Posts tagged as:

jerry saltz

Friday Links: The Art World isn’t Changing

by Paddy Johnson on June 30, 2017

Tomorrow is Canada’s 150th anniversary. July 4th’s coming up too, but we’re a little less excited about celebrating that this year given the healthcare debacle and this muslim ban bullshit. [The Internet]

Curator salaries are increasing according to a new survey conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors. So too are the salaries of COOs. [artnet News]

Acute Art has enlisted a bunch of A list artists to try out their new VR headset. Apparently it’s not very realistic, but the article still ran with a title suggesting the software could change the art world. Given that we’re looking at a bunch of stars promoting a product sounds like the art world is just the same. [Jstore]

Amtrak is making repairs which means Penn Station is going to be more of a world of hell than it already is. Hard to believe that station could be any worse than it already is. This explainer post is useful but also filled with some amazing pictures. [Curbed]

OMG this Times video on the Carsten Höller show at Gagosian is HILARIOUS. It talks about how playful the art is, but it’s narration is slow and plotting and comes across as the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard—all while watching kids run through his sculptures. [The New York Times]

Jerry Saltz reviews “Wrong Side of History” at Bullet Space, a group show addressing Trump’s America. The show gets a good review, but it and its essays are mainly used as vehicle to take a jab at the art world’s predictability. “I love the art world; great art is getting made and shown. Art will live, as always. But we all have to admit that the art world isn’t the definition of radical right now.” [Vulture]

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Monday Links: Artist-Run Spaces Evicted Nationwide, #Pizzagate Trolls Become Art Critics

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on December 12, 2016

Paintings such as this one, by art therapy patient Ria Pratt, are now being used by fake news websites as “proof” of the #pizzagate conspiracy theory, which seems especially unethical.

The #pizzagate trolls are trying their tiny hands at art criticism. Here’s one of several fake news articles examining the murals inside Comet Ping Pong for some nefarious symbolism. We would like to point out that the real murals at Comet Ping Pong are by Arrington de Dionyso, and that most of the images used in this article are from the website of art therapist Kim Noble, and were produced by trauma victims. Also, LOL, this “article” is written by “Liberty Belle” ….ugh, the alt-right has the worst drag names. [Fury News]
Following the deadly fire at Oakland’s Ghost Ship, artist-run spaces nationwide are in crisis. We’ve been getting calls from friends in various cities who’ve had fire inspectors show up at warehouses and tell them they have 30 minutes to grab their stuff and get out. Let’s not let this be the end of an era for counterculture. Now, more than ever, these places are so necessary. [The New York Times]
Just prior to the eviction of Denver’s artist-run space Rhinoceropolis, musician and urban planner Michael Semen discusses how important DIY spaces are to cities and what local governments can do to protect them. [Westword]
Meanwhile in Baltimore, the city has condemned the artist-run space The Bell Foundry, citing safety concerns. Imagine if we lived in the kind of society that went around giving poor people sprinkler systems instead of eviction notices? [The Baltimore Sun]
A massive profile on Jerry Saltz by Kenny Schachter appears in British GQ this January and in Artnet news. There have been a lot of profiles on Saltz over the years, but this one manages to shed new light on the critic, exploring his early home life and then beginning to track his career closely from 2010 on, with his appearance as a judge on Work of Art and a burgeoning social media star. [Artnet news]
Is History Painting making a small, international comeback? K.P. Reji, Michael Armitage, and Daniel Boyd are “de-colonizing” the genre with dreamy, politically-charged illustration-like works. [Artspace]

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Wednesday Links: Foot Traffic is Down at 57th Street Galleries

by Paddy Johnson on December 7, 2016

Outside the Trump Tower

Jerry Saltz discusses Andreas Gursky’s “Amazon”, a photograph taken inside an Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, as it pertains to the election. Saltz describes the photograph as depicting the “almost-unknowable patterns of contemporary mass consumption and the hyper-distribution of goods.” Seems like this photograph really has scale going for it. It’s 81.5 × 160.25 inches. [Vulture]
Retail sales on 57th and 5th street are way down thanks to the Trump Tower security for the president-elect’s family—which is now advertising the security as a draw. That means galleries in that neighborhood such as Tibor de Nagy, Marian Goodman and Mary Boone are all being effected. Nobody is happy. [Artnet news]
Naeem Mohaiemen, in a piece illustrated with Hans Haacke’s photos from Saadiyat Island, writes about the efforts of the Gulf Labor Coalition. From the text: “Defiance is welcomed when it is sanctioned and staged as art. Drill a crater in the floor, flood a gallery, embalm an animal, smash an object, stage a pitiful death—critics hail these gestures as having the power to “shape worlds.” But when artists sit down at a conference table with museum administrators and read from a list of demands for labor rights, this work—involving conversation, negotiation, research, protest—suddenly becomes illegible to the same museum. The artists whose projects were previously praised as stretching boundaries are now tagged as maverick spoilers.” [The Walker Museum of Art]
Josh Baer says Brett Gorvy, the Chair of Contemporary and Post War art at Christie’s will be leaving to join the gallery Dominique Levy. [Baer Faxt]
Does the Oakland Warehouse Fire “mean the end of these spaces in the Bay Area and with it the last vestige of any kind of affordable artists community?’” asks artist Aaron Muszalski. No real answer here, because once you make a warehouse space legal for residence the rents go up. [The New York Times]
The Art Newspaper’s full coverage of the Art Basel Miami here. [The Art Newspaper]

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No Links: On The Donald Trump of Art World Social Media

by Paddy Johnson on October 19, 2016

Artists Leah Dixon and Lauren Christiansen are taking issue with Jerry Saltz’s Instagram feed because they think he’s too interested in vaginas. They’ve titled their social media post, “The Donald Trump of Art World Social Media” and have dedicated themselves to ranting about Saltz’s obsessions. [No link.] “It only takes thirty seconds on Saltz’s instagram to see how destructive and trivial his interests are.” they write. “How he is using his power to openly fetishize female bodies, in lieu of actually presenting valid cultural critique. Honestly, one out of every three of his posts is a vagina.”

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Monday Links: Oh Yeah!

by Paddy Johnson on September 12, 2016

What we’re listening to: Yello’s, “Oh Yeah”. Yello musician Dieter Meier has a show up in Berlin right now, and we’re excited. [Galerie Judin]
An increasing number of museum workers are heading to jobs at auction houses. The pay is significantly better, reports Julia Halperin. [The Art Newspaper]
New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Rockefeller Foundation are investing 1 million in a paid internship program with the hopes of increasing diversity. It’s a good idea, but if something isn’t done about displacement of lower income families due to rent increases and gentrification, they might as well be pouring that money down the drain. [artnet News]
Jerry Saltz rightly lauds the New Museum’s “The Keeper” exhibition, a show he describes as a “museum full of museums, possible encyclopedias, indexes of other orders, and miniature models of pain.” [Vulture]
Liberal Arts degrees pay off later in life. [The Wall Street Journal]
100 roll down security gates in the Lower East Side have been decorated by artist L’Amour Supreme. Round up of highlights here. [Curbed]

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Tuesday Links: Teapot Not Enough Dick-Coverage for Australian Painting

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 30, 2016

Headline of the day: “Bob Ross Was a Tyrant and Hated His Perm, Says Former Manager.” [artnet News]

Police were called to an art gallery in a small town in Australia over a complaint of a nude self-portrait by painter Dennis McIntyre. But you can’t even see his junk in the painting! It’s covered by a teapot. It’s not clear who exactly was so offended by this portrait that they actually called the police. According to gallery volunteer Beryl Ramsay, a group of elderly women recently visited the gallery and were far from offended: “Their only complaint was that they couldn’t lift the teapot to see what was behind it.” [The Border Mail]

Here’s an interview with Rossy de Palma, a.k.a. “Dama Picasso” about her decades of collaborations with Pedro Almodovar and how much fun being an artist was during La Movida Madrileña of the 1980s. [Dazed]

The Shchukin collection—which makes up the bulk of the Hermitage’s early modernist masterworks—is leaving Russia for the first time in a century for a loan to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. There’s a nice irony to this—Shchukin collected mostly Parisian artists during his lifetime and he fled to the French capital during the Russian revolution in which the state seized his art collection. [Bloomberg]

Lisa Cooley talks to ARTnews about closing her gallery. Cooley cites art fair exhaustion as an issue, as well the rise of social media. Seeing and sharing so many images desensitizes people and erodes community and relationship building. That becomes a huge problem when rent rates demand that prices double or triple every year. “The scale is the problem—whether that is scale of information you have to process, or competing with the larger galleries. You can’t scale relationships.” The business model for smaller galleries isn’t working. Hopefully Cooley will get her artists paid. [ARTnews]

As much as people like to hate on Santiago Calatrava, the World Trade Center redevelopment’s numerous cost-overruns, delays, and design failures—and malls—there’s no denying that the Transportation Hub oculus looks beautiful. [Dezeen]

Electric Objects is looking for a Curator-in-Chief. This is a pretty exciting job. It means overseeing the editorial and curatorial direction of the company, setting the direction for their commissions program, and hiring and building a capable team of writers and curators to do the job. [Electric Objects]

Jerry Saltz got himself into some hot water by posting a doctored image of a female tennis player without underwear. The image is now removed (and we won’t post it because the image is offensive), but there are plenty of women still fuming about this over Facebook. [Facebook]

The Studio Museum has installed four public artworks across Harlem parks from Rudy Shepherd, Kori Newkirk, Simone Leigh, and Kevin Beasley. [The Wall Street Journal]
A British community garden features a shed modeled on the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Unfortunately, someone broke into the farm and vandalized it. The Stonebridge City Farm plans on fixing it. [BBC News]

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Friday Links: The Breakfast of Champions

by Rea McNamara on June 3, 2016

How does Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith do breakfast? Neither cook, so according to this AM-focused interview with Saltz, he goes to a nearby deli and gets four cups of coffee, then puts them in the fridge, and when they’re chill, dump them into big 7-11 Double Gulp cups with ice. Instant iced coffee! [Extra Crispy]
Photographer Tod Seelie is leaving New York for LA because he’s been outpaced by the cost of living, and LA is similar, except it has “huge communal households that are building crazy bikes and tree forts in their yards.” [Gothamist]
A week of heavy rains in Europe has led to serious flooding, and its cost is now hitting institutions. The rising levels of the Seine, for instance, has flooded Paris streets, and and is at its highest level in nearly 35 years. Curators at the Louvre moved 250,000 works from its basement storage upstairs to avoid damage. [CTV]
Early career artists working in digital media, there’s an award for you. Equitable Bank’s Emerging Digital Artists Award is now accepting applications. The award comes with a $5,000 prize, and the judging panel includes myself, artist Alex McLeod and curator Amber Christensen. Deadline is September 15. [EDAA]
Definitely not attachment parenting here: a 7 year old Japanese boy, who had been missing for nearly a week after his parents left in a forest as punishment, was found unharmed. Even though the forest was known to include bears, the parents left him there because he had been throwing rocks at people and cars while playing at a river. [CBC]

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Wednesday Links: But Some People Do Care

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on May 18, 2016

Some view Peregrine Honig’s restroom signs as insensitive.

Former Work of Art contestant Peregrine Honig’s “We Don’t Care” restroom signs—created in response to North Carolina’s discriminatory transgender bathroom laws—are sparking some heated social media debate that for once doesn’t involve the right wing. Some view the $150 signs as exploitative and dismissive, while others (mostly cisgendered people) support the artist. It’s spread to multiple threads, but in this one we get to watch AFC friend Molly Rhinestones and Jerry Saltz on opposite sides of the debate. [Facebook]

As the cost of riding the MTA continues to rise, fare evasion on the subway is now the number one cause for arrests in NYC, disproportionately affecting low income people of color. All those arrests cost the city $51 million annually. But it would only cost the city $40.5 million to offer those same 29,000 riders free metrocards instead of arrest records and a night in jail. Activists are trying to call attention to this absurd policy by giving out free metrocard swipes in low-income neighborhoods. [Elite Daily]

Hate read: this piece equates the late Tony Goldman’s art-branded gentrifications schemes with social practice and community arts. Like, not as a criticism of community arts’ vaguely colonial undertones, but as an endorsement of art as a tool for developers. Seriously? [The Huffington Post]

Related: a household now needs to earn $158,000 annually to rent a two-bedroom in New York City, according to HUD metrics. This is so unacceptable. [Curbed]

Who is Yusaku Maezawa, the handsome billionaire from Chiba who pretty much single-handedly rescued the market with almost $100 million in contemporary art purchases last week? He’s a fashion mogul, former musician, and philanthropist with a foundation in Tokyo and a guest house for artists in London. Dear Mr. Maezawa, please bring us to Japan to see your collection, love AFC. [Observer]

This is adorable. Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commissioner Ben Loyola is offended by the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art showing Mark Ryden, who uses Catholic imagery in subversive-cheesy ways, and “paintings of nude portraits in all positions.” He’s upset taxpayer money is funding this. Ben, if you need a theme for a party to raise awareness about your concerns, I suggest the 1980s. [WAVY]

Unsurprisingly, more powerful figures from the art world have been named in the Panama Papers. The latest are gallerist Dominique Lévy and Miami mega-collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros. If you really need to stash assets in a non-taxable form, can’t you just buy more art for your personal museum? [artnet News]

Your animal video of the day: Panda & basket. Cleaning up leaves is a much harder job than it looks when there is a panda involved. [YouTube]

Hip-hop artist The Game commissioned a $65,000 portrait of Prince from street artist Madsteez. I want to see this on the hood of a car. [Complex]

Ben Davis thoughtfully reflects on Jordan Wolfson’s installation at David Zwirner, which focuses a human-like robot being tortured. Davis concludes that Wolfson has a violent need to command the attention of the viewer. [artnet News]

The Handicraft Building in Minneapolis, which was erected in 1907 to house women artists and craftspeople, is being partially demolished and renovated into luxury apartments. This is terrible. Dozens of artists will be displaced, in addition to artist-run galleries. This follows a pattern in downtown Minneapolis, in which small-scaled historic structures are being demolished to make way for larger developments. [City Pages]

In other real estate news, artist-run space Essex Flowers is relocating to Chinatown, where they’ll have a bigger space. [ARTnews]

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Monday Links: James Franco Calls AFC “Particularly Nasty”

by Paddy Johnson Michael Anthony Farley Rea McNamara on April 18, 2016

James Franco

It’s the 10th anniversary of the 2006 Youtube sensation “Shoes” by actor Liam Kyle Sullivan. Not sure the video tells us too much about the internet 10 years ago, though it is a good reminder that Peaches and more generally electroclash were widely popular. The music video, which is about a teenage character named “Kelly” who likes shoes and parties, still holds up. [The Onion AV Club]

Ann Freedman, former director of the scandal-ridden Knoedler Gallery, has given her side again, and what she reveals, is well, not much. Her much-anticipated testimony in the trial over the $8.3 million sale of a fake Rothko to Domenico and Eleanore De Sole was averted when the gallery and collectors settled out of court in February. Expectedly, Freedman confesses she didn’t know any of the works she sold were fakes, and while she says she’s sorry, adds “but let me be clear, this is [about] works of art. I didn’t slay anybody’s first-born. We have to have some perspective on suffering.” While six lawsuits have been settled against Knoedler for all the fakes they sold, four are still active. [Art Newspaper]

Finally, a listicle we can get behind: 10 Awful Public Art Pieces. [Houston Press]

The art market is ripe for abuse, say some. High quality global journalism requires investment. “There were huge steps towards greater transparency in the past 20 years,” says Clare McAndrew, author of the TEFAF Art Market report. “But in the past couple of years it has been going backwards.” Apparently, the trend of private sales at auction houses has created problems as has an unwillingness of private galleries to participate in surveys about purchasing. [FT.com via Art Market Monitor]

Jerry Saltz interviews James Franco. The crux of it seems to be that Franco has been unfairly persecuted in the art world because he’s an A-List actor who’s also an artist and scored his first show at a blue chip with conceptually weak work. The cruelties of the world continue: Jay Z was also unfairly persecuted, for shooting “Picasso Baby” at Pace filled with art world celeb cameos. What planet are these two on? There’s a tiny bit of talk about how Franco’s work wasn’t that strong, but come on. He remade Cindy Sherman photographs and showed them at Pace. Terrible. Franco says the gallery was embarrassed by the show, which HELLO. Of course they were. James Franco describes Art F City as “particularly nasty”. [NY Magazine]

Somewhat tangentially related, but Franco’s talent agency, WME | IMG, have bought a stake in in Frieze. The power-house agency, run by the inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold, will now sponsor the Frieze Tate Fund, providing the Tate with $213,000 for acquisitions. Beyond that, this all basically means you’ll see more celebrities at the fair previews, and the parties will be even more of a hassle to get into. [Artforum]

The Art Basel stabber says she attacked a fellow fair goer to prevent an ISIS attack. [The Observer]

Norwegian grocery baron/art collector Stein Erik Hagen is giving The Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design free reign to pick out works from his $120 million collection. [Forbes]

The dreaded L Train shutdown could begin in 2019. [Curbed]

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Friday Links: “The Fucked-up-ness of American Culture”

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on April 8, 2016

Barkley Hendricks, “In the Crosshairs of the States”

Iggy Pop was at the MoCA Detroit for the opening of American Valhalla: The Art of Post Pop Depression. The exhibition features photography from Andreas Neumann and Matt Helders, and will be tour the same cities as Iggy Pop’s concerts this year. [Billboard]

Could the German baugruppe model work here? German would-be homeowners can form LLCs to act as their own developers, building themselves custom, cheaper housing as opposed to buying off-the-rack condos. [Curbed]

Many in Toronto’s Downtown East are concerned that a new LGBTQ-focused sports center development in Toronto’s Moss Park may not serve the area’s large community of homeless people, sex workers and drug users. The Center is promising to “de-institutionalize” the neighborhood by having all community services under one roof, but the development coincides with an Edmonton developer buying up ten properties across the street to turn into three large condo towers. And so far, the condo development’s language—around “safety” and working “closely” with police “to advance law and order”—is raising concern and fears of displacement for the very community the sports center is supposed to serve. [NOW Magazine]

Barkley L. Hendricks has a new show of paintings at Jack Shainman, and in an interview with Lee Ann Norman, speaks to about his return to portraiture and “the fucked-up-ness of American culture”. [Hyperallergic]

The latest art world revelation from the Panama Papers? Turns out billionaire currency trader Joe Lewis bought the Ganz collection before the record-breaking 1997 Christie’s auction with the support of an offshore firm. Lewis bought 100 works from the collection six months before for $168 million, and then set up the Christie’s sale, which then fetched $206 million. [The Guardian]

James R. Miller is suing the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Sean Kelly Gallery, Skarstedt, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim for copyright infringement. Miller claims he actually staged and shot four iconic Mapplethorpe “self portraits” and is seeking tens of millions in damages. [Hyperallergic]

Dushko Petrovich’s profile of Jerry Saltz is sadly only available in the latest print issue of Tablet, but M.H. Miller provides some highlights here, along with commentary: “Saltz, as one of the few remaining staff art critics in the country, has a lot of power in the art world. He is also a widely known public figure (uncommon for critics of any genre). Negative criticism of him is rare and largely kept private. I’m sure Saltz’s followers would happily—or, more likely, angrily—debate the profile on social media, though in a strange bit of irony for a subject whose persona is so entwined with his presence online, Petrovich’s piece is only available in print.” [ART News]

Earlier this week, I (Michael) asked “Is a graphic diamond a symbol we can attach whatever symbolic associations we want to?” Apparently, yes. Olafur Eliasson’s “Green Light” looks very much like the project “Diamonds Light Baltimore”, but this time, the diamond is about the refugee crisis, not police brutality. [artnet News]

“Any New Yorker who even thinks of voting for Ted Cruz should have their head examined, Really, here’s a guy who refused to sign onto the 9/11 health care act for the cops and fireman. Here’s a guy who talks about New York values.” Even conservatives in New York can’t stand Cruz. That quote’s from Long Island Republican Peter King, who also mocks the Texan’s cowboy boots. [New York Daily News]

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