Here'$ What You Really Want to Know

Those gold hooks by Karmelo Bermego?  10 out of 175 sold at 1500 euro each.

Sold at Pulse:

Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation

Red Girls / Blue Girls

Winkleman Gallery, NY, NY

 *****************

Kiel Johnson

Two Sides to Every Story:  AKA Boom Boom

Davidson Contemporary, NY NY

*****************

 

Cecilia Parades

Chrysanthemum

Diana Lowenstein, Fine Arts

$8000 per print

*****************

 Anything by Brian Dettmer

Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL

 

 

And, hadn't sold yet, but is really cool:

Britannica

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Sold at Aqua:

Lori Nix

Assorted Photographs

 

Miami Basel Hooks Us Up

Is the Art Fair back? Are the buyers buying? One thing is for sure, Karmelo Bermejo and the gallery Maisterravalbuena are hoping to hook whatever fish they can. Bermejo's conceptual foundation is slight enough to appeal to the general public while offering an easy to carry option to the customer who prefers to invest in gold.   Get them while you can -- only 150 in the edition.

 

 

Maisterravalbuena at Art Basel Miami Beach

Social Tedia

A million tweets a day. That's 140 million characters. 3.5 billion text messages a day. That's 560 billion characters. All together, there are 700 billion individual letters being sent through the ether. You'd think with so many monkeys typing, that the new Shakespeare would emerge through sheer random chance. And yet, there you have it: New Moon, what not to say on a first date, and with whom everybody is watching Grey's Anatomy. Not to mention all those Facebook posts about breakfast, TV, and pictures of us eating breakfast and watching TV.








How many phone calls, texts, and postings are made just to tell someone where we are, where we're going, like miniature Gauguins? U, me, 2, 4, dinner, bar, drink, l8r, lol, wow, ok, gnite. We are requiring ourselves to say so little in such tiny ways. In the December 2009 issue of Vanity Fair Jim Windolf writes about how we are "Addicted to Cute," citing the popularity of cat videos on YouTube and the scientific evidence suggesting we are wired to respond protectively to cute things. By extension, he proposes that the demoralized American populace is taking refuge in infantile big eyed snuggies, hoping that someone will snuggle us through the bad times. Like little bleeting lambs, little tweeting birds, everybody is talking baby talk: repetitive, monosyllabic, and insipid.

Where the Child Things Are

Max and Carol

Spike Jones has exceeded all expectations with Where the Wild Things Are. More cohesive, consistent, and complete than the loopy and fantastical "Being John Malcovich" and "Adaptation," the movie has an internal logic that never falters and that persuades on multiple levels: the characters, their universally familiar behaviors of childhood and family, and the big feelings that we all struggle with and that become monstrous when we can't control them, making us feel worse than ever. Sad, sweet, and funny, including a knock knock joke that gets a genuine laugh, the movie pushes you along far past the book that inspired it, into its own story, its own reason for being, its own catharsis. A must see for disfunctional families everywhere, if only we can stand to watch ourselves. Get yourselves in a big pile and dream...

New York Times Likes It: With “Where the Wild Things Are” he has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.





NPR Likes It Too: Except, "its characters come with a back story, to my mind one that spells things out too much" and "And one alteration by Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers is unpardonable: Max dashes out of the house instead of getting sent to bed without supper, so there are no bedroom walls melting away, no forest rolling in — one of the book's most indelible images." (David Edelstein)






And They Don't Like it Either: It's painful to say this — and even more painful to watch it unfold onscreen — but Maurice Sendak's beloved Where the Wild Things Are has been turned into a self-indulgent cinematic fable that neither parents nor children are going to like. (Kenneth Turan)





Clueless Viewer, Didn't Like It: This movie was a complete disappointment. I felt the trailers for this film were misleading in that it didn't show the distorted emotions that most characters in this film possessed. My children were unsure of the Monsters intentions based on the monsters actions. Carol clearly had anger management problems. And the list goes on and on.... This film was totally not what we all were expecting. (Blackie Ocean: Really?)

Max and Carol II

Steel Panther is Creeping Up On You

I tremble before the manhood that is Steel Panther. Their record, Feel the Steel, might be the greatest thing since Spinal Tap. Best of all is their umlaut-rampant website: those pouts, those cheekbones, that spandex! They could be mistaken for a Pat Benataur work-out video. I'll leave it to the rock dudes to explicate the music: metal, shmetal. The lyrics are funny as all get out.

Feel the Steel!

Check out the Maxim Interview

The Shark That Jumped Itself: Bad Blood and True Fans

The second season of True Blood has wrapped its crazy self up, leaving us with a bad hangover and a case of the heebie jeebies. Did our eyes really go black and round? Did we really roll around howling like a banshee with our disgusting next door neighbor/mechanic/teacher/crazy street person? Are the pictures on Facebook?








Like the residents of Bon Temps, we are wondering whether the good times rolled right out of town on the back of a Maenad.







Season one built on the anticipation of the trailer and milked the suspense of the new, hooking viewers with its strange universe. Season two relied on endless cheesecake and replaced suspense with tedious exposition and dialogue that exposed the limits of the accents of many of the actors.

The Victorious Actor Nelsan Ellis

The only cast member who was able to withstand the ridiculousness of season two is Nelsan Ellis, who managed to make sweet music of the sorry lines he was given. His channeling of the gay, vamp-bitten, gun-shy, outrageous, self-possessed and tender character of Lafayette may forever mark his career, and certainly redeems the overall implausibility of this season: the entire town gone mad, orgiastic, consumed, destructive, cutting off their own fingers and flinging themselves around like a fourth grade production of Hair. Season three seems doomed to drown in its own shark bait. If only the show could be more like the trailer...or as good as the fan videos on YouTube.

Lafayette FanVid (Lily Allen's "I Could Be Your Fag Hag")





Eric Northman Fan Video





Eric Sexy Back Fan Video





True Blood Fan Video: It's Raining Men





Jessica Gelt Recaps the Finale

In the Beginning: A Guest Correspondent Reports from Pennsylvania

Excellent production. Parking, seating etc. was well handled.-Violet Murphy, Greer, SC

Recently a dear relation attended the cultural offering at the Sight and Sound Millennium Theatre in Strasburg, Pennsylvania entitled "In the Beginning." Her account follows; one is tempted to think it is a tad exaggerated until the Site and Sound website proves otherwise.

"The show itself was in a huge, new theater almost like the Taj Mahal in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmland. Huge cast, much elaborate scenery as they depicted the story of Adam and Eve. Audience was mostly made up of bus loads of people like us.

Site and Sound Millenium Theatre

Music was contemporary which means that I can't remember any of the melody. Huge cast letter perfect but there was much use of smoke machines, thunder, lightning, ascensions into heaven, angels with flapping wings, live animals, and huge stuffed animals with people inside moving them about.

Eden

Angels on stage wore sneakers with the built-in rollers so they could move swiftly across large areas. The theater was enormous and with a huge surround. God was depicted throughout. He was played by a frail young man with waist-length black wavy wig and he wore a white chiffon robe with sequins and spangles showing from beneath that looked like an evening gown.

God Created Adam In An Evening Gown

Excellent voices but the play was long, dialogue was strange....Adam at one point said, "God is acting different today." Lots of climbing up rocks and hiding in caves and, best of all, there was a huge stuffed wooley mammouth that pulled a cart across the stage. Program note said they'd taken 'liberties with the story.' "

mezzaine direct center seats with no one in your view, Excellent -Ralph Caiazza, Meriden, CT

We will never know, really, whether woolly mamouths and giant turtles lived at the same time as a couple named Adam and Eve. In a follow-up interview, our correspondent added that in the course of the production, Eve disappeared frequently into caves and emerged with babies, producing 43 children. And when God needed to ascend, the angels, who wore white and gold glitter masks with feathers on them, would come stand in front of him flapping their wings while he fastened on the flying gear. No effort was spared, just as God would have wanted it.

Vacations Made Easy

Religulous Holy Land Theme Park

"Experience God's pleasure at his most awesome creation, Adam and Eve, and the complete beauty of their unbroken relationship with God."

Mad Men and Epi-slams

Don Draper

Late on the Mad Men bandwagon, I have spent the last two weeks in a feverish reverie, watching as fast as I could to complete the first two seasons before the season three premier.

Television episodes designed for hour broadcast are actually about 47 minutes long, to allow for commercial breaks. When watched on DVD or on cable-on-demand or internet streaming, the stories can flow seamlessly without stopping, like movies. Suddenly, without the constant interruptions of loud and annoying commercials, the attention span is restored, the wandering around the house stops, the internet surfing idles. The lie of multi-tasking is laid aside, and one can be completely absorbed in the characters, plots, and subtleties. In conjunction with storylines that arc across multiple episodes, even across multiple seasons, the viewer can be drawn into a dreamlike immersion in story.

With a complete season of disks, an entire weekend can be consumed watching an epislam of episodes. Easy obsession that is cheap to satisfy and less destructive than many other weekend hobbies. Like civil war re-enactors who immerse themselves in a long re-creation of experience with such verisimillitude that they experience "period rush" and "Civil War-Gasm", the viewer of an entire season of Mad Men can feel like they have smoked a carton of cigarettes, clinked a couple dozen of ice filled glasses, and sat in perplexed and moody silence until the new era dawns. Like collectors of particular vintage artifacts, viewers can suffer "completism," in which every episode must be watched in chronological order, every commentary track parsed, every set of credits analyzed.

A Google blog search of "dvd watching mad OR men, OR wire, OR lost, OR true OR blood" turns up over 1,295,416 hits; the addition of the word "obsessed" narrows the results to 51,027. How many people do you know who've told you they were watching one of these popular series from end to end?

But Mad Men has a special hold on me. My parents were the same age as Don and Betty Draper at the same time in which the series is set; my father commuted to New York City from the suburbs; came home late on the train; traveled in a world of men and cocktails and golf, riding elevators in office buildings and having secretaries sit outside his glass windowed skyscraper offices. The sheer virtuosity of this recreated world has transfixed me, the details enhancing the effects of the "period rush." And the characters, beautifully clothed and riddled with flaws, mysteries, and self-occlusion, are fascinating in a way that is rare in television or movies of any kind. Like the opening credits, in which a stylized Don Draper falls through the caverns of skyscapers covered with advertising images, so I have fallen prey to series-itis, a benign ailment at worse, and at best, a dream to wallow in for a weekend or two.

A Contrary Opinion About Mad Men

The Real Madison Avenue

Mad Men: Official Website

Opening Credits (Beautiful!)

What Would Don Draper Do?

Stunner Ow-ers

Summer Hours, 2009
L'Heure d'été

Summer Hours. Lovely and languid or tedious and torpid?

Flat. Flatlined. No rising or falling action. No action. The plot points are barely blips in the flatness. It's discouraging to read the film website's synopsis; in fact, the reviews, too, which describe a "struggle" among the siblings, that they "remember" together about the past, that the objects represent something important, that there is conflict and resolution. The family dynamics are so slight, the reviewers' words over-describe the almost invisible events of the movie. Perhaps this is just the filmed equivalent of the Gallic shrug: to recognize their differences, however minimally, is a big struggle to the French?

The teenage invasion at the end almost redeems things, with its implications of doom (the fire, the studio, the pond) and the fresh carelessness of the new generation: stupid, willful, and yet still nostalgic.

""Summer Hours," as calm and quiet as its title, is in some ways [Olivier Assayas] most coherent and complex exploration of the current shape of the world. Don’t be fooled by the apparent modesty of its ambitions. Sometimes a small, homely object — a teapot, a writing desk, a sketchbook, a movie about such things — turns out to be a masterpiece." -- A. O. Scott, New York Times, May 15, 2009

"A movie whose true central subject is how sad it is to sell your two Corots, [but of course who could afford the inheritance tax etc.] is bewildering. Even more bewildering is the fact that Mr. Scott eats it line, hook and sinker."
-- Comment 14. New York Times, May 18th, 2009 8:27 pm. George.

"The actors all find the correct notes. It is a French film, and so they are allowed to be adult and intelligent. They are not the creatures of a screenplay that hurries them along. The film is not about what will happen. It is about them. The recent American film that most resembles this one is Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married." Some audience members didn't know what to think of it, because it didn't tell them. Sometimes you just have to figure out what you think for yourself. "Summer Hours" ends on the perfect note, the more you think about it."
-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 2009

"Lots of films are called haunting, Summer Hours truly is."
-- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, May 14, 2009

"Parts of "Summer Hours" feel very much like real life, which is both the film's strength and its ultimate weakness. The sense of realism can only sustain this downbeat French drama for so long. After a while it feels like you're really spending nearly two hours with your squabbling siblings."
-- Jeff Vice, Deseret News, June 25, 2009

"What is most unusual about "Summer Hours" is that it is concerned about what will be left of French culture if the country's best and brightest move offshore. French films traditionally take France and its eternal appeal for granted. "Summer Hours" is the rare film that worries about that, worries about the future, and that proves to be invaluable."
-- Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times, May 29, 2009

For the real thing, see the patrimony of France and the rest of the Western World at the Musée d'Orsay

Mercy, Mercy, Merce

Photograph by Richard Rutledge of Merce Cunningham in his work Antic Meet (1958)

Merce Cunningham, how do we admire thee? From the depth and breadth of your list of collaborators and accomplishments: John Cage, Martha Graham, Black Rock College, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Karole Armitage, Paul Taylor, 200 choreographed dances, 800 site-specific choreographic works, and a MacArthur Foundation Grant. You were working up to the last minute of your 90 years, most recently ensuring that your legacy would endure, wrapping up all the loose ends. For all of your commitment to chance, you left nothing up to it. Bless your impish, curly little head! Hope you and John are enjoying the after-party.

Photograh of Merce and John by Hans Wild

Thank You, George Dyer

The Most Painted Head

The Francis Bacon centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes it clear that Bacon got to be a better painter because of George Dyer. One look at the big head and that body and you can see why.

George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio, ca. 1964
John Deakin (British, 1912–1972)

What a man... As the exhibit progresses from the popes with the over-reliance on fudged anatomy, gimmicky obsessions, and white grids in place of structure to the paintings from photographs he commissioned, the work gets stronger, and Dyer's death brought out more detail and spatial and emotional meaning. The triptych In Memory of George Dyer is true, mysterious, sad, and cohesive, with its deep central retreating into the death hotel and the arching side portraits. And his self portrait with the sink, while rehashing, or pre-hashing, the twisted posture and memorial fixtures that would pre-occupy so many of his paintings following Dyer's death, is at the same time eloquent, histrionic, obvious, and elusive.

Dyer and Bacon

You have to wonder how Bacon had the energy to be consumed by gambling, alcohol, men and painting. The time. And the unluckiness, or was it luck, to find such doomed and beautiful men, dying to be dissolved into his paintings, destroyed by unhappiness, preserved in linen and oil, blessed by the pope, eternal footnotes to an art that seems half phony and half all-too-serious.

If Joel-Peter Witkin Was a Nursery Rhyme

History of the White World: Arabia

Joel-Peter Witkin
Was standing on a curb
A girlie's head bounced up to him
Her fault he is a perv

Joel-Peter Witkin
Likes to stage tableaux
Scratchy prints of body parts
Dwarves and scenes by Giotto

Joel-Peter Witkin
Went peeping down a lane
And bought a horse to crucify
Convinced he is humane

Joel-Peter Witkin
Has a lot to say
Hermaphrodites and Jesus
The studio of Courbet

Joel-Peter Witkin
Is he just a naughty boy
Who likes a dirty picture
And has a camera for a toy?

More about Joel-Peter Witkin:
On ArtNet
Wikipedia Entry
Edelman Gallery

A Beautiful, Claustrophobic Dream

Reese Street

Jeremiah Zagar has taken refuge behind the camera in this award-winning documentary about his father, Isaiah Zagar, an obsessive post-hippie mosaicist and occasional manic; his mother Julia, a grounded muse, enabler, and entrepreneur; and his brother, a troubled, addicted foil to the family drama. The film is itself a mosaic: family films and photographs, produced as part of the relentless documentation in multiple media of their lives from the mid-sixties forward, animations of Isaiah's drawings, footage of the glittering, mosaic-crusted Philadelphia buildings that Isaiah has transformed, and reality-TV-style depiction of their transitions and ups and downs. Colorful, inspirational, and insightful, the film poses questions about the relationship between art, sanity, family, stability, money, loyalty, and perseverence. Most of all, the relentlessly mosaic-ed interior of the family home overwhelms any possible individuation; the horror vacui of the art work oppressively dominates all who dwell within, as the personality of Isaiah does his family. Bless the families of artists!

All the Leaves are Brown

Andrew Wyeth, 1964 (Baltimore Sun story by Patrick Walters, The Associated Press)

Andrew Wyeth, lover of gray and brown, the sere and the lonely, master of alone-ness, as well as lover of models, has joined the great tempera painting in the sky, a curtain blowing in from an open window.

Wind from the Sea, 1948

At 91, he straddled the uncomfortable gap between low-critical and high-popular acclaim with a certain amount of "whatever," and like many other male artists, did exactly what he wanted to the tune of financial success. His wife took care of the details and didn't sweat the secrecy. In the end, the work exhibits peerless technique in the service of subject matter that veers at times towards the reproducible, and yet still strikes a transcendent chord at least part of the time.

Winter, 1946

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape -- the loneliness of it -- the dead feeling of winter."

Vampires Shmampires

Le Manoir Diable, Georges Méliès

The vampire has been fanging on our collective necks since 1896 with the first appearance of a man transforming into a bat in Méliès two minute fantasy-comedy Le Manoir Diable, followed shortly thereafter by the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. One hundred and twelve years later we are still being stalked by the pallid, otherworldly creatures. Is it a coincidence that as the world seems to becoming a darker and more unpredictable place that the vampire is once again reasserting his hold on our attention? Twilight, True Blood, and Let the Right One In all depict vampires as not only having the savage unquenchable need to drink human blood, but also as having an irresistable charismatic appeal. Why are we feeling the need to fall in love with something that wants to kill us?

The Wikipedia entry on Stoker's Dracula cites themes of imperialism, xenophobia and use of technology to achieve results. Hmm. Sound familiar?

The First Emperor Now at Fascist DisneyWorld

Soldier and Horse by Robin Chen, Not from Exhibit

Imagine standing in the longest line ever, only it never ends. Like being at WalMart, but not only does your hair look really good, so does everybody elses. And WalMart kills your hairdresser. This is something like what it must have been like to be an actual terracotta soldier as currently represented by the exhibit at the High Museum, The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army. The story of the seven thousand uniquely sculpted soldiers that were buried forgotten on a plain for 2,000 years is truly amazing, and the brilliant and systematic efficiency of the ruler Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, produced powerful, lasting effects on the country, and yet, this traveling exhibit which originated at the British Museum manages to summarize, pre-digest, and commodify the complex history without mentioning words like slave, mass murder, or forced labor. But first, you have to pay 18 dollars for admission plus five dollars for the audio tour, which does briefly admit in passing the possibility that the "conscripted workers" could be considered to have been, well, slaves. The extremely minimal content that is imparted in text and on tape would together fill up one side of a cereal box. Why not just charge an even 25 dollars and throw in a pamphlet? By the time you are released into the gift shop of overpriced Chinese knick knacks, you are either programmed to purchase the complete set of miniature replica terracotta soliders, a must-have at the post-Christmas bargain price of $25.00, or worse, you will convince yourself that you need to get a full-size version.

The amount of money that is being made from this exhibit does not seem to be reflected in the content or cultural scholarship that surrounds it. From an article about the terracotta soldiers in Wikipedia:

"According to The Times, many people had to be turned away from the exhibition, despite viewings until midnight, and during the day of events to mark the Chinese new year, the crush was so intense that the gates to the museum had to be shut. The Terracotta Army has been described as the only other set of historic artifacts (along with the remnants of ruins of the Titanic) which can draw a crowd simply on the back of the name alone."

People are deeply interested in these artifacts. Is their attention span sufficient to stand in line to look, but not to think deeply about all of the facts surrounding their creation? It's as if an exhibit in 2000 years focused primarily on Hitler's development of the autobahns and didn't mention the Holocaust. DisneyWorld charges admission for an experience that entertains and diverts, while providing opportunities to separate you from your money for every little thing. Aren't museums supposed to do more than that?

The period of Qin Shi Huang's unification of China is also known as the "burning of the books and burial of the scholars," which sounds just like it was. Perhaps the not-quite-yet-to-materialize Shanghai Disney will offer a thrilling adventure ride modeled on the Cultural Revolution. Great fun for the family!