2010
...that happened.
Wishing you and yours a better decade, or one at least just as good.
_e
Labels: happy holidays
art | politics | gossip | tough love
Labels: happy holidays
Labels: art world, top ten lists
The proposal would replace the “annual review boards” that the Bush administration had used to revisit its decision to hold each prisoner. Under that system, which the Obama administration shut down, a panel of military officers periodically reviewed the accusations against and talked to each prisoner who wanted to participate. The prisoners were not represented by lawyers. Officers then decided whether a prisoner was still a threat or should be released.This is certainly a step in the right direction. But it should not be seen to overshadow what the proposal is NOT doing: addressing the President's unchecked power to designate someone as, what? not an enemy combatant perhaps, but still "a perpetual detainee" in the future:
The Obama proposal, by contrast, would establish a “periodic review board” drawn from many agencies, not just the military, and modeled on a parole board, one official said. Detainees would be represented by lawyers and would have greater access to some of the evidence against them.
Civil liberties and human rights groups — many of whom dislike any policy that involves holding prisoners without trial — reacted with ambivalence to the report that the Obama team has been working on an executive order to establish formal reviews.Indeed, my biggest objection to this power was always how it might be abused, not by Bush (who I found terribly misguided and dangerously arrogant but not really hard-core evil by any stretch), but by his successors. Left unchecked, a power becomes absolute. And an absolute power, as we know, will corrupt absolutely.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said such an order could provide additional safeguards for those prisoners who are already being held in as wartime detainees, but worried that it could be used to entrench the idea of detention without trial.
“My sense and my hope is that it would be limited to the detainees whom Obama inherited from the Bush administration, rather than serving as a permanent regime for the detention of anyone the government may decide is dangerous in the future,” he said.
Speaking on Meet the Press, Kentucky U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell said Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, terming him a “high-tech terrorist.”As I've noted before, the Justice Department is scouring the law books for some way to prosecute Assange, despite the fact that many experts insist he has broken no laws. Flash forward though. What if Assange decides to leak documents that might not only embarrass the White House, but cost it the next election. Could this person, already declared a "terrorist" by one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country, be made a perpetual detainee under this existing executive power?
Labels: politics
Do you honestly believe that a privately funded museum would even go for this exhibition in the first place? I tried for 15 years to slate variants of this exhibition somewhere without so much as a nibble.Ouch! (It hurts because it's true.)
Private institutions are entirely in the thrall of their boards, which is to say, their donors. Controversy in general is bad for donations. Surely you've noted how extensively the American museum world has become an extension of private capital and in the process lost any commitment to public service.
Labels: Art and politics, censorship, politics
Labels: happy holidays, politics
Christopher K. Ho @ Winkleman Gallery from The New York Observer on Vimeo.
Judging from the caliber of the paintings and the memoir’s sophisticated register of discourse, Ho’s/Rothko’s conclusion is every “insider’s” escape fantasy. Yet, as Paul Gauguin, Marcel Duchamp, and Claude Lévi-Strauss have aptly shown us, the fabrication of such cultural myths and artistic personae has been crucial to the regeneration of intellectual and aesthetic production during modernism’s constitution and critique. Rather than assessing the truth status of such constructs, we need to ask why they appear at specific historical junctures and what artistic and institutional possibilities they might engender.Hyperallergic's review by Stephen Truax:
If Ho is seriously proposing regionalism as the next and only logical step forward for artistic production, why then does he reinforce his paintings with performance, philosophy, and fictional narrative? Much of the show’s conceptual apparatus occurs in the press release, the price list, the book, and subsequent interviews with the artist and Ed Winkleman; it demands much investment and thought and work from the viewer.And regarding the Curatorial Research Lab show, Bradley Rubenstein notes in Culture Catch:
The premise that the traces of the changing exhibition (nail holes, plaster, etc.) is as good a metaphor for the curatorial process as we are likely to get -- the materiality of moving works of art around is, in the end, what curating is, all money and politics aside.And, there are still copies available of Christopher's brilliant book (the memoir of Hirsch E.P. Rothko). They make great stocking-stuffers for those art world lovers on your list. And, they're FREE!
Labels: gallery artists exhibitions, press
Labels: happy holidays, politics
[B]y offering your readers a detailed description of the art gallery business, including how it operates, how well it is doing at the moment, and how well it is likely to be doing in the foreseeable future. It is important that you cite reliable sources for your conclusions here and not simply offer your own opinions or conjecture.Another part of your Description of the Industry in your plan should be a description of your specific niche in The Market. Here again, it's important to convince your readers that you understand this well enough that they can trust their money in your hands or know how best to work with you to help you meet your goals:
In The Market section you should describe the specifics of how you’re positioning yourself within the overall market you’ll be competing in. As is true throughout your business plan, your goal in this section remains to provide yourself a roadmap, as well as to convince your readers you have a firm grasp of this topic. To do this, describe the following: who your customers will be, what their needs are, and how you plan to meet those needs; go into detail about the size of the market and how recent market trends will impact that size; provide a matter-of-fact evaluation of your competition, including a list of who they are and what their strengths and weakness are; describe how you plan to position yourself within the market; discuss how your pricing strategy will work to help you meet your goals; and describe how you arrived at your sales estimates based on these combined factors.Of course whether or not a dealer will engage in the painstaking research and reflection required to do all this probably depends on how competitive they wish to be in the market. Believe me, your competitors are doing all this and more. We've all heard the stories of the lengths powerful dealers have gone to to be competitive (one reportedly memorized all the contemporary auction results from the time he was a child, another visits collectors in their home and then, when the collector leaves a room, snaps photos of all the art they have on the walls for future reference), and indeed there's every reason to believe the most competitive forces in the business are gearing up in earnest for a battle for global domination like none ever quite seen before. To fight on this scale, though, you need real power and in the art market, like most other markets, information is power (hence the seemingly mindless memorization and secretive categorization efforts).
Labels: art careers, art making, art market
Maybe that water from that lake from the former Soviet Union, you know, the former censorship capital of the world, has simply drained into one of the main US water supplies, because something has got everyone in a censorship or censorship charging mood in the art world lately.Russia's NTV channel showed a huge, muddy basin where the lake once was, in the village of Bolotnikovo.
"It looks like somebody has pulled the plug out of a gigantic bath," said the TV's correspondent, next to a deep debris-filled hole.
Local officials in Nizhny Novgorod region say the lake was probably sucked into an underground cave.
"This doesn't compare to David Wojnarowicz. This shouldn't be blown up into something larger than it is," he says, describing a curator's prerogative to pick and choose what goes into a show. "Every aspect of the show involves a very considered discussion."but Hrag Vartanian has been effectively deconstructing the PR coming out of MOCA, and I have to agree that something still seems to need clarification here. Deitch's central argument is that he has a responsibility to the community:
"Look at my gallery website — I have supported protest art more than just about any other mainstream gallery in the country," he added. "But as a steward of a public institution, I have to balance a different set of priorities — standing up for artists and also considering the sensitivities of the community."Fair enough.
I think veterans are more sensitive to the abuse of soldiers in wars based on lies and a neocon agenda (i.e. the Iraq War) than anyoneDeitch has explained that this boils down to a miscommunication between him and the artist (he was supposed to meet with Blu in late November, but the artist changed his flight...then when Blu had to begin painting, Deitch was in Miami, so they never got to compare notes)...all of which seems understandable.
When he returned from Miami and saw the mural, then more than halfway completed, Deitch said he made the decision to remove it very quickly, unprompted by complaints. "There were zero complaints, because I took care of it right away." He asked Blu to finish the work so it could be documented as part of the exhibition and appear in the accompanying catalog.But, as also reported in Finkel's article, the impact of this decision will be larger than just one curatorial choice or one interpersonal relationship between a museum director and an artist he's worked with before:
Daniel Lahoda, founder of LA Freewalls Project downtown and one of the few people to photograph the work as it was being removed, said that the street art community is "really upset by this — everyone is talking about it."And that gets to the heart of all these issues me. What is more important, the community's feelings or artistic freedom? Mind you, I don't think artistic freedom means the artist should be free to work outside of an agreed upon framework. The artist is a member of the community too. Had Blu gone off and painted on a different wall of the museum, or over the entrance doors, or on someone's nearby car, I would criticize that strongly. But within a mutually respectful context that the community understands is reserved for art, it's difficult for me to approve any interference with how the artist wishes to express him/herself. It seems condescending to the public for politicians or even museum directors to presume they should protect the community from ideas clearly bubbling within it already.
"If you're planning on mounting the largest graffiti show in a major institution, you've got to give the artists the freedom to do the movement justice — so there's a big failure in what just happened," he says. "The last thing we want is an art institution, someone supposed to support creativity, to destroy it."
Labels: censorship
Labels: art careers, artist community
[T]wo conclusions are immediately reached.The context or what the second conclusion was is irrelevant to my point today, so you'll have to pick up the book yourself if you're curious. The dots that this text connected in my muddled post-Miami mind were between Wikileaks' leader Julian Assange's arrest for sexual "something" and the Justice Department's stated intent to scour the books for some law under which to prosecute Assange once they got their hands on him.
One: These are no coincidences---this is payback.
...suggests that the Justice Department's hunt is motivated by vengeance, not jurisprudence.A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.” –Judge Murray Gurfein, June 1971.
Since August, when Wikileaks first published 91,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, and in October, when they published approximately 400,000 more relating to the War in Iraq, many conservative commentators have been clamoring for the Justice Department to prosecute Wikileaks for publishing classified information.
But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act).
The Associated Press reports that Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange has been cleared of all allegations of rape and "molestation" in Sweden. From all available reports, it sounds like the story involved a trip down the drama-hole between Assange and two female acquaintances, one of whom apparently volunteered with Wikileaks—not any act of physical coercion, and not any crime. Reason deftly debunks the conspiracy theories of Pentagon/CIA "dirty tricks," "smears," and "sex traps," which Assange himself blamed as the scandal spread this past weekend. Newsweek reports way, way, way more than I wanted to know about Mr. Assange's (alleged) intimate habits.The fact that the charges were revived under an "obscure Swedish law against having sex without a condom," though, suggests desperation on the part of someone to get Assange into their grips.
OK, so who needs trashy spy novels? I can just keep reading about Assange's legal troubles and get all my cheap thrills from those. One thing is for certain in all this, though. The mass sphincter twitching inflicting the world's diplomatic circles proves that the old fascist adage that "you have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" applies equally to those in power now.One [of Assange's two] accuser[s], Anna Ardin, may have "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups," according to Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett, writing for CounterPunch.
While in Cuba, Ardin worked with the Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White), a feminist anti-Castro group.
Professor Michael Seltzer pointed out that the group is led by Carlos Alberto Montaner who is reportedly connected to the CIA.
Shamir and Bennett also describe Ardin as a "leftist" who "published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba."
Labels: politics, privacy
We invite you to a screening of 'Where is the Black Beast?' at the IFC Center in NYC on 16th December at 6:45pm. Details below. If you want to reserve complimentary tickets please rsvp by December 10th to ensure a seat. Hope you can make it --Remember to RSVP by tomorrow. We hope to see you there!Where is the Black Beast?a film by Simon Lee and Algis KizysScreening at the IFCDecember 16th, 2010 at 6:45pOn Thursday, December 16th at 6:45pm, Where is the Black Beast? by Simon Lee and Algis Kizys will screen at the IFC Center in Manhattan.Where is the Black Beast? is a film interpretation of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow by Ted Hughes.
Lee pieces together hundreds of abandoned photographs into a film driven by Hughes’ epic cycle of poems. Kizys’compositions guide the piece, with original scores written for each reader: Nesbitt Blaisdell, Carla Bozulich, Julie Spodeck, Flaminia Genari, Eve Sussman, Simon Lee and Algis Kizys.
The mythical imagery and dark cadence of the poetry create a narrative from ordinary familial snapshots. The basic human interaction and gesture between the subjects in the photos becomes imbued with a larger universal meaning.
There will be a brief Q&A with the filmmakers following the screening. This is a single event, so it’s not to be missed. The IFC Center is at 323 6th Ave at West 3rd St., New York.
To reserve a seat please contact catherine@rufuscorporation.com.Simon Lee works in photography, video and installation. His public arts project, Bus Obscura , was part of Miami Basel in 2004 and has since toured extensively in the US and abroad. He has shown work at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, The Passenger’s Festival in Warsaw, Roebling Hall, New York; Pierogi, Brooklyn; Univeristy of Hertforshire, London and Colgate University, Hamilton. He was born in Yorkshire and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Algis Antanas Kizys has played bass/toured/recorded with Swans, Foetus, Pigface, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Of Cabbages and Kings, The Glenn Branca Ensemble, Bag People, The Problem Dogs, and NeVAh amongst others, and non-bass in Prowers, The Termites and The Hallicrafters-- a short-wave radio ensemble. Through the years he has had the delight to have worked with Alex Hacke, Lydia Lunch, Nels Cline, Jonathan Bepler, Eve Sussman, Matthew Barney, to name a few. Film credits include Eve Sussman’s The Rape of the Sabine Women and whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller, and Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester. He has also participated in Experimental Skeleton, Inc with their Dream Machine Project.Where is the Black Beast? has been shown at the LOOP video festival in Barcelona, the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and Decalogue: Films You Can Count On Two Hands at Winkleman Gallery in New York.
With thanks to IFCwww.ifccenter.com
Labels: gallery artists exhibitions
Ants and bugs are an age-old artistic symbol that laments the frailty of human beings and earthly existence. As Ecclesiastes puts it: Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas -- “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Ant-covered flora, bodies and animals turn up in everything from still life paintings in the largely Protestant 17th-century Netherlands to the silent Surrealist film, “An Andalusian Dog” (1929) by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali, a conservative Catholic.Beyond the Catholic League, though, the GOP leaders lining up to protest in front of the cameras in this case are acting so transparently that it's kind of amazing they're showing up on video at all. Here again, Knight nails the irony:
Objectively speaking, an artist bent on making an anti-Christian diatribe would not spend just 15 seconds of a 13-minute video making it. Those images instead serve another function: To rebuke the same self-righteous moralism of those who are attacking the Smithsonian now.Indeed, there's a scene in "A Fire in My Belly" during which ants crawl over US currency, something their actions consistently suggest the GOP views as much more sacred than they do true Christian values or imagery. If they were protesting that scene, it would be easier for me to believe in their sincerity.
Labels: Art and politics
Labels: gallery artists exhibitions
Labels: Art and politics