Been working on Harry's web pages and doing gallery biz stuff. Also been Tweeting and reading a lot of articles suggested by art tweeps. Here is one I could not help but share from the New York Times entitled "The Boom is Over - Long Live the Art!"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?_r=1Below are several of my favorite lines from the article. Each one presents a topic I would love to explore further in discussions with you guys. Several of them I'd like to put in a neon lit sign on my rooftop. I love this article because it goes beyond the typical Eeyore wa wa wa news reports pummeling our ears. It draws on history to present the whole view, that is, when something dies, something new and fresh is born from the ashes:"The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an
Elizabeth Peyton painting of
Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious.
"Art in New York has not, of course, always been so anodyne an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case
it has been artists who have reshaped the game."Everyone treated the city as a found object.
"An artist named Jeffrey Lew turned the ground floor of his building at 112 Greene Street into a
first-come-first-served studio and exhibition space. People came, working with scrap metal, cast-off wood and cloth, industrial paint, rope, string, dirt, lights, mirrors, video. New genres — installation, performance — were invented. Most of the work was made on site and ephemeral:
there one day, gone the next.
"At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory,
make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate.
They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.
"
But if there is a crisis, it is not a crisis of power; it’s a crisis of knowledge. Simply put, we don’t know enough, about the past or about any cultures other than our own.
"I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where
a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. Exactly. Crazy. "
I hope you will read the entire article and talk to me about it.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?_r=1xosuzy
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