Austin Thomas, artist and director of Bushwick's Pocket Utopia, has a new blog up called Drawing On the Utopic - check it out. (I grabbed the images below from it). Also check out Sharon Butler's piece in the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail that mentions Austin's and others' "post-studio" alternatives: Lost in Space: Art Post-Studio.... Although I have to say, this paragraph is a little weird, especially coming from an inveterate artist blogger:
Acutely aware of shrinking real estate opportunities yet persistently nostalgic for the kind of old-fashioned, three-dimensional community that's threatened by the Internet, some artists are making their contemporaries' space predicaments the focus of larger projects and installations.
(Sharon??) I'd say that the Internet, if anything, is very much a part of "post-studio practice", if not studio practice proper, and to say it's part of the threat to artist communities seems a bit silly, considering the social networking potential and community it in fact has provided in spades since the late '90s. Why not drive the point home about the real threat to the visual art community in this city? (cf: From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present).
Above: Obama in Bushwick; below: Hillary sporting an Obama cap on 39th St.
click to enlarge.
click to enlarge.
