BACK IN NYC... A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH A CITY IN CRISIS

Shops are empty, so as restaurants and the streets. Unlike every other year, tourists are missing from the streets. Shopkeepers are aggressive, but they can't magically put money in the pockets and enthusiasm in the hearts of the few who dare to go in. Obama's hope posters and change buttons are on the walls and on people's jackets, but nobody really talks about politics, instead, everyone keeps checking the stocks on their smart phones.

Last Friday, on the first day of our visit, We ran into a bunch of Vancouver art people in the Art Book Fair. The artist Noam Gonick took us to their booth and treated us with Canadian hospitality. Jeff Khonsari of Fillip mentioned my passionate performance at Jaque Rancier talk in UBC last winter. He had the courage to admit to me how pinpoint accurate I was to calling the French theorist on his bullshit about the impossibility of the end of Capitalism.

melanie O'brien at Artspeak table seemed worried about the state of the economy and the silence of the Canadian media regarding the state of our ever weakening dollar.

Thanks to Illingworth Kerr Gallery, I was able to score a copy of Tim Lee's new catalogue. I may hate the artist for his lack of social skills and his indiscreet display of self importance, but I have to admit, the more I read on his work, the more I like it. Can we like the art and dislike the artist? I think so. But we also can dislike the art and the artist, which is my case with the crap, oh sorry the craft of Brian Jungen. He had donated envelopes of 'art ideas' on sale at the Artspeak for 50 dollars. Excuse my bluntness, but do i need Brian to tell me how I can take some sport thing and remake it into an art object like his now very boring Nike Masks?

Here is a very good article on the state of contemporary art from New York Magazine. I quite enjoyed reading it and happen to agree with the writer.

To be continued...