Under the knife

I'll be out of commission today, going under the knife for a major, somewhat urgent and quite unexpected surgery procedure with a substantial recovery period. Surgery starts at 0730; as I type this the main worry in my mind is getting from my house to the hospital (arrival time 0530) with all the ice still all over my neighborhood's twisty and windy streets.

Not looking forward to the next 2-3 weeks. But like Clint Eastwood once famously said: "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all..."

There are lots of things that I am afraid of, but weirdly enough, death is not one of them. I think that the fact that if I were to croak today I'd still be leaving behind around ten thousand pieces of artwork which have been sold, traded, given away, left in hotel rooms, inserted into Goodwill stores and/or otherwise left to leave an artistic footprint, is rather a calming feeling.

This is a major, multi-hour, robot-not-a-human-in-charge operation, which I am told has an 80% success rate where the John Doe doesn't bite the bucket (and frankly, I picked the robot over the human, because of something called "tremors" when it comes to a surgical scalpel), soooooooooo.... If I do bite the bucket, I'd like a tombstone that looks like a Pictish Stone, sort of like this one that I did in Scotland in 1989:

Clach Biorach Pictish Standing Stone
Edderton, Ross, Scotland
circa 1989 by F. Lennox Campello
Pen and Ink wash on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches

Noah Charney on art fakes

Noah Charney is an adjunct professor of art history at the American University of Rome and the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group on issues in art crime. His most recent book is The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers (2015). He writes:

That evening, art forgery was the subject of conversation in the museum’s stylish black marble restaurant. The patrons of the Leopold lamented that they could show their best Schiele drawings (the ones that drew pilgrims) only for a few months at a time. The rest of the time they were in darkened storage, to minimise their exposure to light, and reproductions were displayed in their place. Someone from the Albertina sympathised. She explained that Dürer’s marvellous watercolours, Young Hare and Tuft of Grass, are shown to the public only for three-month periods every few years. Otherwise they reside in temperature-, light- and humidity-controlled Solander boxes in storage. Had I had the chance to see them? 

Indeed I had, and while I had been suspicious that something wasn’t quite right about them, I would be flattering myself to say that I immediately knew they were reproductions. Today’s printing technologies make it difficult to distinguish high-quality facsimiles from originals, at least not without taking them out of the frame and examining the back (which holds a wealth of clues about an object’s age and provenance), or looking at the surface in detail, without the interference of protective glass. In an intentionally shadowy alcove I could sense that something was off, but not exactly what.

Read the whole thing here. 

Idiots of the week: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center

It's nowhere near the DMV, but the idiocy of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center all the way in Texas reaches all the way to the nation's capital.

You see,the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (GCAC) has announced that it has withdrawn as the host for something called the San Antonio’s CAM (Contemporary Art Month) 2016 Perennial. 

Here is the statement released by GCAC Executive Director Jerry Ruiz:

The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center will be withdrawing as the host for the CAM 2016 Perennial. While the GCAC recognizes the talents and merits of the artists in this year’s Perennial, we have determined that CAM is simply not a mission-fit at this juncture. The Guadalupe remains firmly committed to the values of inclusion and access to the arts. The lack of diversity in this year’s group of artists, specifically the lack of representation of Latina artists in this year’s edition of the perennial, has forced the organization to make this difficult decision after much deliberation and dialogue with CAM’s leaders.

Are you fucking serious? You're removing yourself as the host from an art show because of the "lack of representation of Latina artists"?  Was the juror or curator (this year's curator is Laurie Britton Newell from Colorado, not Texas) directed ahead of time that she should include Latina artists in the exhibition? If so, how was the curator to identify and segregate the Latina artists? Was there a check box in the entry form to ID the entry as coming from a Latina? Or was the curator allowed to see the names of the artists so that he/she could give extra merit to anyone whose last name ended in a vowel or a "z" (at the risk of missing the millions of Latinas all over Latin America and the US with non-Hispanic last names); Or given a list of Latina artists? Any direction at all?

This year's selected artists are Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Marlys Dietrick, Emily Fleisher, Jasmyne Graybill, Jessica Halonen and Leigh Anne Lester... all women. Should someone be pissed because there are no males included? Or is this always an all female show (thus somewhat destroying the concept of diversity and inclusion from the very beginning)?

By the way, at least one of the artists (Jennifer Ling Datchuk) is Asian; one appears to be Jewish (based on the dangerous practice of identifying people by last name; this is also a mine field for "Latino" names), and I don't know or care what Jasmyne Graybill's ancestral DNA background is, but her work is spectacular!

There is no issue with this show, because a curator (hopefully) always should select artwork for an open show based on the fucking art itself, not the racial, genderl, or as in this case, ethnic background of the artist. Unless the curator is told ahead of time: "You have to have some Latinas in this show and this is how you identify them" then this all stinks of idiocy.

As a Latino, all I have to say to the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is: "You are all a bunch of comemierdas."

Call for Photographers

Deadline: March 19, 2016

Del Ray Artisans and Union 206 Studio present Surrealism: A Photography Exhibition. This exhibit pushes beyond accepted conventions of reality by representing – in photographs – irrational imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind… disorienting realist imagery often based on fantasy, nightmares, hallucination, and the imagination. The work’s disassociated nature leads to stunning compositions requiring the artist to see past what’s physically there to create pictures of the imagination, inviting all to slip out of the shackles limiting our vision. 

The opening reception is on Friday, May 6 from 7 to 9 pm at Del Ray Artisans gallery in the Nicholas A. Colasanto Center, 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia 22301. 

For more information, please visit http://thedelrayartisans.org/cfe/2016-Surrealism.html or contact curator David Heckman at dheckman@cox.net.

Steeled by Judith Peck

Steeled, 40x60 inches (diptych) Oil and plaster on board by Judith Peck

This is one of the most powerful paintings that I've seen this year so far... by the spectacularly talented DMV painter Judith Peck. 

Everything matters here... the look, the shape and size of the hands, the curling of the toes, the light in the sky, the shape of the light in the sky, the masculinity of the rocks, the tenderness of the veins on the feet, and the cryptography embedded in the light reflections in the folds of the clothing... can you amateur cryptologists decipher the message?