Arrive on Time

A view of the hole created by the explosion at Lexington Avenue near Grand Central Station. (Photo: Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency) Via: NYTimes

Regardless of circumstance practicality — if you can call it that — dominates my thinking in virtually any situation.  For example, I remember walking on 42^nd street September 11th with a Little Debbie snack in my hand, thinking to myself, “If this is the last thing I get to eat, I’m going to be really pissed off.”  Wednesday I had the misfortune of remembering this thought, when I witnessed all manner of chaos at Grand Central.  This time however, the experience prompted different thoughts; the first, a banal observation that I really need a new pair of shoes because I can’t run in the ones I own, and the second that I should purchase a reliable cell phone so that I can call galleries I am supposed to be at to tell them I will be late.

Needless to say, in spite of being a block away from the steam pipe explosion on 42^nd on Wednesday, I did manage to make it to the Double X panel discussion I was part of at Brooklyn FireProof. Not that I would have missed too much if I had been a little late; the conversation about gender representation centered primarily on formalism and painting which was interesting but a little drawn out for my tastes.  Of course, considering the long and remedial historical monologue presented by Phong Bui about the CIA's support of Abstract Expressionism, freedom of expression, and some small point about feminism I never caught, talking about gendered art and the importance of the exhibition and panel discussion High Times Hard Times is nothing to complain about. 

Personally, my favorite contributions came from Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of P.P.O.W. gallery, Deborah Kass, an artist and senior critic in the Yale MFA program and Katy Siegel, Associate Professor of art history and criticism at Hunter University, and contributing editor at Art Forum, but rather than poorly summarize points made by these women because I wasn't taking notes, I'll wait for the promised transcript (and hopefully vlog) to appear online in the next week or so.  I suppose writing 400 words to tell you that I'll be posting thoughts on this later, fails to exhibit the practical thinking I observed earlier on in this post, but then I guess that's not really the word I was looking for anyway.