general

More detail on the BYOB NY show tomorrow night at Spencer Brownstone gallery (from the announcement page):

Friday, November 12, 2010, 6-10 PM
Spencer Brownstone Gallery,
39 Wooster St, New York City.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

AGNES BOLT, ARTIE VIERKANT, BILLY RENNEKAMP, BRITTA THIE, BRIAN CLOSE, CALLA HENKEL & MAX PITEGOFF, CHARLES BROSKOSKI, DAMON ZUCCONI, DUNCAN MALASHOCK, DANIEL CHEW, DENA YAGO, HAYLEY SILVERMAN, JEREMY BAILEY, JESSE ENGLAND, JOEL HOLMBERG, JOHN MICHAEL BOLING, JOYCE JORDAN, KARI ALTMANN, KRIST WOOD, MAI UEDA, MARLOUS BORM, MICHELLE CEJA, MIKE RUIZ, RENE ABYTHE, RILEY HARMON, RYDER RIPPS, SARAH WEIS & ARTURO CUBACUB, TOM MOODY, TRAVESS SMALLEY, TRAVIS HALLENBECK, WOJCIECH KOSMA.

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present the New York edition of BYOB, a one-night-exhibition exploring the medium of projection. 25 artists are invited to bring their own projectors to create a collaborative happening of moving light, sound and performance.

An acronym for Bring Your Own Beamer, the evening will propose a glimpse of computing in the future. Today the internet is confined to screens. Tomorrow information will surround us, composing our surfaces, defining our spaces, enmeshing itself with the ether. No longer simply part-and-parcel of everyday life, it will become a medium in which the everyday exists.

Featuring a generation of artists that grew up behind the screen, BYOB will have an open and dynamic structure that not only allows for spontaneity and experimentation, but also places questions concerning the formalism and engagement of the exhibition directly in the hands in the artists. A moving image is never an object, and when it is coupled with the increased flexibility of portable projection, the realm of experience quickly expands. The individual works will often overlap and sometimes even merge, producing a total environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, this loose, free form format will mirror the chaos of the internet. Gallery visitors will stroll in a forest of browser windows much in the same way one browses sites on the web.

Curated by Rafaël Rozendaal

BYOB exhibitions were done previously in Athens and Berlin. A YouTube of the Berlin incarnation gives a foretaste of Friday's show.

Simon Reynolds has spotted a Gang of Four song ("Natural's Not In It") used in an X-Box commercial. It's just the guitar intro--they had to cut away from lyrics that say:

The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love, a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
Remember Lot's wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the perfect life
This heaven gives me migraine
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure

...which seems especially relevant for a Wii type game ("a new purchase - the body is good business"). The advertisement transposes the gritty lower class "punk" milieu of Gang of Four to nicely dressed people spazzing out in upscale suburban living rooms as they run in place and kick virtual soccer balls. You really have to admire the high-paid advertising "Mad Man" who came up with the line "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." This person probably has, like, an English major.

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz:

Given all of the information that has leaked out about private info on Facebook well, leaking out, I decided to get aggressive with the settings:

I removed all applications that accessed my data;

I turned almost every privacy setting to maximum;

I deleted nearly all page, group, game, and application requests

This was overdue. Maybe I am being paranoid, but Facebook is starting to get a bit creepy . . .

This inspired some comments, mostly from people bugged by Facebook ("Facebook is STARTING to get a bit creepy?").This comment from "spridgets" is unfortunate if it's typical:

As much as I agree with you that the privacy fails are a problem, I’ve found that Facebook is become much like a RSS feed, and there are several media outlets and bloggers that post their updates there, without which I would be checking their sites far less often.

I shouldn't care about someone who uses "fail" as a noun but suspect spridgets is the typical lazy person who trusts ZuckerBorg to aggregate his/her news and won't go looking for it outside of that comforting gated news community. This is why a good, independent (non-Apple, non-Facebook) newsreader would be nice to have. Bloglines appears to be continuing but no idea what will happen to it when the new owner, MerchantCircle, takes over from Ask.com. The word Merchant in the name suggests that Bloglines will soon be trying to sell me stuff.

Paddy Johnson is doing a series of interviews about "survival in NY." A recent one is with Marcin Ramocki. It reminded me of a Q&A I did with a journalist shortly after the Crash that had some similar themes. I never heard back from the writer after sending off these email answers: probably this isn't the sort of crap he wanted to hear.

What brought you to New York?

For a painter it's a necessity. This city has the largest concentration of professionals devoted to the field and unlike music, video, or writing, which can be enjoyed and critiqued long distance, everyone pretty much needs to be looking at actual, physical paintings to make judgments about them. The same applies to sculpture, installation, or anything else presented in a physical space.

How has being in New York aided your career?

[long brag about accomplishments]

Has it been detrimental to your career in any ways?

No. I like it here!

What is it about New York that makes it worth the extra costs involved in living here?

See answer above about painting people all needing to be in the same room, more or less, to evaluate what's going on. Then add that you are rubbing shoulders with equally substantial communities of musicians, software and tech people, writers, filmmakers, and that you have interesting crossovers and bleeds among art and all those other fields.

Has time spent making the money required to live in New York taken away time you might have spent making art if you lived somewhere less expensive? Are you able to support yourself entirely off your art? How realistic is it today for the typical artist to expect to be able to support themselves entirely off their art? Has this ever been a realistic expectation for the average artist?

Most career artists have cycles where they are making money and cycles where they are not making money. Those artists are also navigating the shifting realities of part-, full-, or no-time work, high paid vs low paid jobs, late shift vs early shift, cheap rent vs good location, personal frugality vs needing to spend for art and lifestyle, with the goals of maximizing both their studio time and their "access time." I've been doing this balancing act like everyone else. At the moment I am making in the low billions, thanks for asking.

How were the recent boom-times in New York a good thing for artists in the city? Many things (perhaps most prominently real estate) became much more expensive. Presumably, though, some of the money being made also went towards buying art. Is there an ideal balance where there is enough money in the city to support a thriving art scene but not so much as to inflate costs of living to the point where artists are priced out of the city? How close to/on what side of that balance were we during the last 5 or 6 years?

After being deeply immersed in Chelsea in the dot com era I mostly checked out during the Bush years and have been working and playing with [cyber and net artists from around the world]. A particular focus has been how work made by this group can be shown in gallery spaces. Brooklyn has been the place for these experiments but it goes on in Chelsea as well. This is a small dedicated group that is largely unaffected by the auctions, fairs, etc. I will say the trend of showering money on newly minted MFAs was bad and I hope it's over for a while.

How is the ongoing downturn hurting artists in the area?

See my calculus above re: balancing work, living, studio--it means more day job work or moving to crappier lodgings to keep their art work going. The semi-serious will move on.

But it's really too early to say since I don't think we've felt the full impact of the Greenspan recession. Go out in Brooklyn on any night and there are still lots of people yocking it up in the bars.

Will the downturn be beneficial in any ways? (Some people I’ve spoken to have suggested a renewal of a sense of community in the art world that they’ve felt has been missing.)

I can't speak to that having found my own community during the dark Bush years.

Do you think the larger economy affects the type of art being made in a given era? Does it affect the quality of art being made?

The quality, not really. You will see more art based on scrap-picking: assemblage, bricolage, and yes, more people moving their studios online.

In the popular imagination, at least, there’s a sense that there have been certain “Golden Ages” for art in New York City – times and places where the city was particularly hospitable to artists – like, say, Greenwich Village in the ‘60s or the East Village in the early ‘80s. Is there any truth to this? Or is it largely a matter of myth and selective memory. Do you think, for instance, that Bushwick of the last five years was a fundamentally less hospitable place for making art than the East Village in 1980? Has it been a better place for making art in any ways?

As long as you have masses of students moving here after school and finding each other, in whatever neighborhood, you will have an ongoing Belle Époque.

Was in the Bowery Arts and Restaurant Supply District yesterday (to see the movie Monsters at Landmark Sunshine--worth a look) and finally

finally

...got to see what the New Museum looks like without that awful eyesore by Ugo Rondinone defacing the building.
Yes, it's a happy, joyous

kind of day because this faux kitsch oversized name tag has been removed:

It is a beautiful building without the blemish but from what I've read we won't get to enjoy it long. Apparently modernist anxiety syndrome is so strong at the NewMu that they're planning to replace the Rondinone with some other dumb thing. Bad precedent, bad idea. Just revel in your white starchitect box(es)--you paid for them, they're nice, people like them, mostly.