When Edward Winkleman offered his new storefront gallery on West 27th Street to artists William Powhida and Jen Dalton to “consider ‘alternatives/solutions’ to the market” they decided to organize a show titled #class. The hashtag in front of the name is a reference to Twitter and the communal tags that help users find related tweets on a given topic, event or idea. Like the online service, the #class exhibition — is it an exhibition? — is composed of crowd sourced content. Hyperallergic is taking part with $ECRET$ OF THE NEW YORK ART WORLD.
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Artists jerked out of their studios, cast out onto the street by the government. Building complexes in art zones destroyed without notice, their occupants harassed by hired thugs. Little to no compensation offered for leases cut short, real estate lies and lost investments in renovation and construction. These images, formed from media headlines, blog posts and on-the-spot photos, all contribute to a shocking (and not unrealistic) picture of the displacement of artists in Beijing.
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A group of unidentified New York art bloggers were spotted at the 2010 Whitney Biennial press preview staging an absurd protest of a painting that was lent to the show by New York’s 303 Gallery. The work, Maureen Gallace, “August” (2009), was the unfortunate recipient of the bloggers’ wrath but the protesters told me that their action was not directed towards Gallace but her gallery, 303, which continues to maintain a strict anti-photography policy that is despised by many of the city’s art bloggers.
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Boston artists understand that the city’s contemporary art community lacks punch. After all, they’re the ones in the middle of it, surrounded on all sides by curators, galleries and critics. As artists have responded to the problems set out in my series on the Boston contemporary art scene, their comments point towards a working answer for one question: how could the Boston art community be made better for the city’s artists?
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While we live our artistic lives in the West in relative calm, if sometimes obscurity and poverty, artists in China face some very serious dangers from an autocratic government that only allows art to flower when it fits its political agenda. So when artists in China create a flash mob to protest the systematic destruction of artist studios, it is shocking that no one notices. Thankfully, Austrian blogger Karel has written something for mazine.ws about this vast injustice …
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Greg Cook is proud to be a yokel. As an art critic for The Boston Phoenix weekly, an independent blogger and artist, Greg is a staunch fan and supporter of the Boston contemporary art community. What bugs him about this city’s art scene is that he might have a better opinion of the scene than it does of itself. In a series of blog posts on his New England Journal for Aesthetic Research, Greg has outlined a Yokelist manifesto for a Boston art community with enough confidence to drive itself to greater heights, art world capital or not.
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We were recently deleting our hard drives from the aughts in an effort to upload everything into the cloud and we found these gems among the files. We almost forgot these things happened … oh wait, did they? Who remembers.
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It’s obvious that Jason Andrew and Deborah Brown don’t like to sit around waiting for things to happen, which may explain why they have become cornerstones in Bushwick, Brooklyn’s art scene. Andrew is the driving force behind Norte Maar, an apartment cultural space on Wyckoff Avenue that has played host to some impressive visual arts, musical and performance shows over the past five years, while Brown helped organize the first Bushwick Open Studios and sits on local Community Board #4 as a constant cheerleader for all things culture and Bushwick. The two have joined forces to create Storefront gallery with the mission to promote emerging Bushwick artists and to revisit the work of established talents.
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Since learning of Shaquille O’Neal’s curating gig with Flag Art Foundation, among other dubious projects announced last year, I have found myself returning to Eva Diaz’s piece “Whither Curatorial Studies?” from last February, in which she weighed the teachings of curatorial degree programs against the realities of the profession. Does this “pedagogical cottage industry” adequately prepare its students for the real world of curating?
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It’s been a hell of a decade and the aughts have come to a close. We asked people to chime in about what they loved and hated about the last ten years, including, Karen Wilkin, Johanna Fassl, Ruba Katrib, Gary Panter, William Powhida, Barry Hoggard & James Wagner, Lyra Kilston, and Will Heath.
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