See this post from Joy Garnett on what Schroeder Romero is presenting in honor of the RNC convention. It looks like a great show!

We finally met Joy in person tonight at Foxy Production's opening for the Infinite Fill show. It was a bit crowded and hot to appreciate everything there, but the show looked wonderful. It works as a big black and white installation quite effectively. As James said, like almost everything the very generous Cory Arcangel arranges, it's more about other people than himself.

While we're on the subject of art, don't miss the White Box show of work by Julia Scher that James wrote about last night,

I just added Mark Dixon's sketchbook blog to my list of links.

I like the fact that he puts up images of works, in progress and finished.

We visited three worthy groups shows in Chelsea at their openings last Thursday. Go see them -- not all art is mindless in the summer!

Capsule has a big group show titled And one for Grandma. It was about 100 degrees inside at the opening, but we saw enough to notice several things, including a wall painting by [can't remember, nothing on the site], the photograph on the invitation by Christine Callahan, and some great drawings by Andrew Guenther. I like his work, especially the fact that there is a big variety of work ranging from sculpture to drawings to installations.

Florence Lynch has a show, minimalpop, curated by Petra Bungert of CCNOA (Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art) Brussels. It includes sculpture by John Beech, whom we finally met at the opening. We have one of his rotating paintings.

My favorite work in the show titled The day after I destroyed the women, I wished I had not destroyed them at Oliver Kamm 5BE (curated by Lital Mehr) doesn't photograph well, so I won't put it up. It's The Birds and The Bees by Aaron Wexler. It's an amazing painting-like work created from cut paper mounted on wood. Go by and see it, and ask to see his other works in the back. Other work includes sculpture and installation by Agata Oleksiak (with dancers wearing some at the opening) and paintings by Tom Meacham. Tom is also in the current group show at Nicole Klagsbrun.

Also, don't forget that White Box has a new show (and opening) beginning each Wednesday, 6-8pm, through September 1.

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UPDATED: In the comments, Jeffrey Chiedo from Capsule tells me the wall drawing was by Jen Kim.

I mentioned seeing some of her new work at Jessica Murray Projects back in June. The gallery sent me an image of one of the works. It's hard to get a good feel for it from the image, but here goes:

Jackie Gendel
Untitled (Red), 2004
oil and wax on panel
48 x 60

Want to pick up a great piece of art for $100, while attending a party at one of the coolest Williamsburg galleries? If you can't swing $100, pay $25 for just the party. Food and drink are supplied by Brooklyn Breweries and our favorite Williamsburg Restaurant, Relish.

On Sunday, Champion Fine Art is having a party to help pay for their relocation to Los Angeles. The web site has more details.

Even by the standards of Williamsburg, Champion is one of the least commercial and most artist-driven spaces out there. It's not a permanent gallery, but a two year exhibition series of artist-curated group shows. The twenty exhibitions, titled numerically in descending order, have been in New York so far, and are about to move to Los Angeles. Each is accompanied by a gallery-produced catalog in an edition of one hundred.

I believe the last show will be a "closing party" touching on the various exhibitions of the two year period.

Images of their exhibitions will be up soon. I'm still working on the web site!

They're changing the shows (a combination of a work on the video monitor outside plus something in the window) every week, so go now to see the excellent one up right now, curated by Lawrence Rinder.

The Lutz Bacher piece is Olympiad, a beatifully damaged video of the 1936 Olympics Stadium in Berlin, made famous by another woman filmmaker.

The Tim Hawkinson piece, called Seal, looks like an official seal made from an elephant skin.

Via rodcorp, I found this interview with J.G. Ballard in The Guardian. Fascinating stuff, including his interest in the visual arts. An excerpt:

Today's art scene? Very difficult to judge, since celebrity and the media presence of the artists are inextricably linked with their work. The great artists of the past century tended to become famous in the later stages of their careers, whereas today fame is built into the artists' work from the start, as in the cases of Emin and Hirst.

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. Emin's bed, Hirst's sheep, the Chapmans' defaced Goyas are psychological provocations, mental tests where the aesthetic elements are no more than a framing device.

It's interesting that this should be the case. I assume it is because our environment today, by and large a media landscape, is oversaturated by aestheticising elements (TV ads, packaging, design and presentation, styling and so on) but impoverished and numbed as far as its psychological depth is concerned.

Artists (though sadly not writers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Everything in today's world is stylised and packaged, and Emin and Hirst are trying to say, this is a bed, this is death, this is a body. They are trying to redefine the basic elements of reality, to recapture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.

I am currently reading Ballard's War Fever, a rather prescient set of short stories published in 1999.

You only have a week on two of these:

crits's pix at Black & White has great stuff, especially Julian Montague's "The Stray Shopping Cart: An Illustrated System of Identification" and Jon-Paul Villegas's brilliant mix of wall paintings and sculpture. I'll add images if I can get some. Closes 7/19.

"a dot that went for a walk" at Plus Ultra Gallery includes Katinka Ahlbom (who had a striking installation that was part of "Sunrise Sunset" at Smack Mellon), Vanessa Conte, Rosemarie Fiore, and Medrie Macphee. Closes 7/19.

We will have to go back to "Grotto 2" at Jessica Murray Projects, as it was very hot and difficult to absorb the 60+ artists in the show. A few things did manage to stand out, such as Rachel Mason's video "Model Anthem", the White House sculpture of Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua (we bought the "Todo List" work that went along with it), and Diane Meyer's "Redemption: Professional Confessional." Some lucky person at the opening bought a Reed Anderson work based on a page from a 1977 Penthouse at a very reasonable price. Closes 8/1.

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Updated: There are some photos here from the Black & White show. I also forgot to mention how much I liked Nick Brown's work in the back patio.

I hope I didn't embarass myself too badly. We were interviewed for a Studio 360 segment on Eric Doeringer's "Bootleg" project.

In New York, the program will air on 93.9 FM at 10 AM Saturday, July 10 and on 820 AM at 7 PM on Sunday, July 11. You can also listen online to WNYC.

To find broadcast times/stations in other areas, visit this page. The program will also be archived for one week after the broadcast -- after that you have to pay to listen -- here.