While in Europe I've been working on this project called Check-In Architecture (making videos, writing essays, conducting interviews, maintaining a second blog, travelling incessantly, etc), I've been a bit lazy about posting the details but I'll get to that sometime in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I did an interview with an artist I found really compelling at the Berlin Biennial named Ahmet Ögüt. Ahmet himself goes into a lot of the background information about his projects and practice, so I'll let him do the talking on this one.

This is another instance where the Italian saying that I've grown to love duly applies:

"Morto il papa, se ne fa un altro."
"The pope dies, another is found."

So awhile ago I felt like the only one publicly mourning the demise of the Art Center program (alum Michael Ned Holte later wrote a strong obituary in Artforum, Dec, '07) in Art Criticism (a program I might add, that for better or worse, supplied LA with about half of its current art critics), and now USC with its deep pockets has found us another, a brisk 9-month MA in Arts Journalism. Is this program better than the last? It's a little hard to tell.

The breakdown: well, when USC says arts journalism they really seem to mean every word of it, it's not necessarily criticism and its not necessarily about art. The people who are heading the program are largely drawn from newspaper journalism (last time I checked its pulse, it seemed a bit weak to me) and appear to run the gamut in cultural criticism (a Pulitzer or two in their ranks). The program will ally itself with all the other preexisting schools of the arts (including the the School of Architecture, School of Cinematic Arts, Roski School of Fine Arts,School of Theatre and Thornton School of Music.)

In my mind this could go either way, it could honestly train good journalists and critics who will head out into the world, fully prepared in the most advanced ideas and approaches to art, a smattering of history and discipline specific information as well as an expanded view of cultural critique in general. Or, it could be a bit stagnant, less than experimental, preparing students for jobs that don't exist anymore. Music critics will likely be interviewing (Insert Name of One Hit Wonder Band) for trashy music magazines, art critics will be writing fifty dollar reviews for websites while to scrape together a life from gallery, museum, and/or teaching jobs, and book critics, do we even have many of those left anymore. Edmund Wilson is turning over in his grave. Clement Greenberg's scepter was shattered by Krauss, though a few it's pieces can be found stuck in the side of Artforum and Frieze.

Ready to apply? The deadline for applications is July 1.

Information on the program can be found here and here. If you want to apply (all you budding critics and seasoned pros looking for a break from a stormy career) the place to do so is here.

A couple of nights ago at Galerie Konrad Fischer (in the high pitch of Gallery Weekend Berlin) a man in his thirties, short hair, button shirt, blue jeans, screamed at the top of his lungs while a stylish lesbian played tambourine alongside, screeching in a regular rhythm. Clothes came off at one point as they moved from gallery to gallery in the building. The woman’s shirt became unbuttoned, the man’s pants descended round his ankles, his green American Apparel undies shifted down around his thighs, he shat into his hand (not pausing in his screams) and smeared it onto his forehead. The German gallerists said nothing. But of course, called the police.
As for the shitsmearing American Apparel model, exceptions exist as with anything, but transgressive performance art is more often than not bad, boring, and shudder inducing. But not the shudder of shock and horror that the artist may be shooting for, but a shudder of pity and embarrassment. This was true here, but to call the police about a lame stunt made the gallerists look like harried shopkeepers trying to keep there customers from seeing anything unpleasant, rather than the hip patrons of the arts they play themselves off to be. I don’t know which, but one of the dealers (if not all) called the cops to be sure. And how many came, around 10 cars and a gaggle on bikes. It just would of been more honest if one of the dealers just grabbed the offenders and bounced them out.

One man, one woman, one tambourine, one turd, ten cop cars: Germany!
A new slogan for the Paterland. No offense really to Germany, my countrymen often act foolish as well.

Polizei: Were they artists?
Gallerist: I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Maybe.

The performance artists, or what have you, were arrested.

The Berlin Gallery Weekend is everything the Berlin Biennial is not. An amorphous, inclusive poetic drove the Biennial, which was concentrated on younger and unknown artists, and in the end, perhaps came off as institutional, and maybe just a little bureaucratic. The Gallery Weekend is about the market, famous artists, and of course is as unbureacratic as the Germans are able to be, which, truth be known, is still a stiff.

Everything is a bit disconnected, or maybe I just felt lost there. Berlin I haven’t figured out yet how to navigate. I never end up where I intend, a .66L bottle of Becks gripped in my hand as I get turned around and waste time on taxis and tubes, and then people smear shit onto their foreheads.

Here for interviews, artists have either blown me off (Aida Ruilova) or thrown me out of their studios for perceived transgressions (Carsten Nicolai when Nicolai’s gallerist dropped a photographer I was working with off at his studio and she started taking pictures without his express permission). Some people have been very gentle and generous, Thomas Wulffen, Jaro Straub, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Vladko Vladov, Aaron Moulton, John Kleckner, Mariano Pichler, Susanne Schuricht, and others to be sure, but the cold shoulder acquaintances, self-important gestures, and market pressures came to bare bitter fruit for me.

On Sunday, I went saw nearly every gallery in Berlin.

Shrug.

Maybe the hype was directed at the collectors, and hardly a pfennig spent on impressing (with actual ideas and well-developed artistic visions) foreign art critics of low-to-middling reputation, not very surprising. This is not to say that many gallerists weren’t entirely pleasant to me (though some were patently stupid, such as the vapid assistant at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri that when I asked why Matthieu Mercier included antique baseball masks alongside his finish-fetish formal sculptures, simply answered “Why not?”). And that a few of the non-profit and collector’s shows weren’t without quality, many were. But overall a conservative turn by harried shopkeepers.

Besides a distaste for Beck’s and Mercier, I’ll take away from Berlin an admiration for a handful of artists (and shows) at a handful of spaces (Mona Hatoum at Max Heitzler, Tomas Schmit at Barbara Wein, "The New World" at Artnews Projects, Edith Dekyndt at PROGRAM), but overall a sense that Berlin is caught in two contrasting modes, between it’s history as an alternative art community and its fledgling market.

In the end the Biennial and the Gallery Weekend make nice contrasts to one another, both amorphous but for different purposes. As much as I thought the Biennial shapeless, it chose thoughtful work for seemingly non-commercial reasons. It chose them as one vision of what a biennial and, in particular, this biennial should be.

The Gallery Weekend offers a rather different vision. Though quality has not been wholly dispensed with, it merely becomes a measure of an index, an index whose main purpose is not innovation, artistic process, history, or even humanity, an index whose main measure is money. It’s okay, art and artists adapt and survive, but one can’t help but hear about the halcyon days of Berlin in the 90s (or New York in the 70s) and not wince that they’ve passed. Though I kvetch regularly about money, the market can have a little bounce and energy that the academies and alternatives often do not. A conversation, tension, war, between the two I think is healthy. Usually one dominates the other, or in rather sophisticated societies with an absence of market fund art through the government and universities, which often creates academic art, intellectually well-built but often without energy or ambiguity.

The city is in weid place art-wise, but its still a beautiful city and it attracts more and more artists everyday. If anything its the artists that really amke a community of cultural producers interesting. Why are they coming to Berlin?

It’s damn cheap and beautiful and overall, a very easy place to live. I’m ready to jump the sinking American ship myself and dog paddle over to Berlin for an apartment in Mitte for 500 euros. Not that it ain’t sinking in its own way too, just perhaps at a pace I can deal with.

Gilles Deleuze in Abecedaire complains about the ubiquity of academic conferences, which he thinks are downright silly. The only encounter, he says, that one can really have, are with works of art and not with other intellectuals.

I tend to agree with him. And I've always enjoyed the fact that the august art magazine (and my sometime employer) Artforum has largely stayed out of the intellectual fray when it comes to panels, (us critics have better things to do with our time, like cadging free drinks at openings), but the brand has a certain weight, so when they say they're having a conference, not only can they get some pretty heavyweight actors from the art world to participate but also get the rest of the world, or at least me, looking in their direction to see what they come up.

At Artworld Salon, Jonathan TD Neil introduces the cast of characters at the Artforum panel (titled simply "Art and Money") with aplomb and efficiency:

"The panelists included Tom Crow (much esteemed if somewhat dusty art historian currently installed at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts), Amy Cappellazzo (International Co-Head of Christies ’s Post-War and Contemporary Art department, art world punching bag and proud mother of the auction house as “big box store” analogy), Yinka Shonibare MBE (perhaps the very definition of the post-historical, post-colonial, post-black artist), Kathy Halbreich (former Director of the Walker and now MoMA’s image disciplinarian-cum-Kultur defender) and Jeffrey Deitch (maestro of the art world spectacle who never met a hipster he didn’t like); it was, to say the least, an almost perfectly diverse array of the art industry’s different player positions. Tim Griffin (Artforum’s soft-spoken editor) moderated the event."

Only editor Tim Griffin, our critical representative to this tea party, comes away unscathed from Neil's assessment of the panelists.

And if Neil's play-by-play of the panel is as accurate as his introduction, it would seem that when it comes to art and money, even the most significant players have nothing interesting to say, or rather things I've heard all before and am simply tired of hearing again.

For one:
if I hear someone say Warhol one more time, I'll reach for my gun.

It's curious that this particular artist has come to so dominate what we talk about when we talk about art (especially in relationship to money). Don't get me wrong I like Andy's shenanigans as much as the next red-blooded American with a penchant for pop. But then I grew up.

Artstars, popstars, money grubbing millionaires, philosophers and charlatans, authentic artists and wheeler dealers. Art and money, again? Can we change the subject? Or at least say something new?

This isn't another tiresome tirade delivered from a golden perch atop the ivory tower about the evils of that bad old market, but then again, such complaints are trite because they're true.

The market is bad, it's always bad. Anything that can turn Picasso into pork bellies and back again, I must say, leaves a vomity taste in the back of my throat. I admit that the killing floors of the art fair or auction house are not quite so messy as their less than metaphorical equivalent (unless of course their hawking the work of a Viennese Actionist).

In the rest of the world, mostly they're just talking about money, I'm glad at least that somewhere, art gets top billing.

Who know, maybe the moneychangers have permanently taken over the temple, maybe they've always had it. Fuck 'em. We'll build another.

I've been living in Italy and they have saying here I've grown to love:
When the pope dies, we make another.

When this art world dies, finally passing it's last stale Warhol into the toilet we call the marketplace, and then keels over dead from its own gluttony, we'll be here, finishing off the last of the free drinks, and we'll make another.

++++++

And for my precious few readers out there, thanks for waiting out the strike.

After an impassioned response from some of my colleagues, I retract my earlier sentiment. But I'm still mostly on strike, it'll lift in a few days, and we'll return to our regularly scheduled broadcasts.

For now enjoy this rather amazing video I found today on Freetown Christiania, a radical breakaway town/country in the center of Copenhagen. This documentary dates back from 1991, and Christiania, a living "social experiment" continues on though the rules have changed. Certain hard-line policies by the government have broken the open cannabis trade in Christiania (the main industry for the breakaway) and sent the drug trade all over the city.

Here's the rather thorough wikipedia entry for Freetown Christiania.

It's 61 minutes long so tuck in for a good watch.

Probably my favorite website for every and always, Ubuweb, an online compendium for the historical avant-garde, now has a podcast supported by the Poetry Foundation. I would like to know from Kenny G himself what's new on the site. It publishes about one a month.

Subscribe here.

This time the offending culprit is LA Times staff writer Patrick Goldstein in an article titled "The End of the Critic?" published with a nice picture of Pauline Kael, who it should be noted died quite awhile ago. Goldstein's criticism is as about as current as the picture of Kael.

Criticism is changing, it's always changing. For it to sossify in newspapers, the way it has is a tragedy. One that critical discourse should hardly mourn. The nature of criticism is different than it was five minutes ago. Popular culture was never on our team. Popular press only pretended to have a critically informed opinion or at best hired someone to gild their journalistic credentials. In the end, the critic has always been fighting to be heard, and personally, I would never want ten million readers hanging off my every word. It sounds like some megalomaniacal disease. I want to talk to people who want to listen, many of whom share my same penchant for the written word and critical discourse. If I had five thousand readers, I'd feel like a bloody rockstar.

Who knows? I've never checked the numbers for this site, maybe aggregately I've had five thousand readers. Or a few hundred a day. This is amazing to me. Most of the newspaper critics that Goldstein invokes who got fired or retired were bad. Trying to be smart about bad culture to keep the advertisers happy. Maybe occasionally saying something nice about an experimental masterpiece from a century ago, but hardly spending a line to promote experimental work of our time.

Goodbye to all that. We can decide our own culture. We don't need the newspapers anymore, who's owners were usually jerks anyway. We have each other. And we, us writers and readers alike, can decide for ourselves which critic we think has good and interesting things to say. And if you want to be a professional critic, it's not the easiest or the most difficult thing in the world to achieve. The money has never been that good.

If the music review in the newspaper is dead, goodwrittens, it was never in touch with my sensibility anyways. Has Patrick Goldstein ever heard of Pitchfork Media?
Pitchfork Media's sensibility is more contemporary, smarter, funnier, and more insightful than just about any music journalist writing for the newspapers.

Now it's time we pay attention to critics not because a newspaper says they're good or has enshrined them, but because they say things that are important to us and we vote by reading the website everyday.

The old system was a poor one, I hardly lament its loss, or any of those still clinging to its hull as it slips into the icy sea.

Critics are only as good as their readers, not their print runs or any other nonsense about the death of criticism that Goldstein is trying to pawn off. Like I said yesterday, we need spend more time thinking and less time complaining about our irrelevancy. The system is against this kind of conversation, but we can do it ourselves anyway. It's harder, but I'm not writing because it's easy, or a quick buck, or because I crave celebrity. I write because I have things to say and hopefully I write in way that attracts people to stay and listen.

That's my screed for the week. We now return to regularly scheduled programming.

Though I'm sure he would shake off such a grand subtitle to his article, partially because he's talking about art criticism in general and South Africa in particular. The article gives a beautiful overview of both, and quotes the curmudgeonly Dave Hickey when he said that there are no serious art magazines anymore. I don't know about that. It seems to be that this obsession by critics by their alleged irrelevance takes up more space in the long dark tea time of their souls than thinking about art. And cashing in one commercial gallery commissions, as Hickey does primarily these days, is hardly something to brag about.

And though I see this adventure in blogging more as a conversation than a magazine to hold the hallowed remains of art criticism, blogging and internet publishing makes Dave Hickey, in this regard, look like he has no idea what's going on at all. Perhaps writing on the web hasn't reached it's zenith or even a fraction of its potential for smart, funny discourse, but if there are no good art magazines, nobody's stopping Dave from starting his own online or in print. Such defeatism from the generation that's supposed to be mentoring us in is rather sad to me.

Enough, go read Sean O'Toole's excellent article here.