Recent Comments
Re: “Karen O Isn't The Reason This New Yeah Yeah Yeahs Record Is Good”
Maybe the writer isn't old enough, but I'd guess KO's costuming follows Mick Jagger's use of costuming from the Rich top hat statesman parody to Mr. America to court jester to disco man to Jamaican tribal chief and so on.
Re: “May's Must-See Exhibitions”
Looks like nyc is a bore except for all the cool people.
Re: “Don't Move to New York”
@ Austin, maybe instead of dreaming you could actually read the article and do you have any friends?
Re: “Don't Move to New York”
@Sam. Yeah, I shouldn't have said curriculum, it's, MICA that is, still the same old Master's crap for undergraduate foundation. The painting department for example is a geriatrics ward, Yates is finally gone because of dementia, Barry Nemmit's the chair has been there for for four decades, Middleman longer, Weiss, George Ciscle, Economos, all these people date from the 70's. What I was getting at was younger faculty in terms of marketing the school and younger administrators feel the future is in programs related to gaming, CGI, anime since painting majors are dwindling and kids growing up with 1st person shooters want to get into that. They feel with the souring of the Fine Art world this will be a trend for artists wanting to have a job and not wanting to move to NYC to wait tables to pay off debt. With no movement happening in NY, why come here except for the free food at all the openings, and even that is changing with the nomadic site type openings. You said you were there a few years ago, how many is that and were you tuned into what was going on in terms of recruitment?
Re: “Don't Move to New York”
Anytime Paddy wants to investigate the labor exploitation known as an "internship" by galleries and particularly small film boutiques is fine by me. I lived in S. williamsburg last summer rooming with two people who had internships with the innuendo that the place may hire them. BS, when the word hiring came up they would just say they're not hiring and that they were giving you valuable on the job experience. One of these people had taken out a loan on top of other student debt, just to live Manhattan/Brooklyn.
Re: “Don't Move to New York”
No, it's not a 15 year old article. You use to be able to find deals on raw space in Manhattan in a commercially zoned building for 150-200$ a month. Heat was shut off on the weekends, but hey. You could share a loft in Soho with 5 or 6 people for 200 or so a month, plus utilities. I found a rent controlled deal in EV for 400$ a month. What this article is saying is now such deals no longer exist but just a room sharing a kitchen in say a Chinatown is 600 a month, and that's rare. But wages at menial food service jobs have not risen, creating the squeeze. So people are living in New Jersey like Hoboken or moving to places off the NJ RR like the Oranges or Maplewood. Harlem is getting arty. But, like the article says with even LES getting stale or mundane, and Williamsburg/Bushwick not much different, and the fact like for a painter you can get keep up virtually via gallery web sites, the NEED to be in nyc isn't quite there for artists the way it was 20 years ago. So, it's not only don't come to nyc if you are a painter, it's more like you don't need to live there, just visit for a prolong stay periodically. And the art world becoming no different than a retail Tiffany's just adds to the sour taste.
Re: “Don't Move to New York”
Interesting you say this with the fact that NYC has been gaining population overall.You shouldn't put too much on what you hear from MICA grad's, unless they are Hoffberger painting students. MICA, once a backwater school with all eyes on NYC, has recently had a makeover with an aggressive fund raising administration aiming the curriculum toward anime, manga, CGI and gaming graphics. The money is there. Up to now students were pie eyed for Pixar. So for MICA students not perceiving NYC as mecca hardly surprises.
So only the wealthy can afford to be artists, thus subtracting the bite of class alienation , let's say, that can be seen in a Basquiat. There are some other reasons to not go to nyc, as you allude to. The artists coming to nyc all have a degree with the same homogenized post-modernist agenda, and they formulaically follow. Abstractions drone on, conceptual Pop caricatures leer back their smug irony, Casualist mish mashes seem like sterile university exercises, all safely defanged in some art historical niche. Looking at the big picture, the decline of an art center is not unusual, Athens, Rome, Paris. And, there is denial. Recently Art News printed a small account of a show in Rome that intends to say painting or art in NYC is not dead. The problem is they show an example of Jeff Koons antiquity painting as an example of the viability of the tradition, when in fact, his 'paintings' are the very problem, more at how NYC art has become the 21st Century version of L'Ecole des Beaux Artes. They are totally outsourced, poorly designed, anally crafted collages that say nothing about painting since there is no reason for them to be done in paint. One could just as well send the photoshop image to a large inkjet/laser printer and get the same image. No difference. So, for me, it's not just the cost of living, it's the tradition that's closed out. As Paris needed a Monet, so does NYC. Lastly, for what it's worth, I hear the money is leaving for London, closer to oil and gold.
