back to business

Cary S. Leibowitz (CandyAss)

So I am back...well at least physically back...but still working on that mental part. It is funny because I am putting together the next show at YCG which is conveniently called RUNAWAY (which by the way opens next friday the 13th.)

Here's an article by Saltz that came out about a week ago but in case you missed it...let's just say Jerry isn't big on biennials:

"...Biennials are free-for-alls, but they’re also autocratic throwbacks to the time of kings. Often, they’re selected by one czarlike curator with absolute dictatorial power. These curators, however earnest, can simultaneously be annoying and sanctimonious while foisting their own pious, profligate or shaky taste on everyone else. Yet you have to feel for them; whatever they do, almost everyone will have 55 reasons why their shows stink. A common but almost never uttered one is, 'It’s a bad show if I’m not in it.'

There are currently more than 60 biennials and triennials around the world. Biennial culture is so prevalent that curator Dan Cameron and I have joked about publishing a monthly magazine called Biennial, dealing with nothing but these shows...

...take Great Britain’s current representative in Venice, Tracey Emin, who according to the U.K.’s Observer toured five-star hotels in Venice last year, examining bedding thread counts to decide where she’d stay. She also requested her own boat, and had Julian Schnabel detour to Venice by private jet en route from Rome to Cannes to advise her on the installation. Not that it matters, but she made 60 of the drawings meant for the first room of her pavilion in just five hours. Not that it matters more, but the Museum of Modern Art just put a reserve on half of them. Biennials are big business..."