Donkey Trail

Ten years I learned this year about exhibition organizing.

An art year in review

(Ellsworth Kelly, White Bands on Yellow, 1950)

I am thankful for a year of many changes art-wise (politically, I had hoped for more. I’m ready to face it).

In terms of my own work, it began with a lecture on text-based art and ended with drawings of Mantegna-like mountains. In between came video interruptions, drawings of trees in the wind, paintings of finger-shoot-dicks, and the important revelation that doing fish pose before you start working releases creativity (It does! Try it!).

In terms of galleries and museums, off the top of my head, I was most impressed with the Kippenberger retrospective at MoMa and with Ellsworth Kelly, both his drawings from the 50s and 60s at Matthew Marks, and his paintings in Cézanne and Beyond in Philly. Neither artist really represents change (really who cares), but my attraction to them does.

I also am grateful to Roberta Smith, who makes me feel that what I’m doing is ok, and especially, especially, especially to a few new artist-friends, who embody the word ComRade (in arms, sure!).

And I am grateful to this annoying blog, which almost no one reads, but which somehow organizes my thoughts. And when you do read or comment, I love you for it, I really do.

That said, the path is still bumpy to say the least. So tune in next year.

Love, Molly

PS: My vote on what to call this past decade, which I can’t say I’m sorry to see end, is “the 9/11 years.”

I have absolutely nothing to say

Kill Baby, Kill

I am thankful to Dana, of Art on My Mind past, for introducing me to new artspeak: the term in question is “killing the baby.”

Basically, it's that moment when you've been working really hard on something and you realize it's just not going to pan out, so even though everything in you says to just keep it, you've got to just get rid of it, i.e., kill your baby. I just found comfort in the idea that there was something universal trying to hang on to something that needed to be let go of.

[There is] a process to learning when to kill the baby. For [X], I think his writers' group and [Y] in particular helped him learn this by telling him when something really wasn't working and pressing him to cut it out, and eventually he got better at realizing when he was trying to hold onto a baby he needed to kill. For me, I think I learned it through being edited and then self-editing -- there'll be a concept or an argument or a phrase that I think is brilliant, but it just doesn't fit in with the whole, or it just doesn't get me where I need to go. So, I'm getting more efficient at identifying when that's happening. But, it's hard. Especially when it's something I've invested a lot of time or energy in. It's definitely a process.

Below, please view a drawing on a sheet of $48 paper that just could not be saved. RIP, little one.

What's up in tween culture

Here’s what to mention if you need to impress that eleven year-old in your life this Christmas:

Lady Gaga, and the song Bad Romance. And, gross, what’s with the spine and bulging eyes on YouTube?

Justin Bieber, the fourteen year-old suburban rapper. So hot. That said, MJ is so last summer.

Robert Pattinson from the Twilight movies. Adonis.

And finally, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Squeakquel. And have you seen them singing All the Single Ladies?

Critical Statements

Peter Schjeldahl has made it easier for me to go with my core feeling that the Urs Fischer show at the New Museum is way disappointing and shallow. In particular in his review last week, he mocks the museum behind the show:

It’s all nicely diverting – but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.

Holland Cotter makes MoMa look just as silly. It made Gabriel Orozco’s work look concrete, planned and loud (when it just ain’t). And Cotter's depicts the deference paid to art-starness as frankly smarmy:

During the installation of his exhibition in the kind of white-walled MoMA gallery that that he once spurned, Mr. Orozco, tousle haired and rumpled, received a visit from the museum’s immaculately groomed director, Glenn D. Lowry, whose red silk tie matched his pocket square. “Hola!” Mr. Lowry said, sweeping into the nearly empty gallery, where just a few pieces had been uncrated. “Exciting, exciting.”

The irreverence is refreshing. It is. Would I reject any approach by either of museum? Of course not.

This is how Schjeldahl ends his review this week of the Orozco show, which he views as art historically sensitive:

Pleasure is the only trusty teacher and guarantor of seriousness in art. Why is that so easy to forget?

If by pleasure, he means interest, passion, curiosity, I’d have to agree – even in light of Monday’s post.

Thoughts from the pit

(Molly Stevens, 2009, acrylic on board, 16" x 20")

I think I’d call it the pit, maybe the hole. It’s that place you find yourself after completing a piece or after hanging a show.

Your options at this point are as follows: get depressed or start something new. I usually spend some time with the former, and then eventually move to the latter. The idea motivating me being: if I keep making, maybe I can redeem myself (because there’s always something to be ashamed about in what you’ve done). So I'm sure there’s possible redemption in the future, and it will come through what I do, I think to myself.

How many of you are motivated by love of what you do? Sure, there are moments of pleasure, but, really. Be honest.

It’s also while I’m in the pit that I start realizing how impossible self-sufficiency really is. As much as I’d like to have full confidence in my inner-voice and where it has led me, what other people think matters. And thank god, really, because otherwise I’d be an arrogant prick. Like that guy. You know who I mean. What’s his name.

But do you think you have to be an arrogant prick to really make a splash? Frankly, I think so. Does splashing make for better art? No. I mean, look at what’s his name. Really.

Wednesday Vocab

(O'Shea Jackson, better known as Ice Cube)

When I feel like I’m coming under fire, it’s best for me to keep my emotions under wraps.

In other words:

When I want to disarm my adversary, it is best to stay dispassionate.

I respond by first saying, “that’s interesting.” This passive voice suggests that I feel nothing.

“From my perspective” is also a useful phrase introducing subjectivity, without being attacking.

When making art, and dealing with the art world, cooler on the outside is always better.

Take that motherfucker.

Imaginary wandering

Donkey Trail

Good Vibrations

(Botticelli's "Annunciation")

Michael Kimmelman does it again. With his usual arrogance, he proves that he does not like art.

Of all the shows in Europe - or even in Germany -, Michael, you could not find one to speak about in more edifying terms?

The Botticelli show at the Städel Museum is the first big survey devoted to him in the German-speaking world. The galleries are annoyingly jammed. It’s like rush hour all day in there.

Am I the only idiot around who still doesn’t quite get his popularity? [...]

You might say Botticelli represents a bygone ideal of high art, with its literary roots in rhetoric and poetry, which is to say only that what attracts so many people to him today surely has to do with something else. Is it all that decorative panache and those pretty, melancholy young women? I suspect, as with van Gogh and Rembrandt, it also has to do with the way he devised a signature style that acts like an advertisement for himself. [...]

The myth of the pining, profligate lover, craving religious consolation in extremis and dying forgotten only to be rediscovered many centuries later as an artistic genius, accounts for his popularity too. His suffering is like van Gogh’s ear, the perfect fictive yeast for celebrityhood.

The truth is something else.

It’s to do with the vagaries of taste.

First, here's a tip, use your New York Times press pass to get you into shows on the day the museum is closed. That way you don't have to mingle with the commoners. Then you might feel less annoyed and find the time to explain why it's so bad for an artist to have a signature style and yet vague taste at the same time.

assuming my thought processes are of interest

Donkey Trail.

Pulp

TMT: Too Much Thanksgiving. In the meantime, here’s info on large sheets of paper.

New York Central has a non-flimsy 44” x 60” Coventry rag vellum for $9.50. That’s a good price.

The better papers don’t go larger than 40” x 60” but they do go larger in price. I liked the 1114 lb. Lanaquarelle sheet going for $47.72 a sheet.

Some artists glue several large sheets together. I personally don’t like seeing the joints, however.

At Dieu Donné Papermill, you can custom order a 7 foot by 12 foot sheet for something like $1500. I’ll wait until I have a gallery that can pay for that.

In terms of presenting such surfaces, I did see paper that was mounted on stretched canvas. This was appealing because the texture wasn’t stuck behind glass. At the same time, too much texture can come across as precious or craft-like.

One of the best shows of the decade?

(Carroll Dunham, (Hers) Night and Day, #5, 2009)

Dear Jerry,

I really like you. You remind me of my first shrink. In fact, you’re so familiar, you’d fit right in at our Thanksgiving.

Also, I really appreciate your stats on women in the art world, and the way you keep your eye fresh.

And I just loooove your wife.

But, Jerry.

I mean, I like Carroll Dunham, ok. I like the vigor and the cartoon quality, especially in the drawings. And his imitation wood too. Plus, he seems like a pretty smart guy. Like in the Brooklyn Rail this month.

Your colleague at the Times liked the show a lot too. He said something about an alternative to a male-dominated world. But, I don’t know, mega twats still seem like a male perspective to me. I guess he has a right to his opinion, though.

But, come on, Jerry. One of the best shows of the decade?

All my arguments against the show (the offensive holes, the ugly stylized landscape, the graceless lines, the depthless color, the redundant imagery, the clumsy composition) seem to be part of the point (the dominance of pornography, the nude in art history, high and low esthetics). This leaves me with only one thing to say. I don’t like ‘em and I’m upset you do.

Please come to my show in May anyway.

Bests,
Molly Stevens

A talk with Carin Riley

Good stuff on the Donkey Trail.

Fleshy flesh

(Philip Guston, Untitled, circa 1969-1973)

Yes of course it’s worth it to go all the way to 57th Street to see the show of small paintings by Philip Guston at the McKee Gallery. I like to see how Guston was always working through questions about images and marks – about self and being; the exhibition presents the repeated imagery that became the artist’s personal vocabulary for his searching. Also, the vigorous brushstrokes teach me that he would push around the paint until his lines and shapes sat solidly on the canvas.

Down the hall, at Edwynn Houk, a show of Brassaï’s photographs from the 30s echo Guston’s human touch. Here are pictures of people being people. Their flesh is fleshy, their feelings are on their face, their un-self-consciousness is reflected in mirrors. And these are certainly pictures of a time past, hats, lipstick, waiters and all. You know that imminent war meant a last hurrah. What remains is fleeting tenderness, moments of interaction, subtly joyous, unhappy and sad.
(Brassaï, Au Bal Musette, Les ‘Quatre Saisons’ Rue de Lappe, 1932)

What's newish on DVD

Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2008)
Real good. A documentary about an 80s metal band that has just never quite made it, but is still trying heart and soul after thirty years. The movie has a similar vibe as The Wrestler: the catharsis of role playing and letting your hair down (literally); the struggle to penetrate an industry and get recognized; fading youth. Is the passion pathetic or admirable? Who’s this artist to judge.

Beauty in Trouble (2006)
No good. The moral of this Czech film is that there are some guys you just want to fuck. Fine. The leading actress is pretty.


Treeless Mountain (2008)
Real heartbreaking. A film made by the Korean-American directress So Yong Kim (in Korean) follows two sisters (age sixish and fourish) left by their mother with family members outside the urban center they know. The camera remains essentially at child-height, which along with the many close-ups, points sharply to the psychological effects of a mother-child non-bond. Magical thinking, separation anxiety, and parental narcissism – all over again.

Web Presence

I have a very spiffy new website. Please take a look. It really pays to go professional. If you’re on the lookout for a designer, I recommend Alda.

MollyStevensVisualArt.com

Also, they say Facebook is good for the career. So, I’ve started a fan page, which you can join by clicking that thing on the sidebar. I wish I had known about the fan page before I set up a personal page. I hope to get out of the latter soon.

I learned that Facebook viewing stimulates the same part of the brain as cocaine. I believe it. Last night, after a day of this madness, the words were jumping up and down in my book. Mama mia.

Roberta Report

I went warily to hear Roberta Smith speak last week, because she has become such a standard, a voice in my mind; I didn’t want to leave disappointed, like I did when I went to hear Al Green in Coney Island a few years back. I didn’t.

She spoke in metaphors and a lot about how art making and art viewing is an experience, albeit a mysterious and personal one, requiring not only self-awareness but awareness in general. In fact, she said art was a way to become conscious. It’s true. I had never put it into words like that and that will stick with me as a reason why I love/hate it so.

Her personal path was familiar: love, terror, depression, therapy, terror, therapy, turning thirty-five, coming in to her own voice. In terms of the power she wields, she spoke of it mostly in terms of credibility; that if she hadn’t built up the latter, she would not have so much of the former. She also put it into perspective, reminding us that what she does is ephemeral; an artwork has the potential to last much longer than the weight of her words. That’s true. Still, I wouldn’t want a bad review from her.

I went up to her at the end, and told her that her writing “sustained” me. That was a little hokey, sure. But, I’m glad I told her.

Miscellaneous

This is my favorite commercial viewed during the playoffs and World Series.

For its vivid description of what we see, this is my favorite passage in Peter Schjeldahl’s article on Arshile Gorky in last week’s New Yorker.

Textures of intensely sensitive touch, making forms quiver and squirm, are the most eloquent element in late Gorky.Color comes second, yet it, too, is extraordinary, evoking bodily wounds and inflammations and ungraspable subtleties of nature. Drawing, though busily abundant, feels incidental, like fleeting thoughts of a mind in the grip of an extreme emotion.

Better late than never

Donkey Trail.

What do you call these forms?

Shoots, spurts, jets, fingers,bobs, dicks, people?
(Molly Stevens, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20")

Bigger not better (in this case)

(Matisse, 1950, drawing for the Vence chapel)

I’m attempting my first mega-size drawings (4 feet by 5 feet). Blimey! One problem is not having a sense of the whole page as you’re working, an understanding of where you’re at, how one form relates to another. Instead, you have to kind of enter the page. Or in my case, get swallowed up by it. A friend told me, “you have to put your whole body into it.” Indeed the experience is physical. There’s simply no way to have your thinking mind dominate. This has both its advantages and disadvantages.

Any tips welcome. I already have a step ladder.

When Matisse was ill, he concocted a long bamboo pole-cum-pencil so that he could draw from his bed. I just love the distance from the page and the lightness of touch this tool offered.

The Trail.

Purgatory

(Raoul de Keyser, Hill, 1981)

The Raoul de Keyser show at David Zwirner consists of two rooms of drawings from 1979-1982, and one with recent small paintings. The work has a very human quality, presenting delicate forms described in thin layers. It’s evident that the artist has patiently germinated the shapes, not only on the surface of the canvases, but as sculptures; the rectangles are particular and intimate, and the canvas wraps around the stretchers like a present. Yet none of this is precious.

But the installation: there’s so much air in this antiseptic space, you feel like you’ve entered gallery purgatory.

Purgatory: a place of purification on the way to heaven. Sounds like the word “purge” is in there. So, here I go.

Belgium. Raoul de Keyser is from Belgium.



I have a personal connection to the country because I spent a hunk of my childhood there among an old and dying generation of self-described Wallons. This big-bossomed crowd was quite vocal (in French) about their deep disdain toward the Flemish, their language and culture, which in the 70s, had just become dominant. Their prejudice lodged itself somewhere deep in my subconscious mind. Sluice.

Luc Tuymans. I assume he’s Flemish, so I’ve decided not to like his work, which I’ve never seen except for in books.

Raoul de Keyser, judging from my praise above, has got to be a French-speaking Belgian. A Real Belgian.

Francis Alys. I bet he’s Flemish, but I like his work. Problem.

Bert Teunissen. I love his photographs (that's one above), which act as a Wallon Family Album for me. But I think he’s Flemish. Wait, he’s from the Netherlands. That’s ok.

James Ensor. He must be French-speaking because he’s old. Dead, in fact. Although I don’t like the work all that much, I’ve got to tip my hat to it.

Magritte. Good for Belgium, good for me.

Jacques Brel. Score for our team. Hey Luc, seems like we’re winning this one.

(Flag of Wallonia)

Mini Gallery Crawl

What did I like about these two shows? Not fluff, not irony, not kitsch, but personal imagery that is a tad melancholy but not in a self-important way.

Michael Williams at Canada.






















Matthew Chambers at Rental (closed).

Curate: from the Latin curare, to care. More on the Donkey Trail.

Covers

Can you believe this is what Urs Fischer looks like? (I scanned the pic from this week’s New Yorker, which includes a Calvin Tomkins piece about him). I don’t know, I expected something a little less casual. And fewer tattoos. Maybe you need tattoos to show at the New Museum?






















(Elizabeth Payton, 2004)

Now Luc Tuymans looks exactly like what I expected. Icy cold. Maybe not something you want in your living room.






















In a really nice article in today's Times about the writer Peter Dexter, it says:

Though he has friends who are writers, among them Richard Russo and Padgett Powell, he generally has a hard time with the success of others. “Jealousy’s the wrong word for what I usually feel,” he said. “It’s closer to hoping they get hit by a car.”

Back to covers. You know who really fits the part?

Patterns

(Philip Guston, Untitled, 1973, Oil on masonite)

A pattern has emerged: I’ll finally get a dealer to agree to come over and look at some work. The date is set usually a week or so in advance. Up until the moment of the visit, I’m engaged in a flurry of activity: I pump out just one more piece, I’m up and down ladders adjusting lights, I’m arranging piles of drawings, I’m preparing documentation on the computer, I’m all excited. The dealer comes. We have a decent chat. He or she leaves. I immediately get into bed and take a nap. I’m depressed for a week. I’m convinced I’m in denial about my artmaking. Wake up and smell the coffee.

From this state of mind, I usually turn to Philip Guston, especially Dore Ashton’s critical study. He always thrills me. But I suspect I’m just a wanna be. Get your own voice, girl.

I could quote the whole book, so I’ll just open it at random and give you what I find:

He often recounted the events around his first exhibition of the hooded rampagers, and he always mentioned the response of Willem de Kooning, one of the few painters who congratulated him wholeheartedly: “Philip,” he said, “do you know what the real subject is?” And Guston told how both exclaimed at the same time, “Freedom!” Guston added, “That’s the only possession the artist has – freedom to do whatever you can imagine.”

(Molly Stevens, [Untitled], 2009, Acrylic on masonite)

Donk Donk

We interrupt this program...

I just love chicken wings so much, especially when they’re dripping in spicy BBQ sauce and dipped in blue cheese. I have them with a Jameson or two or three at my local sports bar, where I can enjoy watching a game.

All this to say, there’s nothing better than baseball. It’s a perfect game of suspense where anything can happen within the confines of a set of rules. Plus, a great equalizer of sorts, it is the foundation of my conversations with men who usually consider me an elitist or snob.

Long live the playoffs. Enjoy.

Dis

(Bernard-Henri Lévy in the Times looking like a kook)

I’ve always had something against the Times’ chief art critic Michael Kimmelman because he never likes anything at all, and he’s always sure he’s right about that. Problem is, his arguments are usually pretty convincing. I mean, if you were to disagree with his opinion piece in yesterday’s paper about the Roman Polanski case, you’d basically be depraved beyond hope.

In the article, he presents a despicable picture of a tight knit club of French intellectuals and artists who consider morals “yada yada” and who get away with murder – literally – because their important contribution to culture calls for it. At the end of page two, you say to yourself “thank god I’M not like that.”

OK fine. But why do I always feel that he’s not in it for us but against us? Do we have a cultural dis-advocate at the helm of one of the world’s most powerful media outlets? Might a two-page article on what role this French cultural elite does play be more – I don’t know – inspiring?

Donkey Trail

Read my conversation with Alyssa Pheobus on the Donkey Trail. Good stuff about authenticity, chance and drawing.

The Fou Factor

The thing about the sketch approach is that you’re working on being both loose and rigorous at the same time. You’re leaving room for chance, for un-self-consciousness, while concentrating on improving a particular form or thought or sentence. For me, the thinking and rigor have always come more easily than the letting go. So I’m basically thrilled when I catch a glimpse of the unplanned peeping through. But in the end, it is a balance I’m after.

Chance for chance’s sake – just like expression for expression’s sake – bores me. I find it shallow, narrow. It is therapeutic, for sure, but it’s also self-indulgent if the work you’re making is for public viewing. Like Munch’s Scream: I’m not into it. Although I get where it comes from. Pierrot Le Fou, however, I love (the film had no screenplay).

So rigor is key for me. Another word for rigor might be boundary. Yes, everyone has a different definition of boundary.

All this to say that I enjoyed this quote in Anthony Lane’s portrait of filmmaker Michael Haneke (his films are most unenjoyable however) in this week’s New Yorker.

One tries to re-create the complexity of life, but in a completely orderly way. I don’t believe in chance during shooting. Chance is a gift of the moment, if that exists, but it’s an exception. You have to prepare a chance for an actor, for instance, and push him into a certain situation. But I don’t at all believe in the improvisational method.

Sketch Approach

Sometimes I feel like giving up the blog so bad.

I think the reason I keep it going is like the reason I go to the gym. It makes me feel better, it makes me look better. But do you realize what a pain it is?

A new tactic I’m trying is sketching. You don’t make one drawing, you make ten, and of the same thing. Then you make a bunch more the next time. Of the same thing. It’s a certain understanding that it takes making many to be able to start seeing what's really successful.

This approach has also served me well in the paintings I started last week. It takes a certain courage to completely obliterate a days worth of work by going over it, but with my sketching muscle building up, it’s getting easier, because the weight isn’t as heavy.

And, to my great surprise, I’m also able to apply the strategy to video work. I’m currently developing a new set of text-based interruptions for a video festival. I’m calling them 8 Electric Interruptions. That’s a still above.

So, what does this all mean for this writing here?

New image volley on the Donkey Trail

Check it out

Vermeer Viewing

I’m blog blocked, so I’ll just quote. Here’s Peter Schjeldahl’s description of Vermeer viewing at the Met from last week’s New Yorker (you may need a dictionary). Now this is a testament to the power of art (at least it is if you’re an art lover):

But a little patch of lapis-lazuli-tinted white, describing backlit linen in the head scarf of the Met’s “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,” would have killed me a long time ago, if paint could. […] The entering sunlight sustains all manner of ravishing adventures, throughout the picture, but the incidental detail of the head scarf has affected me like a life-changing secret, whispered to me alone. I revel in it each time I see it – having misremembered it, of course, since the last time, helpless to retain the nuance of the color and the velleity of the painter’s touch. “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” is a Sermon on the Mount of aesthetic value, in which the meek – or, at least, the humdrum, involving trifles of a prosperous but ordinary household, on an ordinary day – inherit the earth. Beholding it, I feel that my usual ways of looking are torpid to the point of dishonoring the world. At the same time, I know that my emotion is manipulated by deliberate artifice. An artist has contrived to lure me out of myself into an illusion of reality more fulfilling than any lived reality can be.

Mini Gallery Crawl

Two shows on the Lower East Side are well worth it.

Spaced Out / On Time, a selection of paintings by a group of artists (including my current fave Chris Martin, who seems to owe a lot to Dona Nelson, also represented) at Canada.

And Within Area Although, paint on photographs and a Cocteau-like sculptural installation by Carter, at Salon 94 Freemans.

See This

On occasion, I'll be posting selected work by various artists. No text, just image.

You can email jpegs, with title and size, for consideration for future "See This" posts. We start with moi.






















Molly Stevens, Tiptoe I, 9" x 12", 2009

I am a gong, you are a gong

I had my first gong bath, folks. While I was too scared to leave my body completely, that was certainly a possibility.

While lying on the floor, what you hear and feel are vibrations from an oceanic and at times frightening sound, which is obtained not only by drumming the instruments but by rubbing their metal surface. The most immediate effect for me was an intense desire to laugh, something that was particularly triggered by master Don Conreaux’s curious reflection, “I am a gong. You are a gong.” The symptom is apparently a common one, indicating, for one, that the solar plexus has been tickled. On more psychological terms, the need to laugh also comes from a release of tension, or perhaps as a release of tension.

Conreaux (that’s him above) had this to say in an interview:

[…] The idea is of these quasi-periodic patterns that come out of the chaos, the great ocean around us. We can begin to find these patterns. That’s actually what you listen for. When you teach people to play gong, you have to direct their ears into a particular area so they’ll catch onto it and go with it, but the patterns that you can create with the gong are in a strange place. They are in a non-dimensional world. […] You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. Everything seems to be right there, like the thousand angels on the head of a pin. […]
I think it’s fascinating. It makes you exercise a certain part of the brain that has to do with intuition. 90% of our brain is still undeveloped, and it’s all in that area of the frontal cerebral cortex, which has to do with intuition. So, as we help people develop their intuition, they use more of their brain. I think that’s going to be the great value of this music.

Fall Preview

(Urs Fischer, You, 2007)

Ever feel like you’re making, making, making, thinking, evolving, envisioning a future, but absolutely no one really cares?

Ever feel like you’re in it alone, really alone? Like you’d really like someone to ask you everyday how your work is going and be interested, so interested in fact that this person would even make a few calls for you?

Ever think the reason why the conversation veers from your art to your day job, or to your friends’ lives, or your family, or your financial hurdles, is not because it’s the natural flow of dialogue, but because your work actually sucks?

Would you keep making work even if you thought it sucked? Is there a reason to?

Ever notice how shitty you are at self-promotion?

Ever know that you’d be a great gallery artist, that you could make enough work, that you’d be heaven to work with, that if only someone would let you in, you’d do more than your share?

Ever just want to unsubscribe from those monthly mailings from the handful of galleries you can bear to visit, cancel the Artforum, skip over the listings in the New Yorker?

Ever wonder how that motherfucker got the show?

Every wonder why it’s so hard for them just to answer the goddamn email?

Welcome to the new art season. Enjoy.