Allison Hester, "Michael Lorenzo Urie 1980" (2011), pen on Arches (all photos by author)

Walking into the Marianne Boesky Gallery’s summer exhibition I Bleed Black, the first work I saw was a small drawing of actor Michael Urie, best-known for his role in the television series Ugly Betty. I knew I was in trouble.

However, the art was not even the most worrisome part of the exhibition. The bizarrely academic language in the gallery press release made me want to tear up the sheet of paper in front of the sweet-looking gallery assistant.

Maybe its just me but I feel like recently there has been a rash of press releases from galleries that are so academic that they are barely comprehensible. I think galleries need to reevaluate what they want visitors to get out of their press releases.

Made up of mostly Marianne Boesky employees from art handlers to registrars, I Bleed Black features a range of artistic mediums and focuses such Elizabeth Miseo’s ceramics and Nicholas Brooks’s installation of a video of a woman masturbating that is housed in a black plastic tent inside the gallery with a sign “Adults Only.”

I was at first curious about the origin of the seemingly goth title “I Bleed Black.”  Some googling led me to a song by the LA doom metal band Saint Vitus. It also led me to countless sites declaring “I Bleed Black and Gold,” which being Pittsburgh-born and-raised made me wish the show was about Pittsburgh sports fanaticism.

Ted Riederer, "The Collectors" (installation shot) (2011), oil on canvas

Even though it was not about bleeding black and gold, I’m still not sure what “bleeding black” has to do with any of the works in the show. The press release is no help, reading as one of the most confusingly academic press releases I’ve ever come across.

Originally, I was supposed to review the actual art in the I Bleed Black exhibition but being fairly unremarkable, the totally irritating press release overtook the show.

Having spent two years in an interdiscplinary Master’s program, I can recognize when the writer is using terms like “societal pressure” and “societal norms” to cover the fact that they’re not saying much of anything. The press release reads:

Emphasizing the power of the individual, I Bleed Black suggests the working artist’s struggle to overcome or transcend the outside factors inherent in society, religion and politics. The individual, steadily seeking an evolved state of being, attempts to create only for himself and deny the influences of the outside components that are inherent in the duties or responsibilities of the day to day.

Um … what?

Stating nothing about the art itself or the artists involved, the press release has paragraph after paragraph repeating the same thing about the artist’s struggle between personal expression and everyday social norms.

Having written a few press releases in various internships, I question who this is written for. The collectors? Art historians? Art critics? I have no idea.

Ethan Minsker, "Rich Boy Cries for Momma" (2010)

As shown in other articles I’ve written, I don’t particularly like when the art in the exhibit can’t back up the lofty language in the press release but this is just absurd, considering I’m not exactly sure I understand what is meant by “steered by an ambition that manifests itself in the routine of the everyday.” I’m also not sure what it has to do with Ethan Minsker’s book Rich Boy Cries for Momma.

In the end, I became so frustrated with trying to figure out the meaning of the show that I walked out of the gallery and began to explore the street art surrounding the closed Chelsea galleries.

Works by street artist RAE on 22nd Street in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

One work that caught my eye were these works by RAE on 22nd Street, reminding me of two-dimensional drawings of Alexander Calder’s wire sculptures of faces. More exciting and even more art historically relevant than the works in I Bleed Black, RAE’s multiple drawings did not need an unintelligible press release to promote their worth.

So to all the gallery press release writers, please stop the overly academic language that sounds like you are trying to up your word count for a college essay.

Marianne Boesky Gallery’s I Bleed Black closed on September 1, 2011. Lucky you.

One of Roa’s best pieces — even by his own admission — during his Brooklyn sojourn. (click to enlarge)

It’s a perpetual refrain among street art watchers that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to street art but I don’t subscribe to that theory. As soon as the warmer weather hits, New York in general — and Brooklyn in particular — always seems to explode with new visual energy that suggests street art still has a lot of life left in it.

This is my highlights for the year with tons of Flickr and blog links that will take you for a tour around the web.

Best in Show

Adam Wissing, Kenny Komer, and Boris Rasin’s street art poster mashed up the New Museum with the Jeff Koons-designed yacht for Dakis Joannou with the New Museum (click to enlarge)

The most notable contributions this season were the door pieces by Ema and Kid Acne (more here, here, here & here) who worked in unison to saturate the street art scape. Their pieces weren’t very loud or large but they were ubiquitous, diverse, and always well-placed — they proved that quantity doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality.

Another notable player was El Sol 25, whose large scale mash-ups showed a new level of skill that I hadn’t previously noticed in his hand-painted images, but that coupled with their ability to stay up without being disturbed on some major spots (1, 2) made him a force to be reckoned with.

Adam Wissing, Kenny Komer, and Boris Rasin may not really be dedicated “street artists” but they sure made a splash with their creative mash-up of the Jeff Koons-designed yacht for Dakis Joannou with a PR-ready image of the New Museum. They brought a new level of Photoshop expertise to a field that is still dominated — for better or worse — by hand-drawn works. They get a special award because the word on the street is that the trio were contacted by the New Museum who didn’t like that they consciously blurred their luxury brand.

Sometimes there are moments in street art watching when you say to yourself, “I wish I did that!” And last month, TrustCorp was the target of my latest bout of street art jealousy. The group pulled off what I consider the biggest coup of the year with their placement of a very witty “Islam Welcome Here” sign at the site of what has come to be known in the right-wing media as the “Ground Zero mosque,” even though it is really called the Cordoba Center. They struck at the height of the anti-Cordoba hysteria, and their pro-tolerance message even confused Fox News. TrustCorp gets an A+.

Big Boys, Big Problems

In terms of big street art brands, we have to mention that Banksy blew into town during his movie premiere a few months ago and, unfortunately, he seemed to bring his b-game to New York (1, 2, 3, 4 … ) stenciling images that didn’t seem all that worthy of his reputation. Even though his New York street pieces may not have been his best, it was still a little sad that they were quickly covered up by graffiti writer Omar (who is apparently a middle-aged old skool graff’er trying to get back in the game) and others. We shed a tear … but moved on.

Even when Fairey’s mural on Bowery & Houston was covered up it couldn’t catch a break from the graff’ers (photo via Luna Park)

Shepard Fairey was also in New York for Deitch Project’s swan song show titled May Day, and the LA-based artist got in trouble with the city’s Department of Buildings when it wasn’t obvious if the Deitch Wall he plastered with his distinctive manner of collage was an advertisement for his SoHo show or an art work — sorry, dude, you can’t have it both ways.

Fairey’s Houston mural was also a magnet for angry graffiti writers, who did everything possible to mess up his mural — including punching huge holes into it. It almost makes you wonder if Barry McGee’s piece for the same wall was a peace offering to the graff community.

Top, The original Fairey wall piece at the beginning of May, Wiliamsburg, Brooklyn (photo by Jake Dobkin); bottom left, Obey gets graffiti’d up by Poster Boy & others; bottom right, Specter “Law & Order: SUV”-ups the Fairey. (click to enlarge)

Speaking of Fairey, yesterday I noticed that one of his crew’s Williamsburg murals has been altered in such a crafty way that I had to go back to make sure it was in fact not in the original mural image. Props to the street artist remixer, most probably Specter, who, according to The Street Spot, devised similar interventions on pieces by Swoon, Faile, Bast & Skewville. I should also mention that Specter produced a series of fantastic sculptures (another one) that were definitely a high point of the past six months.

The Os Gemeos twins were one of two truly world-renowned global street artists to avoid graffiti haters and their (sanctioned) mural — painted last month — continues to stand tall in Chelsea. Swoon is the other street artist that graff’ers seem to like, and her cut outs continue to wow though there’s nothing really new here.

Certainly Notable

In terms of other noteworthy additions to the streetscape, here are some quick links that give you a taste of the riches that were there to be had.

There were the sanctioned pieces by Belgian street star Roa who was in town for his solo show at Factory Fresh. His monochromatic large-scale animal murals in Astoria, Bushwick, and Williamsburg were beautifully executed and striking.

White Cocoa turned heads with her distinctive drawings, like this one in East Williamsburg.

White Cocoa seemed to come out of nowhere, and her hand-drawn portraits were particularly riveting for their sense of movement (1, 2, 3, 4).

Overunder took care to place his striking pieces (1, 2, 3, 4) on color backgrounds to give them a sense of vibrancy.

Aakash Nihalani pulled off a geometric intervention on a stop sign in DUMBO that even bent looked pretty arresting.

Dan Witz is a veteran of street art but he hasn’t been slowing down. This year he is back at his super-realist hijinx that are often overlooked by the uniniated (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 … ).

The big (street art nerd) news of the season is that the inevitable has happened and some anonymous talent in Greenpoint grew tired of the Dick Chicken and Pussy Ham’s mating ritual and decided to take matters into their own hands to consummate the very public courting and turn them into Chicken Ham.

Various & Gould of Germany had a show at Brooklynite earlier this year and during that period they made sure to give the citizens of New York a taste of their colorful creativity, which included (I think) jugglers, plumbers, and composite figures that I can’t even pretend to characterize.

Other visitors of note were Brits Sweet Toof and Nick Walker, Paris-based Jef Aerosol, French artist Ludo (1, 2, 3), Dolk from Norway, and Melbourne-based Miso was also in town with her Art Deco-inspired wheatpastes (1, 2).

Primo at the Lorimer L stop. (click to enlarge)

A few talents that pulled off a few eye-catching pieces were Veng of Robots Will Kill, Alison Corrie, Dude Company, Elbowtoe, and Primo (1, 2).

Showta was everywhere this year but the quality of his work oscillates between pretty damn good to meh.

Paul Richard has been up to his conceptual street art antics again, and his signs near various unsanctioned works have been getting funnier and funnier.

Sometimes I come across things that I can’t figure out, and this sculpture on Driggs Avenue back in April was short-lived but pretty impressive in that it explored a whole new direction for street art sculpture. Kudos to whoever it was by.

I also want to mention that Brooklyn-based Faile, who has been pretty dull in the last few years, up’d their game recently and I started noticing them again. Though, if you ask me they really need to shake things up a bit (1, 2, 3, 4).

One last thing, Mr. Brainwash arrived in the spring for his vanity gallery show in the Meatpacking District, but thankfully TrustCorp let him know that his brand of shlocky street art isn’t really welcome in them these parts.

Politics on the Street

Who knew Che & Mussolini worked so well together. (click to enlarge)

I was rather sad that there was only one really good New York street art response to the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but thankfully it was rather clever (if not perfectly executed) — it was also anonymous.

In terms of politics, there was no one more provocative that an artist whose name I don’t know. Whoever he is (and I’ve been told it is a he), he combined the figures of Che Guevara with Benito Mussolini to create a few memorable images (separate, combined).

Unfortunately, someone told me that the regular street art peeps don’t like him very much (“he looks like a cop,” someone mentioned) and his stuff got covered up in some nasty ways — though the intensity of the splash on his piece on Roebling Avenue makes me wonder if there isn’t some anti-communist or anti-fascist anger involved in the vandalism of the vandalism.

Originality Award

This octopus is obviously a New Yorker (click to enlarge)

And now finally, the hands down winner of the unofficial Hyperallergic Street Art Originality award goes to a brand new anonymous piece by MRtoll [thanks Luna Park for the tip!] that I’ve been obsessed with since Hyperallergic publisher Veken Gueyikian spotted it last Sunday morning. It depicts a blue octopus eating a slice of extra cheese pizza — how’s that for excellence in subject matter.

The small piece, which is glued in place on a quiet stretch of North 8th Street in Williamsburg, has a marvelous Futurama meets Rosemarie Fiore feel to it. Sure, it’s hilarious, absurd, and doesn’t have a chance in hell of surviving the streets of New York (I give it two weeks), but it’s one of those unusual finds that makes you fall in love with street art … yet again.

It just goes to prove that it’s never dull in New York and everyone fits in.

A view of Swoon's "Switchback Sisters" show at the Deitch Project's space in Long Island City (photo by Luna Park & used with permission)

Now that the ethical issue of Jeffrey Deitch’s appointment as the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has dissipated a little (though there’s still the issue of his personal art collection that remains unresolved), I want to discuss possible meanings of his appointment and where they can — and in some ways, I hope will — lead.

One issue in particular that interests me is the assertion that Jeffrey Deitch had a seminal role in introducing street art to New York. That point has come up again and again probably because it’s one of the primary things that distinguishes his art tastes from those of his gallery dealer peers. It’s a funny thing to hear as someone who has been a careful observer of street art but who usually avoids his gallery. Even though Deitch Projects exhibits the work of artists who are considered “street artists” (Keith Haring, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Dash Snow, Swoon, and more recently Os Gemeos and Shepard Fairey) I never really cared for his gallery’s take. It may be a surprising thing to say considering how much time and money he spent developing his stable in the field, but while he appeared to revel in the carnivalesque of street art, he always seemed to do it in a way that robbed it of its weird quirkiness, it’s unpredictableness, and ultimately any bite.

A view of the wall across from the Deitch Project's space on Wooster. (click to enlarge)

When he showed the work of Swoon it felt sanitized, even if it was intensely beautiful. The wall at the corner of Houston and Bowery, which is curated by his soon-to-be-closed gallery (it debuted with a resurrected Haring mural followed by the current Os Gemeos mural) feels precious in the same way that his gallery shows do. The very public spot is flooded with light that makes it appear luxurious, expensive and … well, that word again … sanitized — all things I don’t usually associate with street art. Perhaps it should be expected when street culture collides with high-end gallery culture.

I’m not discrediting what he accomplished as he was able to bring street art to a demographic that hadn’t purchased it before, but he wasn’t the only one. In my opinion, his biggest contribution to the field was the street art outside his gallery, which street artists clamored to fill. Those walls hosted some of the best stuff in that neighborhood and their proximity to Deitch makes me think it was more than coincidental.

But what I can’t stomach is the false notion that he had a major role in street art’s triumphal “arrival” to New York. It’s a falsehood that even Roberta Smith regurgitated in her article in the New York Times a few months ago:

An early advocate of graffiti art in the 1980s, he has more or less introduced New York to its vibrant successor, street art, which originated in San Francisco in the 1990s among artists on the fringe of the skateboard scene.

Too bad it isn’t true. Roberta Smith, who is normally a really interesting critic, has had difficulty with writing about street art before. When she reviewed the Os Gemeos mural she seemed at a loss and resorted to boring descriptions of what she saw with no insight and no critical perspective. I’m guessing she really meant to say that Deitch introduced street art to her slice of the art world at the time but she doesn’t say that. And even that isn’t entirely true.

One of the “Beautiful Losers” (via)

What did Deitch really do? He packaged the “Beautiful Losers” group out of the Bay Area, which included McGee, Johanson, Fairey, for high-end consumption.

The fact is that street art was truly invented in New York, where the perfect storm of an exploding graffiti scene, a sophisticated art scene, a movement to empower nontraditional voices, and a plethora of derelict public spaces sowed the seeds of a movement that was ready to flower. Even if by the 1990s the city’s street art scene was less active it never went away.

For those interested in the early period, a great source is Allan Schwartzman’s Street Art, which was published in 1985! Most of those images will look familiar to street art lovers today. That early generation did things that look remarkably current (versions of wheatpastes, illegal public interventions, culture jamming, … ) and their talent will surprise you. They are an unsung generation and only a few names are familiar to today’s art world, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but I hope that changes. The fact that they are not well-known today is why we often see street art that isn’t in fact original but lauded as such by people with no sense of history about the scene (for instance, compare John Fekner c.1980s to unknown artist c.2009).

Left: Don Leicht with one of his “space invaders” he created with John Fekner in the early 1980s at the cutting-edge Fashion Moda in the South Bronx; right: a work by street artist Space Invader on the streets of London, April 2010.

While it’s great to have advocates of street art, like Deitch, in all levels of the art world, let’s not rewrite history and claim he accomplished something he didn’t.

Which leads me to another issue I’ve been thinking about, namely what is Deitch really trying to accomplish? I felt like he gave us a clue in the New York Times profile of artist William Powhida last December:

Jeffrey Deitch, founder of the high-profile New York gallery Deitch Projects, which sponsored a murals project here in addition to its booth, argued that the show’s slick commercialism and the emphasis on celebrity artists simply reflected a broader shift. He described it as “the collapse between the avant-garde and mainstream pop culture.”

He added:

“What’s happening is that there is this completely new audience of young people who are coming to art in the way they used to come to rock music or hip-hop. That’s a very positive thing.”

I have been thinking quite a bit about these paragraphs since I read them online. They seem to reveal a lot about the gallery owner-cum-museum-director’s ambitions. My instinct says it is about creating a new strata of the art world, which has the same relationship to fine art as television has to cinema. We have to face one thing, street art is not the same as what we have come to define as contemporary gallery art. It’s not that street art may not aspire to the same status but that it isn’t always as substantive. The rebellious world of street art simply plays by a different set of rules that involves memes, placement, and populist discourse, to name a few of the distinctions that make its voice powerful and unique. Like all generalizations, these are not always true.

Would Isa Genzken’s “Mutter Mit Kind” (2004) make any sense on a Brooklyn street? (via www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk)

The fact is that they are not the same thing and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Often street art looks more traditional than contemporary fine art, in that wheatpastes and poster, can feel almost conservative in their aesthetics, and much of contemporary art would lose its power and status if it was removed from the white box and placed on the street. Imagine a work by Isa Genzken at the corner of N7th and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg — it would be dull and forgettable. Placed in a gallery, Genzken’s work is “activated.” It requires the context of the white box to make it relevant. When street art pioneer Dan Witz began his career in the 1970s, he told me during an interview last year that he experimented by placing objects on shelves around the Lower East Side. He used found objects — batteries, plastic caps, anything really — but no one seemed to realize they were art and since he (or anyone else) ever documented them they disappeared into the ether. Only when he started painting super-realistic objects like hummingbirds on derelict spots around the neighborhood did people start to notice. In a recent conversation with street artist Gaia, he emphasized the point, “You need it to look like ‘art’ so that people don’t overlook it on the street.”

What I’m suggesting is that the language of street art and fine art represents two parallel avenues that may cross, blur, and energize one another but they lead to different destinations, even if sometimes they end up in the same zip code. People talk about Shepard Fairey as a major figure in the street art movement, but his aesthetics don’t interest me as much as his creativity at finding new modes of cultural distribution. Fairey distributes posters online that sell out in a matter of minutes. Other street artists do the same, this is pretty amazing, and they often do it without a gallery system or even an outside service.

If Deitch can find a way to expand the art world and incorporate new groups, modes of production, and ideas into it, I’m all for it. The man has an obvious knack for promotion. He can make things that others may dismiss feel exciting and interesting to a general audience — that’s his skill. The art world today is bigger than ever. In the 1940s, New York’s art world numbered only a few hundred people, by the 1970s (according to Tom Wolfe’s snarky The Painted Word) it numbered a few thousand, and today it is probably in the tens of thousands, if not more. With the bigger industry and audience there will have to be a way to feed their hunger for art. Like what happened with cinema during the advent of television, new forms will emerge. At first they may seem awkward and puerile, but eventually they will mature and be a force in their own right. Today, in the era of reality TV, art house cinema still exists, as does the Hollywood blockbuster, the experimental film, and YouTube. They are all parallel, though some may not stand the test of time. But contemporary art is just that, about now, and the more the merrier in my opinion, but don’t expect all of it to be good.

General view of Baltimore street before Gaia’s intervention (via Google Streetview) (click to enlarge)

The scroll (click to enlarge)

Coming across a work by Gaia on the street is a special experience. His work is intelligent, emotional, well-executed, and informed by the wider world. He looks beyond pop culture, where most street art gets stuck. His linocut prints and drawings, often of animals, are beautifully rendered and react to the intensity of the urbanscape and its manmade fauna.

His latest wheatpaste, “St. John” (2010), was recently unveiled in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood and is one of his most lyrical to date. When I first saw the image, I didn’t realize it would be the subject of an experiment that I’d been eager to try since first meeting Gaia back in 2008. At the time, I was interviewing him for an article I was writing, and we discussed the possibililty that street art criticism could be directly engaged with art on the street. The excitement over the idea seemed to spring from our mutual interest in exploring the limits of street-based visual dialogue. There are precedents for this type of street level critical engagement, though the existing examples are either anonymous or tongue-in-cheek — neither strategy appealed to me.

Gaia approached me to put our idea into action, and I immediately started working on a piece that would appear next to his work.

It felt daunting at first having never seen the art in person but what became clear to me was not what I wanted my companion piece to be but what it shouldn’t be, namely ironic or sarcastic. I treated this experiment with the utmost seriousness.

From a pedestrian’s angle (click to enlarge)

Good criticism has the same aspirations as art, it seeks to illuminate ideas but only after a process of exploration and reflection.

Street art tends to exist in neglected spaces that are often, according to Gaia, “reactivated with a new kind of attention that does not find its generation from within the delinquent property owner, but instead from the exterior of autonomous artists.” How does the critic fit into this relationship, if at all? Words on the street have a natural association with advertising and , which have trained us to see text in public as a way to sell something. I wanted the art criticism I was preparing to appear removed from the commercial world. It wasn’t going to be a quick and easy read.

Close-up of the top portion (click to enlarge)

Can criticism on the streeet activate the viewer in ways that an art work cannot? I wanted to spend time explaining the historical allusions in the work and propose ways of interpreting it without restricting other ways of seeing the art.

While it is true that street art often lives in neglected spaces, it is also true that these places are also quite volatile. They are transient zones that change based on whim.

There is another reality I was clear about in my mind. I am not a street artist, I am a critic, writer and blogger, my medium is text and images, without both components my work feels incomplete.

What resulted from my exploration is “Natural Apparition.” After the text was complete I decided that it needed to be printed in black and white (which seems well-suited to the nearby wheatpaste) on letter-size pages that should be posted vertically so that they appeared like a scroll robbed of its spindles. It was something that should be revealed all at once and not incrementally.

The document is signed with my Twitter handle. It is filled with art historical references. It places “St. John” in a continuity that emerges from myth. By looking elsewhere for his artistic language, Gaia’s work was well suited to my critical companion piece. I’d like to think of my work as a friend to “St. John,” connecting it to the rest of the world.

A critic friend mentioned to me the other day that Baltimore has excellent art museums (Baltimore Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum) that are very well attended by the local population. It was a fact that makes me curious about the reaction to my text, and how it may impact the reaction to Gaia’s wheatpaste. I wonder if someone will reach out to me via Twitter to ask what it means … probably not, but serious criticism that is draped in secrecy and anonymity can be tiresome. The great thing about the life of art on the street is that there’s never an easy answer but a lot of questions.

Read “Natural Apparition” here.

Gaia’s Juxtapoz post on the collaboration here and on Vandalog here.

Left to right, “Natural Apparition” and Gaia’s “St. John” (2010)

The unfortunately titled Skin Fruit has already opened on the platinum coast of downtown Manhattan, formerly known as the Bowery. And guess what, not everyone is happy. I know, I know, you’re shocked.

Last weekend while avoiding the art fairs, I spotted a fantastic street poster in Chelsea that lampooned the New Museum and its newfound taste for caviar. Adding to the already hilarious poster was the fact that someone had slapped on a sticker of Hargo’s fantastic CA$H FOR YOUR WARHOL campaign on top so that it appeared as one of the blocks of the structure. It was the type of moment that made me realize how much I love the streets of New York, so full of life … and discontent.

Since my discovery I’ve been looking for the image’s source. I asked street art photographer Luna Park for a possible answer, and she was at a loss after pointing out the poster’s high production values (and no name attached to it) excluded the usual street art suspects.

The infamous poster (click to enlarge)

I wondered if the poster was the work of Bruce High Quality Foundation and their spoof culture, but those guys are so eager to be co-opted by the art system — oh wait, they already are — that I doubt they would flay such a powerful art institution publicly and with such panache!

I finally tracked down the image hidden on the website of Shellac, a New York-based company that does post-production for films.

After a quick phone call, I discovered the brilliant campaign was the brain child of three friends, Adam Wissing, Kenny Komer, and Boris Rasin. The same crew was also responsible for the fantastic wild posting campaign last fall that pitted incumbent New York mayor Michael Bloomberg against fictional millionaire Monty Burns of Simpsons fame.

“It was fun to run an out of touch millionaire against an out of touch billionaire,” Adam said during our phone chat about their first street project that garnered major attention and was part of the Art in Odd Places festival last fall. “We like Bloomberg but he’s changing the rules of the game [for better or worse] and we want to point that out.”

Their latest campaign is a dig at the New Museum and they use the museum’s own ad slogan, “New Art, New Ideas,” against them. “The New Museum says they are about new ideas, but Jeff Koons is the biggest artist out there and so establishment. He’s curating the collection of Dakis, who is one of the biggest collectors, and the value of his collection will go up. There are so many levels to this and it is all being shown in a nonprofit museum. I’m excited to see the show but it’s not ‘new ideas,’” Adam says.

Do the New Museum's pens lie? (image via newmuseumstore.org) (click to enlarge)

Like their previous campaign, the trio aren’t interested in politics as much as pointing out the obvious problems.  “It’s more about creating a dialogue and finding fun and interesting ways of getting people talking about things,” he says.

“Kenny and Boris are more involved in the art world, I’m more of an outsider,” he explains.

The group posted the posters across the city the day before the press preview at the New Museum. They thought about releasing a statement about their campaign but chose not to. “We want to create a dialogue, it’s not about ‘check out our work,’” he says.

If the campaign is obviously critical to art world insiders, the posters impact may be harder to discern for non-art world peeps. A friend of mine on Twitter posted a photo of the posters this morning. When I asked him if he knew the source, he responded that he “had assumed they were done in-house.” Adam wasn’t surprised when I told him that my intelligent Twitter buddy didn’t understand the spoof immediately. “We were debating if it was too similar to the New Museum’s own branding or not,” he says.

Part of me wonders if people simply think the institution has no ethics anymore and will do anything for splash and attention.

The Anti-Establishment poster mashes together the absurd coloring of Dakis Joannou’s Jeff Koons-designed yacht, the New Museum’s iconic (and expensive) structure with a sentiment many of us are wondering for some time now, “Oh, New Museum, when did you become so establishment?”

But even if people don’t get it, it’s really really funny.

Fuck Google, indeed.

5) F.A.T. Lab’s FUCK GOOGLE Week (2010)

Recently F.A.T. (Free Art & Technology) Lab held a week-long series of posts “themed around evil mother Google” during Transmediale10 in Berlin.  This included the now-infamous alleged GPS-bugging of a Google Street View car, custom Firefox themes, and even an instructable on building your own Street View car to fight back against the corporation.  (see also a recent Cargo Collective design campaign).

Vimeo link: Fuck Google Week roundup

4) Constant Dullaart, YouTube as Subject / YouTube as Sculpture (2008-ongoing)

In addition to having the best possible name for a digital conceptual artist, Constant Dullaart’s body of work consists of manipulating with contemporary methods of online viewing and production.

His YouTube works draw attention to the user interface that mediates the majority of Internet video traffic in the Western world, whether by sculpturally mimicking the effect of a loading video or by taking the “Play” icon to a rave.

3) Charles Broskoski, Films (2008-ongoing)

Broskoski’s Films is a daily streaming video program with a difference — there are no moving images to be found, only the subtitle tracks.

Broskoski’s film choices are suited to his audience and include new classics, such as Ghostbusters and Terminator 2, so that anyone who was young in the 1980s or early 90s may actually be able to identify by quotes alone.

Make sure to visit his paintings gallery while visiting the site.

The Internet's answer to the best items for contemporary assemblage: "tinsel, inflatable object, marble, hair, fluorescent lights, ball, water, image of a cat"

2) Ben Schumacher’s Portfolio

Fittingly hosted on a free Blogspot account, Ben Schumacher’s portfolio holds a number of gems situated right at the intersection of Internet art and contemporary sculpture.

He presents a number of clever conceptual pieces, from a contemporary assemblage sculpture crafted according to the specifications of a Yahoo! Answers query to an iStockPhoto image of pool water printed on top of a pool cover. Schumacher merges the preoccupation with the cheap and every day by fashioning a number of his sculptures and wall pieces out of materials from IKEA and Walmart.

A view of “www.fromthedarkpast.com” by Rafael Rozendaal

1) Rafael Rozendaal, COLORFLIP.COM, FROMTHEDARKPAST.COM, INTOTIME.COM, NEKROMISANTROP.COM (2008, 2009, 2010, 2010)

No conversation about contemporary Internet art is complete without Rafael Rozendaal.

Chances are even if you haven’t heard his name you’ve visited one of his websites in the last few years. His particular blend of pop aesthetics and flash animation have made his works popular, though how he treats each website as an individual piece adds an interesting layer.

Purchasing a Rafael Rozendaal piece entails purchasing the domain name as well as the art associated with it, and the website must remain visible to the public (the collector’s name is placed in the Title bar).

A photo of Fauxreel's controversial Vespa Squareheads series (photo via Unurth)

For a while now, people often cite Dan Bergeron, aka Fauxreel, as an example of a street art sell-out. Why? Because back in 2008 he partnered up with Vespa to post 324 seven-foot-tall Vespa Squareheads wheatpaste ads on the streets of Toronto and other Canadian cities as part of an ad campaign that combined his characteristic “photograffiti” style with a very commercial addition ― Vespa scooter handles.

The AntiAdvertising Agency blog characterized the project this way:

It’s a modern classic tale: corporate gas-guzzling motor vehicle manufacturer wants to up the street cred with some ads by a jen-yoo-wine member of the underground, who enjoys to eat of the food, and voila—instant edginess. Marketing gold!

Jonathan Goldsbie of the Toronto Public Space Committee said:

It’s pathetic. It’s anti-democratic. They [Vespa] believe that public space is just a blank canvas for a sales pitch.

It wasn’t just bloggers who had a problem. Some wondered if the action provoked a backlash among members of the public who started to scrawl messages on Fauxreel’s less commercial street work.

This week, Sebastian Buck of Unurth published a very fascinating interview with Fauxreel, who is obviously an intelligent artist with a lot to say. Buck asks about the controversial series and receives this provocative response … I reproduced the whole answer since it feels like a complete thought:

I definitely think artists can work commercially and with a conscience, however, I think that if you are going to do this you should be aware of the differing motivations and you should try to make the commercial project provoking to the public in some respect. Because I like blurring the lines and playing with the public’s perceptions in some of the work I create, I immediately realized that the difficulties surrounding an illegal street campaign completed by a commercial interest would be a perfect fit for me. So I approached the Vespa Squarehead project with the goal of raising questions about the role of advertising in public space, examining the grey area between street art, graffiti and advertising and attempting to make connections between products and people’s identities. If I can complete a series of work that will pose and examine these types of questions and it will allow me to make some money at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with that in my opinion.

Will working on a project like that endear you to the public? Probably not, and for me that’s okay. I think the notion a great deal of the public holds, is that street artists should all fall under the same political leftist umbrella and they should all be anti-capitalism. This is certainly untrue (think about Banksy or Shepard Fairey as businessmen and Princess Hijab as a right wing street artist) and it would be boring if it were. Although the simple act of placing up illegal artwork can be said to have political connotations, if the work in question is a stencil of Talib Kweli or a paste up of fried chicken, the work is then purely aesthetically based and not political at all.

In terms of drawing a line between street art and street advertising and deciding what distinguishes the two, I am not the one to be judging that. I am far more interested in the overlapping areas in between and engaging with audiences who appreciate work that challenges the political status quo associated with street art, or art in general, as well as talking to fellow artists who understand these nuances and who utilize them within their work and their approach to developing their practice and essentially their brand.

I admit to being intrigued by Fauxreel’s framing of the debate. He seems to understand that the nature of street art ― and I’m not talking about graffiti ― has changed from its once revolutionary origins as a voice of the dispossessed. But what I don’t understand, and perhaps many street artists and street art critics are trying to understand (myself included), is what is the street artist’s claim to public space if it isn’t for raising public consciousness or communicating an individual voice to a larger audience? Why would a street artist think they can profit off of public space so directly and still retain the respect of the community? Are they mimicking the corporate world’s continuous land grab for public space?

People like Jordan Seiler at Public Ad Campaign have long been critical of illegal ads and their encrotchment on our lives, so how does this hybrid form of advertising fit in?

The only major advantage for artists, other than the monetary aspect, is that artists caught putting up these hybrid works may potentially be charged as illegal advertisers rather than artistic vandals. The penalties for the former are far less than the latter.

A vandal thinks Fauxreel is a sell-out vandal (via Illegalsigns.ca)

There is a fear in this hybridization and where it could lead. Two years ago, Posterchild, an anti-ad activist in Toronto, had this to say about Fauxreel’s hybrids:

If street art becomes associated with guerrilla advertising, we will lose a lot of support. One of the few things that street art has going for it is that people see it as something of a “Voice for the Voiceless.” This generates some sympathy. That sympathy will disappear when the perpetrator is thought to be aggressive companies pushing even further into our lives. Also, I worry that the end result will be closing/licensing of even more of our public spaces. Shutting out street artists.

The whole interview on Unurth is well worth a read.

Paddy Johnson wins the day!

Paddy's web juice put her over the top. Which goes to prove, don't fuck with an art fag.

After hundreds of votes and dozens of comments on the post, on Twitter & on Facebook, we are happy to announce that Paddy Johnson has been declared the official winner of the first ever Worst. Press. Release. Ever. competition. The press release for Olivier Zahm’s exhibition at New York’s Half Gallery is officially the worst press release.

The art blogosphere’s favorite art fag has crossed the finish line victorious with a whopping 72.3% of votes. Congratulations, Paddy! Today is your day in the sun and drinks are on us tonight!

We asked Paddy Johnson for comment on her victory and she replied, “I feel great. I think this is the art world taking a stand against Oliver Zahm.”

Lyra Kilston was unavailable for comment and did not return our calls.

Today, we announce that our quest to find the worst piece of art PR in the universe has become a contest decided by our loyal readers and fellow netizens. For the first ever Worst.Press.Release.Ever. match up we’ve called on two friends of Hyperallergic to battle it out in a contest that will bestow on the winner bragging rights for eternity.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce the luscious Lyra Kilston, who is no stranger to Hyperallergic fans, and the ambrosial Paddy Johnson, aka Art Fag City, to rumble it out in a contest decided by your votes as to which is the WORST.PRESS.RELEASE.EVER!?!?

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Lyra Kilston calling someone who cares ... her mother?

CONTENDER #1: Lyra Kilston

I chose this based on the extremely poor quality of the writing. It reads like it’s been fed through Babelfish, but I received it through an “international” source that should, one would hope, employ a proofreader for such things. But I guess not. My major problem with this is that you have to read each sentence about three times to understand what it’s aiming for — and even then it’s unclear. I also dislike statements that say things like how an artist’s work “confronts us with the reality of the banality that surrounds us.” I mean, how stupid are we that we need a bird sculpture to tell us that? Banality we can glean from a quick trip to the nearest Applebees. [Bold & colored text mine.]

*   *   *

Peter Rogiers, "The Governess" (2009-2010)

Peter Rogier is toiling through the matter with synthetic resin and cast aluminum attempting to generate an oblique and “different” imagery out of sync with what we recognize in “our” world. Therein lies the core and essence of real artistic production – the desire to mould into a plastic shape undermining visual recognition and shunt man onto the track of imagination. Peter Rogier recently created new so-called “bird sculptures” where the bird is barely an echo of the verbal reference and has become the alibi to freely conjure with abstract forms visually varying according to the place and viewpoint of perception.

The new ‘colourless’ sculptures with an elegant silhouette withstanding the resemblance of a bird transform and “peel” within the sculpture to an abstract skin reminiscent even of the perforated canvas of Enrico Castellani; the Italian artist who in the wake of the zero movement attempted to escape the obligation of formal categories and labels.

The new white “bird sculptures” are less “attractive” than the recent white palm trees: the “birds” are crippled deformities leaning towards Jeroen Bosch where the beauty is hiding in a bolster of artistic recalcitrance. Not the reference is the criterion but rather the full and expansively creative composition of an image not “inspired” by gratuitous feelings, corny moaning or transparent mimesis.

Peter Rogier is and remains one of those sculptors who averse from all personal interests is stuck with his art in brave stubbornness to (certainly) not give into creating any form of languid art whatsoever. In other words, art which does not brighten up but cheers up through the adventure in the form through which Rogier pleases and confronts us with the reality of the banality surrounding us.

His new drawings can further be considered catching thought-moulds where worlds tilt and imagination chases off the grimy reality.

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Paddy Johnson thinks she’s a superhero

CONTENDER #2: Paddy Johnson

Olivier Zahm’s absurd claim that amateur porn cannot be found via Google did not appear in the press release for his solo show at Half Gallery this December. It also didn’t mention his predilection for wearing prescription sunglasses indoors, or his life as a socialite, (though it does hint that the dude might be a bit of a dog). Zahm’s show text earns my recommendation in Hyperallergic’s Worst. Press. Release. Ever. challenge not just for its indecipherable art speak –indeed this release is best characterized by its failed attempt to employ it — but for its utter vanity and vapidity. If there’s a part of the art world out there grosser than this, I don’t know what it is.

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Olivier Zahm’s exhibition at Half Gallery, NYC

A few of Olivier Zahm’s photo show at Half Gallery.

…Spending his time between New York and Paris, the man behind Purple Fashion magazine has published, in [his blog] Purple Diary, pictures that read like a guide to some of his favourite places: the Montana, the brasserie Lipp, and the Café de Flore in Paris, Standard hotel and the Omen restaurant, among many others, in NYC^[1]. His diary develops an imagery [sic] which transcends the original magazine. Thanks to the new digital support, Zahm’s life is now the very material of this new medium^[2]. In this sense, his site is like some sort of^[3] immaterial^[4] ID card of the artist as it chronologically reveals what he is producing and with who, as well as the creative process at work^[5]. Through the representation of a specific microsom [sic] and its codes, he paints a dense social fresco^[6], a fictional document^[7] appropriate to the end of the 00s^[8]. Always navigating between private sphere and public sphere^[9] he’s purposely getting us lost through a maze of multiple indications^[10] that only reveal the surface elegant and opaque^[11]. It all leads to his obessional [sic] paths: bodies of naked and tantalizing women^[12], socialite life^[13], architecture and contemporary still lifes [sic]^[14]. An autofictional picture^[15] as a matter of fact^[16], disclosing [sic] a form of romanticism and mania that show as much in his luxurious approach to aesthetics^[17] as in his view on intimacy^[18].

1. So many places to list, endless space to do it in!
2. In other words Zahm uses a camera to take pictures of his friends, and then posts them on the internet!
3. some sort of = not sure what I’m describing
4. immaterial = web based
5. Long story short, Zahm has a personal blog…
6. Ooooh, old mediums in new forms!
7. posing as a personal diary or immaterial artist ID card
8. and the dot com boom
9. Wait, the Internet is a public space?
10. Indications of what?
11. Zahm is a beautiful enigma!
12. Soft-core pornography
13. classism
14. naked women
15. Not a real word, but if it were it would contradict the release’s earlier description of the work as documentary-style self-portrait
16. The whole project is a ruse charading as a documentary
17. And class
18. aka quest for tail

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So, which is the Worst.Press.Release.Ever?
(Vote until 1 pm EST on Friday, when we will announce the winner.)

One of the most important social, political, and artistic concerns facing us today is the question of access: our ability to share media, our ability to take ownership of or simply to view films, music, and other forms of art. In the past, non-digital and only finitely reproducible media created a certain type of economic exchange and ownership which has long been upended by file sharing. Every day millions of people download and stream films on the Internet in an alternative form of exchange more related to cultural capital than economic capital. This is a political action accomplished as easily as downloading the flat version of Avatar.

Sherrie Levine, "Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp)" (1991)

There is a storied history of artists, particularly those associated with their own contemporary avant garde, supporting liberal viewpoints about access to and use of media. This carries a range of meanings based in the history of the time, including support of public education or public libraries and openly appropriating copyrighted material (Guy Debord, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine). The dialogue surrounding illegal downloading is no different: based on the principle that the free availability and use of material can only stand to benefit society, breakdown class division, and (hopefully) establish a practice that will become a norm for a late capitalist society. Currently we have many labels for these ubiquitous activities: piracy, filesharing, and copyright infringement.

As we have entered the age of ubiquitous digital information it is incredibly important that these issues and the active debates surrounding them are thoroughly understood. Over the next several years the ways that governments, corporations, and individuals chose to deal with intellectual property enforcement may radically shape the way we interface with our own culture in the future. Some of these decisions are happening right before our eyes — this past year a major court case ordered the closure of “The Pirate Bay” (though true to form the site soldiers on defiant), France adopted its HADOPI 2 three strikes bill into law (and recently unveiled an ironically copyright-infringing logo), and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international treaty between 36 major countries (including the entire European Union) has yet to be publicly unveiled but may require Internet service providers (ISPs) to sever an entire household’s Internet connection based on suspicion of piracy. Drafts of ACTA have also included clauses making the search of laptops and iPods at customs or border crossings a possibility.

As individuals it is important that we engage with these issues, but for artists it is imperative. Appropriation and source material have been important artistic tools throughout history but with new developments it is already becoming more and more difficult to defend basic rights like Fair Use — YouTube bots, for instance, have scanned and removed many pieces of video art which included snippets from songs copyrighted by major corporations, completely disregarding the songs’ context and the possibility that they may constitute Fair Use. One of my favorite examples is Obloy Syndrome’s “Sprince (Dog Divengrin),” which has been re-uploaded and removed from YouTube several times over the last two years (here). Thankfully the piece now has a home on Megavideo.

Artists have been dealing with the copyright debate admirably for many years, but there are a few whose recent projects stand out.

AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE

In December of 2008 two graduate students at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Timo Klok and Tobias Leingruber, caused a stir by releasing a Firefox extension called “Pirates of the Amazon” (2008). The extension was simple, it added a link to Amazon.com product pages that read “Download 4 Free” and would automatically redirect your web browser to “The Pirate Bay” and search for the item you were browsing.

Timo Klok and Tobias Leingruber, "Pirates of the Amazon" (2008)

The two free culture radicals were served a take-down notice by Amazon on December 3, 2008, just one day after they had uploaded the extension.

In a statement to the New York Times two days later, they wrote that [Amazon and "The Pirate Bay"] might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide … Our project demonstrated this practically. So it’s a parody of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or subcultural.” The project was lauded by many as a great example of social activism through art, though some weren’t so pleased, posting for instance: “Great, just make it apparent you are stealing stuff.” The statement (as well as the official documentation page) issued by the two artists is apt in its self-description as “parody,” actively inverting the types of ads that show up on torrent trackers for paid content sites.

“Pirates of the Amazon” is in no way alone in its approach to copyright issues by way of highlighting absurdity or revealing mystic truths. The work of Evan Roth is also engaged directly in this divide, somewhere between boyish prank, conceptual art, and anti-capitalist activism.

Evan Roth, "Available Online for Free" (2008)

A recent retrospective of Roth’s work at Advanced Minority gallery in Vienna dubbed Available Online for Free, in fact, made a profoundly similar statement about commercial distribution systems to that of “Pirates of the Amazon.” In conjunction with the exhibition, Roth printed rolls of red stickers with the words “Available Online for Free” and went around city stores placing them on software, movies, and music packaging.

More recently, Roth has begun a piece called “Intellectual Property Asshole Competition,” which pokes fun at the recent copyright controversy between the Associated Press and artist Shepard Fairey. Roth has taken the two images from the copyright dispute — an AP photograph of U.S. President Barack Obama and the iconic “HOPE” image created by Fairey after the photograph, respectively — and created out of each an edition of nine hand-crafted replica paintings, each of which are on sale on his website for $600. How does it become a competition? The first entity to sue Roth over the paintings wins. My money’s on Fairey.

While we wait for the results of Roth’s competition, you can help the cause by becoming an Intellectual Property Donor:

Evan Roth, "Public Domain Donor" (2008)