Right now, you’ll find most of me here and here. I’ll continue posting my research projects on Here is a Fantasy. And you know, you’ve always got my Twitter and Tumblr.

This May’s contemporary art auctions seem tame when compared to the other high-dollar items at auction; a T-Rex skeleton was sold last week and now, a vial of Ronald Reagan’s blood has made its way to an online auction house. Gross factor aside, purchasing a vial of blood is bound to be less strategic than purchasing a multi-million dollar painting.

There’s some sort of use-value with paintings. Even if there’s not always a huge investment return, collectors can at some point donate that T-Rex or that painting to a museum. There’s a level of altruism in putting your collection on view for others, and a financial motive by getting a tax-deductible write-off. A vial of blood in the Smithsonian? They’d never display that type of bodily memorabilia. And the type of refrigeration requirements for that vial would be fine for a medical facility, but not a museum.

Without any public use, these memorabilia purchases become no more than whims for the truly, insanely rich. Someone might have a basement viewing area built specifically for that vial, but it’s not going to be for everyone.

“The Collections Policy Survey” is available for distribution on Google Docs.

Jeff Koons has partnered up with Lisa Perry on a line of ready-to-wear fuglies, er, clothes. This isn’t the first time Koons has mass-produced his wares, but it just might be the silliest. These dresses would look awful on just about anyone—hasn’t he heard that colorful prints make you look fatter?  And Lisa Perry isn’t cool to anyone, except (as I imagine) moms who want to stand prettily for a portrait with their Koons’ sculpture while wearing their Koonsian dress.

Now, if Koons had partnered with Lisa Frank on a line of notebooks, folders, and stationary, then I’d get it. Those two are a match made in shiny animal Heaven.

Xerox Book (1968)

Now you can xerox your own Xerox Book. In collaboration with the non-profit Primary Information, Seth Siegelaub, the do-it-all curator, writer, and art dealer, just released half a dozen of his essays and art projects from the late 60’s and 70’s for free download. It’s all part of Primary Information’s new Seth Siegelaub Online Archive and it will be expanding in the months to come. Siegelaub’s interest in conceptual artists and how they can make a living from ephemeral and reproducible materials remains incredibly fresh, particularly in light of the Occupy Movement.

Siegelaub and Primary Information first began collaborating in 2008, when Primary Information approached Siegelaub about reproducing The Artist’s Contract, a legal document about artists’ rights, as a PDF for download. The work was included in their exhibition on the Art Workers’ Coalition for PS1. According to Miriam Katzeff, co-founder of Primary Information, Siegelaub became interested in releasing more of his archives to a wider audience, viewing PDFs as a new form of artist’s multiple, but still completely different from the original. While Xerox Book was published in a limited edition and cannot be reproduced without written permission, the online version can be downloaded and distributed by anyone.

The essays and projects available on Primary Information include Siegelaub’s greatest hits: the Xerox Book (1968), where he commissioned artists like Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris to make art that would fit on the size of a sheet of paper; The Artist’s Contract (1971), a legal document that can, to this day, be used in part or full by any artist to create their own working contract; and One Month (1969), where he asked 31 artists to create an artwork for each day of March and then created a catalog out of their written responses. For more about The Artist’s Contract and the Xerox Book, see below:

The Artist’s Contract (The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement), 1971

• Co-written with a New York lawyer, Bob Projansky, the 3-page document  includes demands for artists that have become more common since 1971, like the assurance that a collector will take care of an artwork according to artist’s intentions. The rights stated in this document are meant to give artists some control over what happens to an artwork once it’s been sold, ensuring that artists can maintain some element of copyright over their work. These rights include artist royalties, indications of who owns the work if it’s re-sold, and the right to borrow the artwork every five years for exhibition.

Xerox Book, 1968

• The Xerox Book has become a staple of Conceptual art, defining art in terms of systems, but it’s also a project that defined the role of the curator as someone who, quite simply, tells artists what to do. In conversation with Hans Ulrich-Obrist for A Brief History of Curating, Siegelaub said that the Xerox Book “was the first where I proposed a series of ‘requirements’ for the project, concerning the use of a standard size paper and the amount of pages…In fact it was the first exhibition where I asked the artists to do something, and it was probably somewhat less collaborative than I am now making it sound.”

When Narcissus leapt into the waters, in a rash attempt to grasp his own unflappable image of youth, he united desire with death; that is, once he tried to secure pure beauty, he transformed it into something fleeting, susceptible to age and decay. The works in Justin Thomas Schaefer’s solo exhibition Comedy Comedy appeal to this loss, a requiem for a youth that was already old in the livery of spring [Midway Contemporary Art; January 23—March 13, 2010]. This is just one motif in the exhibition’s alchemy of opposites, a space filled with dark holes and bright lights, fresh flowers and cold chrome, where neo-Romantic attempts at authentic emotion brush up against the cool, disinterested presence of minimalist materials. Schaefer’s works—all but one of the twelve are title-less, not even untitled—are composed of unprecious and marginal things. However banal they may seem—cinder blocks, store-bought t-shirts, rolls of toilet paper, and so on—they have been made unfamiliar through alteration or aestheticized, often ornamented with Baroque details.

In the first gallery, cinder blocks have been piled atop each other in a half-hearted attempt at building a labyrinthine structure, a ziggurat to nowhere. Pale violet and gray hues have been stained onto the surface of these ruins. Contributing to the exhibition’s dreamlike atmosphere and the ambiguous, hazy aura of its objects, circular clothing racks filled tightly with black t-shirts and bright, blinding light bulbs have been suspended upside-down from the ceiling. Walls painted a dark, cerulean blue are sparsely populated, save for a single, framed drawing and freshly cut flowers that hover under sheets of Plexiglass. A slumped-over rag doll in a dunce cap drowsily fades into the shadows. And yet, in this sensuous reverie, everything is dying. Left to age and rot throughout the length of the exhibition, the framed flowers become a memento mori—at their peak, they are en route to death. Even the absurdly hanging t-shirts are signifiers of instability, of empty masculinity and its failures: these are cheap t-shirts, not fashionable v-necks or collared shirts that would otherwise signal a successful entry into adulthood or a white-collar workplace.

The arrangement of commercial objects that rot and float—objects given an almost supernatural agency—also appears in the recent works of Urs Fischer (a solitary croissant dangling from the gallery ceiling of the New Museum) and Tatiana Trouvé (who, to a more oppressive effect than Fischer’s absurdities, combines the vocabulary of Robert Morris’ cold steel with horror and S&M in The Antechamber). Imbuing ordinary objects with horror, dread, or some other spirit again relates to the myth of Narcissus.  Although not usually thought of as such, it is a myth of interminable sadness. Having perceived himself to be resolutely alone, Narcissus turned his object of desire inward, an act rooted in the horror of being unable to have another. The projection of unrequited desire is thus secured onto Schaefer’s inanimate, yet quite lively, collection of objects that remain critically distant and aloof—they are desired, but not owned.

Schaefer’s presentation—a collection of visual phenomena—makes language feel awkward and writing becomes an ill-formed means of transcendence from this space with no verbal guidelines, just visual cues. However, as in a dream, where one encounters bits and pieces that do not make sense on their own, visual analogues begin to appear among the individual works. For instance, the light bulbs dangling from inside the clothing racks refract a gorgeous, amorphous splatter onto the floor, a motif repeated in the painted marks on the cinder blocks, the ornate curvature of the palm fronds held behind Plexi, and the outline of a monstrous figure in the framed ink drawing. And yet, maybe these relationships, these meanings between objects, are mere phantoms, just the lies we tell ourselves to make sense of our surroundings.

Turning the corner to leave the first gallery, a reverse projection video plays in the doorway, preventing entry into the last room. In this looped video, Schaefer finally appears, hidden behind a clownish mask of white face paint and wearing prison stripes. He dances and pulls at his suspenders in awkward movements and, at one point, drags a metal rod as a prop. His only respite from this Sisyphean performance is a sad primping effort where he crouches down to tousle his hair. The artist-as-clown motif is heavy-handed, but in this exhibition, it’s an apt reminder of dwindling expectations. If this is a comedy, the artist’s joke delivers no respite.

Hirst may have come under scrutiny for the simultaneous exhibitions of his dots at every Gagosian Gallery location worldwide, but Ai is giving Hirst a run for his money in what could be deemed 2012’s most ludicrous display of exhibition extravagance; and Ai’s global infiltration of the exhibition circuit–with exhibitions at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Hirshhorn, and the Victoria & Albert Museum—has a wider scope than Hirst’s exhibitions at a single chain of galleries. That’s 2012, but 2011 wasn’t a good year for Ai’s art world influence. His auction results, number of solo exhibitions, and quantity of works in museum collections were merely middling.

Ai Weiwei’s works first went to auction in 2006 and the highest hammer price on record occurred in 2007. In 2011, confidence in Ai’s work at auction was restored; a leap in value occurred this past year, showing that Ai’s works were beginning to generate more interest at auction than in the three years prior. His auction values, while on the up-and-up in 2011, didn’t shatter any records.

One striking anomaly in Ai’s career is the lack of museums that own his works. Currently, ten museums worldwide keep Ai’s works in their permanent collection, with just four in the United States—MoMA, LACMA, LaMoCA, and the Rubell Family Collection (Miami). Compared, again, to Hirst, a former claimaint to the top spot on the Power 100 but whose ranking has fallen in recent years—he only placed 64th in 2011—Hirst can count works in more than thirty permanent collections. Hirst’s career has been longer than Ai’s, but only four museum collections in the States is equivalent to, well, nobody at the top of the Power 100. Even the art collective Claire Fontaine, formed in just 2004 and a group never featured on the Power 100 list, is included in the permanent collections of 18 museums. And to get a sense of “who’s who” at the highest echelon of museum collections, works by Andy Warhol, not surprisingly, are owned by almost every modern and contemporary museum in the United States.Regardless of the paltry number of museums that currently own Ai’s work, in 2011, opportunistic curators jumped at the chance to begin showing Ai’s works en masse. Tessa Praun, curator at Magasin 3 in Stockholm, has publicly discussed meeting with the artist while he was still under house arrest for his prison sentence:

Eric Fischl knows how to paint people like they’ve been photographed with bad lighting. This works for Fischl because his imperfections create a type of dignity that’s needed in these otherwise awkward situations. His portraits, currently on view at both Mary Boone locations, are fun ways to test your art world trivia skills: all the paintings refer to the sitters on a first name basis. If you don’t know who Simon is, you’ll miss out on the joke.

This Week in Chelsea’s Grossest

"Batman Returns" installation view

Joyce Pensato’s show at Frederich Petzel is a mess. The gallery was transformed into a studio space, full of half-finished canvases and ravaged stuffed animals. It’s like a bratty child artist started painting in the space and then gave up, tortured by fits of neurotic rage. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a doll torched on a stick, like in James Franco’s 2011 exhibition at Peres Projects, or any number of YouTube videos focused on teen angst. Unlike Mike Kelley’s orderly use of stuffed animals as specimens, clinically arranged on tables, this is just a clusterfuck, an exercise in chaos. In the gallery, I saw a dog chewing on one of Pensato’s Elmo dolls, covering it in slobber. This seemed fitting for such a piece of junk.

Part One: If Curating is Like Cutting Hair, Then I Don’t Want Any Part of it

Curating has become a catch-all term for anyone who wants to present art. Here’s five images of artworks I like on a Tumblr post—it’s curating. Curating has become a two part process: I selected several things I like and then, I put these things somewhere. All you need to curate is desire and a digital or physical space.

The ease of curating has created an excess of curatorial types. It’s hard to describe what a curator does when so many people do it: there’s the curator as DJ, the curator as editor, and, as a recent addition to this list, the curator as hairdresser. All these metaphors are troubling; curating has become like anything and everything. Curating has put on all these disguises, only to lose itself.

It’s time for a serious reevaluation of the curator. Institutional critique has targeted galleries, museums, and the commercialism of art, but so far, this critique has not focused on the curator. To be fair, the professionalism of curatorial practice is still fairly recent.

Art historians were once the only ones who entered museums as curators. In the 1990s, the development of Bard College’s MA in Curatorial Studies, and other advanced degree-granting programs, created an excess of curators with official papers. Now, there’s not always a museum where these curators can land; there’s too many curators and not enough museums.

Without enough museums to house curators, the independent curator has become more active in defining the new curator’s role. Curating inside the museum relies heavily on curare, the Latin word referring to caring for and arranging. Taking care of a collection requires researching individual works, finding relationships among those works, making sure statues aren’t crumbling, and the like. Without a collection to care for, the subject of curating has expanded to reflect this new reality. Rather than working within the limitations of a collection, the independent curator has fewer limitations about the types of works they can show due to the structure of museum departments which are still based on mediums (i.e. photography departments), time-periods (i.e. Post-war art departments), and geographic location (i.e. non-western departments).

The new curator can be anything you want, but this freedom is its biggest flaw. If the curator has become a hairdresser, someone commissioned to trim, cut, and shape another person’s dead skin cells, then what’s the big deal? Curating has lost its fashion and appeal. Hairdressing—well, that’s a pretty one-on-one activity and what’s a hot hairstyle now won’t look so great in a few years.

Johannes Cladders, a curator best-known for giving Joseph Beuys his first museum exhibition, was asked why he preferred curating in a museum to the gallery. He believed that that the importance for showing contemporary art in a museum because “Nobody falls from the moon…Everybody comes out of a tradition.” Cladders was wrong: curators are falling from the moon, only to land on their feet as hairdressers.

By 1945, the hard-headed critic Clement Greenberg had made up his mind about Pollock as the “strongest painter of his generation”; by 1947, he solidified Pollock’s status to the exclusionary disregard of everyone else, ceremoniously stating that “aside from Jackson Pollock, nothing has really been accomplished as yet.”[1] Even though the critic/artist relationship is somewhat rare today, it still happens: Massimiliano Gioni recognized Mauritizio Cattelan’s potential a few years back. Now they’re both at the top of their curating and games. Greenberg picked Pollock out of a flock of artists as evidence of someone who made exemplary art, but what was in the details of Pollock’s paintings that turned Greenberg into Pollock’s personal cheerleader?

In a 1947 review, Greenberg wrote that Pollock’s avant-garde tricks-of-the-trade were most evident in the paintings’ overall tautness and the “tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface that produces the strength of his art.”[2]  For Greenberg, the tension between gesture (all of Pollock’s splatter-marks) and form (the canvas, the floor) produced an illusion of depth. Tension means that something’s happening, or is about to happen. Tension, for Greenberg, was how real-life worked. If there wasn’t tension in a painting, well, it was just a lie about how we know things to be.

In a eulogy for Pollock, Greenberg described the artist’s all-overs as working at their best when they were “disrupting and restoring, by unbalancing and balancing.” [3] This compliment describes the goals of mid-century painting: a constantly in-flux thing. Some kid could drop some spaghetti on a plate that ends up looking like a Pollock splatter painting. Sure, even on the surface of things, loops of spaghetti look like Pollock’s sworls. It’s the debate that’s different. It doesn’t take much in-depth reporting to find out that views on what’s art vary between time and place.