City People ala Giacommetti

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This small bronze by Alberto Giacommetti at MoMA has always enchanted me more than its small size and simple compisition seem to allow. I love how his contoured bronze people seem strong despite their unnatural slenderness and the sense of movement overall.

Entitled City Square (1948), for me it encapsulates how people walking by each other in the city, each absorbed in his own world and striding purposefully. This is probably true anywhere, but I associate the sculpture and the feeling with New York City.

Sonic Youth: A Case of Art and Rock n’ Roll

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There used to be few things cooler than expiremental guitar band Sonic Youth. Despite the unfortunate fact that years pass regardless of one’s coolness, Sonic Youth has remained vibrant and interesting. I don’t even mean that in a senior citizens way. Recent activities include: Sonic Youth Etc.: Sensational Fix, an multidisciplinary and collaborative art exhibition, and playing along with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to choreographer Merce Cunningham’s latest project at BAM.

So in addition to rocking out, they’re doing art. Or as their press release documents, exposing the band’s historical connection to the art world:

“By the early 1980s, an alternative scene emerged in downtown New York City in which music and visual art were tightly connected. Both the raw and rebellious attitude of punk and the atonal, violent guitar music with abstract lyrics of no-wave inspired artists like Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon to play in bands, while performances by these ‘art-rock’ bands were held in exhibition spaces and so-called ‘art lofts’…. The natural crossover between art and experimental music, as was apparent in those days, laid the foundations for the multidisciplinary activities of Sonic Youth. “

Sensational Fix is in Europe until 2010. (It won’t be coming to New York as far as I know.) However, there is a great looking catalog. The 720 pg. book is limited to 600 copies and includes two 7″ records, each one recorded by a different member of the band.

Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Art’s commercial aptitude was apparent last night in the unlikeliest of places—my block. I’ve written about the spread of gallery hopping in Manhattan, but it’s officially reached the last stop of the F train in Manhattan. Seth Price had an opening at Reena Spaulings Fine Art last night. I googled the location, 165 East Broadway. I knew the google map was wrong because there was nothing on the block it showed but a Chinese restaurant.

How wrong was I, I discovered when I climbed the old stairs after a crowd of mid-20s folks who seemed to know where they were going. The floor above the Chinese restaurant is Reena Spaulings Fine Art. Instead of 4 people milling about, there were over 40 drinking, smoking and chatting around—oh yes—the art.

Sitting around the corner from said gallery now, having coffee, watching Chinese people practice New Years dances in the park across the way, the scene of the neighborhood just gets better now that I can include galleries. I understand why Renee Spauling and the LaViolaBanks Gallery, also on East Broadway, are here. The spaces are enormous. There are many tiny gallery spaces in the area immediately north of here, but these are massive. Based off last night, I’d say they draw a good crowd.

But where was art’s commercial potential last night? That takes us back to the art; Seth Price’s works are so polished and intelligent they might sell themselves even in this market.


Stressing the importance of dates, Price has created a series of calendar pieces where he has painted older paintings in a square in the top of a canvas and a calendar locating them in time along the bottom. For me, works like the one featured above, where molded objects or faces break through a flat, plasticine surface were less explicit and more appealing. I didn’t stay for the video, which I suspect was the best part.