I am not going to uncritically reinforce this event, to be held Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel.  Why?  The Ace has up until quite recently been an unpretenious, relatively relaxed place to hang out after work, with a friendly and diverse crowd.  It hasn’t been too cool.  There hasn’t been a door policy, you’ve been able to find a spot to hang out with friends, family, or colleagues; you’ve been able to get work done at one of the long tables.  My fear is that this event represents the end of a comfortable Ace and the beginning of the Ace’s five minutes of attention as a Purple magazine spot, as the new Jane (forgive me for not knowing what there was in between).

via Rhizome and White Box Projects’ press release:

Since his first Apparition on Tournez Manege (1993), Matthieu Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls ‘Apparitions’ on TV and in the media. (In French, the word apparition means both ‘apparition’ and ‘appearances’). ForPandora’s Sound Box, Laurette will develop a new performative series of Apparitions, airing on various American national TV channels from October 27 through November 1st, and continuously on the Video Box in White Box’s exterior window. For the opening on November 2nd, Matthieu Laurette will conceive a site-specific related performative event.

Here is Matthieu’s appearance on The Today Show, NBC, on October 30 (really only the first few seconds):

Many will probably find a gesture like Laurette’s comparable to a very lighthearted form of reality hacking. But to penetrate American network television with a figure such as Jacques Ranciere, who operates in a sphere that has virtually no presence in the medium (in the US anyway), and to do so with clever, not ham-fisted, detournement, actually seems refreshingly powerful. Also, in that the JACQUES RANCIERE IS SO COOL sign bobs/floats around in a disembodied fashion, it really does resemble an apparition. I wonder if doing this during a Halloween special was intended.

Perhaps it’s a stretch, but I am reminded of Chris Burden’s 1972 piece TV Hijack, in which he held his interview hostage, literally commandeering the television medium for artistic purposes. What’s interesting is how two generations of artists think to execute an effectively similar gesture in such different ways.

Chris Burden, TV Hijack, 1972

You can read a full account of TV Hijack on Rhizome

We usually don’t re-blog, but here it is, re-blogged from mirror.co.uk, ArtReview’s top 100 art people of 2009.  Naturally, it’s value is comedic above all (there are some semi-inventive entries), but it will definitely give ArtReview a healthy traffic spike.

via Mirror:

The list is compiled by ArtReview staff, in consultation with a global network of contributing editors and an international panel.

The eighth annual ranking of the most powerful players in the contemporary art world – the ArtReview Power 100 – is published in ArtReview’s November issue and a website – www.artreview100.com – is also featuring those listed.

Here is the ArtReview Power 100:

1. Hans Ulrich Obrist
2. Glenn D Lowry
3. Sir Nicholas Serota
4. Daniel Birnbaum
5. Larry Gagosian
6. Francois Pinault
7. Eli Broad
8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
9. Iwona Blazwick
10. Bruce Nauman
11. Iwan Wirth
12. David Zwirner
13. Jeff Koons
14. Jay Jopling
15. Marian Goodman
16. Agnes Gund
17. Takashi Murakami
18. Alfred Pacquement
19. Fischli & Weiss
20. Mike Kelley
21. Barbara Gladstone
22. Steven A. Cohen
23. Dominique Levy & Robert Mnuchin
24. Adam D. Weinberg
25. Marc Glimcher
26. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo
27. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal
28. Ann Philbin
29. Matthew Higgs
30. Matthew Marks
31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
32. Gavin Brown
33. Ralph Rugoff
34. Liam Gillick
35. Anne Pasternak
36. Dakis Joannou
37. John Baldessari
38. Isa Genzken
39. Paul McCarthy
40. Michael Govan
41. Eugenio Lopez
42. Cindy Sherman
43. Ai Weiwei
44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
45. Annette Schonholzer & Marc Spiegler
46. Diedrich Diederichsen
47. Richard Prince
48. Damien Hirst
49. Bernard Arnault
50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
52. Joel Wachs
53. Victor Pinchuk
54. Udo Kittelmann
55. Marina Abramovic
56. Michael Ringier
57. Gerhard Richter
58. Richard Serra
59. RoseLee Goldberg
60. Kasper Konig
61. Roberta Smith
62. Monika Spruth & Philomene Magers
63. Germano Celant
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. Peter Schjeldahl
66. Beatrix Ruf
67. Okwui Enwezor
68. Nicolas Bourriaud
69. Karen & Christian Boros
70. Isabelle Graw
71. Maurizio Cattelan
72. Charles Saatchi
73. Jerry Saltz
74. Jasper Johns
75. Louise Bourgeois
76. Thaddaeus Ropac
77. Mera & Don Rubell
78. Thelma Golden
79. Sarah Morris
80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
82. Paul Schimmel
83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
84. Sadie Coles
85. Daniel Buchholz
86. Victoria Miro
87. Maureen Paley
88. Johann Konig
89. Nicolai Wallner
90. Maria Lind
91. Massimo De Carlo
92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
93. Rirkrit Tiravanija
94. Toby Webster
95. Long March Space
96. Nicholas Logsdail
97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
98. Claire Hsu
99. Peter Nagy
100. Glenn Beck

48 years ago an unknown author called Richard Yates released his first novel, Revolutionary Road. It was recently adapted into a star-cast Hollywood movie. When the book came out people were shocked by how deftly it portrayed the dull reality of post-war American life. It follows a young couple that settles into the suburbs but gets destroyed as they try to live out the American dream. It was a major success, a finalist for the nation book award alongside Heller’s Catch-22 and Yates won acclaim from writers like Vonnegut, Stryon, Tennesee Williams, Cheever and Richard Ford. But the rest of his career was tainted with disappointment; he never hit the same peak of success. By the time of his death in 1992 his name was out of mention and most of his books were out of print. A tragic story, so with the release of the film, questions arise about how it conveys Yates’ book and his legacy.

For starters, the story’s female protagonist, April Wheeler, is far more complex in the book than she is in the film. In the movie she is portrayed as a beautiful but tortured woman, the dove who is pushed to madness by the dull and misunderstanding world around her. In the book, April is largely insane to begin with. This provides for one of the most interesting and ongoing counterpoints in the novel, one that is not present in the film. In the book, she comes from a broken home (her wealthy parents were wed on a cruise ship by its captain and then divorced not a year later), tries to abort her first child, has (presumably) only slept with one man in her whole life, and is ultimately an icily manipulative and selfish person. The rich depth of her character is not done justice in Sam Mendes’ film.

Also, while April is the focus of the movie, the book is told largely from the perspective of her husband, Frank. One of the novel’s central themes is his quest to prove his manhood. He has an exciting affair with a secretary (which is touched upon in the film), teaches himself how to stop apologizing to people (“Did a lion apologize? Hell, no.” he thinks after he coldly ends his affair with the secretary), and by the end of the book he learns to have a sense of indifference to nearly everything (“this is my problem, that’s your problem.”) His character portrays the emergence of a new American man: confused and repressed. The Frank Wheeler of the film is a simpler man, one merely concerned with keeping his life under control.

Lastly, what is not conveyed is Yates’ sense of humor. There are passages in the novel that are laugh-out-loud funny. The suffocating, repressed nature of the suburbs provides him with countless opportunities to pick and jab at its absurdity (like when Frank, over drinks with the neighbors, embarrassingly realizes he’s telling them, almost verbatim, a story he’s already told them before) In the film, this humor is non-existent, as if it was flushed out for Oscar purposes.

Of course it’s an adaptation and not everything can be conveyed. Mendes tried his best. Its safe to say that what he made was an attractive drama about the tragedy of suburban life and the American dream, it is not, like the book is, a brooding examination of life in the anxiety of the 50′s. Yates wouldn’t be disappointed but he definitely wouldn’t be satisfied. His book mercilessly portrays every aspect of the Wheeler’s painfully ordinary lives. The film is not as dismal and that makes all the difference.

This small, three room exhibit at the Moma is probably one of the most overlooked in the museum, especially with artists like Joan Miro and Van Gough currently on display. This is unfortunate because it is also one of the most interesting.

Looking at Music chronicles some of the art that emerged as a result of the 60’s/70’s experimental sound revolution, a time when musicians were starting to use digital effects, dissonance, and minimalism in their work. Painters, composers, filmmakers, and writers began to take notice and were eager to implement these same elements into their own work.

The first thing you see when you enter the exhibit is a haunting projection of John Lennon on the wall. He’s looking at you from under a dark mop of hair while he stands in the center of a courtyard. You can hear the crisp sound of cars and birds in the background. Slowly, he starts to open his mouth. “Hi,” he says, in a long drawn out growl. And you just feel like you spoke with John Lennon.

It’s a piece by Yoko Ono, which is surprising of course, because her name is associated with the breakup of The Beatles and not interesting thought-provoking art.

Also besides the entrance are a series of compositions by composer John Cage. At the time he was greatly influenced by eastern music, so he tried experimenting with obscure forms of musical notation. One “piece” is notated with a series of dots and circles spread across a graph paper. Two music students staring at it were able to make some sense of the thing, “well, that dot must be a staff, and that speck has to be a quarter note,” they observed.

A contemporary of Cage’s, composer Nam Jan Paik, turned a mini television set into an abstract musical instrument. A bright white line is projected running diagonally across the TV screen. It stays this way, shining through the black. According to Paik the bright line is akin to what a single note of music would be like if it was sounded forever.

There is a clipping from a 1965 issue of The Village Voice. A dark chalked drawing of a woman walks across the page, obscuring the article. The paper was printed that way, with a portion of the story almost impossible to read. This piece signifies how widespread the energy and excitement for experimentation was at the time. Even publications were willing to try something new.

The last portion of the show examines the emergence of experimental music videos. In the “Penny Lane” video, by the Beatles, the band is shown roaming around London, traveling through gardens by horse, and finally having tea in the middle of a park. Strange stuff. In another music video, “Secret Agent Man,” by Devo, the band is shown wearing disturbing Ken Barbie-like masks as they rock out in a dingy factory basement.

The best part of the exhibit however, is watching peoples’ reactions. A pleasant old lady, for example, put on headphones to listen to Steve Riech’s piece, “Come out,” from 1966. The piece consists of a looped voice, which is then slowly sped up to produce a blurring warbling trance. The lady started off with a smile, which then slowly turned into a bemused grin, with then turned into helpless confusion, and she was forced to take the headphones off.

In an art world championed by monumental sculptures and large-format prints, Elizabeth Peyton, painter of small oil portraits and aquatint street scenes, would seem an unlikely success. But such is the mystery and romanticism that shrouds the elusive artists’ career; one that begun in a Chelsea hotel room and continues now in the monumental white box of The New Museum’s main gallery. Almost fifteen years and over a hundred paintings later, there’s still much to be resolved.

In looking for answers within Peyton’s work, we’re forced to contemplate her subject matter which ranges from historical figures (Napoleon, Ludwig II of Bavaria) to more recent celebrities (Kurt Cobain, Jarvis Cocker) to friends and family, many of who are famous in their own right, including the artists Matthew Barney and Piotr Uklański and the designer Marc Jacobs. The later are the most interesting, for what at first appears as systematic star fucking on closer inspection becomes a meditation on the temporality of life.

A portrait of the rapper Eminem, casually titled Em, finds the celebrity in a contemplative, vulnerable state, uneasily positioned against a monotonous grey backdrop while a portrait of the Oasis front man Liam Gallagher and Pulp rocker Jarvis Cocker captures a private moment between two very public figures. The people that populate Peyton’s paintings are not always famous, as in Spencer Walking, in which a friend walks into a bustling city landscape, but even as so they are cast in an iconic light surrounded by figures like Walt Whitman and Keith Richards.

Such romantic a notion could only be fostered by a gallerist like Gavin Brown, Peyton’s long time collaborator who has been known to allow his artists free range within his Chelsea space (even letting the artist Urs Fischer dig a crater into the marble of his gallery’s floor.) Peyton met Brown in 1995 while living in New York, a recent SVA graduate and Brown an aspiring gallerist on the brink of buying his first space. Peyton’s first show was mounted in a small room in The Chelsea Hotel, which Brown had rented allowing visitors to request a key at the front desk. The iconic locale, where Bob Dylan wrote Highway 66 and Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning, is a monument of artistic death and rebirth, which provided the perfect setting for Peyton’s faded icons.

But here, finally on display in a museum, they seem out of place; naked without setting and bare without context. Against white walls, Peyton’s work looses its figurative duality but engages in an irony that so very fitting for her work. Spaced against the walls, lit from overhead, every piece, every fleeting moment seems to live forever.