And why not? Happy busy sharks are friendly sharks, and who could be anything but happy when you've got the likes of Mucca Pazza, The Nicholas Tremulis Orchestra, Rick Rizzo and the issues playing?
While that's all a happy memory, there's no reason to stop now. Sharkforum is not just about making merry, it's also about artists helping themselves and others. To that end Wesley Kimler and David Roth will be giving a presentation tomorrow (Sunday) at 2:00 PM at Art Chicago (Chicago's Merchandise Mart, 8th floor) entitled "Promotional Bootstrapping and Self-Publishing for Artists in a Brave New World."
Come say hello!
Of course I wasn’t appalled because I was exaggerating or anything like that. I was appalled because when I was ‘their age’ I would have squirmed to hear anyone saying such a thing. How old-fogey can you get. (Now that’s a term you don’t hear much these days.) How does saying such a thing do anything except point out the obvious while using a really really embarrassing cliché? But the truth of the matter is I have been around a while now, and yes, I remember the ‘old days.’ In the course of my speechifying and exhorting of the ten or twelve earnest young people, including a girl who brushed her hair during class, which of course catapulted me far enough back to realize, with a start, that my self-conscious, how-do-I-look, hairbrushing-in-public days were so long past as to be terrifying obscure to me, I even mentioned the old days of the art fair. Yes, the art fair, for it wasn’t always Art Chicago, having started out at the Chicago International Art Exposition. Tom Blackman’s Art Chicago was in fact the upstart, much like Nova is to Art Chicago, begun with great excitement and anticipation cheek-by-jowl with the Navy Pier’s CIAE, in a tent on a parcel of real estate on Ogden Slip that surely now sports at least one, maybe even two, sixty-story shiny condo highrises. For this class, interested as they were in the inner workings of museums, especially the one I work for, I pointed out that in the 1980s and well into the 1990s the MCA routinely scheduled its ‘best stuff’ in May, when the international art world came town for the Fair. (The late April dates being a function of the “new” incarnation of Art Chicago, returning to its roots to a tent as it did last year).
(being of a heritage and era where exact birthdates were often obscure). I loved Joe Shapiro, his passion for life and art, and the obvious sustenance he drew from art. I even loved his undisguised delight in and appreciation of “the fairer sex” (which disturbed many) and felt it was a privileged view on a courtly time that was fast disappearing rather than some sort of rude affront to my gender. Joe did not disguise that he loved to lunch with “his harem,” mostly curators and other museum people — female of course — at those dreary sorts of middlebrow restaurants that sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s, i.e. The Homestead in Oak Park. Very few of these places exist today and thus can exist in some sort of rosy glow of nostalgia. In reality they were pretty awful. When invited, however, I always attended, and when I had business with Joe, as I often did, I would bring along other female MCA staffers who had not heard his repertoire of humorous stories which would slowly wind into the realm of bawdy jokes if his listener(s) seemed comfortable. Of course it wasn’t so much that he enjoyed the food at these restaurants. It was the company and conversation that he craved, and it was as much sustenance to him as the daily special. He was an esthete who could converse on the highest levels about art, yet what really tickled him was to author an advice column for the MCA staff newsletter titled “Joe Sez” (which was compiled, incidentally, into a bound volume and presented to Joe, who is often called the “father” of the Museum of Contemporary Art in appreciation for all he did).
