Massive Links! Global Edition!

by Art Fag City on February 19, 2010 · 6 comments Events

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

Miranda July, Things We Don’t Understand and Are Not Going to Talk About, 2006

I’ve been traveling all this week which is why the blog’s been a bit thin content wise. As a result however I’ve got a fair bit more national and international stories to link up. Massive Links, Global Style below!

  • When will the intense level of statistical detail culled from O.K Cupid sites find a fine art equivalency? I’m asking because the information SFMoMA blogger Renny Pritikin seeks — why do people stay or leave the San Francisco art scene — isn’t easy to come by, even with the provided list of 60 artists on either side of that fence.  A few of the questions posed: Do people tend to leave in their 20's and 30's, but if they're still around at 40, do they tend to stay? Are teaching opportunities a key factor in staying or going? Is having, not having, or losing, a gallery affiliation a factor? Are personal or professional interests a key determining factor (e.g. an ardent Sierra skier or camper, a high-tech artist scrounger, a member of a particular ethnic or sexual community centered here, a spouse with a good job, the climatic advantages)? Do these lists in any way shed light on whether the Bay Area is a vital art center?  Is there a qualitative difference in the lists?
    So far there are more than sixty comments on the blog from readers with insights on the two artist lists he provides. We’re interested in those those too. The lists below:
    Sixty Who Left:
    Anne Appleby, Darryl Alvarez, Anthony Aziz, Lewis Baltz, Richard Barnes, Jim Barseness, Nayland Blake, Brad Brown, Ione Rozeal Brown, Bette Burgoyne, Sarah Cain, Carolyn Castaño, Jim Christensen, Chris Cobb, Chris Daubert, Didi Dunphy, Peter Edlund, Simon Evans, Karen Finley, Harrell Fletcher, Jona Frank, Christopher French, Trinh Minh Ha, Frank Haines, Jonathan Hammer, Midori Harima, Paul Hasagawa-Overacker, Fred Hayes, Lisa Hein, Miranda July, Arnold Kemp, Elizabeth King, Steve Lambert, Stephen Laub, Annie Leibovitz, Bob Linder, Judith Linhares, Mads Lynnerup, Chico MacMurtrie, Mike Mandel, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Leah Modigliani, Ruby Neri, Aaron Noble, Rachel Neubauer, Sono Osato, Ed Osborn, Melissa Pokorny, Armando Rascon, Jock Reynolds, Michelle Rollman, Jon Rubin, Nancy Rubins, Sheri Simons, Hank Willis Thomas, Lew Thomas, Lee Walton, Jo Whaley, Jon Winet, John Woodall.
    Sixty Who Stayed:
    Michael Arcega, Lutz Bacher, John Bankston, Robert Bechtle, Rebeca Bollinger, Jim Campbell, Squeak Carnwath, Enrique Chagoya, Dewey Crumpler, Paul De Marinis, Judy Dater, Lewis DeSoto, Kota Ezawa, Vince Fecteau, Amy Franceschini, Rupert Garcia, Carmen Lomas Garza, Jim Goldberg, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Doug Hall, Diane Andrews Hall, Mike Henderson, Todd Hido, Desiree Holman, Mildred Howard, David Huffman, Isabella Kirkland, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Michael Light, Hung Liu, Chip Lord, Bernie Lubell, Tom Marioni, Barry McGee, Richard Misrach, Jim Melchert, Manuel Neri, Deborah Oropollo, Gay Outlaw, Mark Pauline, Nigel Poor, Lucy Puls, Alan Rath, Clare Rojas, Joe Sam, Raymond Saunders, Katherine Sherwood, Leslie Shows, Kathryn Spence, Louise Stanley, Michael Swaine, Stephanie Syjuco, Weston Teruya, Bruce Tomb, Camille Utterback, Catherine Wagner, Anne Walsh, William T. Wiley, Scott Williams.
  • From the SFMoMA blog archives: Prescription for a healthy art scene. Pritikin’s diagram remind me of an article written probably ten years ago by collector and philanthropist Ydessa Hendeles for the Globe and Mail [It’s buried in the Globe’s archives if it exists at all. I can’t find it]. In it she described why Toronto would never be an arts center. The essential difference between Toronto in New York according to Hendeles? In New York, you can’t attend a party without having seen the latest Chelsea and museum exhibitions, in Toronto, it won’t matter. See Pritikin’s points 12, 13, 15, and 16
  • London’s famed Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) warns staff it may be forced to close in May, and Mute Magazine’s JJ Charlesworth thinks the city’s mainstream press has mindlessly bought the “inevitable woe caused by the recession” story. In his post Ekow Eshun’s Experiment in De-instutionalization, or as we like to call it, “How-Ekow-Eshun-Ruined-The-ICA”, a seemingly endless list of troubles.  It’s hard to know where to start, but the institution’s focus on developing short term relationships with sponsors have clearly hurt the ICA now that the economy’s tanked. So did, say, abolishing day membership fees after only a couple weeks before the crash! Probably the most alarming is Eshun’s vision of what faces represent the ICA.
  • It should be the artistic figures that our audience admires… We should celebrate them in our communications as our heroes, our star names already, because our audience believes they are cool. And we should keep in mind that in a week to a year hence, many of those figures will no longer be relevant because there will be a new set or more urgent names to hail. All that matters is now.

    I really hope this isn’t what Jeffrey Deitch brings to L.A as Director of MOCA.

    It bears noting that ICA staff called a vote about whether a no-confidence vote should be counted. I’m not sure why the subject of the vote took such an indirect form, but my guess is that in situations like these, the question isn’t whether the staff has no confidence in their leadership but what can be done to correct the matter. Needless to say the ICA now denies the vote ever took place.

{ 6 comments }

zack February 19, 2010 at 6:41 pm

don’t have time to check the links now, but several SF gallerists have told me: SF collectors often browse in SF but then buy the same work in NYC (status? validation? who knows?) which undercuts SF galleries

zack February 19, 2010 at 2:41 pm

don’t have time to check the links now, but several SF gallerists have told me: SF collectors often browse in SF but then buy the same work in NYC (status? validation? who knows?) which undercuts SF galleries

andrea February 21, 2010 at 12:42 am

People leave the SF art scene because it is sleepy!
There’s only a few clusters of galleries.
There’s a leftover hippie “vibe” (if I can use that term) that rewards people for expression. So there’s a glut of student level work.
I lived there for 3 years- in between living in NY- and I was shocked to see the two main schools of work. One is pretty pretty paintings of a certain style and the other is social justice motivated work. I’m not against either, but there wasn’t much in between.
In SF, the culture is really more interested in tech, entrepreneurship, and social justice than art.

andrea February 20, 2010 at 8:42 pm

People leave the SF art scene because it is sleepy!
There’s only a few clusters of galleries.
There’s a leftover hippie “vibe” (if I can use that term) that rewards people for expression. So there’s a glut of student level work.
I lived there for 3 years- in between living in NY- and I was shocked to see the two main schools of work. One is pretty pretty paintings of a certain style and the other is social justice motivated work. I’m not against either, but there wasn’t much in between.
In SF, the culture is really more interested in tech, entrepreneurship, and social justice than art.

andrea February 21, 2010 at 4:15 pm

I forgot to say that there are, of course, some really great artists living there. It is just a tiny scene.

andrea February 21, 2010 at 12:15 pm

I forgot to say that there are, of course, some really great artists living there. It is just a tiny scene.

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