Massive Links: Miscellany Edition

Vanessa Beecroft. Image via: Artforum.com

Time for an old fashioned link dump! We’ve been remiss about this segment of our programming, but this should help put us back on track. A few items worthy of note which inspire more commentary than we like to see in our fresh link column.

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Good news for the ten cross over Gawker readers on this site: Editor Emily Gould is on vacation this week, which means surfers don’t have to sort through meaningless posts about her break up with her boyfriend and ridiculously lit good-bye swimsuit shots from her on a rooftop. Happily coinciding this, Choire Sicha emparts words of weight loss wisdom, which includes tips on an old favorite at AFC, photographer Vanessa Beecroft,

Also totally hot right now: exercise bulimia! This innovative form, pioneered by conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft, is totally, utterly safe. After Judith Thurman’s 2003 profile of Beecroft in the New Yorker, Thurman participated in a Q&A extolling the virtues of this divine tactic:

Her bulimia –exercise bulimia –isn’t life-threatening. It isn’t like anorexia, which can lead to death. It isn’t even like the more conventional kind of bulimia, which involves vomiting, and which can lead to unpleasant physical conditions, such as gum disease, tooth decay, ulcers, etc. Her obsession does, of
course, “eat up” a tremendous portion of her life, daily and psychic. But it also apparently feeds her art. And she does see a therapist. As she says herself, she didn’t (and I think doesn’t) want to “waste herself” completely.

See? Totally harmless! And look at La Beecroft now! Thin as a twig. And not crazy at all.

There you have it future artists; let your obsessions get the better of you, see a therapist, and not only will you be skinny, but you just might get a gallery out it!

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Jane Kallir writes brilliantly about the perils of a collector driven market in the Art Newspaper saying,

For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). […] Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity's personal preferences will cloud everyone's short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today's collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge.

The above quote is directly lifted from dealer Edward Winkleman who also ruminates on the contemporary art market expressing an interest in using solo shows for artists at fairs as a means of slowing collectors down a bit. Since collectors seem to favor purchasing work at fairs and auctions over exhibitions these days, the suggestion isn’t so far out in left field, but the practicality of it really depends on the fair and the installation. While Urs Fischer’s installation at Gavin Brown in Art Basel Miami might be an exception to this, fairs like ones in Miami create such a frenzied atmosphere amongst collectors that it’s virtually impossible to cut through that to actually see the work.

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The Brooklyn Rail talks with Barry Hoggard, James Wagner, and painternyc about the future of art criticism. The article makes a number of interesting points before getting to the interview, citing artists like Arshile Gorky’s expressed distrust of critics who couldn’t draw, to discussing the current valuations of a gushing review from one of New York’s top critics (that being 50,000.) The interviews themselves are quite good and worth the read. Painterpaparazzi expresses some concern about commenting saying, “The blog format is flawed, and the anonymous nature of posts a problem. I think it might evolve into something like TMZ.com, a celebrity stocking site, or perezhilton.com, where they just deal with celebrities.” James Wagner and Barry Hoggard discuss their blogs, beginning with their first posts, which had no pictures!