April 2008 Archives

A dupe, a puppet, this is the real role of this earnest yet utterly insipid and awful painter. A way of having painting while denigrating it by definition- by de-skilling it, thus raising the importance of its 'conceptual' underpinings/'context'- as in text- written in reams of sameness by academics/curators in order to further their various ambitions within the climes of todays art world. All, while marginalizing the role of art, the artist in the whole rancid equation.

James Kalm: Karen Kilimnik (No Photos Allowed) at 303 GALLERY



Kalm maps the process as he tries to comply with proper protocol for access to Kilimnik's current show. In the end, to file this "Report", Kalm again goes on the "low-down" for exclusive unauthorized footage.

"I went into the New York fairs knowing that I couldn't do the same kind of reporting I'd done in Miami. In fact, I really wanted to view rather than report. But as I started to see work that interested me, the camera came out. Perhaps not surprisingly, ..."

Read more at her blog.

The Art Newspaper presents a very sensible article on the topic of ethics concerning museums' frequent role in increasing the financial value of art work through their exhibitions. The piece is written by Adrian Ellis, the director of AEA Consulting. Link here.

Edward Winkleman has a post about it, which will probably generate a very interesting discussion in the comments, as his posts usually do. Link here.

Yes, we can also point out and extol the virtues of artists we admire.

One of the greatest treasures Chicago has is the photographer Dawoud Bey.

Bey was one of my surprise discoveries last year when I was in the Chicago Art Fair. He came to my booth, we talked, I found him very interesting. Back at Wesley's where I was staying, I googled him, my favorite spy tactic. I was amazed at how outstanding his photos were! I had suspected that he would be a good artist, but here I was presented with a great one. His works unite a strong humanism (that disgraced word) with striking formal qualities in service of an art at once aesthetically challenging, sociological (in the best sense) and personal. And all that depth is carried lightly, under a mantel of (seemingly) direct image making.

His most recent works feature pictures ...

Melissa Severin lives in Chicago and works in search engine marketing. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New England College, and her poems have appeared in MoonLit, The Alembic, Seven Corners, 42opus, and The Cultural Society. She is also the managing editor of Switchback Books. Brute Fact, her chapbook, was released from dancing girl press, 2008.

This is a Story You Won't Tell the Kids We'll Never Have

Hood of your mouth
scraped with saguaro carcasses

Sharkforum contributor Norbert Marszalek and frequent Sharkforum commenter William Dolan have delightfully announced the launch of a new blog e-zine about art: www.neotericart.com. Titled "Neoteric Art," the two painters say it has been created to encourage open dialogue between painters concerning work, issues and the art world.

Neoteric is a pleasing adjective meaning "modern; new; recent." It would be a wonderful term to replace the currently overused "contemporary" and the now-historically placed "modern," as well as to get around the politically loaded "postmodern." Sharkforum wishes them well, and wishes Bill in his Artists' Project booth good luck too. Visit the site here.

(Click on image to view larger)

Time Magazine, and website, writer Richard Lacayo has had it with curatorial dialectic syntax, as exemplified in the Whitney Biennial. Link.

Come step right up! And take a long hard look at the crap you can own for about $200,000.00 of that hedge fund account- its truly mind boggling!

One of the continuing problems creating such academic idiocy as the promotion of Feeble Painting and the likes of Kilimnik lies in the usurpation of the role of the artist by curators, especially of the "independent" and "international" variety. I wrote about this on Sharkforum long ago in the post "Artworld Pyramid Shift."

J. J. Charlesworth has written a scholarly article about this problem, one bearing very much on our Kilimnik and Feeble Painting, Neo-Conceptual Art debates. Charlesworth is the exhibitions curator at the Herbert Read Gallery, University College for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, thus he has a very direct experience of the ills now besetting his profession. Additionally, he has a very uncommon analytic and ethical clarity about them.

Some excerpts:

"If the term 'curator' has been around for as long as there were bodies of objects and bodies of knowledge to preserve and perpetuate, its more active derivative 'curating' is a neologism so recent that dictionaries have not yet caught up."

Ireland's Circa art magazine has an excellent review on its on-line edition by the late, erudite actor and artist Noel Sheridan. He allowed the words of consensus curatorial blather to frame the artist's work. Give them enough rope. The italicized words are Sheridan's. Peruse these excerpts, then read the complete piece at Circa. Link below.

Karen Kilimnik: Fairy Battle, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, September 27, 2002, to February 2, 2003

One of the things Karen Kilmnik's ... installation ... does, because of her extreme take on form and content, is separate the...

The what? Getting a handle on an answer to that...

1st Friday Poetry with
Brandi Homan
Daniel Borzutzky
Nina Corwin
Simone Muench

8:00 - 9:30 PM
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Free admission

DvA Gallery
2568 N. Lincoln

The following interview with Tony Trigilio about his book The Lama's English Lessons was conducted during March 2008 by Andrew Galligan.

Andrew Galligan: According to your bio, you've spent most of your life in two major American cities - Boston and Chicago. Much dissimilarity is apparent - how are they alike?

Tony Trigilio: Both cities are quite different, yes. At the same time, both are cities of neighborhoods. That is, in both cities your daily life can be characterized by the neighborhood in which you live, and each neighborhood has its own rich history. Both cities are hugely segregated; yet at the same time, you can find neighborhoods that are diverse like no other city except probably New York.

Or, if, I can explain away/make a case for this trendy crap, Perhaps I can salvage my reputation in tatters after that rock show/Sympathy For The Devil debacle- (universally loathed in rock music and most quarters of the art world,) and then maybe, just maybe, someone IMPORTANT! will Notice Me! I Might Even Get To Be A Real 'Somebody' Within The International Curatorial Consensus Conglomerate!