When the Verge art fair launched Verge Brooklyn, many Brooklyn galleries were peeved that the DUMBO-based event would take away from local galleries scenes. Why would they have to pay to be in an art fair in their own borough when Armory week was the only time they could get out of town collectors to their spaces? Even if the Verge Brooklyn fair began with a bumpy start it was able pull of something no one has tried before, an art fair in Brooklyn
Loren Munk
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What is Art-xploitation?
Wayne Coe creates complicated sand paintings on the sidewalks and floors of New York using the language of gay male porn theater advertising from the 1970s and 1980s to create ads for contemporary artists. I caught up with the artist, who was performing for six hours yesterday as part of Brooklyn Art Now in DUMBO , to ask him about “art-xploitation,” which he says is “the use of male film hyperbole to sell art.”
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Are Plutocrats Collecting Art or Collecting Artists?
Felix Salmon just posted an incandescent piece on the State of the Art World seen through the lens of Davos. At a meeting of plutocrats and artists, Salmon sees collectors buying art not for its aesthetic quality but for its aura: the respect and awe that comes with owning something really expensive.
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Being Telepresent
For #TheSocialGraph, I proposed a look at the next step in social media — telepresence, which, in its simplest form is a large-scale video chat meant to mimic the presence of someone in the room, and at its most complex can take the form of a roving, camera-enabled robot.
Since almost as early as the invention of the telephone, human beings have imagined the possibilities of video communication. How amazing would it be to see each other over the phone? That technology now exists, as cameras become embedded in our computers and our smart phones. But even Apple has had trouble pushing it past niche uses. Video chat, for most people, is just too weird.
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Loren Munk Talks Social Network Paintings & James Kalm Report
Last Saturday, #TheSocialGraph was honored to host the first-ever retrospective of Loren Munk’s popular online video channel, the James Kalm Report.
Started as a conceptual performance of sorts, Munk and his alterego, James Kalm, have over the course of four and a half years garnered a cult following in the art world (particularly outside New York). The painter turned video artist has demonstrated his savvy in the world of social media and fit in perfectly to the types of conversations we are attempting to have in the social media art show.
To honor Munk, I asked another art visionary Austin Thomas to curate a selection of video since I knew she shared the same respect and passion for Munk’s project as I did. And this is what she had to say in person (and on her blog) about the short videos she chose:
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Get Ready for #TheSocialGraph
In two weeks, #TheSocialGraph will open at Outpost in Bushwick, Brooklyn and we’re incredibly excited. What is #TheSocialGraph? It is an evolving exploration of the burgeoning field of social media art and the relation of contemporary art with this populist tool as a medium, facilitator, and subject for art.
I am the curator of the project and I’ve pulled together a number of interesting artists, writers, social media mavens, and others to share ideas and explore possibilities presented by the intersection of visual art and social media. Some of the art in #TheSocialGraph will be about social media, some will use social media as an integral component of the finished project, and some will be more of an experiment so we’re not exactly sure what to call it.
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Guggenheim’s “Play: A Biennial of Creative Video” Wows
Last night, Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum was transformed into a futuristic new media award’s show venue as the finalists of the first Play: A Biennial of Creative Video biennial were announced to a crowd of Google, Intel, HP, Guggenheim employees (all sponsors of the event), artists, and new media types who were wow’d by the large projections on the interior and exterior of the Fifth Avenue landmark.
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright could’ve never predicted that his building would serve as an ideal screen for a 21st Century online video awards show but it was the ideal venue for the whirlwind of projections that provided the backdrop for a livestreamed event prepared by the online video giant, YouTube.