According to Eric Doeringer, the artist-curator of I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me, the exhibition’s title—a nod to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me”—is meant to convey the “fraught relationship between emerging artists and the art-world establishment,” one marked by a simultaneous desire to criticize the art world’s excesses and to be recognized by it. Art about the institutions of art, both physical and discursive, is hardly a new phenomenon, but unlike Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, cited by Doeringer as predecessors for the work included in this exhibition, what emerges most clearly here is not “institutional critique” but a sense of anxiety or anger about the artists’ own marginalization and lack of mainstream success.
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Scott Kiernan’s Faux Nineties Xeroxes
Scott Kiernan’s canvases want to be underestimated. Their initial impression is bland, but the longer one gazes at these pictures, the weirder and more fascinating they become. At his NURTUREart exhibition Once around the block (twice), Kiernan’s art reveals itself more slowly, doesn’t care if you overlook it, and eventually impresses you by contradicting its first impression.
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Mark Lombardi’s Information Art
A solo exhibition of works by Mark Lombardi at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, feels very timely. Maybe I’m into the paranoia-inducing conspiracy charts because New York’s just-ended art fair week, our own glimpse into the vastness of the international art world, reminded me that there are whole webs of infinite complex connections to the worlds and communities we inhabit. Lombardi’s intricate, highly-researched drawings are clear presentations of information that forces us to rethink how we see ourselves in relation to our political atmosphere.
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Support a New York History of Street Art & Graffiti!
There are only four days left to support a very unique street art project that will create a multi-faceted street art exhibition at the former Donnell Library on 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan, which is across the street from MoMA.
In an era where street art and graffiti is becoming increasingly scarce in Manhattan, this project, PANTHEON: A history of art from the streets of New York City, will explore the heritage of street art and graffiti across the street from the high temple of Modern art.
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In Defense of Art Fairs
Walking around the two-pier behemoth that is today’s Armory Show, it’s hard to imagine that this was once a scrappy upstart hotel fair. Over the course of the week, I heard various people speak nostalgically about what the Armory had been like in its early years, as if it had been some prelapsarian moment before the art world discovered capitalism. However, in a 1995 Frieze magazine survey, co-founder Pat Hearn stated bluntly that “the art fair is simply an effort to move the product in whatever way possible.”
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WTF is… the Secondary Market?
Throughout the course of NYC’s art fair week, I overheard questions over what art work was being sold, and who it was being sold to. Of course, art fairs exist to sell work, and the work on display is there to be sold. But where do these works come from? This is where the secondary market comes in. Though most galleries simply sell work from the studios of the artists they represent, the secondary market deals in works that have already been sold, at least once. Fairs like the Armory’s Modern section focus heavily on secondary market works, as do auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
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Emerging Collectors at 4 NY Art Fairs
For the past three days, we traveled to four New York art fairs to find out who are the people that attend, if they buy art and how do they judge art. The special series, Emerging Collectors at the Fairs, was sponsored by 20×200 and was comprised of a random sampling of attendees to each venue.
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Who Goes to NY Art Fairs? Emerging Collectors at Scope
The fourth and final in a special series sponsored by 20×200 that profiles some of the people who are attending the New York art fairs this week. The following is a random sampling of attendees at the 2011 Scope art fair on Saturday night. Here is who and what I found on a Saturday night in SoHo.
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The Fountain Art Fair Alternative
The Fountain Art Fair was parked at Pier 66 in Chelsea, floating on the water as if at any moment it could set sail for an undisclosed location. The odd cousin in the family of New York art fair week, Fountain is a quirk DIY vision of what’s happening in contemporary art today.
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Who Goes to NY Art Fairs? Emerging Collectors at The Independent
The third in a special series sponsored by 20×200 that profiles some of the people who are attending the New York art fairs this week. The following is a random sampling of attendees at the 2011 The Independent art fair on Friday night. Here is who and what I found on a Friday night in Chelsea.
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Paying Attention at Moving Image 2011
The first thing that I noticed about Moving Image, an art fair based entirely around video works, was the relative calm. Gone were the crowds, gone were the collectors running rabidly from booth to booth, gone were the chatty gallerists and curators. Moving Image is a place to look at art and experience it one on one. It takes some time, but walking through the videos I definitely caught a few stand out pieces that would have been overwhelmed in an regular art fair display.
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Who Goes to NY Art Fairs? Emerging Collectors at The Dependent
The second in a special series sponsored by 20×200 that profiles some of the people who are attending the New York art fairs this week. The following is a random sampling of attendees at the 2011 The Dependent art fair on Friday night. Here is who and what I found on a Thursday afternoon in Chelsea.