Atlanta is Flooded

Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum

On a recent dreary Saturday, Richard Flood ventured forth from NYC's New Museum to the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, where he was called upon to explain why Matthew Barney, why Richard Prince, and why him.  Like an experienced dinner party guest, he related the evolution of his career as, well, a series of dinner parties:  serendipitous opportunities that arose out of his interests, relationships, and the strange way that life can present a solution at just the right juncture to just the right person.  His gifts of story and humor combined with his sensitivity to the artist have enabled him to shepherd artists to the forefront through multiple contexts, including Art Forum, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and the Walker Art Center. 

Swirling around in decades of anecdote, some choice tidbits:

• On being a managing editor:  "The most horrible, brutal job you can get."
• On first going into the unknown Matthew Barney's studio:  "I walked into the future, it was nothing like anything I'd ever seen, an incredible fusion between sports and art."
• On reaching out to the unappreciated Richard Prince:  "He was sitting in the dark like a dog who had been horribly abused."
• On his decision to go to Minneapolis:  "Both of my parents had died.  I was shut down and negative.  I was in analysis.  I didn't like who I had become, how I was using my humor."
• On Minneapolis:  "I never liked Minneapolis but grew to fall in love with Minnesota."
• On working with artists: "When you ask an artist to do a solo exhibition, it's a huge weight on them -- you're asking them to take off their clothes and stand there naked and be assessed, and the market has changed and the critical marketplace has changed."
• On Robert Gober's "Slides of a Changing Painting":  "It's the Rosetta Stone for his practice."
• On the disappearance of major works into private collections:  "It's an American problem."
  
• On younger staff guiding him through the "prairie dog village" of the blogosphere during the recent controversy surrounding "The Imaginary Museum," an exhibition that will expose the private collection of museum trustee Dakis Joannou:  "There's a growing crisis in print media.  Horrible things are happening to newspapers.  I have 23 year old interns who have told me they have never touched a newspaper.  I am starting to doubt the necessity of the catalog.  We are walking into an entirely new world.  [I decided to] embrace the controversy and found a brand new public.  We'll go through it and learn from it.  Of course, it will be worse when the show goes up -- the collection is provocative."
• On the provincialism of NYC, affirming in part the insularity that affects cultural institutions including the New Museum:  "Get rid of it, get New York out of your system, and start a conversaton with the rest of the country."
  

Suicide: Real and Imagined

Suicide is not funny or cute.  The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, however legitimately it proposes to extinguish and extricate the prisoners of social networking sites, has a cute Hello-Kitty-style logo that is actually a goodbye noose.  Yes, social networking can be a real waste of time.  Yes, it is ridiculous that someone would have 800 virtual friends but no real social life.  And, yes, it is true that many people avoid social networking for the same reasons that others wish to disentangle themselves from their online relationships:  too much data, too accessible, too perpetual, too much blah blah blather.

The cease and desist letter that Facebook sent to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests a more sinister issue however:  their ownership of your "stuff."  They own it, not you, and you are not permitted to allow scripts such as those employed by the W2SM to operate as your agent.  Only a person can make those actions.  Of course, there are good reasons that websites don't want automated agents running through their servers and deleting things.  Imagine what kind of unintentional damage could be done.  On the other hand, people want those agents because it is too time-consuming to do the deletion yourself.  In an example cited on the W2SM site, one person with 1000 friends took 9 hours to delete manually and 52 minutes to delete using the W2SM site.

Make new friends and delete the old -- one is silver and the other was a mistake you made when you thought you wanted a thousand imaginary friends.  Perhaps you should pay for that the old fashioned way:  one click at a time.  The use of a flippantly-named, brilliant and rebellious site might be just another mistake, this time in social un-networking. 

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention