works from Dakis Joannou’s collection selected by Jeff Koons.
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