art farts

I am currently employed by one of the largest galleries in New York. The art world has nice work if you can get it.

I suppose the reason I find my job quite interesting is largely due to the fact that the "chosen" people and objects of desire lie at the crux of many issues currently agitatating this big bad world I call home. Religion and economy, higher education and innate intelligence, memory and imagination, media and community, the familiar and the real, fate and chance, fabrication and mass production, value and money and beauty and intended de-aesthetization, sex and power, post-modernity and DIY, performance and depth, color and light. All the tangible stuff people shove in galleries and museums signifies absolutely everything fascinating about our world, and simultanously, means veritably nothing.

However, the concepts at hand become particularly poignant in our city of hustle as the art market is currently experiencing a 90 percent loss of confidence, with most major works currently valued at about a third of their pre-recession worth.

So to say that I'm lucky to be employed is the understatement of the year, and I try to be grateful each day I'm allowed to come to work and talk about massive installations that I've helped produce. Especially programming as absurd and arbitrary as the current show at JD's space in Long Island City where I spend my days and early evenings. It's a group show called "The Pig", and features artists Jim Drain, Paul Chan, Jeff Koons, Simon Martin, Paola Pivi and Gelatin, an Austrian collective. I'm only going to talk about the pieces I like because no one is forcing me to do otherwise. There are only so many times one can explain a steel grid covered in rhinestones that is the size of a movie screen to middle aged white women with Louis Vuitton bags who aren't going to buy anything anyway using words and phrases like- movement, forced navigation of the terrain, texture, organic yet hyper synthetic. Ok, it's actually really fun, but can become mildly nauseating at times.

There are two "moving sculptures" drive around the gallery for a quarter. One piece is covered in stuffed animals and the other is fashioned from aluminum and found wood, titled "Henry Moore for the Poor". Henry Moore was an English artist and sculptor mainly known for large-scale bronze casts. His amorphous yet feminine figures, generally bulbous in form, usually contain an aspect of hollow, negative space.


"Henry Moore for the Poor" is a non-sensical moving machine- I dare not write car because that would imply it moves forward and back upon command- that plays Disney music for its bemused guest. Just as Universal told me I could "ride the movies" at its amusement park in the previews for E.T, Gelatin instructs any proper art patron to "ride" Henry Moore. Or at least his aesthetic.

C'mon, it's summer- everyone's at Basel anyway.