The View from the Edge of the Universe

Looking at Galleries in a New Way

A few months ago, gallery employees in Chelsea must have thought Bryan and I were nuts.  Its an odd experience going into a gallery, not to look at the art, but instead to look at the "box". 
When one goes about opening a gallery, details matter and it was an eye opening experience to see the galleries from a funtional/business standpoint.  I even took pictures!  (The comments next to the pictures are for my architect, Liz Hedrick, so that she could start to get an idea of what my Portland Gallery will look like. I'll post her drawings once they are ready.)
You learn lots of interesting things looking at the ceiling: its best to have three kinds of lights (one of the three being natural light), outlets and input jacks up there are a good idea for video art...luckily wireless technology has solved much of that.  Ceilings to galleries are like shoes to people:  you can tell alot about someone by the shoes they wear.  Ditto for gallery ceilings.  The light, above left, is the current standard in Chelsea gallery lighting by the way.
We had a great time evaluating galleries independent of their reputations and who they represented; instead our criteria consisted of how well the office was designed, how did the walls meet the floor, proportions of the galleries and of course the ceilings!
The one mistake that most young galleries make?  Too small of an office. But see below.
Not entirely surprising, some of the hottest galleries in Chelsea have some of the worst planned and finished spaces.  A plugged-in little bird told me that the lack of professionalism is somewhat intentional: non-professionalism as a marketing identity. Is it working?  I'm not naming names but given the artists they represent, these intentionally(?) scrappy dealers seem to be far more savvy than they let on.

205 Days Until My Gallery Opens!

I knew it was only a matter of time before I jumped in with both feet and joined the art world for real.  I'll be trading in my ten key calculator, moving to Portland Oregon and opening Quality Pictures, a contemporary art gallery with an emphasis on photography.
Although I've loved Atlanta for nearly 20 years, its time to make a change and Portland has one of the most cohesive and enthusiastic art communitites of any city I've seen. 
The 2700 sq ft gallery will be at 916 NW Hoyt in the heart of the Pearl District and close to Portland's other top galleries.
We will open for business on December 7th with two shows: Chris Verene - Self Esteem and POW! Pictures of Women.
During our first season we have solo shows scheduled by David Hilliard, Kojo Griffin, Elizabeth Huey, Jason Fulford, Bryan Schellinger, iona rozeal brown and  Stuart Hawkins.  We are in talks with other artists as well.
I'll chronicle my experience of opening the gallery with once weekly updates here.

Kojo Griffin Selected for Seville Biennial

Atlanta's Kojo Griffin has been selected for inclusion in the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS) to be held from 10.26.06 to 01.15.07 in Seville Spain.

This is Griffin's first international biennial although he has been included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 2002 Corcoran Biennial. 

The artistic director of the Biennial will be Okwui Enwezor, the hottest curator on the planet who was also the artistic director of Documenta 11.  This year's theme will be The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society.

The official artist list has not been announced but will likely be a who's who of the contemporary art world.  The 2004 Biennial included such stars as Ernesto Neto, Maurizio Cattelan, Michel Majerus, Neo Rauch and Tracy Emin.

The news made my week which otherwise was pretty lousy!

Congrats Kojo!

Art Ranting

My brain is cooked this time of year, so I'm borrowing another choice quote lifted from a newspaper article - this time from Michael Kimmelman's New York Times review of the Pierre Bonnard Retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris 

"...young artists in the year 2006 operate in a commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairs and museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter endless objects once and mostly never again. This, the artist and writer Art Spiegelman pointed out to me recently, may be the biggest change in art during the last half-century or so: that more and more artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice. Culture slides into the realm of entertainment.

It is no wonder, then, as Bonnard could say even about his own day, that "few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully." In our visual age, amid a glut of freshly minted, clueless collectors, it's truer now."

Bryan wondered why all the collector bashing lately, but ths one is more of a stab at artists don't you think?

Art to Beauty: See ya

I had a nice talk with Galerie MC owner Marscha Cavaliere a few weeks ago who commented that my art collection was not beautiful.  I agreed. This got me thinking about whether beauty is even a valid criteria with which to evaluate art.

Just as I was formulating a blog entry with my thoughts on the subject, Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz summed up my feelings exactly (and far more eloquently than I possibly could) in his review of the Kara Walker show at the Met:

With all due respect to the legions who argue otherwise, it is totally bogus to claim that art is about beauty or that the two are even connected. Goya's stupendous Saturn Devouring His Children isn't beautiful, nor is Duchamp's bottle rack or Thomas Hirschhorn's recent blood-and-modernism installation. Over time these works may alter definitions of beauty, but it's an oversimplification to say that art and beauty are innately bound. It's as empty, dogmatic, patronizing, misleading and limiting as saying art is about sincerity, wonderment or any other absolute value.

Keats was wrong: Beauty isn't truth, or truth beauty. Saying art is about beauty is like saying, "I'm for children." Everyone loves beauty; Nazis loved beauty; Osama loves beauty. As painter Allison Taylor recently wrote, "Reducing art to beauty hides vacant thoughts; it can be used as propaganda, to decorate mini-mansions, and crowd out art that is harder to deal with." Maybe the people clamoring for beauty are just playing yin to the yang of all those blinkered academics who automatically disdain anything beautiful.

Supply-Side Artonomics and the 2006 Whitney Biennial

The 2006 Whitney Biennial is a stunning curatorial effort: a tightly-focused, bleakly-hued exhibition that is a reaction to an "art world, or a least a conspicuous part of it, that seems tactlessly out of touch with a larger world going to hell." (in the words of Micheal Kimmelman).
If the 2004 Biennial was an Ecstasy-fueled rave, this year's is the intervention.
The '04 Biennial was great for the art market: upbeat, fun and accessible. In turn, collectors responded in droves.  Kimmelman points out: "that show dovetailed with a gathering tsunami of newly rich, clueless collectors infatuated with bright, neatly made, vision-free art."  For the last several years, demand has outstripped supply resulting in new dealers and artists emerging to fill the need.  The problem is, there are artists and there are poseurs. The key is to know the difference.
This points out a dismaying but unfortunate reality about the art world:  when demand outstrips supply, the market drives the art making.  What Kimmelman and the curators of the '06 Biennial are arguing for is supply-side artonomics where the art making drives the market.  "Here! Here!" I say.
Savvy collectors and dealers have always known this and steer clear of trends, instead focusing on art that is groundbreaking which both acknowledges and ignores all that has come before it.  This biennial is full of that kind of art.  Two artists who seemed out of place in the last Biennial - Katy Grannan and Alec Soth - would have fit right in this year.
Here's what I liked best:
- Amy Blakemore's "bad" photographs are a refreshing change of pace and may signal a trend in photography similar to that of Eric Fischl's "bad" paintings of the 1980's;
- Mark Bradford's collages explore the aesthetics and the economics of informal urban transactions;
- Troy Brauntiuch's conte crayon drawings of men's-store dress-shirt stacks are absolutely stunning and carry added conceptual weight in the context of this show;
- Carter's mixed media "anonymous portraits" are a fascinating exploration of social markers;
- Paul Chan's digital animated floor projection of urban objects rising and bodies falling is easily the most visually compelling work in the show;
- Robert Gober's black and white photos and photos within photos are the best photographs in the exhibit;
- Lisa Lapinski's "Nightstand" was graceful and exploding with energy. Brian shrugged his shoulders though.
- Florian Maier-Aichen's sickly colored land and city-scapes ooze death and disease but are strangely beautiful as well. 
- Marilyn Minter's color palette and subject matter sum up the entire exhibition in the three works exhibited;
- Jim O'Rourke's three-channel video contains the same sickly color pallet as much of the works in the exhibit and also uses sound effectively.  As an aside, this Biennial is notable in that sound is used by many artists very effectively in conjunction with more traditional visual devises; 
- Ed Paschke's work, so appropriately included here, proves that supply-side artonomics will produce work of beauty, skill and depth.  Paschke ignored the art market for 30 years while making consistently important work.  The three paintings here were created within a few years of his death in 2004 and are the best paintings in the show.
- Kelly Walker's chocolate and photo based digital collages are where I'd like to see more photography going.

And since every other critic is vilifying the Wrong Gallery and their "exhibition within an exhibition" I would like to go on record as saying that their show "Down by Law" felt less like an exhibition and more like an installation, one that just happened to fit perfectly within the context of the Biennial and was full of very good artworks by the likes of Paul Cadmus and Robert Mapplethorpe.  Plus, it reminded me that no matter how badly one would like for art to drive the market, it's demand that does the real driving: the value of the works chosen in "Down By Law" are likely worth more than the works in the rest of the Biennial put together.

 

Karimanifesto

I'm reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (note to artists: you'll be in charge in the 21st century) and he mentions Karim Rashid's fifty-point manifesto, a guide to life and design.  Pink lists ten of the fifty points (reproduced below)...if anyone can find a link to all fifty, let me know.  I think these ten are damn good advice:
1. Don't specialize.
5. Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you disseminate.
6. Know everything about the history of your profession and then forget it all when you design something new.
7. Never say "i could have done that" because you didn't.
24. Consume experiences, not things.
33. Normal is NOT good.  [YES!]
38. There are three types of beings - those who create culture, those who buy culture and those who don't give a shit about culture.  Move between the first two.
40. Think extensively, not intensively.
43. Experience is the most important part of living, and the exchange of ideas and human contact is all life really is.  Space and objects can encourage increased experiences or distract from our experiences.
50.  Here and now is all we got.

In Defense of William Cordova

I really like William Cordova's work and my recent smart-alecky post is getting picked up by bloggers right and left, so I better set things straight:
Despite the fact that the drawings are similar, the pieces that William donated to each of these auctions were indeed different and the one donated to the Art Papers auction fetched a pretty decent sum.
the funny thing is, I own yet a 4th version of the drawing, shown here:

I Bet David Copperfield Did It

This is hard to believe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4626502.stm

I don't feel so bad about losing my keys now.

Hear Artists Talk the Talk

Chris Verene turned me onto Cindy Center a site where recorded interviews with artists, curators and other culturati can be heard. Not surprisingly, thre is an interview with Chris on the site as well as many other noted artits including Brian Finke and Dale Chihuly.  The interviews are also on Apple's iTune Podcast directory.  Happy listening!