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April 24, 2006
April update
Thought I'd dash off a few thoughts by way of updating folks on my whereabouts and, uh, whatabouts. This will be a more rambling post than you've seen here in a long time.
I am just completing an apartment move to another place in the Upper West Side. It's a really special joint and I've been sprucing it up with things like furniture and knife blocks. Cooking and brewing coffee has a particularly edifying effect on my head and heart here. The hound is especially plussed by the new surroundings and his friendly neighbours, not to mention the dog-accessible loft and that we're only at stoop-level--no more six storey descents for a mid-evening urinary errand.
I have slowed down the number of stories I'm pitching and writing at the moment to concentrate on the book project. Yes, I will become one of those people who are always talking about 'the book' without any visible signs of progress. How I've dreaded this day. In truth, it's been in gestation for a good half-year now in various forms and I've only begun sharing the concept with a few people in the past two weeks. Early reactions have been, dare I say, incredibly encouraging. Of course, there is a share of blank looks and quietly polite uh-hums. So I expect I'll continue plotting that path in May, hopefully with some results I can announce by month's end.
I will of course continue to file some written work, but am equally interested in meeting a few folks around town for coffee. There are a few sparkling examples of Canadian freelancers working the NYC scene, and I want to pay my respects. But there is also the question of tracking down some writers whose work I've followed for years, but never really had the courage, gumption or gall to call up. Now feels like that time. We all know the varying results of meeting up with those whom we respect from afar--from great to underwhelming to depressing!--and I think I've run the gamut here already, so at least the insulation is well in place to shield against disappointment.
There is a growing pile of to-do's, events and, heck, a real live personal life to attend to in the coming month as well. There is the constant call of Brooklyn, too. I'm hoping my more settled state will make tackling all this in a somewhat sane manner more of a reality. Also have plans to tour New England by car for a week's time in late May. Must make time for some of the fine people I'm meeting here, the people who are making New York feel like New York. Of course, I have a few good friends coming to town in the next two weeks; here's hoping I manage to survive them and they me, because my last visitors--an otherwise sober and well-restrained couple--well, we nearly put each other in an Avenue A grave with our antics. Luckily, all limbs still accounted for.
For those fans of the hound, I will definitely be posting some fresh Dante content in the coming weeks. He is still mad for Central Park and generally tugs in that direction on most any walking route we find ourselves.
Posted by Jeff at 8:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Andy Warhol, Pale Male [NY Observer]
[Pulled due to the breaking Page Six scandal. Editor had some kind words for it, however, and the event was darn memorable.]
(WARHOL’S WORLD: PHOTOGRAPHY & TELEVISION, ZWIRNER & WIRTH; Reception, April 5, 2006, 6-8pm)
Andy Warhol is forever an attendee at his own shows. No less so last Wednesday, at an exhibit and book launch for a collection of Factory hey-day candids, where rows of his face beamed down from the walls.
An early crowd had gathered at Zwirner and Wirth’s Upper East Side townhouse gallery, many shooting sidelong glances and murmurs. The parlor game was fixing names for some of the now-elusive faces. Even boldface names go to the great beyond, and some of us were having more difficulty than others navigating past the Biancas and Basquiats.
An elderly Italian man gestured to a young Sly, exuding a remarkable air of savoir-faire for a guy in a g-string: “Steh-Lohne.”
One very young girl, game to the challenge, circulated through the room in a flurry of fingers stabbing air, exclaiming “Andy!” upon each successful spotting.
Andy, the original Pale Male, would likely approve.
Upstairs, four more walls of photos and Andys!, and a TV looping his adventures in cable access.
Rose Hartman paces slower than most others, sizing up each photo individually. With her short but meaningful bearing, a bright shock of hair shooting upright and an aristocratic face, she has the intent look of a scrutineer here.
Hartman shot Bianca Jagger on the white horse in Studio 54. There’s a Goldfrapp single in rotation now called, in homage, “Ride a White Horse”.
Advancing through the room, Hartman verbally captions the shots and their subjects aloud. Art dealers, dancers, models who are not actresses, musicians and artists, all in a giddy swirl.
She drags a reluctant man over to one picture. In the photo, his younger self appears to be holding up Jerry Hall.
“Actually, I was only holding her joint,” he explains.
Is it possible to find a true candid of Andy? Not here.
Rose has one, she says: his mouth pressed to Jerry Hall’s ear in mid-gossip, eyes alighting on her face, wholly unprepared for the camera. “It was very unusual to catch him unprepared.”
Otherwise, he was always on, the camera’s paramour.
“He certainly knew who to fall in love with.”
The townhouse is thrumming with people now, art kids and scenesters of at least two generations, suits and blue-hairs. Manque artists, poseurs and drag queens twirl. Rodney Dangerfield looks on from the wall. A bouquet of cameraphones sprout intently above the crush of people.
Some folks have come not to preen but to recollect. Both seem fitting ways to channel the Andy spirit.
“It’s all so over now,” says Rose. “It was such a special time because it was so short lived. I’m not saying this to be negative; it’s the way it was. Only the clever and the healthy survived.”
“So many people didn’t. Like Halston, Victor Hugo, Perry Ellis, and so on.” Rose gestures to the pictures as she talks. “Either drugs or AIDS befell them. There’s no more fun to be had. It’s done.”
That’s why, she explains, she just got back from Buenos Aries. There’s some fun yet, her smile seems to say.
“Three pesos to one dollar ain’t bad, kid.”
Jeff MacIntyre
Posted by Jeff at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dealbreaker.com [Institutional Investor]
Call it "The Daily Show" for the CNBC set. That's what Elizabeth Spiers, a former New York magazine reporter and founding editor of infamous celebrity-gossip weblog Gawker, considers her new Wall Street blog, Dealbreaker.
"The press does not talk about the things you talk about at cocktail parties," says the 29-year-old Duke graduate, who worked as an investment analyst for several hedge funds before launching Gawker in 2002. "Most mainstream financial coverage seems to imply you need to cover business in a deadly serious manner."
Dealbreaker, which debuted late last month, is anything but. The site's primary goal is to gossip about financial kingpins' paychecks and personal lives - in much the same way that Gawker roasts big media swells. Mixed in with personality-driven commentary will be generous doses of original reporting and entertainment. Among the site's first posts: fake contributions from J.P. Morgan Chase Chairman Bill Harrison (he relays his fixation with his maid, Lucia) and the daughter of uber-investment-banker Joe Perella, who tells how she secretly applied to Harvard Business School despite her parents' disapproval.
"There aren't that many Wall Street blogs, period," explains Spiers. "The editorial route we're taking doesn't really exist right now."
The new venture is backed financially by Carter Burden, chief of web hosting company called Logicworks (which serves such well-read blogs as Daily Candy, The Smoking Gun and Engadget), and Justin Smith, general manager of The Week news magazine. The Dealbreaker partners intend to launch a series of additional blogs, beginning later this fall, as part of the same network.
Spiers, who regularly jabbed at New York's financial elite while editing Gawker, expects that Wall Street's penchant for secrecy means that its denizens will welcome a gossipy blog with open arms. As she did at Gawker, Spiers hopes that some of the site's content, or at least tips, will come anonymously from people who work in the industry.
"There are tons of financial sites out there," she says. "But there are none who cover it like Dealbreaker."
Posted by Jeff at 8:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 5, 2006
World Markets [NY Observer]
[http://www.observer.com/20060410/20060410___thecity_thetransom-4.asp#Markets]
World Markets
New York Observer
Transom column
“There are good people here,” enthused a giddy, well-coifed flack. And wasn’t that Michael Milken? Fifteen minutes before the Contemporary Asian auction began, a dull roar of murmurs and ring tones echoed throughout the Sotheby’s auction chamber.
Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s senior curator for contemporary art, mounted the rostrum like a Teutonic throne. His sinewy body in the charcoal suit and pale blue tie, and the dangling forelock, all of it leaned forward, commanding the room to a hush.
Friday’s sale, in which India and Japan were represented but China predominated, was not another sale. It was more the opening bell for a very well-hyped—and, to some Western latecomers, an utterly new and alien—art market.
Mr. Meyer’s forelock snapped left and right with his torso; his arms, slicing left and right, looked something like Jane Fonda meets Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
Whole lots sailed by, contested only by rival volleys between the phone-ins. They were direct lines to a new base of power in the collecting world. There is also a sense, as with the Asian families perched in the private booths overhead, of a foreign collecting bloc weighing in on the proceedings. “There are a lot of Asians here,” said an audience member.
Thirty-six lots were called before Mr. Meyer took a drink of water.
“Who are these people? Are they dealers?” asked someone on the floor. Well, some of the men, in various stages of disguise using dark sunglasses, looked better disposed to bid on warheads. A woman in a baby blue chubby fur and turquoise jewelry chewed gum, her jaw movements straining her skin taut.
Short, tanned and open-shirted, a vaguely California-louche man perfected his slouch in the front row. A blonde scissored down the aisle from the back to join him. His paddle whipped erect from his waist as the auction’s first big-name lot appeared, a Zhang Xiaogang painting entitled Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 4 (Yellow). The bid started at $50,000 and ended at $419,200. The next painting by Mr. Zhang went for $486,400. The blonde won one.
An hour later, a dizzying bid for the third Zhang piece (Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120) had the audience in a clamor. The $350,000 estimate became a distant memory. People upstairs in the private booths stood up, one woman with a phone dangling limply off her hip, as if in defeat.
“Go, go, go, guys,” said someone in the crowd softly. “They’re already a bargain.” The piece fetched $979,200, from a private collector.
The short, tanned Californian and the blonde fell into a quick embrace. How much had he just made in an hour?
In the afternoon, a new crowd assembled.
An Oliver Stone–Jim Nabors type walked out of a Tide ad with his bright red corduroy blazer. A dolled-up Asian woman, all highlights and fly shades enveloping her forehead, consulted the catalog pages like a flipbook. A bearded Japanese hipster—iPod buds in, wraparounds on, cravat noosed tightly—parked himself in the front row. The third and final auctioneer sported an impressive head of hair and the requisite Sotheby’s forelock.
More big-ticket items moved. That day, Yue Minjun’s Lions climbed to $564,800 from its $150,000 estimate. A Xu Bing installation fetched $408,000.
Asian contemporary is on the march. You can have your $2 million vase and your $4 million jar. Asia Week’s fairs and sales have long trafficked in the mainstays: ceramics, calligraphy, jewelry, landscape painting. On Thursday, Christie’s had rung up $15 million for Indian modern and contemporary works. On Friday, Sotheby’s—expecting $6 million to $8 million—netted $13 million.
The auctioneer, nearing the end, reported that Lot 209 had been printed upside down in the catalog. “But I imagine the buyer can hang it any way that pleases,” he said.
—Jeff MacIntyre
Posted by Jeff at 7:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 1, 2006
The Whitney Biennial, Unexplained [NYT]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/arts/design/02macintyre.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print]
April 2, 2006
Directions
The sprawling Whitney Biennial can be challenging enough for visitors to navigate, even those armed with an exhibition catalog and audio guide. At least one person, however, is doing what he can to help. To help make it more challenging, that is.
Wearing a kimono and an eye patch, and carrying a bullhorn, someone calling himself the Unreliable Tour Guide strolls the galleries, bewildering crowds with his unique commentary. Meet Momus, a performance artist born Nick Currie, whose tour is an official, if unorthodox, part of the biennial. Between his native Scots accent, that bullhorn and remarks that range from playful to political to absurd, many people have difficulty comprehending him, perhaps a fitting problem given his mission of misinformation.
More clear is his intent to challenge art-world pieties and unsettle museumgoer expectations. At one stop on his tour, he tries to pass off a famous image from Abu Ghraib as a Dior Homme fashion statement. The comment leaves a tense silence in his wake. "I think the script will change week by week," said Momus, explaining that his character is acting out a naïve optimism in the face of the show's dark theme of troubled times. "The museum's physical location is starting to influence me, too," he said. "I notice I've started telling Woody Allen jokes."
The following is an effort to decipher where the Whitney catalog description ends and Momus's fiction begins.
LUCAS DEGIULIO
What the Whitney said: "Lucas DeGiulio creates small, delicate sculptures out of an assortment of found objects." He is interested in "transforming familiar items into something fugitive and mysterious."
What Momus said: "Under no circumstances are the artworks in this room preliminary sketches by Saul Steinberg for a new design, commissioned by the Vatican, for the Christian cross."
DANIEL JOHNSTON
What the Whitney said: "The world depicted in Johnston's drawings serves as a personal map of American culture, in which the iconographies of religion and popular culture are meshed."
What Momus said: "Daniel Johnston is not an outsider artist. Daniel Johnston is working on Madison Avenue. All of Daniel Johnston's drawings are in fact produced by a Hong Kong teenager who's paid just $5 for each sheet."
HANNAH GREELY
What the Whitney said: Her "Silencer" shows a toddler, made from cast urethane rubber, with its head under the hood of a jacket. "Greely's distinctive slant on the exploration of objecthood comes through in her sculptures' narratives."
What Momus said: "Please ensure that your hairstyle does not infringe copyright, or represent anyone's prophet."
ROBERT A. PRUITT
What the Whitney said: "Throw Back" is a Ku Klux Klan robe "decorated with dark, hip-hop-inspired puns that deflate the object's historicized status as an icon of terror." He "incorporates America's often-unsettled race relations into the aesthetics of desire."
What Momus said: "Without reductive stereotypes of racial essentialism there can be no reductive politics of racial liberation. Therefore viva reductive stereotypes of racial essentialism."
LIZ LARNER
What the Whitney said: Her "RWBs" is "a red, white and blue thicket of aluminum siding, wire rope, batting, fabric and ribbons."
What Momus said: "In Lagos, Nigeria, if you car breaks down on the freeway it's stripped within minutes of all useful components. Here you see what happened when 400 bicycles broke down on a Lagos freeway."
Posted by Jeff at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack