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New Energy Among Art Handlers As They Continue to Fight Sotheby’s Lock Out

Hurricane Irene may be fast approaching, but there was another type of storm in full force yesterday in front of the Sotheby’s auction house on 72nd and York Avenue in Manhattan. Art handlers of the Teamsters Local 814 union, who were locked out of their jobs at Sotheby’s earlier this month,doubled their efforts to make their anger heard. Hundreds of workers and supporters took over the usually staid streets of the Upper East Side in front of the Sotheby’s offices, shouting for union rights.

Posted inArt

An Adventure at Best, An Art Project At Worst

Biking down the boardwalk in the Rockaways, Queens, I glanced behind me at the storm clouds approaching fast. Thunder ripped loudly, and lightning began to flash with increasing regularity. My friend and I had been riding for 15 miles already. We were on our way to Boggsville Boatel and Boat-In Theater, part of art collective Flux Factory’s summer-long extravaganza, Sea Worthy. The show features artists making work “about, around and on the waterways of New York City,” and includes water excursions, processions and boat-building workshops.

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Why So Serious? A Marriage of Theory and Commerce

So, I have to be honest, I don’t know if I am totally sold on the whole group show thing. It makes sense within the scope of the art center, alternative space or museum, but I sometimes question its benefits in the commercial art world. I think the point of the theoretical, thematic or art historical exhibition, should ideally, be just that, an end into itself. What I am suspicious of are the sorts of “group show” exhibitions that serve as a thinly veiled gathering of gallery stable artists.

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The Plastic Bag as Artistic Muse

In Patrick Griffin’s recent exhibition at The Journal Gallery in Williamsburg, Common Courtesy, he focused on an unusual subject matter: the plastic bag. If you live in a major city then you are more than familiar with these little guys; they accumulate under your sink, get stuck in that storm drain you always walk by on your way to work and blow urban tumbleweeds across the street at all hours of the day and night. Though the artist’s focus is playful and somewhat off kilter, his approach to this body of work seems almost scientific. Griffin collected, catalogued and scanned an army of plastic bags into the computer. Using this databank as his starting point, the artist made paintings directly from the two dimensional planes of these photographs.