You've already read about Buenos Aires, but you've likely never been here.

Whatever article you read probably had an author marveling at how the weekend starts on Tuesday, praising the quality of the beef, and anointing the city the next this or that. This city is perpetually becoming the next Prague. But what Buenos Aires actually deserves comparison to is that idealized version of downtown New York 25 or 30 years ago, where unlikely permutations of unemployed artists collaborated without jealousy, waiting for some special patron to recognize their talent and catapult them to success through ample praise and good-old fashioned exploitation.

 It's not just the music that reigns supreme and the hours people keep that make it feel like the States in the 1970s down here. There is a definite reason why the nightlife in Buenos Aires is so famous worldwide.  But, what no one really mentions is how much of it is directly related to the arts community.

Yes, any party with the right sort of crowd in the States can turn into an opportunity to earn yourself a show, but here, just one--anyone--can serve as your entry into the art world. Is there an eviction party for a publishing company over on Cordoba? That DJ who just threw on Grace Jones isn't just a wild-haired party girl--she's Daniela Luna, the head of one of the most avant-garde galleries in town, Appetite, which has a reputation for its entire aesthetic being based on the idea that any occasion involving art can consist of a rowdy party without being considered gimmicky.

 Likewise, at Milion, an upscale bar in the middle of the Microcentro, the polo-groupie crowd sips martinis while the owner, Osvaldo Gonzalez, broadcasts his weekly pirate radio show live on RadioBerlin--and prominently displays a piece done by one of the country's most famous photographers over the terrace bar. No matter which party or bar you go every night of the week that's not Sunday or Monday, you're guaranteed to run into someone who is a pivotal player in the city's art scene.

But it's not because the creative community is exclusively made up of a cast of characters with more money than brains. Argentina is, after all, a country purposely choked of technology that's perpetually weathering an economic collapse. The difficulties currently impacting the States and Europe don't have the same resonance here. People--all kinds of people--are pretty used to being broke.

And whether it's in a gallery, an abandoned building, or the basement of a dive bar, your average Buenos Aires party looks something like John Waters' dreamland, where a motley crew of drag queens, photographers, and fierce weirdos on their way up and their way out dance, take drugs, and schmooze. Yes, I know that raucous parties in and of themselves aren't anything new, but they're doing it differently here--it's not a room full of independently wealthy faux-ruffians.

In Buenos Aires, the world-famous nightlife of parties stretching on at a rate that makes Barcelona look sluggish is made up entirely of the arts community. The arts community is almost exclusively young, and these young people are actually broke. It's the kind of atmosphere where you can't tell who is joking and who is not when they tell you their given profession is porn star. But more than that, it's a city where almost everyone in town who says they are a combination artist/fashion designer/writer/thrower of fabulous parties actually is--and does a fairly good job in all categories.

There's one thing that consistently gets left out while everyone's praising Buenos Aires: art made by people who actually live here, not expats whose main purpose of relocation was to start record labels or restaurants.

And the combination artists/fashion designers/writers/throwers of fabulous parties are long overdue for their own praise. But in praising them and their glorious scene, it's best not to call their city the next anything--to do so would be a huge disservice to the unique feeling that, no matter where you go in Buenos Aires, somehow you're managing to show up just in time for whatever's happening.

--Whitney Weiss, a writer in  Buenos Aires

(Images: personal photo of Whitney Weiss; Photos by Stefania Fumo: Towa Ginger and Mariel; Nightclubbing in Cocoliche; Charly Darling, 2009)

I eagerly went to Copenhagen Fashion Week overjoyed at the prospect of catwalks filled with wearable equals to Danish furniture design.

When I first moved to Berlin, I bought six sleek wood and white canvas chairs in an Arkonaplatz flea market. They remain my most beloved possessions. So my response to the bland, commercial offerings on Copenhagen's catwalks was deep disappointment.

After the shows stopped, my friends and I went in search of Moonspoon Saloon, the Copenhagen-based collaboration between designer Sara Sachs, artist Tal R, photographer Noam Griegs and stylist Melanie Buchhave.  We had heard it was promisingly conceptual, rather than commercial. Upon arriving at Moonspoon, we found the team in their studio where the group's clothes are cleverly arranged around Tal R's half-painted wood sculptures and massive child-like colorful canvases.

Moonspoon Salon's concept is to create ninety-nine styles, which will each be produced in an edition of ninety-nine. Every year, MSS creates two themed collections of 10-15 designs, working with local artisans such as a crafts group at a senior home outside Copenhagen who knitted sweaters (Björk recently bought one). The craftspeople are given sketches to interpret and the results are whimsical unisex clothes and accessories, including laptop cases with demonic faces in puffy plastic and massive knitted key rings with a Harlequin theme. Once Moonspoon Saloon'a pre-determined numerical possibilities are exhausted, its members will disband and return to their own disciplines. In the mean time, their publicist Frederik Jacobi told me, "We want to start an army. We want to present a new sexuality."

Despite the compelling concept, I liked what I heard much more than what I saw. The actual garments and objects themselves mostly made me mournful that my mother is in Vermont right now, possibly attending the Bread and Puppet festival (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Puppet_Theater).

"This is not art. It is fashion," MoonSpoon Saloon's press secretary Frederick Jacobi said in describing MSS's clothes. "Fashion is something and art is something else. But the inspiration can be the same. What inspires a painting can inspire a dress. But this is a fashion product."  Though Jacobi's wish to direct attention to the clothes themselves is understandable, I personally believe that art is an important element in creative fashion design.

I was initially impelled to see the collection when Luzia, the Parisian PR for the collective, approached me after Vilsbol de Arce's strong conceptual show. She had worked at Collette, recognized me and offered a brief overview of the project.

But more convincing in that moment than the story was how good she looked in the MSS indigo Harlequin jumpsuit she wore open on top with a sheer black bra and thin black belt. Her louche styling and radiant beauty might have made acceptance too easy for the oversized silk one-piece, but she nonetheless demonstrated the wearability and charm of Moonspoon Saloon's and Copenhagen's more challenging designers.

--Ana Finel Honigman, writer, Berlin

(Images: Courtesy of Ana Finel Honigman)

Art, like any information, is consumed.

It's observed, rent apart, and reordered in the mind, and it sometimes produces exhaust (a viewer's Ooh! and Wow! and Bah!, for example). As life's information is consumed more and more quickly, should art keep apace? Can art be both fast and profound? After all, fast or not, we are still profound, right?

Artists should always nod and accept a change in audience temperament, sooner rather than later. Look, I would never promote the deboning of artists, and I would never condemn us to a fate of facile placation of (mostly casual) aesthetes. The value of acceptance lies in insight par excellence to the hidden-in-plain-sight complex world in which subcultures intertwine like ebony and ivory. The artist's job is to turn that fool's gold real. Art doesn't need to aim for the base like a fire extinguisher, but normative behaviors are fine pace cars (or at worst, dipsticks) for the current of culture. And that's a great place to start for profundity.

So how do we plumb the shallows? More art in the world means the art audience has less time for any one work, a mounting problem.  And poor art education ensures that too much of that time will be spent with crap art. Given the quickening and correlative relationship between computer circuit and attention span, how can today’s art be true and profound? Or will we be stuck with the art we "deserve"?

Sadly, and probably for expediency, I'm resigned to bullet-pointing some solutions—editorial obedience—but I'm craving any additions you ArtSlant readers can provide (TBC, as they say): 

*Create an epic work observable in spoonfuls (like my recent six-month reading of Moby Dick)

*Create a portable, even wearable, art—outward-facing rather than inward

*Create a supplementary online doppelgänger, a sort of immersion-by-proxy method

*Create a short spectacle—and, of course, document the hell out of it

*Create a pervasive urban campaign of art, in the spirit of graffiti, but somehow evolved

Most of these ideas fixate on accessibility, creating something that lives everywhere always or somewhere fixed for a long time—hey, we're still confined to space-time. Jem Finer's Longplayer is a 1000-year-long song, an example of how art can be perversely long while being intended for the shortest consumption. It is essentially short-form art. Long-form is for the patient and the dead in today's world of passive futurists.

--Andy Ritchie, staff writer, ArtSlant San Francisco

(Images: Thomas Struth, Museo del Prado 5, 2005, C-print, Ed of 10. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle. Thomas Struth, Audience 1, C-print, Ed of 10. Courtesy of the artist and Galleri K)

Chicago’s citywide celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago has been underway all year, but has really increased in visibility and activity over this summer. If you go anywhere downtown seeing something about the Plan of Chicago is virtually unavoidable, there are the pavilions in Millennium Park, a myriad of exhibitions at many of the city’s institutions, and a slightly creepy, computer generated 3D model of Daniel Burnham’s head graced the entrance to the central Harold Washington Library. Behind the hype and the flash of the celebration is a real opportunity to learn about the legacy of the 1909 Plan and think about what plans Chicago is currently making for the future.

Color plate from The Plan for Chicago. Jules Guerin, delineator; Daniel Burnham and Edward Herbert Bennett, architects. Plan of Chicago, Plate 132: View Looking West of the Proposed Civic Center Plaza and Buildings, Showing It as the Center of the System of Arteries of Circulation and of Surrounding Country, 1908. On permanent loan to the Art Institute of Chicago from the City of Chicago.

There’s a lot to celebrate about the Burnham Plan and what it did for the city. It gave Chicago its lakefront parks that are enjoyed by all the very moment that weather permits after a long winter (and especially by those in Grant Park over the weekend at Lollapalooza). Parks were planned not only along the picturesque lakefront but also radiating out from downtown; these eventually became our current forest preserves. Burnham’s plan also shaped the city itself by unifying Michigan Avenue into a contiguous street and creating a major route for traffic in the creation of Wacker Drive. The rectilinear grid of Chicago’s streets is an asset to the lost and also a result of Burnham’s plan. The very nature of the city and some of its most beloved and valued features are a product of Burnham’s vision for the city.

Officially, the celebrations of the city and its plan are under the auspices of The Burnham Plan Centennial organization, which itself is comprised of virtually every cultural institution in the city in addition to the many others. Even the City of Elgin and Aurora are partners in the centennial celebration. But given the vested interests that are involved in this event, a strong flavor of boosterism can develop, and I have mentioned some of the positive aspects of the plan but I want to take this opportunity to step back and critically reflect on the occasion of the Burnham Plan Centennial.

One of the major events of the Burnham Plan Centennial has been the construction of two pavilions in Millennium Park. One is designed by London architect Zaha Hadid and the other by Ben van Berkel of the Amsterdam-based UNStudio. According to the Burnham Plan Centennial website, the structures are meant to “echo the audacious future-looking images and words of the Burnham Plan.” Each of the structures is no doubt futuristic-looking but the reality of the structures has said volumes more than their intentions.

Zaha Hadid's pavilion in Millennium Park, July 2nd.

Though the van Berkel pavilion opened on time to the public in June, the Hadid pavilion opened to the public only a few days ago, almost two months behind schedule. When I visited on August 6, 2009, it was still roped off to the public as an A/V technician worked on some malfunctioning feature. Once the Hadid pavilion did open (I’m told that happened over the weekend), the van Berkel pavilion will close as crews work to repair damage to the structure that has resulted from visitors.

Zaha Hadid's pavilion in Millennium Park, August 6th.

The lessons of these pavilions’ less-than-stellar performance are the lessons Chicago must take into the future as we consider what the next 100 years may hold. Our citizens are active and energetic, it’s what has built up this city into what it is and it’s how we conduct ourselves in our parks. The destruction that visitors have wrecked on the van Berkel pavilion is unfortunate but not at all unforeseeable. Our future plans must take into account the public at its best and at its most chaotic, we need durable plans that account for the unexpected or even the expected. The long delayed and overly technical Hadid pavilion may prove to be a futuristic architectural wonder, but its reality illustrates that we need practical and expedient solutions to our shared problems in the city, whether that be crime, corruption or pollution. We need to start working on these now, not somewhere down the line.

There’s a lot to celebrate about the Burham Plan and there’s a lot to think about too. It’s impossible to have a celebration of a city plan without boosterism, especially in Chicago where civic pride runs high. But while we’re celebrating we should not forget that there is a lot left to do and even more to anticipate.

--Abraham Ritchie, City Editor, ArtSlant Chicago

Most wars are started in August. It’s true.

Most quotes one finds about summer are about how great summer is. Rarely does one find quotes about how horrible summer is. How long, how hot, how interminable the sweaty days, how much worse work feels under the yoke of summer. Most people who are quoted on summer must be aristocratic poets penning their verse with long lazy loops in leather bound notebooks bought for the purpose of vacationing by the seaside.

Summer is long. Summer is hot. Once you’re out of school, summer is just another season, with longer days and more opportunities to get drunk in the daylight. Summer is a bit sexier and a bit lazier, I’ll give it that, two qualities I hold in high regard. Laziness usually wins out when it comes to art. Look up "summer" in any quote book and the phrase “summer rose” appears all too often. Clichés being a kinder way to say lazy. The making of art is one thing; Van Gogh and Gauguin had good summer runs. But for the exhibition of art, summer is bad, generally speaking. In LA, the museums put on permanent collection shows. In Paris, they're choked with tourists craning to see their reflection in the Mona Lisa so that they can say they saw their reflection in the Mona Lisa. In commercial galleries, it’s the Summer Group Show.

THE SUMMER GROUP SHOW; noun; a ubiquitous and almost entirely useless animal that lumbers around every June through August to haphazardly stuffed galleries.

The Summer Group Show (or SGS) is a phenomenon handed down to us from our New York forefathers (and mothers) that signifies the real money is out of town, nobody’s left around but broke artists, and that sometimes galleries still need to be filled with art because the dealers can’t just stop paying rent for the summer, even though, as forestated, the money’s out of town.

Named after French New Wave films or Joy Division songs or under some vague-ish medium such as “Sculpture” (which though flavorless isn’t dishonest), these SGS's are more often than not a composite of friends, a spare few plucked from legions of art school chums and bar mates, or worse, the uneven program of “gallery artists” (or rather whatever we got in the backroom that ain’t sold yet). These can be fun, no doubt, and their laziness is truly the laziness of summer, but there’s rarely any sense of adventure, expectancy, or play. Rarely do we wonder what comes next or thrill at the twists and turns of an unfolding, an unraveling, a compilation. Rarely do we find the major work of a major artist. Calling around the galleries this June, figuring out what would be up for the summer, the most common answer was, “I don’t know.” And some have the mixed dignity just to not have anything up. But galleries should be filled with art. This is a problem that needs some attempt at solving.

Or does it? As the press release attribute all kind of agencies to art, except that it never says it will look nice with your sofa or could be flipped easily for a swift profit, the summer group show may be a thing that is necessarily broken. Perhaps it gives opportunities to young artists who might not otherwise get into gallery shows. (Although there is the pitfall of the perpetual group show rut, where the CV grows long with badly titled, weakly thought out local exhibitions. Not a good fate). I went to a thrown together SGS this week, but when you have works by Nauman and Baldessari moldering in the basement, you could do worse.

In LA, the Summer Group Show is a slightly bad put on, if only because we’re not New York. Though, I know quite a few well-heeled artists that pretend at being New Yorkers and summer on the Cape or in the Hamptons, with all the historic kitsch of quirkily named beach houses, irate townies, and streets lined with East Coasters with bright white pimply skin and brighter white zinc oxided noses.

In the LA summer not everyone is out of town. In fact, many have simply gone to the beach down the road or are lounging poolside in their own backyard. The weather in Los Angeles is always bearable, unlike the Sweatsock Subway Death Stench that overcomes New York every summer. And the money is in town, just like any other time. Collectors are still about; I see them making the rounds, picking up young works on the cheap from the better SGSs and the savvier dealers (who, no matter what show they have up, have a few Eastern European paintings tucked away in the back just in case the right collector should stroll in.) And for those of us not heading to cottages or beach houses, with family either too close to go visit for days or too far away to visit but every couple of years, we are here. We are looking. We wish we could be lazier but can’t afford to, even the critics just write essays about laziness. What a lost virtue...

So I give in. Give me your Summer Group Shows. Here’s to “Sculpture” and “Paintings” and “10 New Young LA Whatevers.” Here’s to “Me and My Friends” and “Stuff We Got That Ain’t Sold Yet.” Here’s to the vaguely assembled exhibition, titled with hip, pop references and quotations from last season’s theorist. Here’s to the debilitating heat and squelch of sweaty skin pulling away from hot leather seats, the flies and dog days and nights sleeping with only a sheet and it still being too damn hot. Here’s to youth and heat and laziness.

Something, I suppose, is better than nothing.

--Andrew Berardini, West Coast Editor, ArtSlant Los Angeles

While in LA, I was astounded by a kind of linguistic jockeying that seemed to have taken hold. 

In discussing the effect of the economic downturn on the art world, I listened to person after person describe the situation with carefully crafted phrases guaranteed to ameliorate:

"Yes, it really is good because the art world had gotten too frothy..."

"It's the best thing for art.  We can get more serious now..."

"I no longer have to worry so much about sales; now I can give my attention to the work..."

"We needed to re-balance..."

"We'll have to learn a new way of living, a more spiritual way..."

"This will give us space for experimentation..."

On and on the dialogue went...the power of the spin. 

Days later, I arrived back in Paris and took a taxi from the airport.  The taxi driver could have doubled as Mrs. Doubtfire, without the wig.  She (?) sang out "bonjour" as I brought my suitcases over to the taxi, and I thought how well Mrs. Doubtfire sounded in French!  Despite the jet lag, I attempted to make conversation just to hear her talk - about the bad gasole she had gotten the other day; how much she liked les americaines especially les dollars; the balmy spring weather...

Coming off the Peripherique, a bus aggressively pushed us aside in the merge between two lanes.   Mrs. DF buzzed down the window and shouted "terroriste" at the top of her considerable lungs.  The r's rolled perfectly and the point on the final "t" was stinging.  It sounded hip and impossibly ‘now'...using that word as the ultimate signifier of disgust.  Only Mrs. DF could get away with it.  I am sure this word is being used in the most trendy of underground clubs and will soon hit the upper ground in all kinds of spinful ways.  

Then a few days later I found myself in the Jonas Mekas show at the galerie du jour, agnes b., and couldn't help but take a snap of this image:

(Image: Jonas Mekas)

Can an artist terrorize?  How? Do we quake in our boots waiting for the next image to bombard us?  Do we feel psychically or physically violated by art?  Does the violence propagated by artists have the wherewithall to influence politics?  Do we watch to make sure that artists aren't moving in next door?

In seriousness, as it is now a rather serious time, I love the juxtaposition of artist and terrorist...for it alludes to the profoundly powerful manner in which an artist can explode old ways of perceiving and acting.  Take for example, some of these moments of shock from the art world:

Marcel Duchamp 

Artemisia Gentileschi

Philip Guston

Theodore Géricault

Andres Serrano

But nightmares aside, how good it is to be back in the land where I don't understand what is going on.  It's best that way.  Sometimes.  And I've decided for the summer that I will take my café without froth, and spend a bit more time with the work.

-georgia

(All images @ the artists represented)

I am back in LA!  Happy to be here.

Whenever I come back to LA I am amazed at the brightness and brilliance of the light.  It is so consuming.  Bouncing off the ocean, streaming through the desert dryness, the glare is almost too much to take in.  I think about it, talk about it, and often write about it whenever I return to my LA home. 

I went immediately and bought some new sunglasses.  And then I went to the beach to try them out.  Nice….

I like standing on the sand and looking out at the horizon.  Ocean meets sky.  It reminds me of so much art from Rothko to Sugimoto.  Is this the place where we fall off the edge, Christopher Columbus?

I love the beachy breeziness. I had lunch in Venice on Washington Blvd.  What a circus.  Land of the eccentric, the zanier the better.  How many tourists have come and stayed because they like the freedom of getting so close to the edge? 

A friend in Paris, Tony, told me on his first visit to LA that it was the most exotic place he had ever been, and he had been in many exotic places around the world.  Driving down Sunset Boulevard, from west to east, he felt as though he was being rocketed from one dimension to the next.  Abrupt shifts occur along this ride, without logic or explanation,  quickly and without warning.  From culture to culture, style to style, the neighborhoods, the buildings, the people, the signs, the colors, all of it twists and morphs and shape-shifts again and again.  The journey seems to go forever.  Postmodern pastiche played out in real time.  When he told me this, I realized the truth in his impression.

Like all things in LA, the art scene is at once brilliant and dark with hidden depths and an uneasy sense that something destructive or depraved or simply delusional lurks below the shiny surface.  Maybe it is the ocean calling from our subconscious that brings the noir mystique:  shiny and shimmering on the surface; lots going on underneath.  When you go under the surface there is beauty and beast, terror and calm.  Looking up, you can see the surface and safety and relax into the depths for a bit longer.

LA is a city of many lives and lots of lucky charms.  It gives hope and takes it away, just like the roll of the ocean waves.  We come back to the shore each day looking for the next wave.  Perpetual optimism dashed upon the sandy beach.  But who cares when there is so much vision?

The Nine Lives exhibition at the Hammer Museum says it all:  visionary artists from L.A.  I haven’t seen it yet but have it planned.  Nine Lives features over 125 works, much of it new, by nine LA artists spanning four generations —Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, Hirsch Perlman, Victoria Reynolds, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance, and Charlie White.  

Here’s a few of the charms from these lucky nine:

Llyn Foulkes
The Lost Frontier
1997-2005

Mixed media. 87 x 96 x 8 in. (221 x 243.8 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy the artist and Kent Gallery, New York.

Lisa Anne Auerbach
Hand-Knit Bikini
2002/2008

Ultrachrome print. 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. (41.9 x 41.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and Gavlak, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Jeffrey Vallance
The Brown Wall
2008

Photographed in situ at the home of Jeffrey Vallance. Courtesy the artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White.

Julie Becker
Leda and the Swan
1993/2000

Video, color, sound. 4:36 min. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Charles Irvin
Smoky Rider
2008

Ink on paper. 24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm). Courtesy the artist. Photo by Charles Irvin.

Victoria Reynolds
Flight of the Reindeer
2003

Oil on panel, frame. 32 x 43 1/4 in. (81.2 x 109.9 cm). Collection of Barry Sloane. Photo by Tony Cuñha.

Charlie White
Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #2
2008

Chromogenic print. 26 1/2 x 36 in. (67.3 x 91.4 cm). Courtesy Loock Gallery, Berlin.

Kaari Upson
The Grotto
2008-9

Mixed media sculptural installation with video projections. Dimensions variable. Installation view from Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., March 8 - May 31, 2009, Hammer Musuem, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

Hirsch Perlman
An Animus Cat Apostate
2008

Chromogenic print. 97 x 72 in. (246.4 x 182.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

What a whirlwind the last month has been! 

Sort of goes with March winds, but actually Paris has been very unwindy.  Cold, dreary, gray, but not windy.  However, the big news is that the sun has finally appeared to the accompaniment of birds and cafe chatter and screaming children and barking pets running wild in the parks.

(Image: Mark Dutcher, Havilah (installation shot), February, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.)

The Curatorial Team spent a good portion of the last week sequestered at ArtSlant HQ, barely aware of the sun outside.  We were selecting the winners for our first Showcase competition.  Thankfully, with hundreds of images swirling in the head and lots of discussion and some arguing, the winning group was finally settled upon last night.

The overwhelming consensus? Art lives and artists are indomitable.  Put some feathers on that! 

If you ever need a life affirming moment, simply look at some art (or even better lots of art).  The sheer power and determination to create, to communicate, even just to continue, overshadows everything else.  There absolutely is a silver lining and it is called life.

(Image: Mark Dutcher, Sylvester (Do you want to funk?), 2008, acrylic, oil, paintstick, feathers and canvas on wood, 92x72x4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles)

To go along with all of this positivity I received images from Mark Dutcher, a Los Angeles-based artist whom I had first met during a Rackroom interview.  Somehow looking at the images of his current show, I became conscious of the renewal that had occurred over the past week.  It was a renewal brought about not just from the sunshine and the open windows, nor simply from the completion of a difficult task, but it was a renewing of some basic hope.  From having spent hours and days practically non-stop with those hundreds of artists from around the world who had submitted their work for consideration, my attitude had been tranformed.  Work aside, good, bad, indifferent...none of that really mattered.  It was their drive to get up each day and go at it again that had affected me deeply and catalyzed that sense of joyful I AM that I felt.

Put some feathers on that!

(Image: Mark Dutcher, Shafter, 2008, Oil, acrylic, glitter, feathers, foam, and wax on canvas, 25 1/2 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles)

- georgia

I was in London this past week sloshing through the slosh and strolling through St. Pancras. 

Despite the cold and the tube delays and the cabbie demonstration at Trafalgar Square, I managed to get to a few hot shows and to meet up with the team for ArtSlant London.

The team converged on the IMT Gallery for the opening of Maria von Köhler's exhibition, Maybe a Herm, on Thursday evening, February 5th.  While at IMT, Lindsay Friend and Mark Jackson gave us the royal treatment with champagne and lots of hospitality. 

Then we hurried over to The Star of Bethnal Green for some Beatles tunes and a quick drink and gab.  It was the first get-to-know-you for the London team and I think we're all looking forward to big things to come. 

After The Star, a few of us went up to Vyner Street for First Thusday to troll the galleries with the other stalwart art goers.  I have to admit, I didn't last long.  If you don't know about First Thursdays - here's a nice lowdown from those in the know - First Thursdays late night art on the First Thursday of the month in East London.

I got to a few other shows while in London, and as serendipity would have it, they were the same two shows that David Yu one of our new writers in London happened to review for the week.  How weird is that!  I guess art-minds think alike:

Jon Pylypchuk at Alison Jacques (a must see)

Jonathan Meese at Modern Art (brutal)

(Images above: Maria von Köhler, Maybe a Herm, installation shot outside IMT Gallery; Courtesy ArtSlant. Jon Pylypchuck, I miss you, danger, and all its elements, 2006, mixed media, Courtesy the Artist.  Jonathan Meese, "CASINOZ BABYMETABOLISMN" (Put DR. NO'S MONEY in your mouth, Baby) invite image, 2008, Modern Art; Courtesy the Artist & Modern Art, London)

2008 was a very good year for ArtSlant.  This year's collection of reviews and interviews was filled with highlights!    Here are the Top 12 Rackroom Interviews as selected by our community:

January 08:  Lisa Sigal (installation, sculpture) - interview by Yaelle Amir

February 08:  Bruce Tomb (architecture, conceptual) - interview by Natalie Hegert

March 08:  Mark Dutcher (painting) - interview by Georgia Fee

April 08 - Deric Carner (drawing, performance, digital) - interview by Andy Ritchie

May 08: Ruben Ochoa (installation, photography) - interview by Nico Machida

June 08: Margarita Cabrera (sculpture) - interview by Sasha Bergstrom-Katz

July 08: Nicolas Lampert (multi-discipline) - interview by Abraham Ritchie

August 08: Kori Newkirk (sculpture, photography, video) - interview by Catherine Wagley

September 08: Alexandra Grant (drawing & painting) - interview by Ed Schad

October 08: Philippe Gronon (photography) - interview by Frances Guerin

November 08: Kamau Patton (performance, video) - interview by Michelle Y. Hyun

December 08: Marc Ganzglass (video, books, photography) - interview by Trong Gia Nguyen

(Image above: Lisa Sigal, Untitled - Refuge, 2007, mixed-media sculpture. Courtesy the Artist.)