Chelsea Snapshots

Going up across from Gagosian--"sixteen limited-edition riverfront homes with en-suite sky garages." Every New Yorker's fantasy is to have their car on the same floor as their apartment. "Limited edition"--genius marketing in an art district. (Email from MA: "I take it this means that each 'home' has an elevator into which the home-owner drives his car? And the elevator then carries said car and owner to their home with 'en-suite garage'? Or do they just lift the car up with a crane, stick it into the garage, and then wall the hole over so the owner can come and admire his or her car when he or she feels like it without any thought for driving it anywhere? In either case, this strikes me as being one of the most extreme examples of conspicuous consumption in my experience.")

sky garages

Below, a nice piece by Pier Paolo Calzolari, from 1971, at Luhring Augustine, in a museum quality group show of Italian conceptual/povera art from the '60s through the '80s: Pistoletto, Merz, Boetti, etc. This sculpture has a refrigeration unit keeping half the piece frozen (with no dripping)--I like the way the metal supporting the neon words droops on the right like limp fabric.

Update: The blog VVork presents recycled versions of work that looks like this. A VVork artist, though, would have the neon "art adjectives" spell out some world-saving political message, or wouldn't have the subtle touch of the limp metal, which serves no purpose with regard to saving the world through art. Almost always the work of this nature from 30-40 years ago is better, tougher, and stranger than the nth completely unconscious iteration of it.

calzolari

"Sidbeats"

"SidBeats" [mp3 removed]

Straight-up rhythm track done with the kit I made sampling percussion sounds from the Sidstation synth. This is basically a demo; I tried to use all of the samples. The hissing artifacts are noises made by the Sid chip. You have to pay money to get that dirty sound now.

Christian Viveros-Faune

...worked as a critic for the New York Press in the late '90s/early '00s while co-running Roebling Hall gallery.

Was hired as a critic by Village Voice, then unhired in 2008 because he was also working as a director for two art fairs.

The difference between then and now was there were no bloggers looking over the magazine's shoulder and complaining 8 years ago.

Whether CVF has a "conflict" depends on how seriously you take the money side of art*, or value the "one way" nature of traditional mainstream media.

Tyler Green, the blogger who brought CVF low, is really into both.

If CVF was a blogger with comments enabled his "conflict" would matter less because his biases could be called out and discussed.

Up till now art criticism has been like blogging--people looked the other way about "conflicts" because there are so few talented writers and criticism doesn't pay a living wage except to a few staffers of dailies.

I guess art is mature now.

Disclosure: In the New York Press Viveros-Faune wrote supportively about my work and a show I co-curated when the Voice and other publications failed to bite. I certainly didn't begrudge him his "conflict" at that time.

*Years ago, shortly after I moved here, I attended a panel discussion of New York art writers at Matthew Marks gallery. Afterwards I asked an Art in America writer on the panel, who I knew, why they kept the topics to vague generalities and didn't mention any artists by name. "Oh, we can't do that," she said. "Why?" I said. "Because if we do that collectors will run out and buy those artists." I pretty much stopped going to panels after that.