Recently in Culture Category

Come join me and James at ABC No Rio's benefit on May 3rd at Allegra LaViola on the Lower East Side. There will be wine, beer, food, a great silent art auction, and guest DJs including Anna Kustera, Doug McClemont, and Kembra Pfahler.

Tickets start at $50.

James and I are on the benefit committee for this amazing collectively-run center for art and activism founded in 1980 -- initially as a squat where they took over an abandoned building to put on an art show called Real Estate.

The old tenement building is going away to be replaced by a new building by architect Paul Castrucci based on sustainable design principles. Even if you can't make it to the benefit, any donation would be most appreciated!

From the New York Times obituary of Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che Guevara on his motorcycle journey around South America.

Before Che left Cuba in 1965 to pursue revolutions abroad, he left several books with inscriptions for close friends. They included one about the sugar industry for Mr. Granado.

The inscription was prescient.

"My dreams shall know no bounds, at least until bullets decide otherwise," wrote Che, who was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967. "I'll be expecting you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder subsides. A hug for all of you. Che."

James has the full details on his blog, but I wanted to make sure my readers knew about this too. We'll be there on Sunday.

PROTEST DETAILS

Sunday December 19, 2010, 1:00 PM

GATHER on the Metropolitan Museum steps Fifth Ave. & 82nd Street

Then MARCH to the Cooper-Hewitt/Smithsonian FIFTH Ave. & 91st Street

Wear your free expression best and be part of the message.

Art+ is a New York City-based art action group - fighting censorship and homophobia

http://artpositive.org/

From an interview in the December 2010 Progressive.

Q: You call your work not science fiction, but speculative fiction. What's the distinction you're drawing?

Margaret Atwood: The distinction has to do with lineages. It has to do with ancestries, and what family books belong to because books do belong in families. The ancestor of science fiction is H. G. Wells with books like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Those books involved things that are very unlikely to happen or are actually impossible, but they are ways of exploring possibilities and human nature and the way people react to certain things. And if you go to another planet, you get to build the whole society and you can draw blueprints and have fun with talking vegetation and other such things.

The lineage of speculative fiction traces back to Jules Verne, who wrote about things that he could see coming to pass that were possible on the Earth--this wasn't about outer space or space invasions--but things that we could actually do.

There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived.

Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the previous two centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.

...

We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters.

-- from All Tomorrow's Parties, 1999

James and I went to the Irish Hunger Memorial today to see an excerpt of The Voyage of Garbhglas by Christopher Williams courtesy of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The video above is a short segment of the 30-minute performance. I've also added one photo, and you can see more in my flickr set.

Never miss a chance to see this choreographer's work. His 3-hour work The Golden Legend at Dance Theater Workshop was funny, moving, and brilliant.

Details:

Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, 290 Vesey Street at North End Avenue

Monday, August 2, 2010, 12:30�1PM
Tuesday, August 3, 2010, 12:30�1PM
Wednesday, August 4, 2010, 12:30�1PM
Thursday, August 5, 2010, 12:30�1PM

There will be a great opportunity to get some book bargains and benefit New Alternatives for LGBT Homeless Youth, a group I heartily endorse. It was founded by activist Kate Barnhart, whom James and I met long ago via ACT UP when she was a teenage activist.

Huge Book Sale on July 10
At LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street
Will Benefit Homeless LGBT Youth

�Buy a book, save a young life� fundraiser
Offers ten thousand new volumes on sale
For $10 per shopping bag

NEW YORK, NY, June 28, 2010 � A huge sale of more than ten thousand new and used books will take place in the West Village on July 10, with the proceeds going to charity. The event, called �Buy a Book, Save a Young Life,� will take place on Saturday, July 10 from Noon-6pm at the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street.

The books on sale encompass every subject and genre, including children�s, art, classic and modern literature, as well as collectables and rarities. These books were donated by veteran bookseller Robert Warren, who recently closed his landmark New York bookstore, Skyline Books. Admission is free to this event, and people can fill a shopping bag full of books and pay $10 per bag.

All proceeds of the �Buy a Book, Save a Young Life� sale will benefit New Alternatives, the East Village program based at Middle Collegiate Church. New Alternatives provides desperately needed services to LGBT homeless youth, including hot meals, emergency housing referrals, case management, and life skills training.

There will be a special pre-sale on July 10 for dealers and collectors. For an admission fee of $25 (also going to New Alternatives), shoppers can get a jump on the crowd from 11am-Noon. Admission includes one free bag of books. Additional bags of books will be $25 each.

For hardcore bargain hunters, from 5pm to the 6pm closing, the price plummets to $1 per bag of books.

To match New Alternatives goals of promoting HIV awareness and safer-sex education, each bag of books comes with free condoms, and New Alternatives promises a fun festive atmosphere. In addition to great book bargains the event will include performances from queer and queer-friendly acts such as Circus Amok, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and The Church Ladies for Choice. Expect music, stilt walking, juggling and a good vibe to abound.

Paddy Johnson says, "I am only human!" [via John W Beaman's photos on Facebook of #class Rant Night]

Given my lack of time for blogging, and knowing more people would see it and discuss it there, I shared my notes from my rant on the last night of #class with Art Fag City. Don't miss the comments.

Part of the point of #class was to propose solutions, not just whine, so here are my thoughts. As the number of culture critics and writers decline in the printed media, the online world is replacing them, but getting paid enough to write is a big problem, even for relatively well-known writers such as Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City. As the co-founder of Culture Pundits and Idiom, it's something I worry about quite often, and both were founded to find some support for good writing.

My proposal: arts organizations such as The Art Dealers Association of America and the New Art Dealers Alliance should use a portion of their membership dues to fund arts writing. I'm sure similar groups exist for theater and dance as well, but the area I know best is the visual arts. In the long run, they need people to write about art, including their artists and exhibitions, and if people are too broke or busy freelancing to do so, no one wins. For a fraction of the cost of attending even a single art fair, the pooled resources could make a big difference in the quality and quantity of art criticism. Heck, perhaps some of this money could even fund some good editors to work with bloggers and other writers who would like that assistance!

Implementation details, such as an advisory committee for handing out the money, can be discussed. I would strongly recommend against a big proposal process, as I think that takes away from the time writers could use for better purposes. Writers who are interested in being considered could fill out a simple web form with a link to some samples of their writing for a committee to consider. In the interest of smoothing cash flow for all parties involved, the awards could even be monthly payments rather than lump sums. PayPal works very nicely for that.

Related: Two Coats of Paint on art bloggers, legitimacy, and awards.

Henry Cowell as a young man, from Wikipedia

For all of America�s celebration of its own love of invention and innovation, there has been a dark side to American cultural life: an enormous pressure to conform, the rule of a marketplace that is intolerant of genuine individuality and dissent, and a risk-averse anti-intellectualism derived from mistrust, isolationism, and commercial interest.

-- From Leon Botstein's essay on Henry Cowell for the American Symphony Orchestra

We attended the amazing all-Cowell concert, conducted by Botstein, last Friday.

I, along with a few other people you have probably already heard of, will be participating in a panel on blogs and contemporary art organized and moderated by Robin White for ArtTable. Full details below. I recommend RSVP-ing right away, as seating is limited.

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

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, Art 21 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/

About the organizers:

Robin White Owen is a principal at MediaCombo, an award winning multimedia production company that specializes in working with culture, science and environmental organizations. As a blogger, she writes about culture, social media and multimedia in and out of the gallery and museum. Robin has worked on productions for the The Jewish Museum, and the British Museum, in addition to working with VIART, View Magazine, and ArtForum.

www.mediacombo.net

http://mediacomb.net/blog

twitter.com/rocombo

Heather Darcy Bhandari is the director of artist relations at Mixed Greens. Since joining the gallery in 2000, she has curated over forty-five exhibitions while managing and advising a roster of nearly two-dozen artists. She curates independent shows, sits on the board of NURTUREart, and co-authored the professional development guide for artists, ART/WORK, published by Simon and Schuster in 2009. Heather majored in visual arts and anthropology at Brown University and received an MFA in painting from Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Mixed Greens, she worked at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin in New York City.

Lauren Pearson is a contemporary art historian and is currently Assistant Director at ArtCycle, a contemporary art consignment gallery. She recently received her Master's degree in contemporary art and cultural theory from the University College London, UK. Her thesis was titled, "The Spectacular is the Obvious: Negotiating Place in Postcolonial, War-torn and Embodied Geographies" and explored notions of contemporary art and geography. She received her undergraduate degree in art history from New York University in 2001, and has worked for the Smithsonian Institute's Archives of American Art, Milton Glaser Inc., Peter Halley Studio, and FRED [London/Leipzig], LLC. A native of San Francisco, she currently lives in New York City.

About X Initiative

X is a not-for-profit initiative of the global contemporary art community founded to exist for one year at 548 West 22nd Street to present exhibitions and programming. Advised by a 50+ advisory board comprised of artists, curators, museum professionals, gallerists, collectors, art historians and critics, X reaches across traditional boundaries to form a consortium interested in responding quickly to the major philosophical and economic shifts impacting culture. Questions posed in the form of programming address relevant and pressing issues pertaining to the changing landscape of contemporary art.