Favorite things seen in Chelsea on Saturday:

Brock Enright & Ivan Hürzeler’s Forest at Cynthia Broan

You have one more week to see it. Go on the hour and watch the 50-minute film. It’s more than worth the time. It’s a disturbing Lord of the Flies meets Outward Bound experience.

J Shih Chieh Huang at Virgil de Voldere

The show already closed, but the image may give you some sense of the magical environment.

William Powhida’s wall drawing at Schroder Romero/Plus Ultra project space

The image above is a detail for the part that points to Schroeder Romero.

John Pilson’s videos at Nicole Klagsbrun

The description for this one is:

In Wisdom and Charisma, a group of middle-aged men, who used to play Dungeons and Dragons twenty years ago, meet after work for a session of the role-playing game. Seated around a corporate boardroom table, the Dungeon Master, dressed in red, leads the others in debating pathways through astral planes and portals of pandemonium while stationary, control room-like, cameras allow for the reactions and silent exchanges between the players to be fully scrutinized. Their clothes and body language indicate their executive occupation and social standing, a strong contrast to their adolescent pastime.

Photos from other shows, plus some images from Williamsburg, will be up on Flickr soon. As always, use the photos (newer) link on the upper left to get to my latest photos.

The best thing from Sunday in Williamsburg was the group show at LMAK Projects, curated by Franklin Evans. It’s a top pick on ArtCal, and up for one more week.

I was surprised by the number of people who had really negative things to say about the Scope fair. I found it to be a great deal of fun, and filled with a lot of interesting art. I particularly enjoyed a number of the German galleries. Check out the photos I took at Scope. I suspect some people found the wackier stuff, including the installations in the middle, not “serious” enough and therefore wrote off the whole fair as unserious and lacking in good work. The way Todd Gibson described it makes sense to me and is closer to my view of it.

Many of the anti-Scope crowd also complained that The Armory Show was too much about money. I don’t see how we’re going to get some magical middle ground, in which the market rewards precisely the correct people, and no more. I also find the attacks on Scope a bit humorless. I’m big on the idea of having a huge variety of work available for us to see, knowing some of it will be good and some will be bad. I like this part of Art Fag City’s post on Armory:

No one can be impervious to the sales hype the fair brings out, and since so much of what is shown at this fair pushes a formalist aesthetic, it is hard to know the difference between those things that are legitimately good and what merely looks good. Everything looks like you should buy it.

Lately I feel I have encountered a lot of art that feels middlebrow, but is made with great skill.

While I find some aspects of the current market off-putting, I’m also happy to see a huge number of artists making money from their art. Under those conditions, froth happens. Yes, a lot of people that make crappy art will be deemed marketable, but I prefer that outcome to one where almost no one sells work unless its already certified as blue chip. We live in a country where there is very little public funding for art. Even if there were, given the Neanderthals in charge, we would probably end up with a lot of flag paintings, and I don’t mean in the style of Jasper Johns.

I have finished uploading and labeling 192 photos from last week’s art fairs to my Flickr feed. Go here to see them.

ARTList has a great interview up now with Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City, one of my daily blog reads. On the lighter side, this excerpt is very funny (emphasis mine):

EM: Who do you think are some of the most influential artists today?

PJ: I think the most important work being made today is in the medium of new media, which isn’t clear to many yet, but it is why artists like Cory Arcangel (who I suspect will be the next Jeff Koons), MTAA, Marisa Olson, and PaperRad are mentioned so frequently on Art Fag City.

Memorial at Geschwister Scholl Platz

We saw Sophie Scholl at Film Forum yesterday. It’s a very powerful film about using one’s conscience when everyone else is trying to just “get by” in a totalitarian state. I highly recommend seeing it. It runs through the end of the month.

The image above was taken in Munich, at the site of their distribution of anti-Nazi leaflets at the Ludwig University. We visited it in September 2002.

image source

I don’t normally recommend reading the New York Sun_, but my friend Madge the Manicurist3260 sent me this pretty good article on the L train’s effect on Williamsburg’s galleries. Here is the beginning:

On a normal weekend in Williamsburg, with the L subway line running on schedule, several hundred people might visit artMovingProjects if it has a popular exhibit. But when the L train is shut down, owner Aron Namenwirth said he’s lucky if 10 local artists show up.

But such is life along the L line. For the last three years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been modernizing the line so that it can someday accommodate a higher capacity. In order to do the work, the MTA often shuts down the line on the weekends. Since January 1 of this year, the L line has been closed on four weekends out of nine. It’s a situation that hits Williamsburg art galleries especially hard: Most are only open Friday through Sunday.

A co-owner of Schroeder Romero gallery, which recently packed up and moved to Chelsea, said her gallery was losing about $10,000 a year because of weekend disruptions on the L line when it was located in Williamsburg. The neighborhood is known for its upstart art scene, but the problem also affects the bars, restaurants, and shops that usually do their best business on weekend nights.

The MTA originally promised to be finished by June 2005. The current estimate from them is June 2006.

The funniest thing I heard about the art fairs was said to me last night at the closing party at White Columns.

I was telling an artist that James and I attended every fair except DiVA, even Fountain. His response was, “Diva? Was that the LA one?”

I’ve just launched a new gallery site running on the ArtCat system:

Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago)

To give you a feel for how flexible my hosting system can be, both that and

Foxy Production

are running the same software, with minor changes to HTML, CSS, and a bit of Flash in the case of Foxy Production.

I’m too tired to post more at the moment, but based on all that I’ve seen so far, the Scope art fair is the one to see.

Tonight was the “new” opening after the problems of yesterday, and it was quite the scene. There was good energy, a lot of great art, and performances / installations / wandering artists galore.

Valerie Hegarty installation at Guild & Greyshkul

We attended the press preview of the Armory Show today. It was called a press preview, but we often had trouble looking at work because of roaming packs of coifed collector women. I’m sure all the big name collectors were there, and I spotted the Rubells and Horts right away. I had heard from at least one gallery that they had had some difficulties with getting a reasonable number of passes for their collectors, but I guess plenty of them didn’t have too much trouble.

On to the positive!

My favorite galleries in the fair so far:

• David Kordansky – Patrick Hill, Mark Flores, Aaron Curry
• Zeno X – Jenny Scobel, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
• Stuart Shave Modern Art – Tom Burr, Collier Schorr

We only made it through most of one pier, so we have to go back.

Strangest overheard utterance at Armory:

Commercial. It’s the new non-profit.

I have no idea to what it referred. Perhaps the presence of non-profit art spaces selling work at the fair?

We tried to go to the press preview for Scope, but that didn’t work out.

Fountain had some fun stuff from several galleries, and a good mixed crowd, ranging from grungy art collective types to prosperous collectors.

I just put up a bunch of photos of things I liked, and could get decent photos of, on Flickr.