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August 1, 2006
Great moments in GawkerForum: July
It's back: Our monthly swing through GawkerForum, Artforum's usually incoherent proof that it can vacillate between impenetrable, unreadable printed screeds and impenetrable, unreadable, starfucking (or at least what passes for stars among the Artforum crue) in which the art is about as important as the temperature of the white wine.
"Encountering a cracked sheet of bulletproof glass on which the gnomic half-question 'Just an Image in the Room in Which this is Happening of Good Taste?' was spelled out in drippy enamel, I knew I had found what I was looking for." -- Catherine Taft. Apparently pre-gallery-going hits of acid are in.
"Bigwig dealers are keen to tell you that nada means "nothing" in Spanish, but proud NADA members had traveled from far-flung places like North Carolina and Massachusetts to attend this summit." -- Andrew Berardini. Apparently GawkerForum has completely dropped the pretext of the art world having anything to do with art. Because in this dispatch GF reports on a networking-heavy cocktail party of dealers.
"The next day, the shuttle bus, a mighty beast of seasoned age whose history was marked by the scraped-off casino logo on its side, took us from the Standard to the Ovitz Family Collection in Santa Monica. Ovitz was not in attendance, but collection curator Andrea Feldman Falcione led the tour with a sophisticated intern, Julianne Rosenbloom, in tow—a step up from the Broad collection tour, where a recently recruited intern led the proceedings alone." -- Berardini, who seems to think an art collection or art viewing experience is dependent on the tenure or 'sophistication' of the intern leading a tour.
David Velasco slips a metaphor past his editors: "When the discussion turned to the conspicuous lack of meat-based work in Chelsea, artist Peter Coffin divulged that his very first sculpture, crafted at the prime age of sixteen, was a 'scary monster made from raw meat.' "
When GawkerForum-style make-sure-I'm-invited-to-the-party brown-nosing inadvertnetly becomes the punchline of the anecdote: "Koolhaas and Balmond have devised a translucent ovoid canopy that bulges over the curtain wall sheltering the café and auditorium, and while some talked of hot air balloons soaring over summer skies, others talked of golf balls and fungi, and one newspaper critic told me it was like a space station but also like a supermarket and concluded, 'You see, you just can't see up the sphincter of the thing, and that's no good!' " -- Morgan Falconer.
"It's always difficult to appreciate individual works in charged (and humid) circumstances..." -- Sarah Thornton. If only someone at GawkerForum had read this before posting anything in July!!! (Ed: Or ever, you mean?) This sentence alone could have presented an entire month of GF writer complaints about the heat -- and would have saved me the 45 minutes it took to read through their swampy argot. Next: If you can't see the art in crowded, humid circumstances, why go? Why write about it?
Too good to just quote: Old standby Linda Yablonsky ("Attending these art fairs is a bit like combat reporting, where you keep hopping on whatever helicopter is heading out to the next battlefield") spends 835 words freaking out about how after five weeks outside New York, the art scene has become full of people she just doesn't know! Ohmigod! Or that she's been 'forgotten!' Oh no! (She then drops about 200 names and spells them all correctly.) Oh, and the art? Shrug. Whatevs! (OK, OK, one FabYab quote: "[Matthew] Higgs was also collecting signatures, asking all the artists present to sign a blank canvas for later auction on behalf of a charity he supports. I signed too.")
Posted August 1, 2006 8:05 AM
