My latest thoughts on the evolving discussion about the use of social media in art and where it should (in my opinion) go.
William Powhida
Posted inOpinion
An Artist Ponders What’s Wrong & Right With Art World
Ever wonder what’s right and wrong with the art world? William Powhida has some ideas. I thought it would be nice to post the stuff that’s “right,” but it’s fun to read what he thinks is “wrong.”
Posted inArt
Wandering Through Bushwick Open Studios
Never have I been so happy to see a portrait of Betty White. After three trains and two shuttles, and a few failed attempts to get a taxi, I was finally in Bushwick for the 2011 Open Studios.
Posted inArt
Dark and Stormy at Storefront Gallery
Dunkle Wolke is a show at Storefront Gallery in Bushwick curated by William Powhida, our favorite art world curmudgeon. The title translates to “dark cloud,” a perfect match for the small exhibition’s mood, a mixture of bookish depression, modernist angst and goth vibes.
Posted inArt
Back to the Future, the Williamsburg that Waz
After watching Bushwick’s visual arts scene grow and usurp the energy of Williamsburg’s two decades of dominance as the epicenter of the city’s artistic edge, curator Larry Walczak decided it was time to put together an exhibition that investigates the neighborhood’s recent art heritage. The show, Williamsburg2000, opened on March 12 and includes 68 artists. Taking place at the small artist-run indy space Art101 on Grand Street, the exhibition focuses mostly on Williamsburg’s “second wave” that began in 1998 and continued until 2002, coincidentally its the same time period that Walczak ran the Eyewash gallery space with the late Annie Herron.
Posted inOpinion
William Powhida Opines About New York Art Critics
For tonight’s Triangle Arts Association benefit at Beacon restaurant in midtown Manhattan, artist William Powhida submitted this wry drawing of his thoughts about some of the city’s art critics.
Posted inArt
Critics Discuss 6 Important Artists at Triangle Benefit, Mon March 21
On Monday, March 21, Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian will join renowned critic and curator Karen Wilkin for a lively conversation about the work of six important artists — Susanna Heller, Ted Partin, William Powhida, Sean Scully, Robert Taplin and Summer Wheat.
The event is a fundraiser for the Triangle Arts Association, which is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support emerging and mid-career international and national visual artists, encouraging dialogue and experimentation through workshops, residencies and exhibition opportunities.
You can RSVP on Facebook and BUY TICKETS HERE.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading [UPDATED]
This week on Required Reading … responses by William Powhida and Tom Moody to two Hyperallergic posts, poet Elizabeth Bishop’s other art, John Ashbery on R. B. Kitaj, a conservative’s opinion on street art, contemporary art as Mannerism and megalomaniac Zahi Hawass interviews himself …
Posted inArt
A Populist Attack on the Art World Pulls Punches
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.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week on Required Reading … William Powhida has devised a new power axis of art world affirmation … New York Observer explains the thing called the “professional collector” … at Idiom they ask an important question “Can an art experience be authentic even if the status of the work of art remains questionable?” … the NEA leaders gives signs that there will be cutting in the arts … Phong Bui chats with Joe Bradley … some mediations on Black History on Art:21 … and Iceland is digitizing ALL its literature …
Posted inNews
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.
Posted inArt
Angry Art Letters on the Lower East Side
Ridykeulous, founded by artists Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner in 2005, describes itself as an effort to “subvert, sabotage, and overturn the language commonly used to define feminist and lesbian art,” primarily through exhibitions, performances, and zines. Attacking the marginalization of queer and feminist art as “alternative” cultures, they insist upon participating in mainstream dialogues about art and culture; in adopting the role of curators and organizing exhibitions, Steiner and Eisenman forcefully insert themselves and their collaborators into the spaces, both literally and figuratively, of the art establishment. Though not all of the artists in Readykeulous are female, nor do all identify as queer, they share an interest in disrupting the status quo.
