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THIS WEEK IT’S THE AMANDA BROWDER SHOW!!! GUEST STARRING TONY MATELLI!!!

Tony Matelli has always been interested in the underdog. He has become well known for his hyper-realistic sculptures often depicting characters and things just barely getting by; things nearly dead, hopelessly lost or otherwise totally unwanted. These sculptures serve as metaphors for our own social malaise and our general struggle for survival. They mimic inner states of desolation, panic, ambivalence and despair; frequent conditions associated with trying to locate ones self within our social world.

Tony Matelli has exhibited extensively in the US and in Europe. His work was most recently seen in “5 Billion Years,” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Into Me/Out of Me, at P.S. 1 MOMA New York, travelling to KW Berlin Institute of Contemporary Art. Upcoming projects include Evolution: Tony Matelli/Alexis Rockman, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Still Life, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, and Die Macht der Dinge - The Power of Things, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin.

Also Duncan tries out his acting chops, with mixed results.
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In 1994 Paul Morris, Matthew Marks, Pat Hearn and Colin De Land had a vision. That vision was that New York City would have an art fair. What began as the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair has become the the Armory fair, the jewel in the art fair empire the Merchandise Mart has amassed over the last 3 years; Art Chicago, The Armory, Art Toronto, Volta Basel, Next, and Volta NYC.

This week, Paul “the ‘marts Art Czar” Morris and Tony “Boss of Art Chicago” Karman break down why the Art Fair future is the future. Kathryn Born and Duncan MacKenzie listen with slack jaws and open minds.

The weird thing that happened is that Duncan actually started to get behind Art Chicago and the ‘marts future in the Art Business? WTF? Did he drink the Kool Aid? Was he bought off? Or is there reason to believe? Listen and find out… Continue reading »

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The Bad at Sports Art Explosion rolls on.

This week: Duncan and Britton Bertran talk to Kavi Gupta and Christian Viveros-Faune from Next Art Fair.

Much fun is had by all.
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This week, the New York Art Fair explosion.

John Waters v. Amanda Browder, Amanda and Tom get kicked out of Armory, Christopher Hudgens on mic. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED!!!

Amanda and Tom talk to just about everyone, well not really, but they do talk to loads of interesting collectors, gallerists, artists, Europeans, and other assorted folk as they barnstorm the fairs.

And the return of Amanda’s Mom wisecracks, no not really, but this show has an intro guaranteed to piss of Brian and Marc.

Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_137-NYC_Art_fair_madness.mp3

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Spring break 2008 sweeps across Chicago with a vengeance. The freshly brewed warm weather brings Brian back to the midwest to help Duncan with hosting duties.

This week Marc and Brian head down to Ampersand International Arts to check out “How Fast is your World Changing”.

They talk with curator/artist Lori Gordon as well as participating artists Hope Hilton and Markuz Wernli-Saito about lying to curators and the strange effects of silence.

Next week: Bad at sports takes on the Armory in NYC…
Direct download: 136ampersand.mp3

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Local up and coming Chicago Art starlet Melanie Schiff is quizzed about what it is like to be curated into the 2008 Whitney Biennial, her work and WTF is up with contemporary Photography. Oak Park correspondent/Chicago Art Star Tony Tasset co-hosts.
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This week Caleb Lyons, one of the directors at Chicago curious space “Old Gold,” drops in to interview John Phillips and Tony Wight about the current changes at Bodybuilder and Sportsman/Tony Wight Gallery, John and Caleb’s exhibitions, contemporary abstract painting, and we once again tackle the topic of what is a hipster?.

Where is Richard? Continue reading »

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Sorry. We were a little slow due to power outages and the mediocre AT&T.

Art Critic Greg Cook (The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix) joins Matt Nash, James Nadeau and Christian Holland of Big RED & Shiny to discuss
the 2008 AICA New England Awards.

Using the list of winners as a starting point, they discuss the state of the arts in New England and what they thought was great, mediocre and terrible. Disappointment in the new Institute of Contemporary Art is expressed; AICA is scrutinized; and conclusions are elusive.

And the magic of Mike Benedetto.
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First we had a story on a visually harmless apple computer virus that gets the drop on your desktop. Then we had a episode that included the Helvetica independent film that came out and was a great watch. Take the two and put them together and you get the Bullet Speed Helvetica Dropclock Screensaver™ which will make everyone happy and macophiles feel warm in that special place we only point to on dolls.

Check it out and have fun, it can be downloaded here

From the website of the artist Ranjit Bhatnagar:

“Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part’s not done yet, so you won’t see it in the video.)

In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.”

The tech is pretty basic and the conversion to music is largely straight forward but the presentation of the idea is pretty sharp. I would love to see how well the system works with a high noise to signal ratio. Can it only make “music” in a relatively quiet room of two people talking or can it eliminate some white noise to find the melody of a large conversation.

Citizens of Oak Lawn, IL have a history of coasting through stop signs and in response the city installed smaller signs below their larger, legal counterparts to get motorists attention while providing them a tongue in cheek appeal to their conscience. The extra signs mimicked the red octagon shape only 1/3rd the size with slogans including “and smell the roses,” “right there pilgrim” and “means you’re not moving.” instead of the word STOP.

The town’s mayor and citizens found them funny, but there is a Local vs State conflict inherint in the act. The Illinois Department of Transportation claims that the signs violated the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Threatening to put federal funding for projects in the city on gold till they were removed. $1,700 worth of signs are now pulled down.

Pamela Michelle Johnson was one of the many (250) artists showing at this years Artropolis Artist Project and was kind enough to give a quick interview.

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Via Brett Sokol for New York Magazine:

If the glory, freneticism, excess, and sunny evanescence of the current contemporary-art boom has a symbolic home, it’s Miami Beach. Thanks to the appearance of an exponentially more fabulous Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December since 2002, the once-tattered resort town has gained a new sense of itself as an aesthetic destination that goes beyond the mere appreciation of a set of well-wrought silicone implants. Now members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends—collectors, artists, and curators from around the world—want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy—especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown. Which is why a local developer and collector, Craig Robins, is starting a free postgraduate art program in Miami.
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This just in from the New York Times. Hooray!

Biomaterial charges against N.Y. art professor dismissed.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — A judge threw out charges Monday against a college art professor accused of improperly obtaining biological materials for an exhibit protesting U.S. government food policies.

U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that the 2004 mail and wire fraud indictment against Steven Kurtz, a University at Buffalo professor, was ”insufficient on its face.”

Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, which has used human DNA and other biological materials in works intended to draw attention to political and social issues. His arrest drew protests from artists in several countries who called the charges an intrusion on artistic freedom.

”Obviously this is a weight off his back, but he still had to suffer through this for four years,” said Kurtz’s attorney, Paul Cambria. ”The last thing this guy is is a bioterrorist.”
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From the New York Times:

MILAN — The two friends, both performance artists, hatched the idea about a year ago: wearing white wedding dresses, they would hitchhike from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East to send a message of peace and “marriage between different peoples and nations.”

But the message delivered by their performance piece was mostly sad and raw. After just three weeks on the road, one of the two Italian artists, Pippa Bacca, 33, was killed by a driver who offered her a ride.

Her naked body was found on April 11 in some bushes near a Turkish village after a suspect led investigators to the site. Although an official cause of death has not been given, local Turkish authorities said Ms. Bacca had been raped and strangled.

The killing has stirred broad public anger and grief in Turkey and Italy. Still, what Ms. Bacca would have wanted, her family and friends said, was her message of peace to live on.

“She thought that in the world there were more positive than negative people, and that it was right to be trusting,” said Rosalia Pasqualino, a sister of Ms. Bacca, whose real name was Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo. “Trust is a very human factor, and she believed that to understand people, you had to get to know them.”
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Sneaker blog SlamXHype blogged about this a few days ago.

“Last year, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, in the name of art, took a dog from the street, and starved him to death. Endorsed by the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American, Habacuc has been invited to repeat this unbelievably cruel act again in 2008. We at SlamXhype stand with Arkitip Intelligence in boycotting this ‘artist’ and urge you to sign this petition to end this right now.”

From the Yale Daily News:

Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for “shock value.”

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

The “fabricators,” or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Art major Juan Castillo ‘08 said that although he was intrigued by the creativity and beauty of her senior project, not everyone was as thrilled as he was by the concept and the means by which she attained the result.
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Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has sacked its Chief Financial Officer, Roberto Cearsolo Barrenetxea, Wednesday over confessed embezzlement totaling nearly $800,000 USD over the past decade through small transactions dealing with two companies related to the museum.

Museum officials were unaware of the theft until local authorities raised questions about an unrelated financial transaction.

According to Guggenheim Bilbao director Juan Ignacio Vidarte, Cearsolo confessed in a letter and has returned nearly $462,000 to the museum and has also pledged to return the remainder and to co-operate with a formal investigation.