GalleryBeatBox

Art by J. Fiber, close up, ink on paper. Cloud Nine is open until May 13

Anyway, I was at this opening (I'll have to borrow someone's snap since I didn't take any of the opening) and this show is called CLOUD NINE and it's at this Billyburg gallery, The Front Room, and it's crowded as shit, hot, the beers gone and I get introduced to this artist, Disney Nasa Borg, (?), and he's a surfer but he looks like he's from Road Warrior. So we're gabbin' about cold water when this angry little thing in glasses places herself in the middle of us, like a ref, looks up and says "excuse me but can I see the art?" and bulldozes her way to the big life size collage of a naked fat dude in a room encrusted with fast food wrappers. (by Cham Giobbi) She was a pisser that one. Why at an opening that is so damn crowded in a small room? It's not like I haven't seen it before but there is that simmering aggression of the desperate under appreciated artist that flowers in unlikely places. I appreciate her segway - so I went to the show the next day when the gallery was relatively quiet.

Photograph by Jung Nam Lee

What else can be said that the headline didn't take care of? I can't help it if there are times when art is just art and life is life and taking care of life or working on a film about doctors that I started and became all consuming and blotted out everything in it's path? I suppose working on a documentary is another form of long-form journalism. It's like I started it and it turned out I had to go to another country, medical country. But it's our country and it's our screwball heath non system and it effects everyone even if you don't think it effects you. It does. It surely will. It has more to do with art as much as it does finance. It's all connected. You'll see.

Odd Nerdrum, the Norwegian artist sentenced to two years in jail for tax evasion, won’t be allowed to keep painting in prison. He’s appealing his sentence, but if it stands, the 67-year-old Nerdrum will have to leave his brushes and easels behind.

Newspaper Aftenposten reported that the Justice Ministry has stressed that convicted prisoners aren’t allowed to continue their business activities while held in custody. For someone like Nerdrum, who has lived off income from sales of his artwork, his passion for painting will thus conflict with regulations governing prison terms.

It’s different for other convicts, who have been allowed to paint, read or conduct approved hobbies as a means of passing the time in jail. Aftenposten noted that convicted robber Johnny Thendrup, for example, sentenced to 13 years in prison for the commando-style NOKAS heist in 2004, took up his old hobby of painting while his case was pending. He has since continued to paint while incarcerated at the Ila prison for high-risk criminals outside Oslo.  more »

First off, I would like to say welcome and thank you for reading my new column. GalleryBeat Media, as Mr. H-O likes to call it, has been quiet and rather dusty as he chases after documentary film subjects while letting this perfectly nice piece of real estate right here lay fallow. I told Mr. H-O that I would be happy to take care of his little estate in return for room, board and cultural opinion/enlightenment in his squalid little guest house.

I have been intrigued by the arrest of Dominique Straus-Kahn here in New York and what a mess it's become because it was about sex. We don't know what kind of sex took place but if the news reports are nominally factual it would seem that Mons. Straus-Kahn left his manly signature splashed about his posh hotel room. Even discounting the maid's contention of rape to say, half rape, it's still a mess and if you don't know who DSK is then you may have to search International Monetary Fund ex-chairman and likely-dashed-hope-future president of France. Now the accuser has brought suit against Rupert Murdoch's NY Post for calling her a prostitute on the front page.

What has this to do with Paris or London or art?

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David Hammons, The Man Nobody Killed screened spray paint on corrugated cardboard, 8.5"X11", 1986

By Paul H-O

How was I to know David Hammons would become huge? I did not. I never thought about it. I'd met Mr. Hammons at the Horseshoe Bar (or Vazacs) at 7th St. and Ave. B in 1984 or '85 through artist Cynthia Kuebel when she was living on Clinton St. near Delancey. I'd only moved to New York in September of '84 because I'd curated a traveling group multi-media exhibition I named SF/SF (San Francisco Science Fiction) and it was the the season opener at PS 1's Clocktower after being at the S.F. Arts Commission Gallery.   It was a post-art-punk installation of metal mechanical sculpture, some paintings, and some photographs my partner and 2nd co-curator Jo Babcock and I had driven in a rented U-Haul 24 foot truck. Once I got to NY after that trip from San Francisco, I had just enough personal belongings in that truck to live in New York.

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Serendipity, cohesion, and conceptual width. Until May 28 at Elga Wimmer PCC 526 West 26th Street #310 New York, NY 10001   ARTISTS:  Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, Melanie Bonajo, T.R. Ericsson, Faith Holland, Yeji Jun, Lisa Levy, Sono Osato, Carrie Mae Rose, Jason Swift, Jil Weinstock http://www3.fitnyc.edu/artmarket/pieceofmind/pr.html What happens when a fresh faced group of twelve F.I.T. graduate student curators spend a year combing the New York art base  more »