Via Paper Mag:

“Several of us are banding together to start a new party – Kate Bush Night @ Sweet Paradise. We don’t know if it will be weekly, monthly, or a one time thing, but we’re giving it a test run this Sunday. We’re positioning it as a semi-tongue in cheek counter to Sway’s Morrissey night. And any excuse is a good excuse to listen to Kate Bush…”

Something tells me that when Jerry Saltz said, “It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you.” He meant something like this:

From the Press Release for Transfers:

Untitled, a 16-millimeter film first screened as part of an exhibition at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006, emerged from Price‘s observation that abstraction was rarely seen in film or video presented in art-world settings, despite a strong tradition in experimental film in general. Price purchased a 6-second video loop from a company that makes “empty” background images for corporate use, then added color effects, looped it, and transferred it to film, yielding a hypnotic, emptied-out work that looks back to structuralist and early film experiments even as it presents an image of degraded and détourned digital junk, threatening at each instant to collapse into compression artifacts.

Perhaps out of stubbornness, I still plan to attend.  Although it’s an intriguing proposition that we’ll see less of this type of work rather than more.

My projection about our generation — I myself am younger than Jesus — was not even to be found in the New Museum exhibition.  The only thing that the New Museum seems to deserve some credit for is posing a question about the present moment at an opportune time. Coupled with the collapse of the art market, it is not inappropriate to be thinking, “What now?”  And that can very easily translate into “What IS now?” The New Museum, however, did not seem to have the answer.  (Which is actually just fine).

Here’s how others summed up Generation OMG as represented by the New Museum show:

• “It is antiseptic, safe, death to hierarchies of taste and distinctions of talent, and yet determined to neutralize our eyes with an overload of useless information.”
• “These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime;”
• “The show is low-budget bubbly fun, for the most part—and noisy, what with all the videos and sound pieces.”
• “A brief glance at the show makes one thing clear: most of its participants are committed multitaskers.”

It’s not very often that I actually pick up the postcards and flyers I see on the counter of the local coffee shop.  This one, however, caught my eye as it sat there and mocked the New York Times sitting next to it.  Apparently the artist Seth Kinmont knows how to grab the attention of his audience: give them lots of text and images in a clever package.  I expect the same from his electric car.

The car is powered by four twelve volt batteries and sports a set of other familiar amenities, you know, the usual disc brakes, rack and pinion stirring, headlights, air conditioning(!).  And just to throw in a little bit of a challenge, he’s built the whole thing out of wood.  From the invite:

Tuesday, April 7th 7-9 pm 138 Division Street (Orchard/Ludlow)

On April 7th, the first in a series of three wooden electric cars will be on view and will be giving rides around the block during the opening hours. Space is limited, so if you are interested a ride, please arrive early to place yourself on the ride list.

On a related note, I objectively love the Project No. 8 website.

The Highlights is having its two-year anniversary event, happening Saturday, April 4 at CSV Cultural Center (107 Suffolk at Rivington). Please join us in celebrating two glorious years of salacious commentary on the world-wide web with drinks, DJs, live music, and installations. Featuring artwork by Lisha Bai, Skyler Brickley, Mac Carbonell, Tova Carlin, Yoonjai Choi, Allen Cordell, Ethan Greenbaum, Lucy Kim, Ken Meier, Leeza Meksin, Dave Scanavino, Luke Stettner, Julia Weist, Mike Womack, and Sun You, plus a very special musical guest at midnight.

The rest of the website is only slightly more elucidating, but equally fascinating: http://www.pifas.net

Meanwhile, there are only 23 other Google Reader Feed Subscribers to Cory Arcangel’s Delicious posts.  Here’s some of the gems that guy has drolled up from those internets:

a disturbingly accurate art history lesson from jmb courtesy of Battlestar Galactica

this is totally unreal

Old Nytimes story about an all latin listserv in the 90′s. wicked.

this is some serious next level stuff (thx jonah)

johannes p osterhoff gets his shield on

Kurt Cobain Hot Water Bottle Cover

What I saw here in New York is clearly respectable in the Tom Marioni sense, but I’ve got to stand my ground. Some things are better left to the midwest.

There I am standing in front of that photograph at the opening of Walead Beshty’s show at Wallspace just on the other side of that wall that cuts into the left of the picture…

Psych, actually I’m standing behind that other more important looking guy (happens to be the Director of White Columns) at the edge of the photograph.

I found this mildly entertaining in the context of conceptual photography, a popular brand in which Beshty always has one foot.    This show where I happened to be “scene” follows two veins of Beshty’s work, although I imagine they are meant to be taken together as a record of the process.  The first is the prominently featured abstract photograms.  These large sheets of color photo paper are somehow folded or rolled in the exposure process.  This is only gleaned from looking at them, so I’m not sure what the process is actually, but it seems sufficient to take away that these colors and shapes are not chosen but rather arbitrarily arrived at through a photographic process.  In the other works — black and white portraits of the people, places, and machines that have helped Besthy along the way to producing his work — he likewise lets his process do all the decision making. Notice here the photogram that actually hangs off of the center wall.

This placement was arrived at again by some system of finding the center of walls… I don’t think the point is actually to understand the system in place, but rather to see that there is a system, and recognize it as arbitrarily imposed… After all I think that is the underlying critique even found in this rhyming press release:

Whatever Marxist schadenfreude might be gleaned from black-and-white
Effectively reclaims the found object as a multivalent political site

Of the show’s relaxed attitude toward lines of demarcation
which, sexy as it sounded, felt like little more than rhetorical lubrication

Among the most special is Walead Beshty’s photo-slide meditation
Here flashy surface need not come at the cost of art historical, conceptual, and
socio-political elaboration

After my brush with the art world paparazzi I’ve decided to lay low, but I will be venturing out tonight to see two openings that look promising.  First, “It’s You. Not me” at Andrew Kreps in Chelsea.  Second, and honestly more exciting, is the first solo show in four years for the painter Richard Phillips at Gagosian uptown.  I’ll leave you with some enticing words from Phillips himself and follow up later with my conclusions on the show:

“At its core, this show is the conflict between capitalism, fascism, and communism. It looks into the nature of representation, propaganda, and misinformation, and how they redirect the ideologies of institutions.”