Today two art critics/curators came to visit the museum, one from Australia and the other from Sweden. She was asked to speak with them and welcome them to the museum, so she did. She asked politely what brought them to Syracuse and they said they had been visiting NYC and had come up to visit a friend who was teaching philosophy at SU. She asked if they had an interest in contemporary art and if they had gone to the Armory Show. When they nodded yes, she launched into her thoughts on the Armory Show and the galleries she had seen. She suddenly realized how starved she was to talk to knowledgeable people about art. She was so hungry for a two-way discussion that she was willing to try to engage complete, but promising, strangers on the subject.

Later as she thought over the event, she hoped they had seen her as friendly and not desperate.

She went to NYC this weekend and stayed with her friend Kim Boattner up in the South Bronx. She was delighted to find that Kim had set herself up with a beautiful, spacious loft.

The art in Chelsea was fabulous. Her favorite was Sophie Calle’s work inspired by Paul Auster’s character Maria in Leviathan, who he acknowledged, in turn, as having been inspired by Sophie Calle. The mingling of the real artist and the fictional character was highlighted through a series of conceptual artworks where the artist had eaten foods of only one color for the day, organized her day around one letter of the alphabet, and had birthday parties where she invited one guest for every year of her life with one person being someone she had never met, then saving all the gifts as the documentation of the experience.

Her other favorite was Jessica Stockholder’s installations at Gorney Bravin + Lee. The artist’s sensitivity to color, texture, and form left her breathless. One of the sculptures featured a fan with a green string attached to it which playfully licked at a lamp’s trembling red shade sitting within a white bathtub inset. Her entire body became sexually charged while looking at the work.

She also loved Aligheiro e Boetti’s map textiles at Gagosian, Rosemarie Trockel’s funny, yet poignant videos Manu’s Spleen and Manu’s Spleen III at Barbara Gladstone, Thomas Demand’s large scale photos of his own paper and cardboard constructions at 303 Gallery, Martin Kersels’ Tumble Room at Deitch Projects, and (of course) Paul McCarthy’s installations at Luhring Augustine, Deitch Projects and the New Museum.

The Armory Show at the piers was an encyclopedic view of contemporary art. It was exhausting, but it offered a touching portrait of the dog-eat-dog commerce of the contemporary art world. She swore she would never go to another one.

It had been an amazing weekend. Saturday night was the closing reception for her exhibition. She was surprised when every one of her drawings had sold. She hadn't taken any money home, it had all gone to the gallery to help pay for the cost of the reception and equipment needed for installation, but she was still pleased. Men had bought her work. Men she didn't know.

She celebrated by going to Wal-Mart and buying almost $90 worth of supplies to create new work. It struck her as funny that as a student she had always bought supplies at art stores and now she bought them at Wal-Mart, Salvation Army, and Michael's Craft Supplies.

She brought everything up to her attic studio and began to work. She loved her attic space. Kim preferred the basement--a dark, damp underground--but she liked to sit at the top of the house, where the everyday, mundane world was beneath her and the tops of the trees swayed with the wind just outside the attic windows. It was a place where she could safely be herself, where the music could pour through her as she opened herself to the homesickness for New York City and her friends.

She found another artist getting rid of everything. It was definitely a trend.

Man to destroy all he owns for art exhibit

A Londoner is to destroy all his possessions in the name of art.
Over the next two weeks, Michael Landy, an installation artist, will reduce everything he owns to dust as part of an exhibition called Break Down.

Some 7,006 objects - including a Saab 900 car and rare artworks - will be destroyed in a former C&A store.

By the end of the exhibition, all he will have left will be a cat named Rats and his girlfriend, the Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing.

Over the past year Mr Landy has made an inventory of everything he owns, from odd socks and David Bowie singles.

Each item will be placed on a conveyer belt in the Oxford Street shop and a group of 10 operatives will begin the painstaking task of meticulous destruction.

Eventually everything will be shredded or granulated so that nothing but particles of the broken down material will remain.

Mr Landy says the exhibition is an examination of society's romance with consumerism.

"It's about the amount of raw material that goes into making objects and about the lifespan of things. But the title also reflects an emotional break down," he said.

While many of the items will be worthless utensils such as kitchen equipment, Mr Landy will also be destroying his valuable art collection, which includes pieces by artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

The exhibition will run for two weeks from February 10 at 499-523 Oxford Street, London.

She and Kim went for coffee and talked about art and how much an artist should care about what others think about their work.

"When you think about it, other people's criticisms are based on their own limited imaginations," her friend Kim said, "And who wants to be defined by that?"

"That's great. You could write a self-help book based on that idea," she said.

"I'm full of self help, baby." Kim answered.

She'd been trying to put the George W. Bush thing out of her mind. Then the other night, she was half-snoozing while watching the McNeil report on PBS and, in her sleep, she heard Bush saying, "It's not too big and it's not too small. It's exactly the right size." For some reason, in her stupor, she thought he was talking about his penis. It woke her up.

It turned out he was talking about his proposed tax cut.

Today she read this article from the Associated Press wire:

Old Baby Skeleton Found in Attic
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Feb. 7, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- Contractors installing duct work in an attic found a suitcase containing the skeleton of a baby who apparently died more than 20 years ago, police said.

Two heating and cooling workers found the suitcase Tuesday in the attic of a two-story house in a well-to-do neighborhood of northwest Washington. "When they attempted to remove it, the suitcase basically came apart in their hands,'' police Lt. Josiah M. Eaves said.

He said the blue suitcase appeared to be more than 30 years old. The skeleton, which was wrapped in cloth, "appears to have been there quite a long time, in excess of 20 years,'' Eaves said. Police estimated that the baby was 1 or 2 months old at death.
The brick, semidetached house was built in 1928 and was occupied by the same family until the mid-1990s. The last of four elderly sisters who lived there died in 1995 at the age of 102, and the house was sold five years ago.

Neighbor Beryl Hall, 81, who has lived across the street from the house since 1963, said she was shocked by the finding.
"They were all little Christian ladies,'' she said of the elderly sisters.

The current owner told police she never went into the attic, and police said she is not suspected of wrongdoing. Police said they were trying to locate relatives of the previous owners.

Eaves said an autopsy would be done to determine the precise age of the infant, and about when he or she died.

Filed under things she wished she'd done first: http://www.atavar.com/

Last night in a dream she found herself in the company of her “mother” who was a gallery owner, her “mother’s” fiancé who was a curator at a contemporary art museum, a “sister” named Destiny, and her old boss from the New Museum, Dan Cameron. They were standing inside a fabulous house talking about art and deals. Dan was acting very strange and as they finished the conversation and everyone went their own way, she figured out why: she was dreaming. So finding herself in a semi-lucid dream state she ran to find each member of her dream.


First, she found Dan. “Dan, why are you in my dream? What do you represent?”

“Your loneliness,” he said, “your homesickness for New York City.”



Next, she found the woman, who in this dream was her mother. “Mother, what is your message to me? What do you represent?”

“Sex is power,” the mother said, flashing her diamond engagement ring.

“But, do you have to marry?” she asked.

“Of course not.”


Then she found the girl, who in this dream was her sister Destiny. “Destiny, what do you represent?”

“You must watch your diet,” Destiny said. “Especially your sugar intake! You must do so immediately.”

“I promise I will,” she said.


And then she found the man, who in this dream was her mother’s fiancé and a curator. She stripped off her clothes and he stripped off his. He had a long, thin penis. “Needle prick,” she said. She fucked him until he was dead.

Last night she and Lisa went to hear Grand Theft Audio. After the performance one of the boys from the band came over and asked if they wanted to go hang out with the band at a pub next door. She could tell that the boy was interested in Lisa, with her thin, long-legged body. She was just an unfortunate part of the package, “the friend.” She knew the boy was probably reading things right, Lisa would sleep with him and she wouldn’t, but she wanted the recognition--that compliment of desire--that Lisa inspired. It made her feel ugly, frumpy, and unwanted.