CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER...

That seems to be the trendy PHRASE of a lot of galleries now WE ARE ...CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER.

Nobody wants to talk about it but, it is really happening...

There is rumors about a couple of high ones closing but, you are not going to hear it here.

By: Alexandra Peers for New York Magazine

Amid the art-world recession, some galleries are saying they're closing for the summer to take advantage of the downturn and its lower rents. For example: ZieherSmith is "currently renovating a new gallery space in Chelsea"; 303 Gallery is consolidating its two Chelsea spaces into one; the Proposition is hosting "virtual exhibitions" on its website while the owner shops for a new space; and Moti Hasson Gallery announced on its site: "We are in the moving process," and cautions, "We no longer accept artist submissions."

Closed gallery doors evoke chilling memories of the early nineties, when, during the downturn, a handful of galleries temporarily closed, never to reopen. Amy Smith-Stewart, whose eponymous Stanton Street gallery is also taking an "extended summer," asserts that this is purely about scoring a better lease. "The lease is up, so I decided to take advantage of the uptick in available commercial spaces for less," she explains. A similar logic is behind the recent closing of Rare Gallery, which is undergoing a relocation process: "I felt it was time to change things up in terms of our look and to take advantage of the lower rents available," says Pete Surace, president. Nevertheless, the real test will be whether the galleries reopen come fall.

Your Guide to This Week’s Six Unsnobby Art Fairs

Photo: Patrick McMullan

Day #2 of the Art Fair Mania in Manhattan!

ARTmostfierce is a bit fried already (way too much wine to relief sorrows). So before, I engage into another evening of public intoxication, here is a smart list and description of the NYC Art Fairs put together by Alexandra Peers of New York Magazine. In addition, Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City blog has a great google map with its locations. See you around somewhere and if you see me say hello!

By Alexandra Peers

Art-world snobbery gets shelved this week, as six art fairs opening around town tonight or tomorrow make an economy-inspired effort to be democratic and welcoming — even to outworlders (hint: wear black, sip wine, look bored). Can't tell Pulse from Scope without a scorecard? Here's one!

THE ARMORY SHOW

Scene: Art-world mecca

Dealers: Deitch Projects, Marlborough, Marianne Boesky, Robert Miller

Patently obvious efforts to be more inclusive: Has slashed ticket prices to tonight’s opening-night MoMA benefit to $100 from $250; Top collectors like Evelyn Lauder, Susan Goodman opening homes for tours.

Celebs you might spot shopping: Lance Armstrong, Mary-Kate Olsen, Calvin Klein

Weirdest performance piece planned: An all-day spray painting of Pier 94 by Kenny Schachter

Specifics: Piers 92 and 94, 55th St. and Twelfth Ave., March 4–8, $30, $10 students



VOLTA

Scene: Scholarly — in a good way

Dealers: I-20, Nicholas Robinson, Magnan Projects

Patently obvious effort to be more inclusive: Theme of the one-artist shows is the universal “Age of Anxiety.” Plus: expanded T-shirt shop.

Celeb you might see shopping: Mera Rubell

Weirdest performance piece planned: Post-modern hors d’oeuvre. Experimental-artist-pastry-chef Tara Strickstein will serve "imaginative flavor pairings combined with a unique sense of social ritual based in art theory."

Specifics: 7 W. 34th St., March 5–8, $15



SCOPE

Scene: Scrappy kitchen-sink mix of dirt-cheap and established art

Dealers: RARE, Mike Weiss, Greene Contemporary, 33 bond

Patently obvious effort to be more inclusive: Usually invite-only preview party tonight is open to the public ($100); silent auction features "welding lessons"

Celeb you might spot shopping: David Byrne

Weirdest performance piece planned: “Cheap, Fast and Out of Control” music program offers an Electric Junkyard Gamelan.

Specifics: Lincoln Center Damrosch Park, 62nd St. & Tenth Ave., March 4–8; $15, $10 students



PULSE

Scene: Packed snapshot of the “emerging” scene

Dealers: Mixed Greens, Schroeder Romero, PPOW, Margaret Thatcher Projects, Freight + Volume

Patently obvious effort to be more inclusive: Video lounge is showing artists’ YouTube-video playlists

Celeb you might spot shopping: Tobey Maguire

Weirdest Performance Piece Planned: Tomorrow, in an eleven-hour performance, Moroccan artist Miriam Cabessa will use her body to roll paint across the floor

Specifics: Pier 40, 353 West St. at Houston, March 5–9; $20, $15 students and seniors



BRIDGE

Scene: Salute to global "on-the-verge" art; several dealers from resort locations (Grand Cayman, isle of Capri, Buenos Aires) make this a good place to make friends

Dealers: Art 101, Charlotta Janssen, Double Luck of Beijing

Patently obvious effort to be more inclusive: “ArtOut” service pairs up art lovers and artists so they can “get into their minds”

Celeb you might see shopping: Digital-porn innovator Sergio Messina

Weirdest performance piece planned: In a virtual happening, a Cadillac Fleetwood is demolished online in Second Life

Specifics: 222 Twelth Ave., March 5–8, $15, $10 for students



FOUNTAIN

Scene: Low-key fair for people who hate art fairs

Dealers: Glowlab, Leo Kesting, Brooklyn’s Ad Hoc, Definition, and Front Room

Patently obvious effort to be more inclusive: Copious beer; a "meet the artists" reception Friday night

Celeb you might see shopping: Jon Stewart

Weirdest performance piece planned: None, but there is a benefit for the Swoon collective’s plan to sail floating sculptures from Slovenia to this summer’s Venice Biennale

Specifics: Pier 66, 26th & Hudson River Park; March 5–8, suggested donation of $5

Arte Povera !...Why recession isn’t good for art.

Rough start this week so far, without even starting the NYC Art Fairs Mania. Posting will be very light this week so, for now please read and enjoy article by Alexandra Peers of New York Magazine. Viola ! And see you around somewhere. Wherever you find me, I will be drinking and trying to get rid of the headache that this Economy is bringing to us all. Cheers!!!!

By Alexandra Peers Published March 1, 2009

Not many people would argue that fewer jobs for dancers are a boon to ballet, or shrinking advances are good for literature, or newspapers in bankruptcy are good for journalism. But it’s become commonplace to declare, as the Times did recently, that “a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.” Newsweek took it further, comparing the art boom to an imaginary world where jazz—once appreciated only by “an audience who really dug what they were hearing” in a “cozy club”—started packing Wembley. The unseemly result, per Newsweek? “A grotesque imitation of heavy metal for the masses.”



Certainly, the excesses of the art world were alienating. But there’s Schadenfreude in the argument that bad times are good for the naughty, naughty art world. It is, and was, a place where you could fly to Miami to see Dita Von Teese strip on a giant pink sequined lipstick and call it “work.” And there’s something both marvelous and ridiculous in that.



The evidence of such profligacy was often on view at the annual art fairs—the massive Armory, plus Volta, Pulse, and Scope—which return this week, considerably constricted by the financial collapse. The art fairs are all still promising breakthrough art, cutting-edge performances, and, now, more “inclusive” or “accessible” events. (Translation: There’s more photography, decorative art, and small works, and the parties will be easier to crash.)



But as for the art, will it be any better? Is the recession good for art?



It’s doubtful. As curator Renée Riccardo, whose group show “The Garden at 4 AM” just opened at Gana Art Gallery, notes, recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” The recession isn’t breeding creativity so much as demand for familiar, less-threatening work. Ellen Donahue is closing her Chelsea gallery, the Proposition, after seven years and another eighteen running other downtown galleries. “People come in, they look, but they don’t even talk about buying,” she says. “All over Chelsea, artists are being told to pick up their work.” A half-dozen spaces have closed this year, and dealers like Zach Feuer have culled their stables.



The art world’s “brand names” have it easier—they can experiment in a recession, try new media, ride it out—but they aren’t immune. Photographer David LaChapelle says he worries about having to cut back. “I worry about the people who rely on me”—his staff and studio assistants.



The thing the bust fans are missing is that art in good times can capture those good times (even when artists sometimes become overly intoxicated by them). Andy Warhol’s soup cans came out of the postwar era, when cupboards opened to bounties of food. “There’s no correlation” between the economy and the quality of art being produced, says John Good, a director of the Gagosian Gallery. “The great artists transcend.” The art world’s romantic Van Gogh myth holds that starving artists toil anonymously until they’re eventually (or posthumously) discovered. But he was the exception: For centuries, many great artists were patronized in their lifetimes, generously, by popes and kings. (King François I paid for the Mona Lisa.)



Certainly, with things like shows in empty buildings, and a good deal of scrappiness and human suffering, art will adapt, survive. Perhaps it had gotten too easy, too publicized, self-involved. But not any more than anything else during the boom. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible place to spend some of those now-fanciful-seeming billions. And the level of excitement that a boom brings to art—the sheer number of people paying attention, trying to learn the new names and debating who matters—is itself an engine of creativity. In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

DeathWatch Stalks Galleries

OMG!!! this is exactly what we should not engage during this current economic climate. A blogger killing the art business!
Please read and not promote!
Scary!

Virtual Schadenfreude.
By Alexandra Peers Published, Jan 25, 2009
New York Magazine

As if art dealers weren’t upset enough about falling prices, now there’s short-selling of galleries. Last fall, the How’s My Dealing? blog (which rates gallerists’ treatment of their artists according to anonymous informants) began a gallery “DeathWatch” thread—and dealers are on edge over its retailing of unsubstantiated rumors. “Everything about it is ghoulish,” says Edward Winkleman (whose Chelsea gallery has not been mentioned), adding that posting the name of a troubled gallery could contribute to “accelerating” its demise. The blogger, an artist who calls himself Buck Naked, says that he allows most posts (guided by what the site terms “my sense of the commenter’s sincerity”). But he claims the operation’s been “fairly predictive.” Two galleries put on DeathWatch in October have closed: Plane Space and Roebling Hall. (Three weeks ago, Roebling dealer Joel Beck e-mailed his artists saying his debts “cannot yet be addressed … probably for some time.”) Yet one gallery was listed as “R.I.P.” only to have that designation reversed. DeathWatch is fueled “by bitterness and revenge, but I check it almost every day,” says a Chelsea dealer, who suspects some artists post because they haven’t been paid for sales. “A lot of galleries are on the edge—I worry what’s getting them through is that they’re spending the artists’ money.”

How Do You Stop an Art Collector From Charging?

Say GOOD BYE to plastic money @ art auctions!
Read below!
By: Erica Orden
New York Magazine

Sotheby's is having an auction of Old Masters Drawings on January 28, but don't expect to put that Hans Bock the Elder on your charge card. Until the end of 2008, Sotheby's accepted plastic for auction purchases (Eli Broad famously charged his $2.47 million purchase of Roy Lichtenstein's painting I ... I'm Sorry with his American Express card in 1995), but now they're taking only checks, wire transfers, and cash. Sotheby's never announced the change publicly, and instead has been noting it in a discreet sign perched on its lobby desk. Putting an auction item on a card "was not widely utilized," explained a Sotheby's spokesperson, who also confirmed that the Sotheby's-branded MasterCard, which offered "privileged access to Sotheby's experiences and distinctive services, benefits and rewards," has been discontinued. But, for those who can't stop charging, Christie's, on the other hand, started taking credit cards last fall at its New York auctions for purchases of up to $100,000.

The New Factory: In Brooklyn, an Industrial Artists’ Colony

Clockwise from top left: one of the many alleyways at Industry City; Jarrod Beck in his studio; a view from the top of 882 Third Avenue, where future studios are being planned; Travis Boyer in the studio he shares with Donnie Cervantes.
(Photo: Dean Kaufman )

Attention Artists!
Looking for affordable studio space?
The next up and coming cool neighborhood in NYC?
The Next Big Art Scene emerging from this economic recession?
Well ...here it is try Industry City in Brooklyn, NYC.

Check out this article By Joshua David Stein of New York Magazine
The future of New York art smells like vanilla and resides on the Sunset Park waterfront in sixteen massive buildings called Industry City. The smell is courtesy of Virginia Dare, maker of food-flavor products, which has had a factory there since 1923. The bohemian spirit is from the 57 recently opened artist studios, the vast empty floors ready for avant-garde performance, and Lise Soskolne, a Bard-educated artist who happens to work for the landlord, Industry City Associates. Last year, Soskolne persuaded the landlords to carve out 45 “incubator” studios for emerging artists and twelve market-rate studios for more established ones out of the 6 million square feet of space left partially vacant by the dwindling maritime trade. If you build it, artists will come, she reasoned—and after them, perhaps, a deluge of new market-rate commercial clients.



The theory has precedent, of course. With miles of light-flooded warehouse space separated by heavy pillars, Industry City looks like a giant indoor version of Soho in the seventies, when artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Chuck Close, and Vito Acconci moved into the abandoned factory spaces of bygone manufacturers. Lured by spacious $422-per-month studios, artists are now discovering this neo-Soho on New York Bay. Nearly all of the incubator studios have been rented, and only three of the market-rate ones are available (although there are plans to create more). Incubator tenants include video and performance artist K8 Hardy, sculptor Jarrod Beck, and textile-based artists Travis Boyer and Donnie Cervantes. In the market-rate building (where rents are as low as $685 a month), you’ll find Paul Chan, who recently had a solo show at the New Museum; Sharon Hayes, the well-known performance artist; and Doug Ashford, a professor at Cooper Union.



“The really important part is that you are not working in a hotel room where you have a life that is separate from anywhere else,” says Beck. “It’s great to be invited into people’s studios and see what they’re doing.” Boyer, who recently invited his friends and neighbors to an indigo-dyeing party (45 people showed up), agrees: “There’s a community. This is where we’re going to work together and create stuff. It’s not completely defined yet, but there’s definitely a sense of group togetherness.” Bands of artists scour the empty floors, foraging for raw material. Every Tuesday, Thomas Beard and Ed Halter host an experimental-film-screening-and-lecture series called “Light Industry,” which is as much a loft party as it is a forum for, for instance, the work of avant-garde director James Benning (whose daughter Sadie has a studio here). “It’s really affirming about why we’re in New York and what it means to be an artist in New York,” says Boyer.



A small committee handpicks the artists who get studios. “All of the artists here are engaged politically and aware of what’s going on in the world,” Soskolne says proudly. She’s set up common spaces for artist interaction and has programmed events in some of the empty floors. (In August, she invited the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf to perform a queer adaptation of Macbeth.) But for all their similarities, Industry City isn’t likely to go the way of Soho, or even Dumbo. Boxed in by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives on the north and a federal penitentiary to the south, the area isn’t zoned for residential development. That’s fine by Soskolne: “I don’t want to see the artists turfed out.”

A More Cautious Orgy!The post-bubble Art Basel Miami Beach promises to be much less of a haute debauch. Where are the sponsors?

(Photo: AP Photo/J Pay Carter)



ARTmostfierce says...Let the party begin!

With Miami Art Basel happening in a matter of 2 weeks, there is a lot of buss resonating about how the Art Fair is going to resonate with the current economic crisis.

Here is some forecast from NY Magazine by Alexandra Peers

Art Basel Miami Beach kicks off at the start of December, and everybody who’s getting on those private planes—traffic is steady with last year, says NetJets—has the economy on his mind. There will still be star power: Steven Soderbergh and David Lynch are being saluted. Jeff Koons, Russell Simmons, and Marcel Wanders are throwing parties at the new Mondrian Hotel. A tight ticket is the coming-out party for the new owners of Phillips de Pury—“the Leonids,” Strunin and Friedland—to meet clients and collectors, sponsored by Tsum, the Russian department store they own. “Art Basel is still a marketer’s playground,” says hotelier Andre Balazs, who invited designer Marc Newson to showcase a new watch at the Raleigh. But with auctions and retailing in the doldrums, things won’t be quite so brash. Orders for liquor—Southern Wine & Spirits provides hooch for “official” Art Basel parties and many others—are down at least 20 percent from last year. Many events are doing just Champagne, to cut out the bartenders. The Guggenheim and New Museum are sending trustee and collecting groups, but the Modern isn’t. There’s no decadent Pucci party this year, though Tommy Hilfiger will throw an event. Fendi is coming, but its message is that in times like these, people should “buy less, but buy better,” says scion Silvia Venturini Fendi.

Here is some facts about the fair

Pre-Fair Auctions
2007:Sotheby’s boasted its then-highest contemporary-art sale total ever, bringing in $315.9 million.
2008: This fall’s Sotheby’s auction made a mere $125 million, with $52.6 million in guarantee-related losses.



Hot Galleries
2007: Maccarone, which sold Paul McCarthy’s chocolate “Santa” with butt plugs; Rivington Arms was the alternative hit.
2008: Maccarone is a no-show. Rivington Arms is scheduled to fold in January.



Sponsorship
2007: UBS was already suffering, having reported its first quarterly loss in five years due to subprime losses.
2008: UBS has lost almost $50 billion; its top wealth manager, a Basel regular, was indicted for aiding clients’ tax evasion.



Parties
2007: Exhibit A: the Accompanied Literary Society’s Swarovski-studded bash for the limited-edition book The Worth of Art.
2008: “Fifty percent of the events that I know about have been canceled,” ALS head Brooke Geahan says.



Satellite Fairs
2007: There were more than twenty, up from twelve in 2006.
2008: New fairs: Zero. Losses: Two—Flow and the Association of International Photography Art Dealers.

Poetic Justice-Will the Crappy Art Market Have Its Revenge on Richard Fuld?

Glamour takes a fall...

Richard and Kathy Fuld master drawings collection is for sale and trust me the money is not going back to save Lehman Brothers!


By: Alexandra Peers- New York Magazine
At its contemporary-art auction, Christie’s is selling “master drawings from a private collection” that turns out to be Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld’s. The Fulds consigned the art late last summer, just weeks before the September 15 announcement by Lehman that it would file for bankruptcy. The sixteen works by artists like Willem de Kooning and Agnes Martin are valued at about $14 million to $20 million. Given the economic climate, in the past few weeks, Christie’s has been calling up contemporary-art sellers encouraging them to be willing to take less for their art, says Christie’s deputy chairman Brett Gorvy. Christie’s guaranteed a minimum amount to the Fulds and won’t say how much, but guarantees generally run about 75 percent. Sotheby’s also bid for the collection, and an insider there says the drawings are “gorgeous” but they valued it lower because “the Fuld name at this moment is not a selling point.”

The Fulds purchased most of the top works from Christie’s, Gagosian, and dealer Robert Mnuchin over the last decade, and one $2.5 million Barnett Newman they bought just last year. Christie’s is offering them just as the art market has turned sour. Last night, at Sotheby’s contemporary-art sale, only two out of three artworks sold, and the ones that did find buyers did so at bargain prices. (Designer Valentino, Eli Broad, Gap founder Don Fisher and Larry Gagosian all did some bidding.) There were no bids for some works by superstars like Roy Lichtenstein and Takashi Murakami. Kathy Fuld is a vice-chairman at the Museum of Modern Art, and some of the works being sold are ones that might have fit in well at the museum; one Arshille Gorky drawing is a study for a painting, Agony, that the Modern has in its own collection.

Signs of Financial Trouble Abound

Two weeks ago , I wrote in this blog something similar as Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine wrote this past Oct 24, 2008 about the current state of the Art market.
Please read article below and enjoy!

Frieze After the Freeze
At London’s big art fair, signs of financial trouble abound. But maybe that’s okay.

By Jerry Saltz Published Oct 24, 2008

Two weeks ago, the Death Star that has hovered over the art world for the last two years finally fired its lasers. It was October 15, the day the stock market fell more than 700 points—again—and a month after Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch collapsed and Damien Hirst pawned off $200 million worth of crapola on clueless rubes at Sotheby’s. Against this backdrop, at 11 a.m., the gates of London’s Frieze Art Fair opened, and in streamed the international traveling circus of bigwigs, collectors, curators, advisers, museum directors, trustees, models, movie stars, and critics like moi.



Talk of financial doom filled the air. Karl Schweizer, UBS’s head of art banking, told one reporter, “We are in a liquidity crisis.” Money manager Randy Slifka added, “There is blood on the streets on Wall Street.” Collectors talked about “sewing up our pockets.” Yet much of the art world was playing on as if nothing had happened. A German dealer told Artforum.com, “This economic mess will all be over by January.” Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo spun her house’s recent sales: “If you bought something, you bought something real.” In truth, most of the speculators are buying something real bad or badly overpriced.



In fact, though, things were different. Those of us who have frequented Frieze could see that something was off. Dealers and assistants who in recent years were always busy with clients now stood or sat quietly. Sales were happening, but slowly, one at a time. The claim of “It’s sold” was replaced by “I have it on several holds.” Although the megagalleries like Gagosian and White Cube teemed with moneyed types and very tall women in very high heels, many younger dealers looked perplexed. A gallerist who entered the field in the go-go aughts and who had sold only two pieces by 5 p.m. that first day asked, “What’s going on?”



As I made my way through the 152 booths, I thought about the moment in Titanic when the designer of the doomed luxury liner warns Kate Winslet to find a lifeboat because “all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.” When I tried this idea out on attendees, several said I was “a buzzkill.” I asked, “Isn’t the buzz already beginning to disappear?”



If the art economy is as bad as it looks—if worse comes to worst—40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits—possibly the Armory Show, because so many dealers hate the conditions on the piers, or maybe Art Basel Miami Beach, because although it’s fun, it’s also ridiculous. Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse, although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet.



As for artists, too many have been getting away with murder, making questionable or derivative work and selling it for inflated prices. They will either lower their prices or stop selling. Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly. Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability. Many of the hot Chinese artists, most of whom are only nth-generation photo-realists, will fall by the wayside, having stuck collectors with a lot of junk.



Much good art got made while money ruled; I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren’t virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists—especially emerging ones—won’t have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They’ll be able to experiment as much as they want.



But my Schadenfreude side wishes a pox on the auction houses, those shrines to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of commerce. If they don’t go belly up or return to dealing mainly with dead artists, they need to stop pretending that they have any interest in art beyond the financial. Additionally, I hope many of the speculators who never really cared about art will go away. Either way, money will no longer be the measure of success. It hasn’t made art better. It made some artists—notably Hirst, Murakami, Prince, and maybe Piotr Ukla´nski—shallower.



Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art. The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn. New generations took the stage; new communities spawned energy; things opened up; deadwood washed away. With luck, New Museum curator Laura Hoptman’s wish will come true: “Art will flower and triumph not as a hobby, an investment, or a career, but as what it is and was—a life.”

The 30 shows, installations, and artworks you really cannot miss this fall.

These are some of the Fall 2008 ART events from New York Magazine so , you don't have to be running around like a headless chicken all over town trying to find out what to do.

Update your fall calender!
Enjoy !


Frankie.1995
(Photo: Catherine Opie/Courtesy of the artist and Regan Projects. Los Angeles


The 30 shows, installations, and artworks you really cannot miss this fall. Please click on link below:
http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2008/art/49472/

7. “Catherine Opie: American Photographer”At the Guggenheim Museum, Sept. 26– Jan. 7. Opie’s magnetic self-portraits have made her the visual bard of lesbian life. But her hazy, almost minimalist series of surfers and architectural photographs avoid the identity-politics ghetto.

Olafur Elliasson NYC Waterfalls

ARTmostfierce can't wait for this event. It is going to be as big as The Gates. Also currently he has a solo show at the MoMA and PS 1 tilted Take your Time .

Please read NY Magazine article by Michael Joseph Gross. Get the whole scoop and don't miss it!
Enjoy!

Olafur Eliasson has seduced Mike Bloomberg with a spectacle to rival The Gates.
Add a Comment
By Michael Joseph Gross Published Jun 8, 2008


(Photo: David Harry Stewart)

'Oh, wow!” roars Olafur Eliasson, getting slapped in the face with long, ropy splashes of water, as he clings to the railing of a tiny Grady-White fishing boat. Rain clouds hover over Manhattan’s southern tip, and as the boat pitches on four-foot swells, Eliasson makes his first visit from the water to four scaffolding structures rising at the Brooklyn Bridge and Pier 35 (near the Manhattan Bridge), between Piers 4 and 5 (near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade), and near the Governors Island ferry station. The scale of each structure melds so well with the surrounding buildings that, when the first one was completed, Eliasson didn’t even recognize his own work. Today, though, he looks at them and sees waterfalls: the largest installation of his career as an artist, and one of New York’s most surreal dalliances with large-scale public spectacle.



The New York City Waterfalls, whose spigots open at the end of the month and run until October, will remind many New Yorkers of the winter of 2005, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude decorated Central Park. Like The Gates, the waterfalls are a pet project of Michael Bloomberg, who is rumored to have personally paid much of the tab and whose office steered the project through a byzantine permit process. But Eliasson’s spectacle is much more complicated than The Gates, which consisted of thousands of saffron flags planted along 23 miles of paths. Robert Benazzi, the hydraulics designer working with Eliasson, created a system that will suck up the East River, lift it ten stories into the air, and drop it back down, thousands of gallons a minute. He says the only comparably complex job in his 40-year career was designing the sprinkler system for the Sears Tower.



Eliasson, a 41-year-old Danish-Icelandic artist who lives in Copenhagen, works in Berlin, and currently has a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1, speaks four languages fluently but not flawlessly. For an artist whose work has required astonishing perseverance in the face of mind-numbing bureaucracy, he is a surprisingly gentle guy, with odd edges and catholic tastes. (He loves electronica and bluegrass, and brags he can play three versions of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.”) Many of his best-known works explore architecture and the mechanics of perception, almost as if the fantastical imaginings of Buckminster Fuller were reinterpreted by a cognitive scientist. Eliasson’s work is most compelling, however, in its visceral embrace of beauty and wonder, prompting the kinds of basic questions that most of us stopped asking when we were 7 years old. “It’s so weird how the helicopters actually can take off,” he says as we hit the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, Wall Street choppers buzzing overhead. “It always puzzles me. It’s like an insect.”



The waterfalls, he hopes, will provoke New Yorkers to raise similar questions about something we habitually ignore. “You take the water around Manhattan for granted,” Eliasson says as our boat traces the landscape of the harbor. To help restore our sense of engagement with that landscape, he wants “to make water explicit.” It’s a phrase he often employs. “Falling water, it makes a sound, it engages a whole different range of senses. You see gravity. To make it explicit is to take it, hold it up, and let it fall.”



One day in 1999, while riding in a car in Manhattan, Eliasson looked across Eighth Avenue toward the Hudson and saw a sailboat drifting down the street. The boat (which, after a double-take, he realized was on the river, not the pavement) made an impression. It was one of those odd spectacles that occur in New York, if you are willing to look. It also got him thinking about Manhattan’s relationship to the rivers at its borders.



Around that time, he decided he wanted to turn a skyscraper into a lighthouse. He would erect a massive, circular searchlight whose beam would be seen throughout the city. “Of course we didn’t have the means to do it,” remembers Tanya Bonakdar, whose New York gallery has represented him since those days. “But we did know a very nice collector who had a very tall building, so we put a beacon on there, and if you knew what to look for you would see it.”



The year after the Crédit Lyonnais building temporarily became a makeshift lighthouse, Eliasson began discussions with Tom Eccles at the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit that for the last 30 years has used mostly private money to place works of art in public spaces across New York City. Eliasson had been experimenting with large-scale works involving water in other cities: He dyed rivers in Bremen, Germany; Los Angeles; and Tokyo bright green, and he created a small flood in Johannesburg. He had also started making small waterfall sculptures, such as his Reversed Waterfall, now on view at P.S. 1. Those interests converged in 2002, when Eliasson offered Eccles an idea for New York: Take some of the water surrounding Manhattan and raise it up as a waterfall, at the western end of 14th Street, where for a split second his sailboat had floated.

Please continue reading by clicking link below!



http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47554/

Elizabeth Peyton

ARTmostfierce is great fan of Elizabeth Peyton. Her portraiture paintings are quite stunning specially in this era of the digitized media. Please read this review written by Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine. Read and go and see the show!

Worth it!

Elizabeth Peyton returns to life.
By Jerry Saltz
Published May 11, 2008

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age. The change is so subtle you can miss it, and it’s not even in all her new pictures, some of which just seem pretty—although one should never bemoan such a delicate touch and honed sense of too-muchness. Yet Peyton’s lavender, lilac, and crimson love letters to the age of innocence are finally reflecting the age of experience. Her deft brushwork and starry-eyed doting are still in evidence, but her color has darkened and her gaze is less moony. Several of her subjects look world-weary, like they’re living life, not just being fabulous. Some artists, like Robert Ryman or On Kawara, aren’t expected to change, because their work is about continuity. But change is built into what Peyton does. That’s why these signs of growth are good.



Peyton’s career took off in November 1993, when she and Gavin Brown (her current dealer, who back then had no gallery) sent out postcards requesting that viewers come to the Chelsea hotel. For two weeks, people went to the desk, asked for the key to room 828, and there beheld drawings of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Queen Elizabeth. As innocent and as “girly” as her work seemed, her subjects, scale, and exhibition strategy were inherently critical of the large work and massive gallery exhibitions then in vogue. The show was open 24 hours a day; no personnel were on hand. I went there alone on Thanksgiving and felt like I was in nineteenth-century Paris. According to Brown, about 50 people saw the show. Peyton’s star was ascendant.



Over the next two years, Peyton focused on painting and added modern life to her art. Her new candy-colored work titillated the eye while commenting on the photorealism of Gerhard Richter. Where the cool-as-a-cucumber German claimed to have “loathed subjectivity” and painted soldiers, terrorists, and historical figures “without sentiment,” Peyton used photographs from fan and fashion magazines. Far from feeling detached, Peyton said her subjects evoked a feeling like “I love you; I think you’re the best thing I’ve ever seen.” Since then, she’s painted beautiful, androgynous boys like Sid Vicious, Beck, and Liam Gallagher. We’ve seen Brown (“Meeting him was huge, like Brian Epstein and the Beatles”) and the late gallerist Colin de Land. There have been portraits of angel-faced male artists like Maurizio Cattelan and Rirkrit Tiravanija (to whom she was married for a time), and of course Andy Warhol. In Peyton’s world, these lads were thin, fashionable, and famous forever.



That’s where the problems set in. The times changed, and as Peyton became a star, her paintings became psychically static and claustrophobic. There were startling moments—in her 1999 depiction of the German rocker Jochen Distelmeyer, his baby blues can melt you—but her Prince Charmings seemed lost in time, unthreatening, more elves than flesh and blood. Her visions of modernity floated free of anything vulnerable.



That’s changing, especially in the drawings. Her swoony weightlessness is sprouting roots and gaining gravity. She is painting and drawing more from life. In one picture, of Matthew Barney, he’s sitting slightly hunched. He isn’t just some lambkin; there are circles under his eyes, he stares into the distance and into himself, posing in such a way to accept and reject our gaze. It’s a performance, a surrender, and a protective defense. In her portrait of poet John Giorno, we see him radiating self-awareness and comfort in his older age. In several arresting pictures of Peyton’s girlfriend, we see a severe, pretty woman reading or sleeping. She isn’t an idealized angel; she’s someone with moods, thoughts, and psychic power.



Subtle as these changes are, they are promising for an artist that some have feared has been drifting in her own lighter-than-air meringue style, making bonbon portraits of the cute and famous. We’re getting to see what life is doing to Peyton and what it’s doing to us.

A Baghdad ART Rescue Operation

ARTmostfierce found this article and was quite touched by it.It is such a good reminder of not taking our freedom of expression for granted!
Please read this article from NY magazine by Jake Helpern...wow.
Art can be so powerful that even a war can't get in the way!

Enjoy!
More blogging coming up tonight!

How one Navy officer whisked Iraqi art out of the country—and into Soho.
By Jake Halpern Published May 11, 2008

Christopher Brownfield was something of an oddity on his nuclear-powered submarine. While the other seamen hung out and watched taoks films—crew jargon for flicks involving tits, ass, ordnance, kung fu, and swordplay—the 28-year-old lieutenant was just as happy to curl up in his bunk and read T.S. Eliot. Perhaps not surprisingly, Brownfield wasn’t long for the Navy.



Last October, he was honorably discharged and returned to civilian life in his New Haven bachelor pad, which, on a recent visit, looked like it had been converted into an art gallery’s warehouse. Virtually every inch of wall and floor space was occupied by artwork. There were Cubist-like oil paintings, bronze statues, drawings so lifelike they could pass for photographs, and ornate collages that incorporated materials like old shirts, charred dolls, and election ballots written in Kurdish and Arabic. “They’re on loan from artists in Baghdad,” he explained. “I suppose I have become their agent.”



Back when he still worked for the American military, Brownfield volunteered to go to Iraq, where he was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. One day, while wandering around the Green Zone, he stumbled upon the closest thing to a museum that exists within the compound: a souvenir shop selling Persian rugs, hookahs, and a large number of oil paintings.



“The paintings were made for tourists, which means U.S. soldiers, and they featured the kind of clichéd images of Arabs and camels that would be too cheesy to make it into Lawrence of Arabia,” recalls Brownfield. “But at the back of the shop I came upon a painting whose front was turned against the wall.” He flipped it around to find an abstract depiction of a child holding a balloon against a collage of newspaper articles about recent suicide bombings. The painting was signed by a man named Mohammed al Hamadany. Brownfield found the shopkeeper reluctant to talk about Al Hamadany—“they were feeling me out”—but he persisted, and eventually the shopkeeper told him that he would ask the “supplier” to come with more “gallery pieces” like this one.



Several days later, Brownfield met the supplier, who, it turned out, was a painter in his own right. During the following year, the supplier—who Brownfield fears would be labeled as a collaborator and killed by extremists if he were identified—made frequent visits to the Green Zone, where he and Brownfield would meet at the souvenir shop to discuss art.



Brownfield would bring art books of American painters like John Singer Sargent and Jackson Pollock, and the supplier would unfurl his latest gallery pieces. These paintings came from several professional artists in Baghdad who, like Al Hamadany, couldn’t sell their work amid the violence and were struggling to feed their families. These painters were so poor, and art supplies were so expensive in Baghdad, that their canvases often contained only the thinnest veneer of color. Indeed, on one of the few occasions that Brownfield encountered Iraqi painters in the shop, they told him that Vincent van Gogh, great as he was, used too much good paint.



Brownfield fell in love with the supplier’s art, and promised to send much of it back to the U.S. and try to sell it. His smuggling technique was remarkably straightforward: the U.S. Armed Forces’ postal system. At one point, clerks got wind of what he was doing and tried to stop him, suspicious that he might be looting. Brownfield said that he owned the paintings (untrue; he was just acting as a middleman), and when they became insistent, he pulled rank. “I said, ‘Look, I am not going to argue with you—this is my property.’ And they didn’t challenge me, partly because I was a much more senior officer.” Over the course of five months, Brownfield sent more than 100 paintings, as well as five drawings and two bronze statues, back to his mother’s house in Detroit. On May 22, a show of all the paintings will open at the Pomegranate Gallery in Soho. He has priced them inexpensively (to make sure everything sells), and he plans to deliver all the proceeds, in cash, to the supplier when they rendezvous in Egypt later this summer.



Among the haul were paintings by Sat’aar Darweesh, whose childhood-themed canvases were once joyous but have taken on a much darker tone, and by Mohammed Hamdan, who has since (thanks to a French visa) moved to Paris. He is, Brownfield believes, the only artist among the group to have left Iraq.



As I perused the artwork in Brownfield’s apartment, my attention was soon drawn to a haunting series of 25 paintings dubbed “Laylat an Nar,” or “The Night of Fire,” which depicts the shock-and-awe bombardment of Baghdad. The work of the same Al Hamadany who first attracted Brownfield’s eye, the paintings show ghostlike faces being drawn to the windows of buildings as the city below is consumed in flames. I recently spoke with the 38-year-old artist over the phone from Baghdad. (I called his cell phone, and—rather miraculously—it worked.) It was quickly apparent, however, that Al Hamadany was distressed. “Right now, while I am speaking to you, there are rockets going over my house!” he said through a translator, Yale Near East expert Simon Samoeil. The phone crackled with static, and a great deal of commotion could be heard in the background. “The situation is very, very bad. The infrastructure is zero. Electricity is zero. I work with all the difficulties to put food on the table for my children.” Al Hamadany went on to explain that he had four children and that he and his wife were expecting a fifth in just two days. It seemed inconceivable that, given the circumstances, he would want to continue with the interview. But he seemed intent on talking, so I asked him about the “Night of Fire” paintings.

Please read more in link below:
http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/46794/index1.html

Gone in an Instant!

More Polaroid news. Please enjoy NY Magazine article by Christopher Bonanos

Top photographers are angry over Polaroid’s fade to black.
By Christopher Bonanos
Published May 4, 2008

Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled, 1973
(Photo: courtesy of the Whitney with permission from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation )


It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe,” opening this week at the Whitney, has become a memorial to the medium. Several weeks ago, the diminished Polaroid Corporation announced it will, in 2009, quit the instant-film business. Of course, it’s hard to argue with the ease of digital for the lion’s share of see-it-now picture-taking. Nevertheless, a lot of photographers are vehement about what they’re losing. “It’s the worst disaster since Hiroshima,” shouts Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who shoots large-format Polaroid Type 809. “I just bought $5,000 worth—I’ve got it in my basement. I never shot color till the mid-eighties, when I started to work with Polaroid. It was such a beautiful film—lush color, very forgiving for skin. It was always something artists liked.” Chuck Close, who uses Polaroid’s 20-by-24-inch studio camera, loved the black-and-white tones: “It’s loaded with silver. Actually, there used to be even more, in the old films that you had to coat. It was beautiful. It’s not replaceable, and they’re leaving it like roadkill. These corporate raiders who buy a company and strip it for everything profitable—they just pick the bones.”



Mapplethorpe’s work at the Whitney is from the early seventies, when he was learning how to take pictures, and “its instant nature was incredibly important,” says show curator Sylvia Wolf. “You can see that he was learning how to expose, how to compose. He said he was too impatient to wait for a lab.” It’s also evident that he was working in the moment. Over and over, he photographed Patti Smith, his roommate at the Hotel Chelsea. “There’s a sexiness and titillation to the instant process,” says Wolf. It’s intimate.



“Now what the hell am I supposed to do?” asks John Waters, who’s shot a Polaroid of each person who’s come into his apartment since 1992—friends, interviewers, deliverymen, everyone. “Digital isn’t instant gratification, and those cameras don’t make that sexy sound.” Waters, too, is hoarding film. “What are wardrobe departments supposed to do?” he continues. “How else will they keep costume continuity shots? And has anybody thought about the poor home-porno enthusiasts? Are they supposed to now risk arrest by taking some memory disk to the drugstore to get printed? The world is a terrible place without Polaroid.”

Miami ART Machine

ARTmostfierce loves Miami and hopes that some day it can become an Art destination other than when Miami Art Basel happens every year.

Please read article by Brett Sokol from NY Magazine

If the glory, freneticism, excess, and sunny evanescence of the current contemporary-art boom has a symbolic home, it’s Miami Beach. Thanks to the appearance of an exponentially more fabulous Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December since 2002, the once-tattered resort town has gained a new sense of itself as an aesthetic destination that goes beyond the mere appreciation of a set of well-wrought silicone implants. Now members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends—collectors, artists, and curators from around the world—want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy—especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown. Which is why a local developer and collector, Craig Robins, is starting a free postgraduate art program in Miami.



He’s not alone in this municipal-improvement gambit: Terry Riley, a former Museum of Modern Art curator, moved down two years ago to be director of the Miami Art Museum and oversee building its $220 million Herzog & de Meuron–designed home. Riley cites the example of Spain and its Guggenheim Bilbao as a model: “They wanted to catch up, join the European Union, and transform the country. They realized that to do that, they had to go from being a cheap vacation destination of sangría, sand, and sun to a place that could compete with the rest of Europe as a major cultural destination.”

Please read more about it in the link below!
http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/46423/

Opening Night at the Whitney Biennial: The Art Crowd Is Not Impressed

Mika Rottenberg's Valkyrian milkmaids.

New York Magazine

by Alexandra Peers

It was hip to be squared at the opening of the 2008 Whitney Biennial last night, where a slew of artists in the sculpture-heavy show went for big raw boxy installations. Think the skeletal frame of a house, cubes of cracked glass, a resin block, a pool-size bin of kitty litter, slices of offices and rooms and houses. With its organic materials and echoes of architecture, the show sometimes looked like Janson’s History of Conceptual Art meets Home Depot. We're not sure what it all meant, but don’t miss Mika Rottenberg’s cool ramshackle barn in which you watch videos of Valkyrian milkmaids and baying goats.

As a whole, the hometown show (more than half the artists now live in New York) wasn’t quite wowing the crowd. “It could have used a jolt of sexy painting," Artkrush editor Paul Laster complained. There was not much politics, even less sex. The dominant aesthetic was so tentative and half-done that one rival institution’s curator wondered if artists racing to make deadlines hadn’t finished. Then an SVA professor thoughtfully explained: “It’s what they’re teaching in schools now. It’s non-iconic.”

Buzzy works included the powerhouse lobby office from Jason Rhoades (the gifted L.A. artist who died of heart failure in 2006), Phoebe Washburn’s room-size ecosystem run on Gatorade, and Eduardo Sarabia’s witty storage room of art knockoffs by Koons, etc., which thoughtfully included an order catalog. Said Chelsea dealer Robert Goff: “It’s awesome — because it looked finished.” —Alexandra Peers

ARTmostfierce will go this weekend to see it and give his 2 cents opinion!
http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0810,351176,351176,13.html

Art Market in for Early-’90s-Style Bust?

Art Market in for Early-’90s-Style Bust?
Boone sees a boon.

New York Magazine
By Andrew M. Goldstein
Published Feb 18, 2008
Is the art world about to hit hard times? It looks that way to artists and dealers who remember the end of the last boom. “We are definitely in a recession,” gallerist Mary Boone said at the Tribeca Ball on February 12. Artist Eric Fischl agreed. “I think everybody’s going to take a hit,” he said. “The last time that happened, the prices of everybody’s work were cut in half and then within months cut in half again. So yeah, I think it’s going to have the same effect.” But, he added, “There are a lot of artists with an awful lot of money invested in them, and no one’s going to let them go down.” On the other hand, Boone said, “I think a recession is actually very good for the art world and very good for artists. You don’t have to worry about collectors’ motives, that they’re for investment.”

Ok... folks what do you think ?

Would love to hear your opinion.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=23296