I mentioned seeing some of her new work at Jessica Murray Projects back in June. The gallery sent me an image of one of the works. It’s hard to get a good feel for it from the image, but here goes:

Two quotes for your Friday afternoon reading:

Today (I like the bit about the corrupt US-backed regime):

TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) – President Bush accused Cuba’s Fidel Castro on Friday of welcoming sex tourism and contributing to a global problem of human trafficking, as he courted Cuban voters in Florida, a pivotal state in the election.

“The regime of Fidel Castro has turned Cuba into a major destination for sex tourism,” Bush said, adding that the Cuban president “welcomes sex tourism” as a source of hard currency for his government.

Addressing a conference on human trafficking, Bush quoted Castro as saying that prostitutes in Havana were the cleanest and best educated in the world.

Bush said that comment was evidence that Havana was encouraging sex tourism. Castro praised Cuban prostitutes for having a college education in a documentary interview by the U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone.

Cuba’s government, born of a revolution against a corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorship that allowed Mafia-run gaming and prostitution to thrive in Havana in the 1950’s, strongly denies tolerating sex tourism. Police have cracked down on the trade.

November 25, 2003:

HOUSTON, Texas (Reuters) — Neil Bush, younger brother of President Bush, detailed lucrative business deals and admitted to engaging in sex romps with women in Asia in a deposition taken in March as part of his divorce from now ex-wife Sharon Bush.

….

The Bush divorce, completed in April after 23 years of marriage, was prompted in part by Bush’s relationship with another woman. He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.

The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.

“Mr. Bush, you have to admit it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her,” Brown said.

“It was very unusual,” Bush said.

Want to pick up a great piece of art for $100, while attending a party at one of the coolest Williamsburg galleries? If you can’t swing $100, pay $25 for just the party. Food and drink are supplied by Brooklyn Breweries and our favorite Williamsburg Restaurant, Relish.

On Sunday, Champion Fine Art is having a party to help pay for their relocation to Los Angeles. The web site has more details.

Even by the standards of Williamsburg, Champion is one of the least commercial and most artist-driven spaces out there. It’s not a permanent gallery, but a two year exhibition series of artist-curated group shows. The twenty exhibitions, titled numerically in descending order, have been in New York so far, and are about to move to Los Angeles. Each is accompanied by a gallery-produced catalog in an edition of one hundred.

I believe the last show will be a “closing party” touching on the various exhibitions of the two year period.

Images of their exhibitions will be up soon. I’m still working on the web site!

They’re changing the shows (a combination of a work on the video monitor outside plus something in the window) every week, so go now to see the excellent one up right now, curated by Lawrence Rinder.

The Lutz Bacher piece is Olympiad, a beatifully damaged video of the 1936 Olympics Stadium in Berlin, made famous by another woman filmmaker.

The Tim Hawkinson piece, called Seal, looks like an official seal made from an elephant skin.

Senator Rick Santorum on the anti-gay marriage amendment:

“I would argue that the future of our country hangs in the balance because the future of marriage hangs in the balance,” he said shortly before the vote. “Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?”

As a New Yorker, I’m pretty sure that gay marriage is NOT the biggest danger we face.

[photo courtesy of Jesse Chan-Norris]

Via rodcorp, I found this interview with J.G. Ballard in The Guardian. Fascinating stuff, including his interest in the visual arts. An excerpt:

Today’s art scene? Very difficult to judge, since celebrity and the media presence of the artists are inextricably linked with their work. The great artists of the past century tended to become famous in the later stages of their careers, whereas today fame is built into the artists’ work from the start, as in the cases of Emin and Hirst.

There’s a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means. Emin’s bed, Hirst’s sheep, the Chapmans’ defaced Goyas are psychological provocations, mental tests where the aesthetic elements are no more than a framing device.

It’s interesting that this should be the case. I assume it is because our environment today, by and large a media landscape, is oversaturated by aestheticising elements (TV ads, packaging, design and presentation, styling and so on) but impoverished and numbed as far as its psychological depth is concerned.

Artists (though sadly not writers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Everything in today’s world is stylised and packaged, and Emin and Hirst are trying to say, this is a bed, this is death, this is a body. They are trying to redefine the basic elements of reality, to recapture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.

I am currently reading Ballard’s War Fever, a rather prescient set of short stories published in 1999.

We had lunch with friends at The Spotted Pig yesterday.

The gnudi (like gnocchi but only made of ricotta) with butter and sage: excellent.

The halibut with chunky puree of peas and sauteed escarole: yummy.

The service: HORRIBLE.

If you want to learn more about gnudi, this Rogers and Gray cookbook (they of River Cafe in London fame) has a whole chapter.

Why Mac OS X is Better

You only have a week on two of these:

crits’s pix at Black & White has great stuff, especially Julian Montague’s “The Stray Shopping Cart: An Illustrated System of Identification” and Jon-Paul Villegas’s brilliant mix of wall paintings and sculpture. I’ll add images if I can get some. Closes 7/19.

“a dot that went for a walk” at Plus Ultra Gallery includes Katinka Ahlbom (who had a striking installation that was part of “Sunrise Sunset” at Smack Mellon), Vanessa Conte, Rosemarie Fiore, and Medrie Macphee. Closes 7/19.

We will have to go back to “Grotto 2” at Jessica Murray Projects, as it was very hot and difficult to absorb the 60+ artists in the show. A few things did manage to stand out, such as Rachel Mason’s video “Model Anthem”, the White House sculpture of Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua (we bought the “Todo List” work that went along with it), and Diane Meyer’s “Redemption: Professional Confessional.” Some lucky person at the opening bought a Reed Anderson work based on a page from a 1977 Penthouse at a very reasonable price. Closes 8/1.

—

Updated: There are some photos here from the Black & White show. I also forgot to mention how much I liked Nick Brown’s work in the back patio.

Joy Garnett tells us of a GOP memo given to people at Penn South (the big complex a little north of us on Eighth Avenue), telling them to stay inside during the convention, and to carry ID at all times. Lovely.