Assorted Links

by Robert Boyd


Esther Watson, Mistake Pizzas, acrylic on panel, 6" x 6" (posted on curate 1K)

The Cheap Art Revolution continues. To me, the cure to the elitism of much of the art world is not picketing, but making less expensive art available. I've written about schemes for this purpose here and here. curate 1K is another source. Norah, the woman behind curate 1K, writes

Living with art is joyful, but it has a bad reputation for being prohibitively expensive. Luckily, there are an increasing number of websites that sell gorgeous pieces in a price bracket most of us can afford. [...] While plenty of the artwork featured on curate 1k is original, I also include prints. I try to find archival, signed and numbered editions whenever possible. curate1k is a project, not a business. I do not act as a middleman between artist and buyer, and I do not profit monetarily from the site.  My aim is to to gather together the best online art I can find and present it in an accessible, fun-to-follow format.

Another reason to dislike Laurel Nakadate's work, in case you need one. I guess it's no secret that I dislike her work. Corinna Kirsch, writing for Art Fag City, piles on.

Regardless of whether or not you’re anti-feminist, there’s plenty of reasons to dislike Laurel Nakadate’s work. My choice: her works are too simple.365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2010-11) could have been ripped from an undergrad photography course assignment: take a photo of yourself repeating the same action everyday; then read about how photographs always lie about real life (re: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin).

Good point, Corinna Kirsch! (Art Fag City)

Art in Porn, a seriously extremely NSFW link. The creator of the blog Art in Porn has done some serious art historical detective work. Looking at various pornographic photos, he has identified the various art prints on the wall in the backgrounds. Why are their art prints on the walls in the first place? I guess they make it seem like there is actually someone living there, and that the people in the photos might be porn performers, but they also have at least some culture. Who knows? But I like the idea that someone if looking past the porn at the weird background details. (Art in Porn)

Some of Jerry Saltz's pet peeves. He's the art critic for New York Magazine (and married to Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times--they may be the only family that can sustain a pretty decent lifestyle from art criticism). Asked about his art worl pet peeve, he launched into a lengthy list:

I am peeved at idiot billionaires flying mindless millionaire artists to bloated biennials to party down on private yachts; at seven-figure prices paid for derivative dreck that supposedly "critiques the system"; at gilded auctions attended by those who get their kicks from being profligate in public; at the absolute equation of art with capital; at curators flying from city to city to speak on one other's panels about "The Role of the Curator"; at an endless stream of art-school-trained artists trying to crawl up the asses of Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Gerhard Richter in order to stake out a microscopic piece of insular, already-approved territory; Also, I wish lots more young art-critics would start online blogs, art-magazines, screed-sheets, Facebook pages, whatever. Art critics aren't paid anything anyway so there's nothing to lose. (My emphasis.)

This isn't everything on his list, by the way. ("19 Questions for Art Critic and 'Work of Art' Judge Jerry Saltz," ArtInfo)

The Great God Pan Is Linked

by Robert Boyd

Hey, that's my beat! Claire Ruud takes a detailed look at the 990s (the forms nonprofits submit each year to the IRS) for Arthouse and the Dallas Contemporary over at Glasstire. Very interesting. She points out that it is hard to tell when revenue is for operating expenses and when it is for capital expenditures based on the 990. In the case of Arthouse, she should be able to derive the capex by looking at their assets from year to year--after building their new building, their assets will have jumped by a lot. That "jump" is equal to the capex. (The 990 essentially combines elements of an income statement, a balance sheet, and a statement of cash flow--so for a forensic accountant, including an amateur one like me, part of what you do in looking at them is to try to recreate the more traditional accounting statements from them.) (Glasstire)


Speaking of taxes... Longtime art curmudgeon Charlie Finch has a suggestion for what Western institutions can do about Ai Wei Wei's situation--stop paying taxes to the Chinese government. He writes, "I respectfully call on Pace Gallery chairman Arne Glimcher, a man quite familiar, through his family history, of the lethal actions promulgated by fascist governments, whose art operations have been at the vanguard of the Chinese contemporary art scene, to direct Pace not to pay any taxes to the Chinese government until Ai Weiwei and his associates are freed and the charges against them permanently dropped." (Artnet)



Crybaby. Photographer/video artist/exploiter Laurel Nakadate has been on a crying jag... for art. "'I guess it's not a secret anymore, that I cried on each day of the year 2010,' says Laurel Nakadate, whose photographic record of those tearful months is currently on view both at MoMA PS1 and Leslie Tokonow gallery in New York. 'I did it as a performance, as a personal moment each day, a moment in which I deliberately took part in sadness.'" I would please me to think that at least some of her crying was done after reading this or this.But I suspect her supreme indifference to other people means that she's mainly been crying all the way to the bank. (Artinfo)

Set the Date: If you haven't started taking healthy, stress-relieving regular naps by October 21st, you will be caught up in the Napture--a world-wide event of permanent insomnia. So sayeth Emily Sloan, head of the Southern Naptist Convention. (Artists are on the vanguard of this pro-napping movement, for some reason.) It's not to late to repent! (Emily Sloan)

The Year in Pan

There is one more day in the year, so I thought I'd look back at how this blog did in 2010. Over the course of 2010, I got a little more than 46,000 page views. Considering that there are blogs that get that many page views every day (and more), it's not too exciting. That works out to about 126 page views per day.

As you might expect, however, this hasn't been constant. From January to August, I got about 2570 page views a month. Then I discovered Reddit. I started posting my posts in appropriate Reddit forums, and my page views show up. After September, my average page views per month were about 6360 per month. Now this may be as good as it gets. After, my two main subjects, contemporary art in Houston and art comics, are not hugely popular. There's a reason Gawker covers celebrity gossip instead of contemporary art.

Reddit surprised me in another way--the posts people liked the most weren't necessarily what I would have guessed (although in retrospect, their popularity makes sense). Here are the ten most popular posts from 2010, based on page views.



Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976

1.The Woodmans: This post was about a film about the late photographer Francesca Woodman and her family. When I posted it up on Reddit, the number of people visiting Pan exploded.


Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960

2. Where Does a Work of Art Get Its Value? This post was from September 2009, but when I posted a link to Reddit, it took off. That said, it is a post that readers often manage to find--the issues surrounding what makes a given piece of artwork valuable are always interesting.


Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007

3. Lady Art at McClain. This is another one from last year (December 24, 2009). It's about an ill-conceived group show at the McClain Gallery, which is about the bluest of blue-chip galleries in Houston. Why is it popular? I don't know--I can't credit Reddit for this one. I will say one thing about it, though. I was really snarky--it's one of the few bad reviews I've written. And given the way people liked it, maybe I should write some more!


Norman Lindsay, Visitors from the Moon, watercolor

4. Two Books by Norman Lindsay. This post was a review of a novel and a memoir by the eccentric Australian erotic artist, Norman Lindsay, with whom I became somewhat fascinated by over the course of 2010. Why is this post so popular? Well, I suppose it's that sex sells!

5. Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say that it is my writerly brilliance that brings readers to Pan, but this popular post demonstrates otherwise. It is essentially a repost of a video from New York Magazine.


Michael Crowder, Du musée Sauvignons detail, glass, 2009

6. L'heure bleue d'Michael Crowder. This is another post from 2009 that somehow has remained popular throughout 2010. The gallery linked back to the review, which I presume drove some of the views. But really, I don't understand why this post--a review of a nice show by a Houston-area artist--should have been so much more popular than many other similar posts.


E.C. Segar, Popeye daily strips

7. "I Yam What I Yam" On the other hand, I know exactly why this post is so popular. It's a post about how frequently E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, put Popeye in drag--and how comfortable Popeye seemed to be cross-dressing. It was a response to a post by Jeet Heer on his excellent blog Sans Everything. He mentioned my post on his blog, which sent some readers over. Apparently, someone at the popular liberal blog Alas! A Blog saw Heer's post and posted a link. Which was very nice. That said, I don't think that posting about cross-dressing comic strip characters would, in general, increase my readership. (This post appeared exactly one year ago today.)


Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage cover, 1974

8. The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. This one was from November, 2009. It, like many others, was given a new lease on life when I uploaded a link to Reddit. On the face of it, it seems strange that an avant garde graphic novel published in a small print run in 1975 should be of any interest to readers today. But it has a kind of mystique attached to it, and many contemporary readers and creators of art comics are extremely curious about it. It's an amazing work, and one that should be reprinted.


Laurel Nakadate, Stay The Same Never Change film still

9. What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change. I saw this Laurel Nakadate film during FotoFest. I hated it. I wrote a highly negative review and quoted some hilarious things Nakadate said about the film. Perhaps this is a signal that I should continue to write negative reviews. Or perhaps it just means that Nakadate remains a popular search engine subject (maybe for artsy people who like to see naked ladies--which would help explain the popularity of the Francesca Woodman post as well).


still from Boogie Woogie

10. I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To. This post is sort of a review of this movie set in the art world. And it is pretty negative, which strongly suggests a trend. BUT! It also has nudity--boobs to be precise--so that's another trend. That's what you people like--snarky negative reviews with naked boobs.

So that's it--the most viewed pages of the past year. Expect to see more crossdressing cartoon characters, more boobs, more bad reviews, more movie reviews, and more reposting of popular posts from other blogs. Happy New Year!

I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To

This is not a review of Boogie Woogie. I don't have anything to say about it as a film beyond what has been said in the reviews in the New York Times and DVD Talk. I pretty much agree with what they wrote. It's not a dreadful movie--it's definitely watchable, but only just.

Briefly, the film is set in the London art world. There is a blue-chip gallery owned by Art Spindle (Danny Huston), a pair of collectors, the Maclestones (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgård), a pair of artists (Jack Huston and Jaimie Winstone), a pair of gallerinas at different stages of their careers (Heather Graham, whose character is about to quit and start her own gallery, and Amanda Seyfried, who has just been hired), and an older couple who own a Modrian that everybody wants (Christopher Lee and Joanna Lumley). Alan Cumming plays the enabling friend of Elaine, the lesbian video artist; he helps her career and gets nothing in return.

One thing really interesting about the movie was that it featured a lot of blue chip art. It didn't try to fake it, as many movies do. The art on screen was curated by Damien Hirst, and it is not surprising that the film features a lot of Hirst work.



He even seems to have fabricated a piece for the film. Paige Prideaux, the Amanda Seyfried character, has a medical emergency which results in a teratoma being removed. Bob Maclestone then commissions Hirst to make a really gross artwork out of it.



The Maclestone's apartment is loaded with art.



I can't identify all the pieces here, but the flower cart is by Michael Landy, the $ by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, and of course the Brancusi.



Not to mention a Warhol.




And Jake and Dinos Chapman. This movie has a lot of sex in it (all of it kind of horrible and compromised--which this image really speaks to).

Boob lovers will enjoy this movie. Heather Graham's character gets a boob job so she can have "power breasts" (I remember in the 80s when a yellow tie was, for some reason, called a "power tie" on Wall Street--thanks to Spy for telling me this. But this was the first time I had ever heard the term "power breasts.") She is breaking away from Art Spindle to start her own gallery, and has snagged Elaine, the lesbian Casanova who videotapes her conquests, for her opening. This is the scene where Graham is showing Elaine her new "power breasts".


Elaine then decides to show hers. 


Then she seduces Graham's character--while surreptitiously  videotaping it.


Elaine comes off as a combination of Nan Goldin (in her obsessive documenting) and Laurel Nakadate (in her exploitation of her subjects). Secretly filmed sex is hardly the worst thing that shows up in Elaine's video art.

That's the thing about this film. Literally everyone (except Dewey, the Alan Cumming character) is awful. And Dewey is a pathetic victim. I have no idea what the world of blue chip art is really like, but I have a hard time believing that everyone is this bad.

For some reason, gallery owners are almost never portrayed positively in movies. In Beverly Hills Cop and Legal Eagles, the gallery owners are actually murderers. Art Spindle is not quite that evil, but he does come off as a scheming scumbag. (The gallery owner in Age of Consent, however, was portrayed in a positive light. That seems to be the exception.) This is completely different from pretty much every gallery owner I personally know.

I would like to see a movie set in the art world at a lower level than this--not the blue chip world but the world that I encounter weekly, which is far larger than the tiny blue chip world. It might be hard, though, to find all that much drama there...

Laurel Nakadate, Humiliating People in the Name of Art Once Again

If there was any doubt about the moral vacuity of Laurel Nakadate's art, this new video demolishes it. She brought porn performers in, telling them that they were reading for a role. She then had them read poems by Dora Malech. The "try-outs" were the roles in the video. The porn actresses are wearing lingerie, woodenly reading these poems, occasionally mispronouncing hard words. Jeez, I hope these women at least got paid for it.(I wonder what Malech thought?)

Whatever her artistic justification, the effect of this is to humiliate these women. It's like the mirror image of Beg For Your Life. To me, her work says this: "I'm Laurel Nakadate, artist-exploiter, and pathetic, unself-aware, uneducated people are my medium."


Untitled from laurel nakadate on Vimeo.

I feel guilty for even disseminating this...

I know a lot of people think Nakadate is just great. If you think that, I welcome you to explain why in the comments.

The Laurel Nakadate Backlash

Laurel Nakadate, still from Beg For Your Life, video, 2006

I thought I was going out on a limb when I panned Laural Nakadate. I mean, it seems like Houston loves her--in the past year, she has had two exhibits here (at Diverse Works and at the Art League). But I feel her work was kind of exploitative, particularly of the lonely old pervy guys with whom she enacts her scenarios. It turns out I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Bless her heart, that Laurel Nakadate just can’t help herself. She’s just cute as a button and old, weird guys flock to her. What’s a girl to do but exploit and mock them for her art? Nakadate does just that in her videos, some of which are on view as a part of the FotoFest exhibition “Medianation” at the Art League, Houston.

Am I just imagining this, or has a “Bum Fight” sensibility taken hold of our culture? All sorts of media types and wannabes are mocking and/or exploiting others for entertainment, from Howard Stern to reality TV to YouTube. I see this practice slowly seeping into the artworld and being perceived as “edgy.”

The message for artists seems to be, go ahead, take advantage of the unwitting, the poor, the desperate, the pathetic, the naïve. Hey it’s for YOUR ART! And aren’t you and your art, so much more important than these people? (Kelly Klaasmeyer, Glasstire)

Good piece.

What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change

Robert Boyd

If you've ever seen Laurel Nakadate's photography or videos, you know a lot of it is about how men (particularly older men) relate to cute sexy younger women (particularly Laurel Nakadate). I think viewers are meant to be a little freaked out by it. Personally, I see a sexually desirable woman exploiting some lonely old pervs while occasionally showing her tits. One can see the same any night of the week over at Rick's, but few call it art.

So I was on the fence about seeing a feature film by Nakadate, but I decided to check it out. It's called Stay the Same Never Change. I assumed it would be boring, but that's ok--there is a kind of exquisite boredom in seeing beautiful things over time. It's what makes watching, say, a Michelangelo Antionioni film tolerable.

The audience were mostly people who were somehow officially involved in FotoFest. They came on a chartered bus, and they all had nametags. Nakadate was present. She was wearing a black teeshirt and tight black miniskirt (sorry fellas, I didn't take any full-length photos). I mention this because so much of her art hinges on the fact that she is pretty and has a scrumptious body. Would the old guys she meets through Craig's List (or however she meets them) be willing to go through with her scenarios otherwise?

She was introduced by curator Rachel Cook. She started off before the film by saying she "asks for a little patience." Good advice!



Laurel Nakadate at the Glassell

The movie doesn't have much in the way of plot--Nakadate said she originally planned it as a series of separate videos but then got money to make a feature, so she decided to intertwine them. Her usual themes are here. Unhappy cute girls, feeling depression or anomie, dressed in tight clothes, miniskirts and shorts but looking basically very fresh and young and pretty. Older guys who are attracted to them, some with seriously bad intent. Other characters--parents, therapists--who fail to connect with the girls at all.




This girl, earlier in the movie, talks about how she can understand why people go on shooting rampages in schools. Here, she is asking these two men to drown her. They just want to hang out, though. And they are freaked out when she tells them she is 17. They book, leaving her behind. Later she drowns her teddy bear.

One scene has Katy (I think that was her name in the movie) and her mom talking when two exterminators show up. They are there to set traps for mice, which Katy doesn't believe are there. She has an argument with her mom about it. But what's freaky are the exterminators in their overalls. They look exactly like the guys who show up in porn movies (delivering pizza, installing the phone, etc.--activities that in porn flicks always lead to sex). Their comically bad acting makes them seem like porn guys as well. This is one of several scenes where Nakadate leads you into thinking you are about to see something shocking--but pulls the football away at the last second. (She rarely pulls the football away in her videos.) One thing that made the exterminators seem especially naughty was that one of them had a black bar over his eyes! In fact, all through the movie there are men (and it seems like it is only men) with black bars over their eyes. It's a creepy effect that makes the movie seem all the more pervy and illicit. (Of course it takes away what little humanity these men have, but that doesn't seem like a big concern for Nakadate.)



Julie on the left and Katy (?) on the right

There is a lot of implied violence and sex, but the viewer is never given confirmation that any of the things that are implied to have happened actually happened. When a group of men surrounds a seemingly willing girl in the woods, you think a gang bang is about to happen. But later you see the girl and a guy (who in the credits is called "Kidnapper") stopping at a restaurant for some pie. Did anything actually happen?

After it was all over, Nakadate said, "Thanks for staying all the way through." It's almost like she knew it was boring. It was also really badly done. The sound was so bad I think I could understand maybe half of what was said. (The soundtrack music was good, though.) Of course the acting was terrible.

I asked about the black bars over the eyes--it turned out it was mostly because she didn't have releases from everyone who appeared in the film. She said this was partly because of the tiny crew she had and super low budget she worked with. What a disappointment. If it had been an aesthetic decision, I would have respected it more.

She also blamed her low budget for the crappy sound recording, but also said that wasn't important to her because she was a photographer. For her, it was all about the images. When she auditioned the girls, she wasn't looking for good actresses, just the right look. This is irritating. She was making a movie, not a photograph. Other ultra-low-budget filmmakers sweat out getting the recording right, getting good performances out of their amateur or semi-pro actors. Her casual dismissal of this seemed both lazy and showed a lack of respect for the medium and for her audience. That it's "art" strikes me as the weakest possible excuse for a lack of basic craftsmanship. (A much harsher review can be read here.)

Anyway, I want to leave you with a few Laurel Nakadate quotes:

"You can miss the first half an hour and you're ok."
"Voyeurism is an amazing, beautiful thing."
(Referring to the soundtrack) "I want it to feel like the saddest prom on earth in 1958."

OK, one last thing--a great tattoo that I photographed surreptitiously (voyeuristically?):

Open Season

Robert Boyd

This weekend was the beginning of the "new season" for art. I'm not sure what that means--there were plenty of gallery shows this summer. I know in New York, well-to-do collectors head out to their summer homes, so the art industry, which is a consumer luxury item industry after all, slows down. For example, there is usually only one issue each of Art in America and Artforum in the summer. But why this should apply to Houston, I don't know.

Be that as it may, tons of shows opened in Houston last week. I only went to one opening (opening parties are not a good way to look at art). But I went to a few galleries after opening nights, however.

Diverse Works season opening show '"Now that I'm by myself," she says, "I'm not by myself, which is good."' is almost all video. I have no problem with video or film as an art-form. But I hate seeing video in a gallery. It is just not an environment conducive to watching video or film. Video (generally) demands your time. If you are going to get anything useful out of a video, you need to sit still and watch it unfold for whatever its length is. And that can be a challenge, especially if the video is perplexing, hermetic, outside your comfort zone--which is what art video mostly is.

There's a reason movie theaters are the way they are. You sit in a comfortable seat--that helps a lot while you watch two hours of film (or eight hours, if you are watching Our Hitler). The theater is dark, so it concentrates your attention on the projected image. And, perhaps most importantly, you can only see one movie at a time at a movie theater. You don't have two movies showing simultaneously, their blaring soundtracks competing in your ears for attention.

So Diverse Works for this show was the exact opposite of a movie theater--no comfy chairs, no darkened room, multiple videos (and soundtracks!) playing all at once.

I will mention the work of Laurel Nakadate. Her videos got my attention for all the wrong reasons: she is beautiful and gets naked in many of them. But they were definitely uncomfortable--she seemed to star with a bunch of weird older men, some who pretended to brutalize her or murder her, some on whom she held toy guns, instructing them to beg for mercy. The men were good sports--acting ability wasn't at a premium, and there was a lot of giggling as the dudes said things like, "Please don't kill me!"

 
Laurel Nakadate, "Beg for Your Life" still,  video, 2006

But for the most part, I just couldn't connect with the material I was seeing. That, if anything, is my main complaint about a lot of the new shows I saw this weekend. Peel Gallery, new art from Mexico City--it was just a jumble of brightly-colored faux-naif stuff. None of it felt particularly original (not a sin by any means), engaging, or memorable. The flower art up at the Barbara Davis Gallery were so forgettable that I had to look the show up to remember what I had seen there. (Still, flowers--they'll probably sell and for a commercial gallery, that's what counts.)

I had never been to CNTRL Gallery before--they had three artists up. One who was doing some kind of intervention on newspapers, making them hazy, washed-out, and unreadable; one who made rather unexciting 3-D fabric sculptures; and one who did what appeared to be severe, early-Frank-Stella-like abstractions made from carpet remnants.


Sasha Pierce, grey red pink, oil on canvas, 2009

But I took a closer look at Sasha Pierce's work--a lot closer.


Sasha Pierce, grey red pink detail, oil on canvas, 2009

This is not carpet--it's paint. How the hell did she do that?! Still, her paintings look like they were made with industrial no-stain carpet. She has accomplished something amazing in her technique, and used it to make some pretty boring paintings.

At least good old Dawolu Jabari Anderson came through. He had a show at Joan Wich of his giant comic book cover paintings and his drawings. His drawings are weak tea, obviously copied from other drawings or photographs, without any indication of drawing mastery. But his paintings are fun, pastiches of Jack Kirby comics covers but starring an "Aunt Jemima"-style character called Mam-E.


Dawolu Jaban Anderson, "Pig knuckles served with a punch?", latex, acrylic and ink on paper, 2009

Amazing that I saw two pieces of art featuring the Kool-Aid man this weekend. One more and it'll be a trend.

 
Dawolu Jaban Anderson, "The Jig's Up", latex, acrylic and ink on paper, 2009

In the end, I think these paintings are sort of trivial, and I think riffing on Kirby creates a kind of incoherence and is a substitute for having an original idea. But even as I write those words, they seem too harsh for these humorous, likable works. (Sorry for the lameness of my photos. They always look pretty sharp when I take them. Consider it an inducement to go see the pieces in the flesh--or at least check them out on the Joan Wich website.)

One show I liked a lot even though I had low expectations was the "Collected Works" show at Inman Gallery.  The gallery is celebrating its 20th anniversary, so it put on a show of various pieces by a bunch of different artists that had been borrowed from collectors who originally bought them from Inman. I could see how this would be a way for a gallery to pat itself on the back, but it also seemed a little contrary to mission of a contempary art gallery--to bring new work to a public of potential and existing buyers. My objection was a bit abstract, I'll admit. And it went away as soon as I saw the work. It was a jumble--too many different pieces in different styles. But there was so much there that was really good that you can safely dismiss my initial reservations.


Wayne White, "They're All Like What Does It mean and I'm All Like I Don't Know," acrylic on framed lithographs, 2003

For one thing, I got to see a Wayne White word painting up close. This two-part painting is quite small and has a totally different presence than "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep." It's nice to be able to see this side of his work while the other big installation is up just a few blocks south.


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938," embroidery on textile, 2008

I only really know Secor from her snarky, funny Glasstire columns. But I love this art! This is a piece that like Sasha Pierce's rewards looking close. Obviously Secor labored mightily to make this--embroidery is not a fast art. And yet it looks so expressive, so sketchy, so spontaneous. The colors are great, and it's great to see how she achieves her color effects by layering different colored threads.


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938" detail,  embroidery on textile, 2008


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938" detail,  embroidery on textile, 2008

I also liked this extremely detailed realistic domestic painting (below), especially trying to figure out what that thing in the middle of the room is. It feels vaguely menacing.


Jim Richard, "Blinds," oil on linen, 2009

There were many other interesting pieces at the Inman--definitely worth checking out.

Finally, I went to The Joanna for their secret Saturday sale. I met Cody Ledvina who showed me around and told me a little about their evolving philosophy of pricing the art. Almost everything was under $200--apparently this approach was decided on after they drastically overpriced the art at the I Love You Baby show in July.The big exception were two huge canvases by Cheyenne Ramos (who normally shows at Joan Wich).


Cheyenne Ramos, don't know what this one is called...

Her paintings were definitely my favorites of the show there. The Joanna is a house where Mr. Ledvina lives that he rents from The Menil Foundation. They clear out the living room for the occasional exhibit. The Joanna can't put a sign out front (part of the lease agreement), but they are pretty sure that the Menil knows what they are doing.

That is all for this past weekend--but there are still plenty of shows that have just opened that I haven't seen yet. So look for more next week...