"Deer Eating." Source: https://annej6.files.wordpress.com
Spring is just around the corner!!! Whew, finally. Meanwhile, here’s What’s Cookin:
- VIDEO EXCLUSIVE | Jeff Koons: Money & Value: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.
- Matthew Savitsky, Philadelphia-based artist talks with blogger Kevin McGarry about his new project Healing With Purple (Here Lies Helvetica), inspired by a visit to a faerie cemetery in Short Mountain, Tennessee; his thoughts about Robert Gober’s piece currently on view at the New Museum, his frustration with writing and triumphs related to art as poetry; and his urge to communicate gay colloquialisms and sensibilities.
- Continued from Part 1, Kevin McGarry shares his first impressions about the controversial exhibition Skin Fruit. If you are not in New York and don’t plan to be anytime soon, never fear; McGarry describes what he has saw there in detail. If you are still not satisfied, go to YouTube and check out this video produced by NOWNESS. The question remains: how much here is transparent and how much just can’t be seen? How fun to guess?
- Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in the Weekly Roundup.
- Welcome new guest blogger Ivan Lozano, a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
- CONVERSATIONS about CONSERVATION: How can cultural value on a place be defined? Is this an image that is always beautiful? Blogger Richard McCoy has been preparing a presentation for the colloquium at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art.” He now speaks with Mitchell Harnes Bishop, the curator of historic collections at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden responsible for its historic buildings, collections, and the cultural landscape.
- TEACHING WITH CONTEMPORARY ART: We have A LOT to learn from our colleagues! Joe Fusaro lets us in on a well-known secret, but kindly reminds us that, “sharing best practices is something that takes organization, time, and effort. Over the past nine years I have learned repeatedly that this is time well spent and absolutely worth the extra effort…Let’s face it, reading about good teaching, or just daydreaming about it, is one thing. Seeing good teaching in action is quite another…” Let’s feed the fire!
- What if an artist wants to re-create a performance? Does he or she have to credit the original artist? Some don’t. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory. It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules,” says Marina Abramovic. Abramovic’s current exhibition at MoMA has received a lot of press, perhaps some in part for her continued efforts towards the conservation of time-based performance art. Um, how do you do that? Hey, check out this twist: doing the Marina Abromavic in drag? Blogger Ivan Lozano tinkers with the thought. READ THIS!
- LOOKING AT LOS ANGELES: L.A. galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment. According to Catherine Wagley, Mel Bochner makes a keen impression with his palette of words. “He works in the realm of one-horsed wagons and burnt tongues…”
- FLASHPOINTS: Must art be ethical? Advocating ethical practices and tolerance are two different positions. Tyler Green is an advocate for stronger ethics in the art world, while Jerry Saltz seems intent on defending the relative tolerance and heterogeneity of the commercial side no matter how dysfunctional it may appear, even lovingly referring to the art world as “Babylon.” Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green, according to William Powhida, are not talking about the same thing in their public non-debate… Worried about being late to class? Don’t worry, according to Ben Davis 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, you won’t ever be because “the art world is not separate from society or its class structure.” Please note Powhida’s point that the art world is not representative of any society in its entirety…“As an artist I am to both invent and preserve, challenge and perpetuate, be new and responsible, for the past and the future”… There’s still so much more. READ THIS!
- GASTRO-VISION: Food in Contemporary Art and Culture: Remember Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life? Somebody grab a bucket! Are we a culture of gluttonous over-indulgent consumers that want MORE of it ALL? Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. Nicole Caruth questions and reflects.
- CALL FOR ENTRIES: WRITERS WANTED FOR THE ART21 BLOG!