Category: Blog

Here’s my trip to Cincy’s Contemporary Arts Center from this past Sunday. (links to dead site removed)

Okay, let me backtrack for the past few days since I haven’t been online… I went mainly to visit my aunt who lost both of her daughters, one to lupus, the other choked to death on food. I love her dearly and we have always been close so, it made sense to spend the holiday with her.

On my drive up I stopped overnight and spent the day with my niece living in Atlanta. I cooked them dinner before leaving for Ohio. She’s doing great, working on new drawings, completing a book, and her husband is also working on some new drawings and a comic book. Two artists they are.

I decorated the tree and cooked Christmas dinner. We spent the days before and after Christmas talking, watching TV, having a good time in each other’s company. It was a perfect Christmas!

I left to stop and visit cousins, also in Ohio, and see as many family members as possible. I did. It was also a great time. My cousin made two fresh apple pies and then we ate just about all of them. We left nothing but crumbs from her fantastic pound cake.

My cousin’s two girls wanted to do some Gap outlet shopping down in KY so, I went along and bought a couple polo shirts. We stopped, at my suggestion, at the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati) and ran into the handsome chrisglass coming down the stairs. We talked a bit and I felt good to have met him in person although it couldn’t have been planned better.

After breakfast with another aunt and cousins, we all headed off to home. Those cousins live in Alabama. I stopped in rural Georgia for the night with a friend of my aunt. She is a sweet lady. After another breakfast, I headed home.

I had the best Christmas in years. I called my dad when I got home because he wasn’t home for Christmas, he went to Calif. New Years should be quiet unless I get invited out tonight. Be safe and well everybody!

(p.s. I took some pic in the CAC and will have a little write up about it in Miamiartexchange.com later today, if you care to read it.)

Well, I’m finally home from the best Christmas I’ve had in many years. I spent the full time with family in Atlanta and Ohio. I’m so blessed! Love to all and have a great new year celebration! (I’ll post more tomorrow)

Greetings everyone. I’m visiting relatives in Ohio and having a wonderful time. I’ll do more filling in when I get back home in a few days. Have a blessed New Years!

“The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens.” (Jean Baudrillard)

“Hussein, having his mouth swabbed and his hair inspected for lice, yielded an image of perfect and abject medical humiliation. Shaving, on the other hand, is done by servants. And so we saw Hussein unshorn, shaggy and haggard, and then, through the miracle of not showing, we saw him clean, looking like our old, familiar adversary, just a bit more tired and gaunt. In The Washington Post, [the] two images, played side by side, suggested a deeper symbolic power, a Samson effect, in the shaving. Hussein, with a beard, kept his head raised and stared slightly upward, like an inwardly dazzled mystic looking to the horizon. Hussein shorn had his head down, and looked not so much faraway and all-seeing but glassy and drunk.”

“Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin); An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The overwhelming presence of slavery in early America,” according to the New York Times’ Gordon S. Wood, is “driving a huge rethinking of our history.” Slate

I say, it’s about time.

“If anything can take founders like Washington and Jefferson out of our present and place them back into the particular context of their time, it is this fact that they were slaveholders. Slavery is virtually inconceivable to us. We can scarcely imagine one person owning another for life. Seeing Washington and Jefferson as slaveholders, men who bought, sold and flogged slaves, [and fathered children by their slaves] has to change our conception of them. They don’t belong to us today; they belong to the 18th century, to that coarse and brutal world that is so remote from our own.”

We’re moving, as a nation, toward the right location to solve, and finally resolve the issues of our past. Just because I never met my great-grandfather, was born into slavery, doesn’t mean I am not affected by it. On the other side of my family the aunt of my grandmother who I did know, was also born into slavery. Mixed race people, like part of my family, lead to some issues that still affect my family. Part of my family in Georgia deny any blood relationship, even though it could be proven otherwise by DNA. That legacy, the legacy of this nation, needs to be understood but, not lingered over needlessly so that we can move on.

“You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the postmodernists, you collect avant-garde Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal articles for breakfast. You positively live for theory. It really doesn’t matter what kind, as long as the words are big and the paragraph breaks few and far between.”

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

Thank goodness the art fairs of December are over. I was starting to get hassled for not showing up at a few openings. I am still giving finals, with the last one being tonight in about an hour. I have a web updating job that’s going to pay my real money. A couple of my sponsors on Miamiartexchange.com were trying to get me feature them during the fair. Sorry. I chose work that I thought was good and I could write about pretty quickly. I covered all the major venues and that’s as much as I could do. I didn’t attend a single party although, there were LOTS of them around.

The problem, as age old as it is, is that artists don’t have the luxury to create their work then go out promoting it too. In reality, it takes just as much time to promote the work as it does to create it, if not more. That’s why artists seek out galleries and dealers. And, dealers are not interested in promoting work that isn’t easy to sell, unless they really like the work and see potential in it and or the artist. That is the reason dealers and gallerists take up to a 50% cut of the selling price.

Based on those terms, dealers get very territorial, literally and figuratively. Unless you have a written contract it might be problematic on some level to have another dealer promoting your work. There are advantages and disadvantages to both having and not having a written contract.

Museums don’t normally get into the business of selling artists work but, if you see a wall label that says, “Collection of the artist,” it means the work is most likely for sale. In those situations collectors can probably get work at a lower cost and the artist won’t have to give up a cut of the money.

Commissions, public and private, are a whole different matter. Just the process itself can be taxing enough to make many artists never do it more than once. Public commissions require the artist to do the bidding of many people one would not normally deal with in the creation of ones art.

Anyway, I’ve gone way beyond the art fairs-as-exhibition spaces, and beyond the first week of Decemeber having become the MOST important week for ANY and EVERY artist living in Florida. The faculty of UF even had a exhibition in Miami! Gainesville is 800 miles north of here!

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	art_thirst
Your haiku:	something have you ever been attracted to someone of your type
Username:
Created by Grahame

The first and most important part of the art season has now come and gone. Next is the January events of Art Miami and Palm Beach Contemporary (art fair). Even though they are not on the same level (in terms of sales, collectors, or galleries), they nonetheless are an important part of our art culture. Some locals have already said that those events are a waste of time however, just a few short years ago that is all we had. It’s good that a few people I know made some money this past week selling art (both artists and dealers).