Category: art

I just found and reread this post from a couple of years ago, and I still like it very much, unfortunately.
How Conceptual Art is Like a Renaissance Tapestry

WPS1.org, the online audio program of PS1, has been up for a few weeks now, and it’s getting better. Some listening tips:

An exclusive preview of “Nurse,” the latest CD from Sonic Youth, broadcast on The Larry Rivers Memorial Music Hour #1. [Surf their unlinkable site: previous broadcasts > Week of May 24th]

A raucous 1962 debate over Pop Art, where “Henry Geldzhaler and Hilton Kramer match wits with Dore Ashton, Stanley Kunitz and Leo Steinberg. William Lieberman referees, er moderates.” [Week of May 17th. Parts I & II were rebroadcast together this week, but I can’t find links to the combined show.]

I went to Houston last week for the opening of an amazing show at the Menil Collection, photographs by Olafur Eliasson. Of course, my post about it is now like a 10,000-word essay, which I don’t know if even I’ll ever read.
So in the mean time, check out the show, and the Times article on the de Menil’s Philip Johnson-designed house, which was a sharp International Style stick in the eye of Tara-style 1950’s Houston.

Ouch. a 10,000sf warehouse of Momart, the leading art handler/storage company in the UK, burned to the ground yesterday, taking an as-yet unknown number of major Brit Art works with it. The Guardian has some speculative details on what burned, including Jake and Dinos Chapman’s massive installation, Hell, but there’s still a lot that’s not known.
If Charles Saatchi believed in karma, this would be devastating to him right now. But unless he’s actively trying to come back as a worm, he doesn’t so, never mind. [via MAN]
Update: I’ve rewritten the title for this post half a dozen times. My initial impulse of shock still stands, but the close second–schadenfreude over Saatchi’s misfortune–is untenable. It really is–sorry, Charlie–not about you. Jonathan Jones visits the site an reflects on the ashes of Hell.

Ouch. a 10,000sf warehouse of Momart, the leading art handler/storage company in the UK, burned to the ground yesterday, taking an as-yet unknown number of major Brit Art works with it. The Guardian has some speculative details on what burned, including Jake and Dinos Chapman’s massive installation, Hell, but there’s still a lot that’s not known.
If Charles Saatchi believed in karma, this would be devastating to him right now. But unless he’s actively trying to come back as a worm, he doesn’t so, never mind. [via MAN]
Update: I’ve rewritten the title for this post half a dozen times. My initial impulse of shock still stands, but the close second–schadenfreude over Saatchi’s misfortune–is untenable. It really is–sorry, Charlie–not about you. Jonathan Jones visits the site an reflects on the ashes of Hell.

Umm… I was excited for the launch of WPS1: Art Radio, the new online audio programming wing of PS1. Launched three weeks ago, WPS1 is daily mp3 streamed programming in three broad categories: awesome, edge music from all over; rare and archival artist recordings from parent/affiliate MoMA’s library; and self-produced art-related talk/interview shows. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
After listening to a dozen or so art talk shows on WPS1, I find them almost unlistenable. Excruciatingly amateurish, painfully ad hoc. Can I say it? I have to. They BLOOOOOWW.
Which really blows, because I’m a fan of PS1. A lot of cool people; in-tune, even daring curators; great artists, great opportunities for new artists; great music, especially in the summer; a very refreshing and energetic institution. I even know a few of the people involved in WPS1 and have been anticipating the launch for months.

Continue reading “WPS1: Let’s put on a [radio] show!”

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In the Times, Roberta Smith combines a righteous review of Jon Routson’s “Bootleg” series–video recordings of films Routson attends–with righteous indignation against increasingly draconian copyright legislation (like making possession of a camcorder in a theater a felony).

It does not matter whether you think that Mr. Routson’s work is good or bad art; it is quite good enough, in my view. It does matter that the no-camcorder laws may not do much to stem pirating while making it increasingly difficult for artists to do one of the things they do best: comment on the world around them.
Our surroundings are so thoroughly saturated with images and logos, both still and moving, that forbidding artists to use them in their work is like barring 19th-century landscape painters from depicting trees on their canvases. Pop culture is our landscape…
At once stolen and given away, Mr. Routson’s works operate somewhere between the manipulated magazine advertising images of the 1980’s artist Richard Prince and the keep-the-gift-in-motion aesthetic of 90’s artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose sculptures included large piles of wrapped candy, free for the taking, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose first exhibitions consisted of cooking curry and serving it to gallery visitors. [Nice company you keep, Jon. -greg]

Routson’s show runs through Saturday at Team Gallery.
Related, Law:
Theaters used nightvision goggles to bust the only man to record (or see) The Alamo (04.15.04)
“If camcorders are illegal, only criminals will have camcorders.” (11.21.03)
& Artist:
Jon Routson profile in Baltimore City Paper (with important-sounding quotes from me) (01.21.04)
Jon Routson’s edited-for-TV Cremaster 4 and video art bootlegging (08.18.03)

Not to get all Elvis Mitchell on yer ass or anything, but if auction reports were white cotton handkerchiefs, dry, practical, and folded neatly, dutifully, and boringly into the breast pocket of some print media outlet or another, Stuart Waltzer’s account of last night’s Whitney Picasso sale at Sotheby’s is a stunning, showy-but-inutile giant Hermes carre, silkscreened with a riot of intricate patterns, cascading like a technicolor waterfall out of the blazer of some too-tanned-for-January decorator at La Goulue.

In helpful, 2×2 grid format:

Go to the Jim Lambie show at Anton Kern, which ends Saturday. Nice pants. (Roberta Smith agrees.)

Go to Momenta Art benefit auction at White Columns Saturday night.

Go to the deKooning show at Gagosian. (Roberta Smith agrees. Again. Stop following me!) The man was either a painting genius, or he had Alzheimer’s his whole life.

Read John Rockwell’s amused, largely successful attempt to conserve and convey an admittedly ephemeral artistic experience–in this case, NYU’s brainy panel discussion, “Not for Sale: Curating, Conserving and Collecting Ephemeral Art”– before the Times locks it up in its archives.

Try to see, literally, Benjamin Cottam’s one-man show of beautiful-to-look-at, aggressively hard-to-see portraits and drawings at Gasser Grunert on 19th St. We snapped up four of the fingernail-sized dead artist portraits as soon as we saw them, which, fortunately, was several months ago in the studio. (Roberta, where are you when we need you?)

Print out your treatment, and head down to the Tribeca Film Festival.

Go to Naoshima in Japan, either with a blogger or with a tourful of “journalling” middle aged artists (how do you tell them apart, you might ask? just look for the elastic-waisted batik pants.)

It’s a fine hook to hang a puff piece for the Guggenheim’s minimalism exhibit on: Tour the city with the curators and uncover the minimalism all around us. Should be ideal; so why would I rather take my chances on the Baghdad-Najaf local?

Is it the idea of riding around in a van all day? The constant competition for most nerve-fraying whine between Nancy Spector’s 3-month-old baby and chief curator/clotheshorse Lisa Dennison? (“There is a very real danger that I will start to shop, so we’d better be brief.”)

No, it’s the depressing realization that these supposedly high-octane New York artminds, augmented by artist and prolific writer Liam Gillick, couldn’t have come up with a more unimaginative, uninformative itinerary. With the exception of Donald Judd’s own studio/house in SoHo, their minimalist sites barely warrant looking up as your cab goes by.
Jil Sander (by Spector’s husband) instead of Calvin Klein (by maxi-minimalist and Judd cut-and-paster John Pawson)? The window at the Time Warner Mall instead of the Rose Center Planetarium (which did clear-glass curtainwall first, infinitely better, and happens to be by an actual architect)? Richard Meier’s silly Asia de Cuba or whatever the hell it’s called? (My guess: Lisa’s idea.)

And the piece de resistance: the Seagram building instead of something actually minimalist, like _____(I’m thinking.) This minimalist braintrust actually drinks the Miesian Koolaid, that it’s all about “structure as the expression of the buildng.” Mies was as much about decoration as the next classicist, it turns out, as the renovation of his IIT in Chicago proved. His structure was a veneer on top of the actual structure: aestheticized, artificial, techno-classicist.

[Update: I am not all right on this Mies nonsense, but it turns out I’m even lazier than a vanful of curators. And I’m too bored with their conceit to care. If you’re really interested in minimalism and the grid and its influence on the city, go read the chapter on how laying out the grid led to the development of the skyscraper in Koolhaas’s Delirious New York.

Police arrest 2 under new ‘anti-camcording’ law
15 Apr 2004 10:07am EDT – By Jesse Hiestand
The MPAA announced Wednesdaythe first arrests under a new California law targetting movie pirates who use camcorders in theaters. Min Jae Joun was arrested on suspicion of violating the anti-camcording law after theater personnel saw a red light from his camcorder during an April 10 screening of The Passion of the Christ at the Pacific Theatre at the Grove in Los Angeles. Joun’s next hearing date is May 5 in Los Angeles’ central arraignment court. Also arrested on suspicion of the misdemeanor charge was Ruben Centeno Moreno, who allegedly recorded The Alamo on April 12 at the Pacific Winnetka Theatre in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles. A projectionist observed a light from the video camera and confirmed it using night-vision goggles, according to the MPAA. No hearing date has been set yet for Moreno. [via IMDb]

If you can actually tell me which of the three highlighted parts of this story is the craziest, I’ll paypal you a dollar.
Related: Jon Routson got a good, if cautionary, review for his current show of bootlegged films-as-art.

Ever the arts enthusiast in search of a common man constituency, Tyler Green wrote an op-ed for the WSJ that gamely proposes to take the Whitney Biennial on the road, to the people–in the “hinterlands.”
And what could be wrong with that? Besides going to bat for the perennially controversial-at-best biennial? Besides coming off as populist and condescending toward your biennial’s flyover audience?
Well, there’s playing right into the middle of the WSJ‘s own FoxNews-like editorial slant, for one. Tyler shouldn’t be surprised when the comments he received were at odds with the crusty, Moral Majority-form letters the Journal itself published. Tyler lobbed one over the net, and the Journal‘s know-nothing niche shot it down like the pigeon his editors knew it would be.