Michael Wang

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  diary November 02, 2005

  Double Bill

  New York

  The opening festivities for P.S. 1's batch of fall shows felt like a fancy version of their summer “Warm Up” series, with crowds hanging out on the courtyard steps, clutching beers in plastic cups, and even shelling out a five-dollar entry charge. Any attempt to navigate the former elementary school’s labyrinthine interior required a map to plot where each show or artist had set up camp. Photographer Stephen Shore, stationed in the café, busily signed copies of American Surfaces, his new monograph of road-trip shots from 1972 and '73; Dutch shutterbug Ari Marcopoulos and his wife presided over

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  diary October 07, 2005

  Like Father Like Daughter

  New York

  Legendary Feature Inc. director Hudson describes the “more inspired . . . larger jumps” in Tom Friedman's latest work as a function of “maturing, expanding one's consciousness, expanding one's thinking.” The delicate, precious (yet conceptually rigorous) new works crowding the modest space precluded the possibility of an opening party, and on the first day of the show connoisseurs and the curious alike were admitted by appointment only. Continuing his Wittgensteinian explorations into the nature of experience (with an Einsteinian bent), Friedman tinkers in paper, paint, Styrofoam, and stuffing,

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  diary September 26, 2005

  Pop Shop

  New York

  Last Wednesday, following months of art-world speculation and a plug in Vogue, former Gagosian staffers Stefania Bortolami and Amalia Dayan (granddaughter of eyepatch-wearing erstwhile Israeli defense minister Moshe) opened their spanking-new 2,700-square-foot Chelsea gallery. Bejeweled socialites and Prada-clad collectors mingled with artists, MFA candidates, and the occasional stray bike messenger who had stumbled upon the two fully stocked open bars in the garage-turned-party-venue/performance space adjoining the gallery. The space, itself a converted garage, was designed by veteran art-world

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  diary August 02, 2005

  Dog and Pony Show

  Brooklyn

  “This is Jeffrey at his finest,” announced Steve Powers, a.k.a. ESPO, assessing the Italian dinner served up in honor of the Dreamland Artist Club, Powers’s urban beautification project which, for the past two years, has recruited mostly New York-based artists to create signage for Coney Island businesses, concession stands, and arcade games. To celebrate, Jeffrey Deitch and non-profit Creative Time teamed up to throw a real “island party” in Brooklyn. Held in the sprawling Gargiulo’s restaurant (whose outdoor mosaics and plaster fountains have a new addition, Dreamland’s crowning achievement:

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  diary July 05, 2005

  Mother's Courage

  New York

  The second and final performance of Robert Melee’s Talent Show last Thursday at The Kitchen drew a sold-out crowd. (At the last minute colorful pillows were thrown on the floor in front, kindergarten-style, for additional seating). The homage to current downtown performance ran the queer gamut from the haute-foppish pretension of Wayne Koestenbaum’s poetry reading (“But relatedness—Winnicott, Klein?—shines in her eyes”) to the pure gender-bending ridiculousness of Julie Atlas Muz’s anatomically perverse “Mr. Pussy,” which eschewed vagina dentata in favor of the relatively ineffectual

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  diary May 27, 2005

  Market Forces

  New York

  Last Saturday afternoon, the thirty-eigth class of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art and the third class in the ISP’s Architecture and Urban Studies program held a “non-opening” for their end-of-year exhibition. A crowd made up mostly of the students and their friends attended the “non-event” (as the invite billed it), held in the basement of the ISP’s Lafayette Street space, and a sort of knowing camaraderie permeated the show (which had actually “opened” the day before). The program’s legacy of socially engaged practice certainly encourages a particular approach to artmaking,

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  diary April 06, 2005

  Right Stuff

  New York

  With the Bush twins sighted recently at hipster hotspot Freeman’s and indie provocateur Vincent Gallo proclaiming his admiration for George W. and Nixon while promoting his last film (spawning the label “hipcon”), painters Mathew Cerletty and David Scanavino’s “Neocon”—a show of young downtown artists (and one father figure, Robert Moskowitz) at Gavin Brown’s Passerby—couldn’t be more timely. I was half expecting a show cooked up by the Project for the New American Century (the invite even sported a Ronald Reagan commemorative stamp), and the show did offer up a sampling of neocon-inspired

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  diary March 04, 2005

  The Dye Is Cast

  New York

  The undiscovered, the up-and-coming, and the never-will-be snaked along the cobbles of Wooster, around Grand, and back down Greene on Monday morning, braving a twenty-three-degree wind chill and an approaching snowstorm. It looked like the usual throng outside a Deitch Projects opening, but this time the kids were lining up in hope of being selected for the new reality-TV series Artstar. Created by artist Christopher Sperandio and dealer James Fuentes in collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch, the show will follow nine artists chosen to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch’s gallery. In the