A New Kind of Boom by Jerry Saltz

I hope to seen Mr. Saltz in December although it will most likely be a very brief greeting since my personal schedule will change dramatically this year. I will be at, and report on, Art Basel Miami Beach, but probably miss more of the satellite fairs this year.

A NEW KIND OF BOOM by Jerry Saltz:

“Despite the dire predictions, galleries and artists are busting out.

In mid-August at the Queens Museum, the intrepid artist Duke Riley — once arrested for piloting his makeshift submarine too close to the Queen Mary 2 — staged a mock battle between art museums in a Flushing Meadows pool. Employees of various institutions, ensconced in homemade ships, laid siege to each others’ vessels; the crowd was encouraged to get in the water and throw tomatoes. Riley conjured something intoxicating and joyous that had been missing of late: the ambition, competition and sheer effort it takes to make art and museums great.

Two weeks earlier, I sat transfixed listening to Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, a cutting and cute send-up of art history by a loose collective of young artists known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. These human bullshit detectors aim to provide “an alternative to everything” — their mission, to call out an art world “mired in irrelevance.” At the event, artists lectured from a pithy script dealing with “contemporary art as a futures market,” “corrupt business practices” and Mark Rothko. Since the summer, the collective has opened an actual school that anyone can attend, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a.k.a. BHQFU, a free, unaccredited school in Tribeca where artists propose courses and interested others sign up to take them. As the Bruces write, “The $200,000 debt model of art education is simply untenable.” Amen.”

(Via artnet Magazine.)