"Maypole Dogs", Source: Everlasting Love (a blog), 2009

Ready… set …GO!!!

• Letter from London: Memento Mori:Ben Street writes to us about Emily Princes drawing installation project that counts the dead… or does it? This artist’s approach to statistics utilizes rembrance as a fight against abstraction…
• Nicole Rounds Them UP! This week Art21 artists depict nether regions, play with light and space, bundle and fuse old toys, mirror the dandy, reimagine rooftops, photograph electricity, and display cookie cutters by the thousands
• BLOG THIS! Blogging the Contemporary Arts, a panel discussion at X-Initiative. Blogs about contemporary arts and the art world play an increasingly important role by providing multiple viewpoints, information and commentaries about the art market, the gallery scene, artists and their work on a daily basis.
• Adolf Hitler  (character) IMDB Spreadsheet
• Teaching with Contemporary Art: Anything Can Happen. Being a Ranger Fan is a lot like Contemporary Art.
• Announcing Art Educators 2010-2011. The Education staff at Art21 is launching the second year of Art21 Educators and we are now accepting applications. For those of you just hearing about this program, Art21 Educators is an intensive, year-long professional development initiative designed to cultivate and support K-12 art educators interested in bringing contemporary art, artists, and themes into their classrooms.
• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Allan McCollum Cookie Cutters

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Larry Little, co-founder of Aunt Holly’s Copper Cookie Cutters with his wife Holly, describes his experiences working with artist Allan McCollum on the Shapes from Maine (2009) exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Little describes the origins of his home business in Trescott, Maine, the process he developed for making cookie cutters by hand, and his working relationship with McCollum.

This project can currently be seen at Murray Guy gallery in New York through February 2010, as part of the exhibition Vertically Integrated Manufacturing including works by Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, Fia Backström, Bernd & Hilla Becher, DAS INSTITUT, Dexter Sinister, Douglas Huebler, Stephen Prina, and Seth Price. “The works in this show put their own conditions of production on display, responding to and perhaps even anticipating changing processes of labor. If art has the capacity to bridge sensory experience and abstract thought, it might be uniquely suited to reflect on an economy that increasingly blurs differences between physical goods and immaterial services, and confuses distinctions between production and consumption.” (via the press release)

Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, Allan McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, comprised of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity.

Allan McCollum is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Dowling. Camera: Richard Kane & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Kenny Weinberg. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Allan McCollum. Thanks: Holly & Larry Little.

Art21 Educators: The Summer Institute, July 2009.

The Education staff at Art21 is launching the second year of Art21 Educators and we are now accepting applications. For those of you just hearing about this program, Art21 Educators is an intensive, year-long professional development initiative designed to cultivate and support K-12 art educators interested in bringing contemporary art, artists, and themes into their classrooms.

This program provides a unique professional development opportunity for educators to:

• Spend an intensive year working with Art21 and a network of peers,which kicks off with a 6-day institute in New York City;
• Share innovative ideas, resources, and strategies with educators from across the country;
• and use video and other media to document and reflect on your teaching practice.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to some of the current participants present their perspectives on Art21 Educators. In this uncut video testimonial, Keeley Stitt, an art teacher from Chicago, IL, discusses how the program made her rethink her ideas about art education.

Art21 Educators Testimonial: Keeley Stitt from Art21 on Vimeo.

Stacey Ward Kelly, a current Art21 Educator from Beacon, NY, shares how the Art21 Educators program changed her approach to teaching.

Art21 Educators Testimonial: Stacey Ward Kelly from Art21 on Vimeo.

This round of Art21 Educators we will be accepting applications from K-12 art and media teachers from across the United States. We want to create a diverse group of participants who reflect urban, rural, and suburban communities as well as distinct student populations.

Join us and be part of a national group of educators who will explore, design, and implement curriculum utilizing the visual art of our time. Apply now!

For an application form or more information, please visit art21.org.
Applications must be received by the Art21 Education Staff by Monday, February 26, 2010.

Questions? Read our FAQs or, if you’re still stumped, email education [at] art21.org

Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's Myspace profile

The exhibition history and creative output of the artist Anthony Burdin is intertwined with—and often overshadowed by his nomadic lifestyle. The 2006 Whitney Biennial participant identifies himself as a recording artist and is most known for his installations and video performances. In a 2005 review for artnet.com, Jerry Saltz described Burdin as a “sort of traveling magician-maniac-minstrel, [who] lives, makes art, and stages performances in his van.”

Up until a few years ago, Burdin recorded an astronomical amount of videotape that he captured while driving around Southern California. Like most people reading this blog, he spends a lot of time online (picking up unprotected wireless networks?). His band’s MySpace accounts (1, 2) show a shift from persistently documenting the physical landscape and his relationship with it to developing a relationship with online services and trolling social networks in search of a focused type of user to friend-request.

Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's MySpace profile

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Hans Haacke, "Cowboy with Cigarette," 1990. Pasted paper, charcoal, ink, and frame, 37 x 31 x 2 3/8" (94 x 80 x 6 cm). Collection Joseph Lebon. Photo: courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York

Our new Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art, will be launching soon and we’re inviting you to participate.  Intrigued?  Want to know more?  Keep reading!

This theme will look at the relationship between ethics and contemporary art.  Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make.  This can include something as personal as the creation of art, or as public as a museum’s mission statement.  These decisions can also become confused, especially when competing priorities are at work.  With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines for the art world. A few of the questions we’ll be exploring will include:

• How does ethics factor into institutional practice?
• How do artists address ethical issues in their work?
• What kind of ethical decisions are made during the artistic process?
• Are ethics emphasized in art education today?
• Must art be ethical?

We are eager to hear from a range of perspectives, including those of you who work as artists, arts professionals, students, art educators, funders, organizers, and academics. Propose a Flash Points blog post related to the above topic and have a chance to be featured on this site. Email ideas and pitches to blog [at] art21 [dot] org.  Deadline is January 31st.

Mr. Deitch's Summery Treat 2006, Courtesy Saatchi Online Daily Magazine; LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, Courtesy Monica Almeida/The New York Times.

If you’re like me, you’ve already been inundated with a whole range of opinions on MOCA’s announcement this week, and it’s only Thursday. Whether they are ultimately booing or cheering, everyone and their mother seems to be up in arms about the board’s unanimous decision to hire Jeffrey Deitch as the new director of Los Angeles’s foremost contemporary art institution.

Deitch’s reputation as both a savvy business man and over-the-top sensationalist precede him. In various rhetorical feats, these two aspects of Deitch’s notorious career are being claimed by both sides of the argument, simultaneously leveraged as selling points by supporters while being cited by naysayers as evidence that MOCA will find itself hurtling, once again, toward catastrophe. Deitch himself told The New Yorker in 2007, “‘I helped create this whole thing of a professional art-advisory service, and also this fusion of art and entertainment…I’m not sure which one the old school despises more.’”

Deitch floating up and away from NYC, 2007. Courtesy The New Yorker.

It’s been nearly five years since I looked straight into the bespectacled eyes of Deitch. Against my better judgment, I was auditioning for his reality TV show ArtStar, amidst warnings from my New York friends that Deitch was a “polarizing figure.” As it turned out, my audition was unsuccessful and ultimately, so was the TV series. But even if nobody watched it, the show was encircled by countless heated debates, and the move was indeed polarizing. The main concern, of course, was if a reality TV show about art would further erode the problematically shrinking gap between intellectual innovation and populist entertainment.

This week, Bravo announced the details of a copycat art reality TV show, entitled Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (for which I may or may not have also auditioned). News that the show will feature art world heavyweights Simon de Pury, Jerry Saltz, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn has surely dominated the art blogosphere this week. However, Deitch’s appointment by MOCA, coincidentally announced less than 24 hours later, has eclipsed a revival of the debate first sparked by ArtStar. While the Merchant of MOCA controversy traverses essentially the same territory as the reality art TV conundrum—i.e. the complicated intersection of creativity and commercialism—the stakes are much higher in the case of the former.

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The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Having recently moved to Minnesota, I became intrigued by the amount of funding and grant programs available for the arts, including many initiatives directed toward funding public art. Although asking why public art and the environment have been recognized as reciprocal concerns is a weighty question, it may simply be that in cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul, where municipal funding for the arts already co-exists with green initiatives, the two go hand in hand.

The permanent placement of public art has demanded an awareness of environmental concerns, from the safety of materials to how normative weather conditions will affect artworks over time. The Weisman Art Museum (where I am currently employed) administers the public art program at the University of Minnesota and has a full-time Curator of Public Art. While this may seem like a small gesture, it allows for art on campus to be treated like any other historical object in a museum collection, requiring routine conservation and discussions of proper storage and exhibition. It is necessary for cities with public art collections to treat them just as such—as collections—whereby the city can continue to maintain them year after year. Maintenance is a huge issue, and with dwindling resources, it’s easy to postpone taking care of art collections. Minneapolis has a maintenance fund for its collection, but there are many works not in the city’s collection that are ignored.

While storage and exhibition in a museum can be regulated through temperature control and security guards (to a degree), public art can often succumb to problems such as lawnmowers scraping against sculpture or the oxidation of bronze sculptures. These issues point to a difficult question for public works—what happens when no one is closely watching the art?

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Image courtesy gnurf.net

Outside of Tyler Green (Modern Art Notes), I am not sure how many contemporary art-lover hockey fans are out there. There may be more, but down deep I think we’re two of just a few.

As I was watching the Devils-Rangers game last night and lamenting over the fact that my interview with Abbe Futterman wasn’t ready to post yet (Abbe gave me so many great photos that I’m still choosing and editing them), it suddenly dawned on me: being a Ranger fan is a lot like teaching with contemporary art. For example….

• Anything can happen, and it will.
• Being prepared is half the battle.
• You’re often anxious.
• People make fun of you, but once in a while you get to laugh back.
• Practically every game (class) is exciting, no matter how much the last one sucked.
• You’re always looking to try something a little different, a little better.
• Carefully timed risks make all the difference.

Maybe being a Ranger fan is a lot like teaching in general?

Tune in next week for my interview with Abbe Futterman, an inspiring teacher at The Earth School in New York who creatively combines the teaching of science and art in her elementary classroom.

When looking at the IMDB profile for Adolf Hilter (character), not Adolf Hitler (self), questions begin to emerge with regards to how one might infer a sense of the political climate of a certain time period based on whether the majority of portrayals of the Füher in popular culture are spoofs or dramatic snoozefests. Perhaps even more cultural subtext can be found in the absence of Hilter in TV or cinematic releases of a certain year (e.g. 1986, 1980).

While Hilter’s screen-time in movies and TV may ebb and flow, he is sure to remain a staple of discussion on the Internet for many years to come. (see Godwin’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law)

Adolf Hilter (character) IMDB spreadsheet, 1935 – 2009:
Each ’|' indicates where an actor has portrayed Adolf Hitler in either a motion picture or a TV appearance.

Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads: (Black and Blue Eyebrows), 2008. Three dimensional archival print, laminated with lexan and mounted on shaped form with acrylic paint, 57 3/4 x 102 x 6 3/4 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

WHEN
Friday, January 15, 6:30 pm
Please note that the Gallery is open 12 – 6 pm so arrive early if you want to view the final phase of exhibitions at X.

WHERE
X Initiative
548 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011
RSVP

Moderator: Robin White
Panelists:
Barry Hoggard, Bloggy, ArtCat, Culture Pundits: blogger, collector, entrepreneur
Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City: news and opinion blogger, writer
William Powhida: artist, blogger
Kelly Shindler, Art21: educational blogger
Edward Winkleman: gallery owner, blogger

Blogs about contemporary arts and the art world play an increasingly important role by providing multiple viewpoints, information and commentaries about the art market, the gallery scene, artists and their work on a daily basis. As the number of printed newspaper and culture journals decreases, some blogs are becoming a source for substantial art journalism and art criticism. By pairing the 5-most read, and hotly debated, bloggers of New York City, we want to touch on a topic that is timely and relevant, and offer a dynamic and lively conversation at the X-Initiative.

We have curated the panel to incorporate a wide spectrum of practicing bloggers: from art news to art education, from the perspective of the art market including both the point of view of an artist and a gallerist, and those who are taking the online art world to a whole new-networked level.

About the Panelists
Barry Hoggard writes about art and politics on bloggy.com. He is the editor, along with James Wagner, of the arts calendar ArtCat, and proprietor of CulturePundits.com, a curated network of today’s leading cultural websites and blogs. He recently began publishing Idiom, an online publication of urban artistic practice. He is also a software developer.
http://bloggy.com/
http://www.culturepundits.com/
http://www.artcat.com/
http://idiommag.com/

Paddy Johnson aka ArtFagCity blogger, has been published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and many others. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet and in 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.
http://www.artfagcity.com/

William Powhida’s blog has covered controversial topics including creating an “enemies” list as well as letters addressed to famous contemporary curators, collectors and critics, requesting recognition. According to Wikipedia as an artist he constructs work deliberately about growing his own fame, addressing the major obstacles facing emerging contemporary artists.
http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/

Kelly Shindler, Art21 Blog Founder and Editor, has worked at Art21 since 2003, where she is presently Director of Special Projects. She is also a curator and writer, as well as a dual Master’s candidate in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism/Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
http://blog.art21.org/

Edward Winkleman is an art dealer and a blogger. He started his eponymous blog about the art world and politics in 2005 and is a contributing editor to the international blog Art World Salon. He began his career in the art world with a series of guerilla-style exhibitions organized in New York and London under the name ‘hit & run’. In 2001 he co-founded the Plus Ultra Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Moving into Manhattan’s art district Chelsea in 2006, he changed the name of the gallery to Winkleman Gallery.
http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/