R.I.P.

Malcolm McLaren, the impresario, promoter, and self-promoter who once claimed to have invented punk rock, and who assembled and managed the youthful, unruly members of the Sex Pistols, the breakthrough British punk band, has died. He was sixty-four. His companion of many years, Young Kim, confirmed that McLaren died on Thursday, and said that he died of mesothelioma at a hospital in Switzerland, the New York Times’s Dave Itzkoff reports.

In the 1970s, McLaren returned to his native London from New York, where he had briefly managed the New York Dolls in the waning days of that band’s career. With his business partner and girlfriend at the time, Vivienne Westwood, they renamed their clothing shop Sex, and McLaren set about putting together his own rock act of untested British youth, which became the Sex Pistols.

Fronted by John Lydon—whose repugnant appearance and Irish background earned him the stage name Johnny Rotten—with Steve Jones (guitar), Paul Cook (drums), and Sid Vicious (a bassist who replaced original member Glen Matlock), the Sex Pistols terrified traditional music sensibilities with songs like “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen,” and fueled McLaren’s flair for over-the-top spectacle: He arranged for the band to sign its contract with A&M Records outside Buckingham Palace, and organized a private boat performance of their “God Save the Queen” on the Thames that was quickly shut down by the police, cementing the group’s rebellious reputation.

As a solo artist, McLaren released genre-defying albums like Duck Rock in 1983 and Waltz Darling in 1989, and remained a perennial presence in the worlds of art and fashion. Greil Marcus wrote on McLaren’s most recent video work, Paris: Capital of the XXIst Century, in the March issue of Artforum.

HAVERFORD COLLEGE CURATORIAL CONFERENCE

Each participant will present a manifesto of curatorial practice. These presentations will be followed by an open conversation among the four presenters and audience members, considering the role of the curator in cultivating visual culture across disciplinary boundaries; the institutional elements necessary to integrate the display of art objects within a wider programmatic framework of interdisciplinary inquiry, experimentation, critique, or activism; and the purpose(s) of exhibitions in this contemporary moment of media dissemination, social networking, and other “ethereal” forms.

10 AM - 12:30 PM, Stokes 102, Haverford College

Speakers:
Ian Berry Curator, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
Julie Joyce Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Aaron Levy Executive Director and Chief Curator, Slought Foundation
Ingrid Schaffner Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

Free and open to the public; lunch to follow in the Center For Peace & Global Citizenship (CPGC) Café, Stokes 104.

ART WEEK

Art week, Nov. 25 - Dec. 1, 1940 : Buy American art.New York : New York City W.P.A. Art Project, 1940.

EXHIBITION TALK: PAINTERS/PAINTING

In conjunction with the exhibition Don't Piss on Me and Tell Me it's Raining, apexart presents:

Tom Sanford will moderate a panel of five other painters who will talk about painting, including: Kamrooz Aram, Holly Coulis, David Humphrey, Dike Blair and Deborah Kass.

Wednesday, April 28: 6 pm

Painter and Bad at Sports NYC correspondent Tom Sanford will moderate a panel of five other painters in a discussion about painting. Kamrooz Aram, Holly Coulis, David Humphrey, Dike Blair, and Deborah Kass, representing various generations of New York painters, are all prominent voices among their cohort who enlist a wide variety of approaches to the medium. These "Painters of Painting" will discuss the current concerns in painting as well as painting's enduring relevance as a humanistic and idiosyncratic antidote to the prevailing corporate culture of consensus and commoditization.

And, if you are not familiar with the podcast Bad at Sports – definitely check it out.

QUOTE OF THE DAY (not necessarily a recurring feature)

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Salvador Dali.

NEW IN THE PEI READING ROOM

Come on in and READ ‘EM


On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators
Carolee Thea's second volume of interviews with ten of today's leading curators, explores the intellectual convictions and personal visions that lay the groundwork for the most prestigious and influential exhibitions in the world today. Among the aesthetic and theoretical issues raised are the relationship between artist and curator, globalism, post-colonialism, capitalism, the future of cultural tourism and the biennial as spectacle or utopian ideal. As Thea notes in her introduction, "the biennial or mega-exhibition--a laboratory for experimentation, investigation and aesthetic liberation--is where the curators' experience and knowledge are tested.

Seeing Out Louder
Jerry Saltz doesn't only address art objects in these essays, he considers the art world as an ever-mutating organism. He signals out mismanaged museums, out-of-control auction houses, misguided artists, the gossip pages of Artforum, and the tent-city casinos known as Art Fairs. Saltz has an unsparing eye, a deep love of the art world, respect for artists, self-deprecating humor, sweet skepticism, and one of the easiest writing styles of any critic working today. Tracking the most recent all-out orgy of art and money, Saltz considers what this did to art and asks, now that the money is gone, how might art and the art world put their house in order?

Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings
"Institutional critique" is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own place within galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when—driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art—institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present, gathering writings and representative art projects of artists who developed and extended the genre.


The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art)
In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.

IT'S NOT DRY YET

Discovery Channel has their Shark Week and in early May PEI has our Painting Week. Relevant to conversation(s) is an article Roberta Smith wrote this past weekend for the NY Times. Check it out…