This just crossed our email inboxes, and we know Bad at Sports has more than a few listeners/readers who are going to be interested in submitting work to this competition. Note the deadline is coming up soon! So read on, and get those slides and jpegs in order.

New American Paintings 2012 Midwestern Competition

Deadline: 2.29.12 (Midnight EST)

Juror: Lisa D. Freiman, Senior Curator and Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art

New American Paintings is a museum-quality, soft-cover art periodical, published bimonthly by The Open Studios Press. Each 184 page volume is a regional exhibition-in-print, selling for $20 at 1,500 bookstores, museum shops and art supply stores nationwide. The books have become periodical resources for collectors and art world professionals.

Competition winners retain all rights to their images and pay nothing to appear in New American Paintings.

 Now accepting entries from:

IL, IN, IA, MI, MN, MO, OH, and WI

The competition’s 40 winners will appear in the Aug/Sept 2012 edition of New American Paintings.

 All styles and media are welcome, as long as the work is singular and two-dimensional.

 To Enter, visit:

http://www.newamericanpaintings.net

For more details, visit:

http://www.newamericanpaintings.com/competitions.html

 Questions? Call 617.778.5265

 www.newamericanpaintings.com

 

This week, I’ve delved into the Bad at Sports archive and pulled an especially interesting interview with Mark Dion, conducted by Duncan and Brian in June of 2010. Below, excerpts from Mark’s discussion of the joys of being a dilettante:

“I have a lot of interests but I have to keep that somewhat narrow, in a sense. I want to have some degree of expertise. I can’t do everything. I really do feel like it’s my responsible as an artist, that if I’m working around issues of zoology that I have to have a foundation in zoology, and if I’m working in issues of archaeology, I have to know that. So I can’t just jump from one thing to the other in a haphazard way, I do have a responsibility to at least have the core of what that field is. And so it’s difficult. I still am very much a dilettante, not a professional. I’m not an ornithologist or an ichthyologist or a herpetologist or an archaeologist, but I do try to use aspects of their shared methodologies in a way to tease out some of their own prejudices and to look at those fields from a distance. My wife often says, “you’re an archaeologist like Tin Tin is a journalist.”

“Certainly I had to study biology before I started this work in a formal way, but I’ve learned a lot going through these projects and having opportunities such as being artist in residence at the Natural History Museum of London. I do learn a lot by my contexts with these experts. We’re always partnering with other experts in the field, and that’s a big deal, to have someone you can trust who understands the emphasis of your project and can advise you on decisions.

“On one hand, very often I’m working with institutions that are practicing science now, and a lot of the individuals working in them are very tied to the history of that science, and we share an interest in that history and maybe even a passion for the aesthetics of that history. Very often, a lot of [the scientists who work in these institutions], they know by the time they’re 12 or 14 that this is what they want to do. I share that passion and that interest from the early stages, but I still exist as an amateur in a way.

“I could never be a scientist because the rigors of that and the amount of time one has to spend in front of a computer screen or in an office is just overwhelming. I meet people who spend two months in Guyana or wherever doing field work, collecting, and then for the next four years they’re in an office sifting through that material and making sense of it. Taking the road of the artist is the road I’ve chosen…of being a professional dilettante, in a sense. I’d like to rescue that term, “dilettante,” and bring it back…A lot of my work does hearken back to a moment where there’s a collapse of disciplines, to this kind of time where the artist, the scientiest, the poet, the theologian–were the same person.”

Click here to listen to or download the podcast.

 

 

 

This week, we pull Duncan and Richard’s 2009 interview with Monica Bonvicini from the archives, conducted during Bonvicini’s exhibition Light Me Black at The Art Institute of Chicago.

“I think that perception goes through the body. I want people to come into the space not knowing how to walk, and get blinded by the work…I kept reading about Renzo Piano saying [the Modern Wing] is a temple of light. Walking around I see there are so many windows everywhere, but they’re all covered up. What is all that light for?” – Monica Bonvicini interviewed by Bad at Sports.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

 

Herewith, Amanda Browder presents three Art Review Haikus of shows that are currently on view in New York. Art critics, note the concise blend of poetic word-play and to-the-pointness; this is how it should be done. [Read more]

This week’s entry from the Bad at Sports archives is Richard Holland’s interview with Hardy Fox of the Cryptic Corporation, who acts as the agent of The Residents, an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works.

“The definition of a band is generally thought of as a guitar player meets a drummer and they decide together…and gradually form a band. In this situation you have idea people who are not interested in one form of media over another. They’re more interested in what’s possible, idea wise, and to create projects. It’s a band not of musicians, it’s a band of idea people, and certainly one of the things they do is music, and they’ve always had the point of view that if the project calls for a band they’ll be a band, but they are still not a band in the traditional sense. They like to be thought of as a group…. The way it’s defined is that anyone who works on a project is a Resident. If there’s a tour and there’s a bus driver on the tour, then the bus driver is a Resident. They’re residents of that project…. The Residents like to stay fresh, they have to take each project as a whole new fresh project every time and a reinvention not only of who they are but of what is possible.”–Hardy Fox, Cryptic Corporation, agent of The Residents.