Art Fag City

Emergency Grants for Artists and Writers

by John Gawarecki-Maxwell on February 1, 2012 · 1 comment

Are you an artist or writer who’s lost their job and needs financial help? Here’s a list of resources and grants that will help if you’re in need.

Massimiliano Gioni named Curator of the Venice Biennale

by Will Brand on January 31, 2012 · 2 comments

Newswire

If you have any kind of career in the art world, Massimiliano Gioni should make you feel bad. Now, as the newly-named curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, he should make you feel worse.

This Show Is Not About Don King: “Rumble” at Hauser & Wirth

by Will Brand on January 31, 2012 · 0 comments

Review

Midway through Roberta Smith’s recent review of Damien Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings, she asked: “Am I grading on a curve?” It’s a good question, and one that recognizes the difficulty of measuring art on a shifting scale: a good show at one gallery is a disappointment at another, and the best show in January might have been middling in the bustle of October.

Make no mistake: Rashid Johnson’s Rumble is one of the best shows in New York right now. It’s a tightly interwoven, confidently executed show that looks good, sounds smart, and plays to the preternatural ability to move between media that is Johnson’s greatest strength. At the same time, it has obvious flaws: it is unmoving, at times indecipherable, and falls into the Conceptualist trap of sounding better as a press release than it looks as a show.

Old Men, Little Girls, and Bad Paintings

by Corinna Kirsch on January 31, 2012 · 0 comments

The internet might be run on cats, but this sea otter rap proves that all mammals are proper fodder for a meme. [Lair2000.net]
Guards at London’s National Gallery went on strike this past weekend to protest staff cuts, and they’re planning even more walk outs in the days to come. [The Guardian]
In preparation for the Guggenheim’s upcoming exhibition by teen prodigy Francesca Woodman, Cabinet‘s profile on another child genius, the poet Minou Drouet, provides some good background into the life and times of precocious youths. It’s filled with absurd stories – like how the French government locked “this little kitten” in a room to determine whether she wrote her own poems. [Cabinet]
This weekend, Tyler Green commented on NPR’s “oh-so-impressive art coverage” [MAN], an atrocious piece of journalism that asks that old and tired question, “Is Jackson Pollock really an artist?” Groan. [NPR]
Author Jonathan Franzen, that overly satirical writer about the failures of masculinity and the American dream, rants against ebooks, but ends up sounding like a whiny luddite who doesn’t understand kids nowadays with their new-fangled technology. [The Telegraph]
House arrest won’t prevent Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from hosting his own TV show. [New York Magazine]
So far, six people have completed the Gagosian Spot Challenge. And all they got was a lousy t-shirt. [other criteria]

Is A Teen Art Gallery A Good Idea?

by Reid Singer on January 31, 2012 · 5 comments

From the Desk of AFC

Post image for Is A Teen Art Gallery A Good Idea?

Credit where credit is due, right? We at Art Fag City heartily applaud the energy and self-starting spirit that a project like this represents, even as we bear in mind the things that can go wrong when the art world embraces youth too eagerly. After they’ve shown at T.A.G., though, one wonders what will happen next to an exhibition’s contributors. Hopefully, they’ll go to art school, refine their skills, and expose themselves to work by other artists. In other words, they’ll do what they were going to do anyway. The space on their resumes occupied by their work with Banks will be pushed downward as soon as they have something to fill it.

Twitter Debate About ArtPrize, Now a YouTube Series

by Paddy Johnson on January 30, 2012 · 28 comments

Interview

Back in early January, Carolina Miranda, John Powers and I had a twitter debate over the merits of ArtPrize, the self-proclaimed grand experiment in Grand Rapids, MI, which awards hundreds of thousands of dollars, based mostly on popular vote. Carolina was suspicious, John thought ArtPrize could do artists better, and I decided the event was great. Hoping to hash this issues out a little a more in person, John Powers and I spent close to two hours with ArtPrize’s Kevin Buist, discussing its various merits and detractors. The result: 18 sequential YouTube videos documenting our conversation, idea by idea.