NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Cuchifritos Holiday Benefit & Silent Auction, Monday @ Sara Meltzer Gallery

via:

Cuchifritos Holiday Benefit & Silent Auction!

Dear Cuchifritos friend,

Please Save this Date! On Monday December 17th from 6 to 9pm, we at Cuchifritos are holding our first ever Holiday Benefit and Silent Auction on behalf of the gallery. Please come support us, and celebrate with us!

The event is being generously hosted at the
Sara Meltzer Gallery
525-531 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001.

Please RSVP to paul.clay[AT]aai-nyc.org or call Paul at 917.238.9324

Look for the following artists at our silent auction!
Eric Angles, Nicole Awai, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, Erica Baum, Laura Carton, Alyssa Casey, Azul Ceballos, Chris Coffin, Madeline Djerejian, Raul Vincent Enriquez, Inka Essenhigh, Jon Feinstein, Lilah Freedland, Joy Garnett, Kate Gilmore, Max Goldfarb, Charles Goldman, Patti Hallock, Heather Hart, Nicholas Herman, Elana Herzog, Christopher K. Ho, Yoko Inoue, Peter Kreider, Laura Lobdell, Reynard Loki, Adria Marquez, Frank Meuschke, Lisa Mordhorst, Navin Norling, Marie Roberts, Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Edward Schexnayder, Fran Shalom, Adam Shecter, Jean Shin, Eve Sussman, Spencer Sweeney, Steed Taylor, Mary Valverde, and James Walsh.

In the last six and a half years, Cuchifritos has shown well over 200 contemporary artists, many of them young and as yet undiscovered, and others of some note.

Past artists exhibited include: Adam Cvijanovic, Rainer Ganahl, Chitra Ganesh, Ellen Harvey, Eunjung Hwang, Nina Katchadourian, Peter Kreider, Sun K. Kwak, Edgar Orlaineta, Tony Oursler, Shinique Smith, Alex Villar, and Seth Tobocman. Two of the artists exhibited at Cuchifritos, Javier Cambre and Gedi Sibony, have subsequently shown in Whitney Biennials.

A list of past curators involved with AAI and/or Cuchifritos includes: Regine Basha, Koan-Jeff Baysa, Naomi Beckwith, Dean Daderko, Anne Ellegood, Berit Fischer, David Gibson, Rachel Gugelberger, Christopher K. Ho, Mauricio Laffitte-Soler, Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Jose Parla (Ease), Sara Reisman, Andrea Salerno, Mari Spirito, Simone Subal, and Herb Tam.

Through Cuchifritos art gallery/project space, AAI is pioneering new relationships and understandings in the field of contemporary art and curatorial practice, especially in relation to community and public space.

Your support & encouragement is vital to us, and will allow us to continue presenting new artists and new work, in seven thought provoking exhibits this coming year.

Please come celebrate the holiday season with us, purchase some art, and help us continue the valuable work.

You can DONATE RIGHT NOW on-line at:  aai-nyc.org/AAI_Info/Donate/index.html

Click the link to the "Network for Good" on-line donation system. You can indicate your contribution is for Cuchifritos in the optional "Designation" slot.

We thank you deeply for your support!  With best regards,

The Benefit Committee,

Paul Clay, Stephanie Diamond, Rachel Gugelberger, Christopher K. Ho,
Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Mark Power, and Mari Spirito

Santa Baby

reblogged; via MTAA, MTAA-RR » news » twhid » :

For those of us braving the NYC cold, I'm thinking we need to go see Paul McCarthy’s show/business venture at Maccarone Gallery.

Will these butt plug wielding Santa chocolates appreciate? I wonder…

via NYTimes, Art in Review, 12/7/07:

PAUL MCCARTHY'S Chocolate Factory

Maccarone Gallery
630 Greenwich Street, West Village
Through Dec. 24

By HOLLAND COTTER

The Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy is not a sentimentalist. In performances in the 1990s he turned Santa Claus into a filthy old man, nose running and face bloodied, as he smeared his white-trimmed red costume with food and various fluids. Christmas wasn’t a holiday; it was a psychotic episode. The spirit of giving was just a nice term for compulsive acting out.

A decade later Mr. McCarthy, like everyone else in the art world, has appeared to put childish rebelliousness aside, cleaned up his act and gone into business. He used to make a mess; now he’s making product, specifically a line of expensive chocolate Santa Clauses for the holiday season under the name Peter Paul Chocolates LLC.

To this end, he has temporarily transformed his gallery, Maccarone, into a factory outlet, which wasn’t so easy to do; the plumbing and electrical systems had to be overhauled to meet city codes before kitchen hardware could be brought in. Then, because no one really knew the confectionary ropes, Peter P. Greweling of the Culinary Institute of America was enlisted to supervise the whole affair.

The results are worth the hassle. The figures of Santa carrying a Christmas tree — 10 inches high and made of top-of-the-line semisweet Guittard chocolate — are being smoothly turned out in gift wrapping at a rate of 1,000 a day. Cost: $100 a figure, not including a shipping and handling fee. The retail office is open and taking orders on the gallery premises seven days a week. (The work is also available on the Web at peterpaulchocolates.com.) And even if you don’t want to buy, you can watch the fully staffed factory, enclosed in glass, in operation.

It’s all so great: art as the cottage-industry enterprise everybody wants it to be, turning out a line of cute cash-and-carry luxury objects, consumerist totems for the holiday shopping countdown. Of course none of this would bear the McCarthy stamp unless there were some spoiler element. In this case the tree the Santa carries is modeled on a commercial sex toy. You may not see this at first, but once you do, you keep seeing it.

But that’s great art for you: It may give you a sugar high, but it has dirty little secrets.  

The Kindle Swindle

reblogged via Defective by Design:

The Kindle Swindle

Posted On: Wed, 2007-12-12 07:36 by Joshua Gay

       

      
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com

The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon. If you try to move them to a new ebook reader or a computer, Amazon can end your service and remove access to the books you have already purchased.

It seems that Amazon only cares to oppose DRM when they can profit from it, such as when they advertise their MP3's as "Play Anywhere, DRM-Free Downloads." The same is not true for Kindle ebooks. Perhaps if they were honest they would advertise their ebooks as "Play Only Here, DRM-Laden Kindle Ebooks."

Many people will accept the restrictions that come with the Kindle, but, they should know that their decision won't only effect just themselves. If enough people accept the DRM on ebooks, there will be no incentive in the future for Amazon, or anybody else to offer non-DRM ebooks. We are threatened by the market establishing a new cultural precedence in which books become bound to our devices, unable to be shared, and unable to be moved over to a new device or competing system. We must reject DRM on ebooks and we must reject the Kindle. Please help us in letting people know that the Kindle it is nothing more than a swindle.

Mark Pilgrim, author of Dive into Python, paints a lucid picture of the Future of Reading through a series of quotations. It starts out with one from the CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos (see image above), from an open letter he wrote to the Author's Guild in 2002:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

 

This is juxtaposed next to the Kindle's Term of Service, which states,

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

And Mark finishes his "Play" with the termination clause in the Kindle Terms of Service that states:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

When you agree to this Terms of Service, you are locked in to the Kindle, and you must promise to never try to escape. This is why we have decided to rename the Kindle, the Swindle, and we invite you all to join us in tagging the Kindle and all of the the Kindle ebooks on Amazon.com with the phrase "Kindle Swindle."

 

"Arranged": New York Magazine Film Critics' Pick (Opens Friday Dec 14th @ The Quad)

opens at the QUAD December 14th!

QUAD Cinemas
34 West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011

Showtimes will be: 1:00 3:00 5:25 7:30 10:00

(212) 255-8800 schedule
(212) 255-2243 office

$10 Adults
$7 Senior Citizens over the age of 62.
$7 Children between 5 and 12 years old.

More info, trailer, etc.

Read the reviews in Variety, The New York Sun, and TimeOut. (Cluelessness abounds if you want it in The New York Times as well as The Village Voice, ho hum). Best of all is the interview with Lister-Jones and Williams Cole in The Brooklyn Rail...

Johanna Drucker @ SVA Tuesday, 12/11/07

Not to be missed: Johanna Drucker, author of Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, is coming to NY to speak at SVA this week:

Art Theory Now: from Aesthetics to Aesthesis

Johanna Drucker

School of Visual Arts: Tuesday, December 11, 7pm

Amphitheater
 209 East 23rd Street, 3rd floor, free and open to the public

If the job of art criticism is interpretation, the task of art theory is to offer foundational principles for understanding the identity and cultural function of works of art. But what aesthetic theory accommodates Damien Hirst’s In the Name of God, Phil Collins’ The World Won’t Listen, Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital video works or Robert Longo’s drawings of deep space or atomic blasts? How do we formulate aesthetic theory after Adorno? This lecture outlines a shift from aesthetics as the study of objects to aesthesis as a mode of experience and knowledge, and draws on ideas sketched in the author's recent article, "Making Space: Image-Events in an Extreme State," published in Cultural Politics.

Johanna Drucker is Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago, 2006) and The Century of Artists' Books (Granary, 2004). Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department.