Closing after this long weekend is the Power Plant’s sprawling summer exhibition, Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Curated by Andrea Andersson and Nora Burnett Abrams, this multi-sensory feast for the eyes, ears, and mind is a testament to the variety and richness of artistic and poetic approaches to language undertaken by conceptual artists and writers since the 1960s.
Summer travels always put us in mind of the weather and its extremes. Between sunny skies, stifling heat, and sudden storms, we become exquisitely aware of the weather, and how it may impact our precious few days of vacation. We check the five-day forecast, we debate packing the rainwear, and once we’ve left, we keep tabs on the weather back home, glad to be free from the heat of the city, or sad that we are missing out on some of the best metropolitan weather in weeks.
Perhaps with this in mind, Interaccess opened their summer season with an exhibition based in the documentation of weather from the far northern territory of Nunavut. We were lucky enough to have seen Constructed Land earlier in the month and had planned to write a review of it before leaving; that didn’t happen. Now we’re back, the exhibition is closed, and we’re offering up a brief après-view instead.
As we prepare for our summer travels (during which time posts to this blog will be on the short, sweet, or somewhat sporadic side), we leave you with this wonderful exhibition website featuring the atmospheric photographs of Robert Adams:
Robert Adams: The Place We Live, Yale University Art Gallery
John Baldessari, 2623 Third Street, Santa Monica, 2000, suite of four color lithographs with screenprint, overall dimensions 54 x 54 inches, edition of 61, Brooke Alexander Gallery
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As the world’s first online only art fair, VIP has experienced major growing pains since it’s launch in 2011, with many collectors frustrated by tech glitches and dealers reporting low traffic and sales as a result. While the site’s capacity and interface issues are well known and improving, the question of whether the term “online art fair” is an oxymoron continues to be raised. To our minds, this is largely a semantic issue; regardless of what one wants to call it, VIP simply represents yet another web-based opportunity for those who have the art to show it to those who don’t (see our previous post on other online art-buying venues such as Paddle8 and Phillips de Pury, linked below), and the success or failure of any online platform will most likely depend on practical concerns such as whether the art is shown to best effect (sharp, high-resolution, colour-correct images, intuitive and glitch-free scalability, easy and consistent bookmarking for collecting, comparing, and return visits), whether the artwork information is complete, correct, and actually informative, and whether dealers are ready and willing to operate in a more transparent, service-oriented manner (responding to inquiries in a timely fashion, making pricing and availability information accessible, and instituting reasonable return policies where possible, since art sometimes has a way of not actually looking like it does onscreen) which is appropriate to dealing with the wider, more diverse audience that an online platform presumably draws. Improvements in any of these areas would be a welcome development.
In recent years there has been an unprecedented rush into online contemporary art sales, a formerly taboo practice among gallerists accustomed to a fair amount of opacity in their dealings. My, how things have changed, with well-known commercial galleries such as David Zwirner and White Cube, not-for-profit spaces including Artists Space and SculptureCenter, and even museums such as the Whitney and the New Museum unashamedly making works available through Artspace and other online venues. Last week, The Armory Show announced an exclusive partnership with Paddle8 to present artworks for collectors to preview, reserve, and purchase in advance of this Thursday’s opening. Following in the footsteps of the online-only VIP Art Fair, The Armory Show is hedging its bets that having an online presence will extend its reach into new markets far beyond the tri-state area.
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In the wake of Hennessey Youngman’s hilarious and pointed YouTube critique of Damien Hirst (linked below) in which Hirst gets skewered for: a) perpretrating “a perfect storm of banality”, b) oozing an unprecedented level of “Iroc-Z Axe Body Spray douchery” and c) yes, using money as his medium, it seems an opportune moment to take a look at some other recent money-based projects as an interesting counterpoint to the art of excess.
Just yesterday, Hyperallergic profiled Occupy George, an online initiative in which infographics visualizing aspects of the economic disparity in the US have been made available for anyone to download and print onto dollar bills. The stated intent? To circulate the stamped money as much as possible, passing knowledge to all who come across the bills.
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Hello and thanks for visiting. We originally wrote this post at the beginning of December 2011, and as new information and events continued to unfold in the following weeks, we updated this page with fresh links and images. Now, as Occupy emerges from the winter months having given birth to an entirely new movement in contemporary visual culture, we feel it is appropriate to archive this post as a chronicle of Occupy’s visual beginnings, and allow the movement time and space to further evolve with respect to protest aesthetics in the arts and design, music and performance, giant puppets, flashmobs, bat signals, and whatever other forms it will eventually take. Thanks for the feedback and interest, and let’s all stay tuned.
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Paddle8 is an incredibly professional (verging on slick) platform for art exhibition and sales online. Beautifully designed, at times powerful, possibly groundbreaking presentation. With names like Marina Abramovic behind you, how can you fail — but a champagne bottle for scale… really? At any rate, it will be interesting to see how this platform evolves.
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The Artist is Present is a game in which anyone can pit themselves against a most formidable opponent—uncertainty—by participating in a virtual re-creation of Marina Abramovic’s 2010 performance at MoMA. I admit to losing the game almost immediately after starting it, but rather enjoyed game designer Pippin Barr’s own account of playing it, as well as his response to the avalanche of interest the game’s release brought his way.
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Fun social project at Dear Photograph, which invites viewers to submit images for display on their website. Some poignant, some silly, all fascinating trips through time.