Baltimore City Paper – Meditations in Green: Jack W. Schneider’s show explores the color scheme of 1980s America By Baynard Woods
Green may be the color of our era. We talk now about “going green” to mean living in a more environmentally friendly way. And while this metaphorical use of the color has become big business—bringing in the other metaphorical green—the use of color in marketing is nothing new. In 1907, the Paint Manufacturers Association of America sent out a memo claiming that, “If we can guide or educate the taste of the house-mistress in respect to the colors in which her dwelling is to be clad, we control the entire situation.”
More recently, color specialist Leslie Harrington, a member of the Color Marketing Group, has been credited with the recent popularity of “wasabi” and other yellow-green colors.
http://citypaper.com/arts/visualart/meditations-in-green-1.1414826
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Washington City Paper Arts Desk: Shit’s Fucked Up: Pink Line Project Opens an Etsy Shop by Kriston Capps
It hardly matters that Vestibule was only a temporary art display erected during Occupy D.C., which was itself a short-lived protest over, oh, sort of everything involving banks and power. The sentiment lives on in a cursory statement from D.C. artist Joe Orzal that debuted as a piece of text-art at Vestibule that read, “Shit’s Fucked Up.”
Isn’t that just about the perfect Occupy statement? Shit’s fucked up and stuff. And shit is fucked up, so frequently—maybe even 99 percent of the time. Anyway, folks in D.C. appear to endorse Orzal’s sentiment. Kristina Bilonick’s Pleasant Plains Workshop adopted Orzal’s painting and turned it into a print last summer. Now the Pink Line Project is kicking out Shit’s Fucked Up T-shirts through a new Pink Line shop on Etsy.
Read the rest at Washington City Paper here.
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Art Fag City: Art Fairs: The View From The Top by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand
What a turd. Reporting from Art Basel Miami Beach, New York Times writer Patricia Cohen gets the exclusively super-rich take on class war. Unsuprisingly, they don’t get what the big deal is.
Cohen mentions the list of writers who’ve had it, like Sarah Thornton, Felix Salmon, Will Gompertz and Dave Hickey. She leaves the criticism at that; Thornton’s disgusted retirement from art market reporting is summed up with the quote “Money talks loudly and easily drowns out other meanings,” while Simon Doonan’s lengthy, hit-and-miss piece in Slate is boiled down to a quote about how there’re a lot of cheese platters.
Meanwhile, Cohen’s sources are given carte blanche to say whatever they like, without any response or fact-checking. Jason Rubell asks, “What do people want — to go back to the recession?” at a time when unemployment remains higher than it has been since the Great Depression. Nor does Cohen bother to counter Pace heir Marc Glimcher’s conception that “more people than ever before had developed an appreciation for art.” That’s an idea that you can only have at the top: auction prices are up, but museum attendance is down, and government support has been dropping here and abroad for years.
http://www.artfagcity.com/2012/12/10/art-fairs-the-view-from-the-top/
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Washington City Paper Arts Desk: Corcoran to Stay Put…But How? by Kriston Capps
The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art + Design will not sell its longtime and historic Beaux-Arts home near the White House, the Washington Post reports. The museum and school, which began mulling a plan to sell its building and move elsewhere in June (as City Paper first reported), is staying put.
But while that question has been put to rest, plenty of others are still afoot—and they need answers. Among them: What “opportunities,” alluded to in the Post story, allowed the Corcoran to stay? Corcoran president Fred Bollerer and Board Chairman Harry F. Hopper III did not tell the Post how or whether the Corcoran has found a path to financial stability. If it hasn’t stumbled upon a surge of new money, what factors convinced them that they could remain in the building? What did the chain of decisions look like after they sought a valuation on the Corc’s historical landmark home—another figure leaders did not reveal?
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/visual-arts/2012/12/10/corcoran-to-stay-put-but-how/
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Baltimore Citypaper: Basel Dazzle By Chloe Helton-Gallagher
For the past 12 years a single week in December has seen the population of Miami swell by over 50,000 people. Drawn by the glittering allure of the self-described “most prestigious art show in the Americas,” attendants of Art Basel Miami Beach pack a surprisingly high proportion of unpractical shoes to tramp around the more than 260 galleries which show in Basel proper alone, not including the dozens of satellite fairs and hotel shows.
Basel is one long catwalk for the fashionable and the hiply unfashionable. (Sunday morning as the fair wound down, a woman in a head-to-toe felt dinosaur costume was seen roaming the streets despite the 80 degree temperatures). But, setting aside the stories of pool parties, fashion faux pas, and people falling down, the experience of Art Basel Miami yielded a breathtaking exposure to the pulse of contemporary art around the world: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The namesake fair, the largest and most high-end of the fairs, is held in the Miami Beach Convention Center. It is gargantuan, and more than one day could easily be spent roaming its halls. Top galleries from around the world, from Gagosian to Haunch of Venison, show here, exhibiting name brand artists like John Baldessari and Tracey Emin. http://blogs.citypaper.com/index.php/2012/12/basel-dazzle/
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What Weekly: Gran Prix
Nudashank, Gallery Four, Charles Fish & Sons Building, 425 North Eutaw Street
November 16th – December 16th, 2012
Gran Prix seems to suggest that rather than Baltimore being a place where artists tread water before decamping to the promised land of Bushwick, both Baltimore and Brooklyn are bedroom communities from which culture producers and consumers commute to the internet. Of course the Baltimore artists in this show produce work with similar concerns and aesthetic sensibilities as the New Yorkers. So do artists in Richmond, San Francisco, Chicago, and countless other places. But the paradigm is no longer that we all look to New York, it is that New York, along with the rest of the world, looks at Tumblr.
http://whatweekly.com/2012/12/12/nudashank-new-york-new-work/
