Art’s Insidious New Cliché: Neo-Mannerism

Scads of artists are trying to be junior postmodernists. A phalanx of work has appeared that might be called "Modest Abstraction" or "MFA See, MFA Do." It's everywhere, and it all looks the same. In sculpture there's Anarchy Lite. Those post-minimalist formal arrangements of clunky stuff, sticks, planks, bent metal, wood boxes, fabric, old furniture, concrete things, and whatnot leaned, stacked, stuck, piled, or dispersed around a clean white gallery. There's usually a subtext about wastefulness, sustainability, politics, urbanism, or art history. That history is almost always straight out of sixties and seventies Artforum magazines or the syllabi of academic teachers who've scared their students into being pleasingly meek, imitative, and ordinary.

 Read excellent piece by Jerry Saltz here.

Congrats to Hemphill!

Congratulations to Hemphill, who this year celebrates its 20th anniversary - in gallery years this is like being 100!

You can't even imagine the hard work involved in achieving and surviving as a respected art gallery in this town for 20 years.

20 more!

Games goverments play...

I went to the DO NOT CALL registry website today to renew my home number, and got this message:

Due to the Government shutdown, we are unable to offer this website service at this time. We will resume normal operations when the government is funded.

Debido al cierre del gobierno no podemos ofrecer este servicio telefónico en este momento. Nosotros reanudaremos el funcionamiento normal cuando el gobierno este fianciado.

To start with, this is quite an interesting Spanish translation of the English language statement. It appears to discuss some sort of telephone service... but I have no idea what the last word means... clearly someone typing the statement juxtuposed two letters and came up with a new word... cough, cough...

From the Google uses, I think "fianciado" is a Portuguese word, although most Google references are now just simply people referencing the DO NOT CALL registry and making fun of a vindictive government that shuts down websites that run (or at least should run) on automatic.

This is what the Spanish statement actually says:

Due to the closing of the government [missing comma] we can't offer this telephonic service at this moment. We will renew normal functioning when the government is "fianciado"

Cough, cough...

Less than a month left!

There’s less than a month left to apply for a VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship!

VMFA is offering awards to:

• Professional artists: $8,000
• Graduate students in the visual arts or art history: $6,000
• Undergraduate students in the visual arts (including college-bound high school seniors): $4,000

No application fee!  Applications due Friday, November 8, 2013.

For a PDF flyer, the application form, and all instructions on how to apply, visit this website: www.VMFA.museum/Fellowships.

Why can't WMATA put original regional art on SmartTrip Cards?

Was the question that NotionsCapital.com's Mike Licht asked me...

Read all about it here... Cough, cough...

Washington Redskin Potatoes

My wife Alida Anderson has a great solution to the Washington Redskins name controversy: Just change the mascot to a red potato and then call them the Washington Redskin Potatoes... Cough, cough... New helmet designs coming!...

Update: Upgrade number one to the brilliant idea above: What she actually said last night was to continue to call them the Washington Redskins, but to change the helmet design so that instead of the current one, it is now a ferocious-looking red skin potato!

Update 2: She also thought of another great name option: The Washington Federals! 

Sold at (e)merge... sold at AAFNYC... Miami next

The (e)merge art fair was a resounding success last week... we sold multiple works by Elissa Farrow-Savos, multiple works by Judith Peck, a work by Ric Garcia and multiple works by yours truly; see this nice review.

In NYC, the Affordable Art Fair was just as good, and all three artists (Anne Marchand, Jodi Waslh and Tim Vermeulen) had multiple sales each.

In addition to about 20 of my drawings, I sold two major video pieces, including the below work:

Young Photographer Worshiping at the Altar of Contemporary Photography
Watercolor, charcoal and gesso with embedded electronics
8x20 inches, matted and framed to 20x28 inches
In a Private Collection in Potomac, MD

What's next for us? CONTEXT Art Fair in Miami!