From the category archives:

Visual Arts

Banksy in the Catskills: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Arts and Culture
Exit Through the Gift Shop Banksy Film

Of course, just as I get interested in street art, it’s gotta go and get all shitty on me (and the world). Even if you have been living under a rock, you’ve by now heard about the documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” a look inside the world of international street art, produced by Banksy, the world’s premier street artist. The marketing hype for this movie has involved every kind of overt and covert marketing imaginable including street art showing up in Park City a few days before the movie’s premiere at Sundance. It’s all been very predictable.

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Barbara Kruger's "The Globe Shrinks" at Mary Boone Gallery

Arts and Culture
Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone

Two words came to mind as I watched Barbara Kruger’s current exhibition “The Globe Shrinks” at Mary Boone Gallery: discombobulating and humorous. These are not descriptors one usually finds in conversation about Kruger’s work.

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New Museum! Resurrect Thyself!

Kinetic vs Static
How The New Museum Can Save Itself

The New Museum should look at the past 6 months, bookended by the announcement of Skin Fruit and Richard Flood’s incredibly tragi-comic performance today, as a “teachable moment.” We are in the Obama-era now after all. The New Museum must recognize how out of touch they are both on an artistic, ethical and technological front.

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William Powhida Reading "Catastrofuck" at #Class

Arts and Culture
Powhida Reading Castrofuck at #Class Rant Night

Reading Paddy Johnson’s post “This Week in Comments Part Two: Powhida!” and the accompanying comments made me realize why Jade Townsend and I made the drawing the first place. The art world is a big ‘catastrofuc’k to borrow a term from a Miami NewTimes writer.

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Social Media as Flattening Agent in the Art World

Arts and Culture
The World is Flat

As in many other cultural industries, music, publishing, journalism, film, social media is having a flattening effect on the notoriously hierarchically-structured art world. We cannot yet see what the result of widespread adoption of the tools, instruments and philosophies of social media will be upon the art world, because, as in other industries, it is primarily the avant-garde that is engaging these new tools.

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#Class: Does the System Work?

Arts and Culture
Does the Art Market Work #class

That was the question for tonight’s sparsely attended, but spirited conversation at #Class tonight at Ed Winkleman Gallery. The title of the discussion perfectly embodies the dialectic that has motivated the entire #class experiment; of course the system is broken, and at the same time, it has always been broken and will always be broken, and furthermore must always be broken. That is the world [...]

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Video Interview: Social Media As An Agent of Flatness

Arts and Culture
Edouard Manet The Picnic

Of course all this flattening is quite messy and will remain so for the time being until new business models are tested and implemented. But the general premise that only an art gallery can control the flow of money and access to art is over. Some will continue to operate by the old model by virtue of the depth of their pockets and relationships with collectors. But at some point even the wealthy collectors of contemporary art will discover they can find better art, for less money, without having to go through the galleries, which currently take a heavy fee for their service of connecting.

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