Quick study: New Year’s edition with Honeycutt, Winkleman, Viveros-Faun�, Schor, Twitter, and Kohler

2014 is off to a good start. I just returned from Schenectady where I installed paintings (image above of installation in process) for “Blueprint,” a three-person exhibition at Union College curated by Brece Honeycutt. Inspired by Simon Mawer’s 2009 novel The Glass Room, the exhibition features work by Victoria Palermo, Peter Dudek, and me. The show runs from January 10 through February 27, with an artists’ talk on February 20. More details and images to come.

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On his blog, dealer Ed Winkleman reminds collectors that they should think of themselves as patrons of the visual arts, with the same obligations to the quality of our collective legacy as do artists, curators, critics, and dealers. “One must form opinions, share those opinions (if only via one’s acquisitions), defend those opinions (if only via not flipping artwork like penny stocks), and put one’s money and growing expertise where one’s mouth is. It’s not a game for the faint of heart. It’s not a status you can buy with money alone. In fact, as many have proven (such as the Vogels), it need not require all that much money at all…”  Read more.

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In The Village Voice Christian Viveros-Faun� reports that the art market, famously unregulated, is more corrupt than ever. “A year-end wrap-up of art in Gotham would be meaningless without mentioning the single greatest transformation to have struck the visual arts globally: namely, that the art market has turned into one big corrupt casino, a place where price fixing, market manipulation, bribery, forgery, theft, and money laundering have become as popular as risky mortgages were in 2007….” Read more.

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Any artist or critic who has ever had a tweet quoted in a news story or used in an art project  knows that our tweets have a life of their own. Film critic A.O. Scott praised a movie on Twitter, and the next thing you know, the tweet appears as a full page ad in the NYTimes. (via Gothamist)

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Unimpressed and unmoved, Mira Schor on Chris Wool’s show at the Guggenheim: “I don�t object to ‘no-hands’ techniques of screen printing and other methods of producing a painting�in fact the Wool exhibition made me start to think more fondly of Wade Guyton�s digitally printed paeons to corporate modernism in his exhibition at the Whitney last year: Guyton�s paintings at least gave me the eerie sensation that I was on the set of a 1960s spy caper movie, all shiny white surfaces, Knoll furniture, white shag rugs, and Marrimekko patterns, which brought back a happy whiff of being a teenager in New York in the suddenly swinging �60s, while Wool�s paintings give off more of Bloomberg corporate headquarters vibe than Lever House or In Like Flint…. Read more.

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In the Huffington Post, William Eckhardt Kohler posts a Lower East Side round-up, which includes a nice shout for the big “Clouds” show at Lesley Heller. “We live in a time when artists, curators and galleries are no longer expected or required to hew rigidly to a particular dogma and artistic ideology, to represent a camp and to draw battle lines in the heroic march of artistic progress. Though orthodoxies exist, and while pluralism in art is not anything like a new idea, it seems that this is one of those periods of art when, outside some passing fashions, it would be difficult to identify any dominant movement. There is a great deal of lively and generous work being made and shown today that crosses lines and exists in between historical polarities…” Read more.

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