One of my favorite art fairs starts Thursday:

The NY Art Book Fair

It's free except for the benefit preview!

FAIR HOURS
Friday/Saturday, September 28/29, 2007, 11am - 7pm
Sunday, September 30, 2007, 11am - 5pm

BENEFIT PREVIEW
Thursday, September 27, 2007, benefiting Printed Matter, Inc.
6 - 7 pm, early admission to preview
7 - 9 pm, general admission to preview

BENEFIT PREVIEW TICKETS
· Price on Request (early admission to preview plus
Ed Ruscha edition Little Mexican Church on a Windowsill & David Shrigley ticket edition)
· $150 (general admission to preview plus
Josephine Meckseper edition Untitled (%) Shelf [Detail] & David Shrigley ticket edition)
· $150 (general admission to preview plus
Josephine Meckseper edition Untitled (March...) & David Shrigley ticket edition)
· $20 (general admission plus David Shrigley ticket edition Fucking Ace)

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Pool Art Fair at the Hotel Chelsea, Friday and Saturday 12-8PM, with a benefit preview Thursday 6PM-?

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FREE SHOW, a series of interactive works taking place in the corner windows of an apartment building at 304 West 10th Street (near the water, corner of Weehawken) kicks off Saturday with a performance by our friend Nancy Hwang on Saturday, 1-6PM.

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I'm sure there is more going on, but I'm running out to a tech seminar. Here's an inside tip: Soon you will be able to check the new ArtCal Zine for special events like these. Look for it next week.

This my favorite photo from m.river's images of MTAA's Super Slow 5K.

Bryan Zanisnik, Colby Chamberlain, and I discussed some radical ideas for ArtCal at the opening at NURTUREart on Friday night. Some possibilities:

• Community ratings of the drinks served at openings, including how long before they typically run out of the good stuff
• A podcast, with press releases read out loud, and recommendations from guest editors

The Pool Art Fair's next incarnation, Art Attack, will be held at the Hotel Chelsea September 27-29. Given the concerns about what's going to happen with the hotel under its new management, this sounds like a good thing for the hotel and art.

If you're walking by the Zach Feuer window on Tenth Avenue (between 25th and 26th Streets) in Chelsea, and want to learn more about the artist being shown, visit his website. He is Matthew Northridge, with a site hosted by ArtCat.

I see that at least two galleries, both of whom have a significant number of artists with street art or illustration backgrounds, think taking photos in their galleries is a bad thing. What are they afraid of? Do they think any of us is going to go home and upload images to CafePress to sell t-shirts?

James and I encountered a rather hostile reception at Capla Kesting after he took some photos of Travis Lindquist's exhibition, and were told to never return. Didn't they found the Fountain Art Fair, and invite us to attend as press?

Jonathan LeVine Gallery -- who shows Shepard Fairey for heaven's sake! -- now has a policy of no photos too. I learned that from Heart as Arena.

Today's New York Times has an article about Lisa Dennison, who after a three decade career at the Guggenheim, has moved to the action house Sotheby's. I was pretty shocked to see this quote:

Actually, the whitewashed walls of the Upper East Side apartment she shares with her husband, Roderick Waywell, who used to own the East Side Tennis Club but segued into philanthropy to help run an arts education program championed by the crooner Tony Bennett, are devoid of artwork.

Her rationale: “I didn’t want to live with second-rate art, so I decided that if I couldn’t have Kandinsky or Mondrian, I’d rather live with nothing.” Well, not quite nothing. Francesco Clemente painted her in odalisque form after she organized a Guggenheim retrospective of his work, and as a further favor, lent her the eight-foot painting.

Doesn't this seem like an odd thing to say when your job involves trying to convince people to buy and sell contemporary art via Sotheby's? Perhaps not, since the auction houses are making it more expensive to sell lower-priced works.

Alice Neel
Self-Portrait, Skull, 1958
Ink on paper
11 1/2 × 8 1/2 inches

I know of at least two shows dealing with skulls or skeletons opening in the next week, and the invitation image for the Sherry Levine show at NYEHAUS is a skull too. What's up with that?

• Cheim & Read, I Am As You Will Be
• Dinter Fine Art, Death & Love in Modern Times
• NYEHAUSE, Sherry Levine

I saw the show at Dinter Fine Art in the process of being installed today and it looks awesome.

[image above is from the Cheim & Read website]

James and I, along with Leah Stuhltrager, are participating as jurors in this benefit on Saturday. I think that means we three will award a prize or prizes to some of the artists who donated works for the benefit. Show up and be shocked to see us outside before 2pm!

The Greenpoint 100: Friends of the Greenpoint Library Artists' Benefit

Saturday, September 15, 2007
11:00 am to 2:30 pm

At the Greenpoint Library
107 Norman Avenue at Leonard St.
Brooklyn, NY 11222
map

For more information please call the library at 718-349-8504 or email friendsofthegreenpointlibrary@gmail.com.

We made two shows on the Lower East Side "top picks" on ArtCal today:

Ahmed Alsoudani at Thierry Goldberg

Michael Jones McKean at SUNDAY. Look for a post from James soon, as we spent an hour at the gallery hanging out, looking at the work, and talking with the artist.

[top image from the gallery website, bottom image by me]

The new ArtCal uses feeds from Flickr, blip.tv, and also searches for links back to each listing via Bloglines Citations. When you're out taking photos and videos, or writing about shows, don't forget to tag/link appropriately.

This page (which was used for the screencap above) shows a good example of all three.

Update: Here is another idea for artists and galleries. If you have video or computer animation in a show, and your website isn't really set up well for video (unlike this), put some excerpts on blip.tv and tag them so that people visiting the exhibition page on ArtCal can watch them.

For those not here in NYC to avail themselves of the 193 upcoming openings on ArtCal, here are some openings of friends or people I've written about coming up in other cities.

Scott Treleaven, buckskin (iii), 2007
Watercolor and paper
9.5 × 5.75 inches

First, Scott Treleaven has an opening on Saturday, September 8, at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles. James and I are big fans of his work.

The Soap Factory in Minneapolis has a group show titled Host curated by Elizabeth M Grady that includes a number of artists whom I either know or have written about, including Derick Melander, Carol Salmanson, and Caitlyn Masley. That opens September 8th.

In Washington, DC, artist JT Kirkland of the Thinking About Art blog, has curated a show titled The One Word Project Show, a group show of 33 artists. It will be held at The Arts Club of Washington, the former home of President James Monroe and at one point the White House. It opens September 7th.