With a Mark Rothko painting selling for nearly $87 million at Sotheby’s in addition to record prices for artists from Edvard Munch to Roy Lichtenstein, it seems pretty strange to see a variety of art and business writers are predicting the end of the art market boom.
Emily Colucci
Emily Colucci is a recently graduated NYU interdisciplinary Master's student with a focus on art history and gender/sexuality studies. Her interests lie in graffiti, street art and New York-based art from the 1970's and 1980's.
Posted inNews
Artists Remember Stay High 149, Graffiti Innovator and Artist
Known as a pioneering figure in graffiti writing with his memorable “Smoker” tag, a haloed stick figure cartoon, taken from 1960s TV show “The Saint,” smoking a joint, Wayne Roberts, or Stay High 149, passed away on Monday.
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Vincent Gallo Stands Up the Whitney Biennial
Like a sad, jilted date, this year’s recently closed Whitney Biennial was left without director, actor, musician and all-around creepster Vincent Gallo’s promised film, entitled ironically Promises Written in Water. And apparently, Gallo didn’t even call.
Posted inArt
Gay Sex, Art and Nostalgia on the New York Waterfront
While at The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, one question kept popping up in my mind: What is with this obsessive nostalgia for the decaying, destroyed and often depressing New York of the past, particularly as connected to the emerging gay subculture and downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s?
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Take Two Monets and Call Me in the Morning
I’ve gone many random places for art, but I never thought I would end up surrounded by lab-coat-wearing doctors and other medical professionals in a lecture hall at the Queens Hospital Center listening to Russian expat artist Alexander Melamid speak about the benefits of art healing.
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ACT UP Returns to Wall Street With Occupy and Others on April 25
On April 25th, and in honor of its 25th anniversary, AIDS activist group ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), joined by organizations ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Visual AIDS to Housingworks as well as other AIDS activist and queer organizations, will be staging a large scale demonstration on Wall Street reminiscent of its original Wall Street protests of the late 1980s.
Posted inArt
The Best Show At MoMA Is Not What You Think
With the hype surrounding the Cindy Sherman blockbuster retrospective on the 6th floor, which critics have almost unanimously praised, I was surprised to find that the most invigorating, exciting and generally mind-blowing exhibition at MoMA right now is Exquisite Corpses.
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Searching For An Explanation at the Moving Image and Independent Fairs
After attending both the Moving Image Fair at the Waterfront Tunnel and the Independent in the old Dia:Chelsea building, I realized that art fairs and the art contained within them are suffering from the same problem as many recent exhibitions in major museums: It’s nearly impossible to appreciate the art by itself without a detailed explanation of the artist’s background and motivations.
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What Happened to Charles Atlas?
Wading my way through an opening crowd consisting of a bizarre combination of bearded and flanneled Bushwick hipsters, New York Times critic Roberta Smith and MoMA PS1 curator Klaus Biesenbach at Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine’s new Bushwick location, I was shocked to discover a cold screensaver-esque video installation by filmmaker Charles Atlas, leaving me with some serious questions about the progress and demands on queer art.
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Is Art Enough? Gran Fury in Perspective
Walking through galleries filled with reproductions of posters, flyers, takeaways and other ephemera rather than torn and yellowed scraps of archival materials, I spoke with Gran Fury member and artist Marlene McCarty and 80 Washington Square East Gallery assistant director and curator Michael Cohen, who gave me an illuminating walk-through of the exhibition and answered my questions from the history of Gran Fury to its connection with subsequent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street to the importance of archiving the history of AIDS activism and AIDS losses.
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Is Punk, DIY Art in NYC Going Down With The Building?
Sitting in a cold performance space in the gritty, graffiti-ed punk art institution, ABC No Rio, for possibly the final time before the building is demolished for renovations in March, watching the last Michael Alan’s Living Installation performance, I became profoundly worried that I was witnessing the last gasps of a long history of free-wheeling, punk, D-I-Y art.
Posted inOpinion
Damien Hirst’s Power to Piss People Off
Like most art writers and enthusiasts, I rolled my eyes when I first heard about Damien Hirst’s spotted global Gagosian invasion. Then I started thinking maybe the artist’s real artistic strength comes from his unquestionable power to piss people off.
