This week: Lisa Boyle talks about her gallery’s recent move. She schools our listeners on how emerging artists should and should not approach galleries. She tells us about the fascinating game(?) Bird Horse Muffin which totally blows Richard and Duncan’s tiny little minds.
Michael Benedetto: our new 30 second film critic reviews The Proposition.
Richard, Duncan and Amanda review shows at Kavi Gupta, Carrie Secrist (during which Richard apologizes to Missy), they talk about why they were mystified by their shabby treatment at Kraft/Lieberman gallery AND why Mark Rowland of Rowland Contemporary knows how to treat gallery patrons right, and lastly Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery. The phrase “Shitty Drawing” is thrown around way way way WAY too much. Wow.
Lisa Yuskavage
Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola
Richard Tuttle
Hirsch Perlman
Jeanne Dunning
Tony Tasset
Arturo Herrera
Corey McCorkle
Helen Mirra
Marc LeBlanc
49 Geary St. San Francisco
Jack Hanley Gallery
Donald Urquhart
Fraenkel Gallery
Eleanor Harwood Gallery
Emily Prince
Adobe Books
Suitable Gallery
Standard Gallery
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_59_Lisa_Boyle.mp3
- Episode 886: Scott Speh on 20 Years of Western Exhibitions & Chicago Art Scene Reflections - November 29, 2024
- Episode 885: Betsy Odom - November 26, 2024
- Episode 884: Pete and Jake Fagundo - November 12, 2024
hey wait a minute, those arent maple leaves theyre smoking…
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15239501/from/ET/
So what you’re saying is: Shitty Drawing = Cracked out retards with firecrackers?
Bad at Sports in this month’s Flash Art!!!
Check it out.
R
I still argue that there is a place for shitty drawing. I don’t know if I could make a line of what is and is not….but I would take a crack at saying that anyone who is rocking out the long term on shitty drawing must be doing something interesting. (or have direction or conviction)
And why is naive or short-bus drawing so frustrating…isn’t realisic drawing for the eighties, bad photoshop illustrators, and animators?
I guess it depends on the artist’s intent. If they are drawing shitty because it is a form of abstraction or simplification of the image, good for them. If they are drawing crappy because they don’t have the skill, don’t bother. Go non objective. I aesthetically like well rendered pictures.
I think that the Devendra Banharts of the world with their ‘I’m a child of the world I’m so innocent I don’t know any better in fact oops I pooped my pants’ aesthetic should all be rounded up and kicked off a cliff somewhere near Hells Mouth Montana.
wah00! i shall be a responsible artist and keep my mouth shut! but my ears open.
k
don’t go there duncan
😉
Come on Katie weigh in on this!
“wah00! i shall be a responsible artist and keep my mouth shut! but my ears open.”
katie….did you loose an opinion…c’mon open your mouth and your heart.
steve….how do we tell who is a skilled artist? Does school make this happen? Practice?
It seems as if it’s a developed style within the parameters of their aesthetic. I argue that time and effort make good work. Of course opinion, and taste are factors in an audience liking or disliking a piece, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t talented or driven.
I too dislike some shitty drawing, but I do admit it’s coupled with the art fair’s environment where there are a million shitty drawings in one cube, and no names, or organization…It’s chaos and anarchy,…not very helpful, and unfortunately discouraging.
I argue that time and effort make good work. Of course opinion, and taste are factors in an audience liking or disliking a piece, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t talented or driven.
Though I agree with the idea that these things ‘may’ result in good work. I just can’t believe that all of these people stumbled upon shitty drawing at the same time. They made a conscious choice to draw that way based on an aesthetic shift brought on by the art market.
As an active member of the Board of Directors of the Shitty Drawing Anti-Defamation League, I will have you know that you will be hearing from our people. We are shocked and disgusted to hear such invectives spewing forth after all of the strides we have made in the last few decades. If you do not cease your hate speech against a misunderstood, but sincere, people, you will be glad you have a lawyer on your side.
Hey Bad At Sports,
I’m sorry to hear that you went to my show and were treated badly. I have to say I was hoping you would see the exhibit at some point in its run. Now i’ll never know what you thought or if you even were able to ‘see straight’ after your experience.
Oh well, there will be more chances in the future perhaps. Maybe next fall you’ll be able to come out to my show at the Elmhurst Art Museum. They will treat you well there to be sure.
If you do want to see my work just go to http://www.dougfogelson.com and check it out that way. Then if you want to see things in person come visit my studio. You might be treated like crap then, but only if you deserve it!
Until then,
Doug
Doug,
I liked your show, particularly the photo pieces. I would encourage your gallery to keep postcards on hand or other info so viewers don’t have to guess, and perhaps in the future to be a little more polite to people who come through the space. Holy guacamole usually people want to talk about the work in their space!
Remind us of the Elmhurst Art show as the day draws nearer, we’ll do our damndest to check it out!
Sorry,
Richard
Thanks Richard. It’s weird that sometimes Jeff Kraft does a great job talking about the work, etc, and sometimes REALLY rubs people the wrong way intentionally or not. Your experience is not the first time I have heard this feeling mentioned. Perhaps it is his East Coast style of speaking or perhaps it is because he is actually CLOSING the gallery after my show. I’m not sure what his plans are exactly yet for the future of his gallery. But it looks like i’m free to find another gallery here in Chicago as soon as this show comes down next week. Hmmmmm.
In his defense there are postcards, press releases, prices, and info on hand about the show and other gallery artists by the desk. Also in general I find that people in galleries are not very nice at all, with a few excellent exceptions. It is my belief that the gallery should in fact be nice, helpful, and educate the viewer/collector in the hope of both making the sale and making the art experience fun. Fuck the ivory tower of white wall gallery stiffness! Sometimes people confuse the attitude with the art itself and that is just a shame. We shouldn’t have to deal with that much here in the friendly confines of the Midwest!
Anyway now i’m rambling… see you later.
Shitty Drawing:
My issue with the shitty drawing style (for lack of a better name) is largely not in its individual merits but due more to the fact that it once was a way of expressing first person naive raw innocence. Which visually I didn’t care for but was an interesting style of expression. Now the number of people doing that style have grown to massive levels (I believe due more to the ease of execution & not the love of the voice of the style) where you cant even begin to keep track of any individual ideas, visuals or growth and it all blurs into a amalgamation of “the shittiest drawing†in the back of your mind.
Also I agree with many that when I first saw a group of these kinds of works back in the 90’s the draftsmanship of them was indeed “better†then it is currently, the trend seems to be to a loser and less representational approach. I love the fact that people do work that I wouldn’t want to, it gives me a counter point to my ideas, but its seems to be just art equivalent of white noise lately?
Amanda-I have no idea why there is this movement towards Shitty Drawing. Maybe everyone got together and said “Let’s all start drawing with our feet!â€. The crappier thing is that it’s getting bought up in the fairs. I think I’m going to start a new art movement called The Illustrationists where craftsmanship is rewarded.
Doug- I’m not a big fan of photography, but I really like your stuff, especially the buildings.
Richard- I’ll see you tomorrow at the salon. We should go see American Hardcore.
Inca & Alison- I plead the 5th
Richard
You may want to check your notes! If I did not speak to you when you came in, perhaps YOU were involved in a conversation that I did not want to interrupt, or perhaps I was with a client, or on the phone? In any case, I have been told that I talk too much, not too little. As far as information, there have been many people in to see Doug Fogelsons Exhibition and all of the material has been taken. This is a good thing, No? I am sorry that you felt ignored, but as a critic / reviewer wouldn’t you want some quiet to form your own opinion of the work? Please stop in again and introduce yourself. You can’t imagine how wrong you may be.
Jeffrey L. Kraft
Kraft Lieberman Gallery
Oct 19th, 2006 at 6:02 am
I liked your show, particularly the photo pieces. I would encourage your gallery to keep postcards on hand or other info so viewers don’t have to guess, and perhaps in the future to be a little more polite to people who come through the space. Holy guacamole usually people want to talk about the work in their space!
Doug:
“Perhaps it is his East Coast style of speaking…”
Sheesh! I live on the East Coast and we’re not all brusque and rude over here. You might say many of us are even Muffin/Muffin/Muffins (like Duncan).
We do however suffer from a glut of shitty drawing.
Hudgens Oct 19th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Shitty Drawing:
My issue with the shitty drawing style (for lack of a better name) is largely not in its individual merits but due more to the fact that it once was a way of expressing first person naive raw innocence.
Exactly, at one point, the naive quality of a drawing style, see Lee Godie, was due to the fact that the artist was untrained and that this was genuinely the style at which they arrived. I guess that is part of the point, most of the ‘shitty drawing’ doesn’t seem genuine, it seems kind of like Napoleon Dynamite, trying way to hard to capture some kind of childhood past inthe present, and instead coming off as well kind of shitty.
I am more in league with Amanda on the issue.
We have to be careful when generalizing. For example, what is a Cy Twombly but a huge scribble over and over, what is a Basquiat? If we diss naive style expressionism altogether we may lose a lot of amazing work.
But on the other hand I agree probably 90% of this kind of work being made today seems insincere and market/trend-conscious. If you came across one of these types of works in a garage sale, would you recognize that as art? Is that an important question? Does work have to look like art to be art?
The Duchampian Urinal Conundrum.
~nooyawker~
I don’t really mean to generalize, but what else can you do with this flood of shitty drawing.
I agree Twombly, Debuffet, Basquiat are all important artists that worked in a naive style, but can you really compare any of this current crop of artists to them?
M-
I don’t want to get in the place of saying art was all better back then- “in the good old days” – because that is a bias and keeps one from seeing clearly what could be happening now. Basically there were good & bad artists then and when the dust settles, there will also be good & bad artists now.
Maybe the issue to me is not so much the shitty drawing genre per se, but the current wave of “adolescence” themed art (including shitty drawing). I question this type of art more and more these days, because the world has changed dramatically on us, with the war/nuclear threat/anxiety and I seem to have lost patience with work that feels like a teenage prank or a 15 year old girl’s 1980’s bedroom. Silliness and insincerity in art can ring hollow and false in the current climate.
I was never guilty of this “Shitty” draing style.
MMdC
Honestly I always slotted in my mind the “shitty drawing” as a reaction to the dry seperated clinical concept art of the late 90’s. I know this is a construct of my own making but it made sense to me. They could not be on more oposite ends of the spectrum if someone planed it that way (insert joke here).
I also have been of the opinion that there needs to be a serious line between art & superstar artists. Cy Twombly or better yet Robert Raushenburg have at their level as much to do with mainstream art styles (god that feels weird saying) as the constellation Orion or Cassiopeia does with a large gasseous object we call a star. They are simular in a grouping way but really very seperate. Superstars have in my mindset less relation to a group or style and more to do with themselves, even if we shoehorn them into some Pop, Expressionism, Brit art, or Shitty Drawing category??
Shitty drawing like Chris Johanson’s seams to be like the Shags’ music. I wouldn’t call the Shags a great band. Their appeal is in the shock value that they were ever recorded. It’s amusing, but doesn’t go much further. A cult following is all they will ever get. Unfortunately Johanson gets serious consideration.
Art is like midlevel corporate management. One could completely suck, yet achieve much success.
What’s wrong with a little visual pleasure. Reading all these comments I remember this Dave Hickey phrase: “Ultimately, I would be forced to admit that all the volumes of Proust were nothing, quantitatively, compared to the 20-minute experience of eating breakfast on a spring morning at a Denny’s in Mobile – and that the more authoritatively and extensively I sought to encode such an experience, the more profoundly it was obliterated from the immediacy of memory and transported into the imaginary realm of remembrance, invested with identity, shorn of utility, and polished up as an object of delectation.” But there sure are a lot of big words in there. Forget it. What’s up with a pic of Lisa Boyle on the site?
Let’s discuss “Painting-That-Relies-Too-Heavily-on-Use-of-a-Projector” next!
Mabye Duncan is like Old Man Clemens…
[after putting dog poop in a paper bag and lighting it on fire on Old Man Clemens’ porch]
Billy Madison: Oh my God, Old Man Clemens hates shit.
Frank: Shh, here he comes.
Old Man Clemens: Who the hell is it? What do you want? Judas Priest, Barbara, it’s one of those flaming bags again.
Barbara: Don’t put it out with your boots, Ted.
Old Man Clemens: Don’t tell me my business, Devil Woman. Call the fire department, this one’s outta control.
[Old Man Clemens steps on the bag, then lifts up his boot and smells]
Old Man Clemens: Eck, poop again.
Billy Madison: He called the shit “poop”.
[Billy, Jack, and Frank laugh hysterically]
Frank: This is the best night of my life.
[They continue laughing]
Old Man Clemens: I’ll get you damn kids for this. You’re all gonna die.
Damn right Allison. Next topic, work that relies heavilyon the use of projectors and a gaggle of studio assistants…1-2-3 Go!
I was at a show where this young kid was selling his book of shitty drawings for $10,000.00. they hung on the wall under plexy so you didn’t know if they were functional books or two dimensional objects and that was interesting although i don’t think it was $10,000 interesting…
I thought he was joking actually and told him…”thats funny”…
his reply…”but they are so special to me” – i needed more wine……..
i gave away my books to the white elephant along with a lot of other “art” FOR FREE. see everyone has shitty drawings but its better to recognize it as such and give it to charity.
so some anon person may have bought a handmade box, book, functional sculpture thing… a whole sketchbook or an antique suitcase with old etching plates and offset books and who knows what else.
good. go. be free, art. be free.
let me think about projectors
k
K
Now that’s what I’m talkin about charitable giving, I did the same thing a few years ago. I mean how else would all of those thrift stores end up with all that shitty art.
Ooo maybe someone will ‘find’ it and turn it into a found art project.
I guess I’m a bit confused…
Shitty drawing, how does this differ from anything else Shitty?
Shitty music, Shitty design, Shitty style, Shitty Art, Shitty art?
I wonder if mexican wrestler masks are Shitty Readymades to Duchamp.
Shitty, Shitty, Shitty.
Lenard,
Shitty drawing is a pickup term for the style of art drawing that tries to emulate the kind of drawing you would see on grade school book covers or by people like Daniel Johnson. A kind of thin devolved woodblock image. Many peple call it shitty due to its more universal and identifying traits which is purposefully bad drawing.
Dear Admin,
Is it possible you meant Daniel Johnston (musician/artist). I only mention it because I will be presenting the work of Daniel Johnson in the near future at 65GRAND and wanted to alleviate any possible confusion. Or you may in fact be refering to the latter artist in which case come see his work and ignore my comment.
Bill/65GRAND
More system, less art. Is there anything in there? Bring back Lane.
Jeezus, two shows worth of Lane blowing ever-so-hard is more more more than enough.
That guy is a root cause of global warming with that much hot air.
Scott Speh is all muffin!
god who can sit through this boring self satisfying drivel… besides
the people in your very own fishbowl.
every time i do research and find the galleries that seem to handle work closest to mine, they NEVER accept submissions! Every time! Its crazy.
Baldwin,
Podcasting is all about niche audiences; of course it is provincial as the day is long. What were you expecting? I completely encourage you to start your own show and show us how it is done right, seriously, that would be awesome.
Richard
Although I must admit his description is pretty accurate.
and yet “the little plastic castle is surprise everytime!”
I’d like to take a too-late moment to object to “bird horse muffin”- I just don’t get the muffin thing, and I have no desire to be categorized as either a bird (flighty, pointy, distracted) or a horse (plodding, aloof, strong). I’m much more familiar with “bird horse dog” which I think gives a more interesting and all-animal rating system.
(dog: easygoing excited occasional doofus)
dog horse dog,
brad
I love the fact that Lisa embraced the possibility of “growing” or changing her interests, while trying to stay true to them. How many of us art-worldies whether curators, gallerist, critics or artists will even discuss such a thing. We all tend to try and sound so stable and pre-determined and so on.
But she has laid a new bad habit on me — I can’t stop the BIRD HORSE MUFFIN thing!
By the way, Duncan, I love the “shitty drawing” term. In central Europe, our shitty drawing is shitty gesture-installations. Shitty Neo-Con — like a junk filled room, a huge pile of potatoes in a room, shitty videos of surfers in a pile of shitty junk in a room, etc. So things could be worse, but keep up the criticism!
I guess you could widen the reference pile in her game. Then I am Cat Horse Muffin and Kimler is Shark Horse Horse.
Here in Miami Madness, and after talking with Richard, I have come to some very important realizations. Ones that will have a fundamental effect on my world view and have the power to transform even the most deeply held beliefs.
They include but are not limited to:
Item 1: There are no Muffin Bird Birds. A wrench has been thrown and has had hit me squarely in the forehead. I don’t know if I can go on.
Item 2: It doesn’t pay to be nice.
Item 3: “Essence of Pear” should not be used to concoct alcoholic beverages, and if that by chance you have superimposed a rebellious attitude in this regard, they should be ingested gingerly and with a fully honest knowledge of what the results could be.
Item 4: Parties with a line at the door can be accessed without a VIP pass by simply asking to use the bathroom at the desk of the hotel lobby.
Item 5: And finally , don’t be fooled, the Art Week blitz in Miami is not made up of the “best” things going on right now, but merely a lot of things going on at once. We have reached full
saturation.