Ai Wei Wei's Chairs
- Both a tribute Ai Wei Wei’s 2007 installation Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs at Documenta 12, and a protest of the Chinese Government’s continued detention of the artist for unspecified economic crimes, thousands gathered outside Chinese Embassies in cities across North America and Europe to show their support for the artist. Look to 16 miles, Hyperallergic, Greg.org and Eyeteeth for full reports. Sadly, I missed the protest as I was on an early train to Dia. Robert Whitman’s opening performance occurred later that night, a non-narrative theatrical tribute to slowness. A full report on that soon.
- Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ destroyed by Christian protestors in Paris. According the Guardian, four people in sunglasses entered the gallery yesterday, threatened security staff with a hammer and slashed the photograph with what appeared to be screwdriver or ice pick. They also destroyed a photograph of nuns hands in prayer. Critic Kriston Capps asks over Twitter whether replacing the photograph will effect the edition. Ask John Waters. Apparently “Rush”, an inflatable bottle of liquid incense now on display at Invisible Exports has been destroyed twice by people accidentally falling on the piece. Both times the work was simply fabricated again.
- Former AFC intern Julia Halperin has a new column at ArtInfo titled “Definitions” and it’s generating a lot of discussion. First term to tackle? “Emerging”. Halperin asked Zach Miner of Phillips De Pury and a bunch of artists at Rachel Uffner Gallery how they define the term. “Between unknown and overexposed?” quips the ever-reliable Roger White. White co-founded Paper Monument and is known for his depressingly bleak watercolors of Britta waterfilters. Artist Pam Lins hates the term, saying it’s characterized by a short time span and is therefore “at odds with a lifelong engagement of art”. Professor Terry Smith says the term designates eligibility for grants in Canada, Australia, and Germany, etc. I personally don’t have a problem with the word; I’ve always thought “emerging” evoked both hope and excitement for the future, unlike “mid-career”, a term with relatively little pizazz that also happens to be very close to the hateful designation “middle-aged”. We need to come up with a better word for mid-career.
- MAN announces the winner of his duderific Art Madness II (drum-roll pleez): Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty defeats Jasper Johns White Flag 56. I think we can all breathe a little bit easier now knowing that the best Post-War art work has been definitively named.
- There’s been a lot of discussion surfacing again about why the review is a form of writing that either does or doesn’t need an update. To my mind, Roberta Smith recent review of Richard Serra’s’ drawings at The Met is exactly the kind of piece that refutes the idea that the internet has so transformed the art world that traditional criticism is no longer needed. Good reviews provide historical context, hard looking, and critical thinking. From Smith,
It is not quite like anything seen at the Met before: genuinely radical, physically unsettling art installed with a reasonable degree of effectiveness. It proclaims this august institution's commitment to recent art with an encouraging forcefulness.
But there are shortcomings. For one thing — and this is basic — drawing doesn't afford Mr. Serra the same leeway in terms of real space, real materials and audience participation that sculpture does. He is, in fact, a more austere, abstract, hermetic, “difficult” artist in drawing than in sculpture, and this narrowness sometimes accentuates his penchant for bombast and opacity.
- When do you ever see this kind of writing and thinking in a reported piece? You don’t.
- Still, Kriston Capps deserves a nod for this gem over Twitter: “My think-piece on the state of art criticism would be “Since ’96″. I don’t think art has changed criticism as much as AOL has.”
- Related: Robert Storr pens his final column for Frieze describing critics as agile bottom feeders. He goes on to complain that increasingly participation means little more than getting a word in edgewise. These sound like the words of a critic without an active Facebook account.
- Finally, what’s a Massive Link post without at least one link or screen grab from a dating site? The Internet celebrates OKCupid for deleting someone’s account because he made threatening and racist remarks. I’m sure he’s made a new one by now.
