Ms. Vassell gives the art a run for its money and downtown art czar Jeffrey Deitch a guided tour…

Supertouch homegirl and allstar DEITCH GALLERY director NICOLA VASSELL is one of the downtown NYC art scene’s most important operators. This week finds the NEW YORK TIMES dedicating an almost unprecedented amount of ink to profiling the gorgeous young aesthete, one that might just emerge as one of the city’s new powerbrokers when the art world finally rights itself in the coming years (decades?):

A SHAPER OF TALENT FOR A CHANGING ART WORLD
By Felicia R. Lee
February 2, 2009 Source: NYTimes

The wall labels were missing. The inventory needed to be finished. And where was the sign for the shuttle bus to the gallery, a former warehouse west of the Wynwood art district in Miami? Just hours before the opening party for “It Ain’t Fair,” an exhibition of more than 30 emerging artists on the fringe of Art Basel Miami Beach, the glamorous, outsize international art fair held every year in early December, the O.H.W.O.W. gallery (for Our House West of Wynwood) was still strewn with forlorn boxes, the wall stacked with cases of beer that only hinted at the festivities to come.

“No one will ever know,” Nicola Vassell, a director at the Deitch Projects gallery in Manhattan, said of the mess. Her comment was for Kathy Grayson, also a Deitch director and, like Ms. Vassell, one of several curators of “It Ain’t Fair.”

Ms. Vassell, 30, began working as an intern at Deitch in SoHo in 2005, when both optimism and price tags ran high. But by the time “It Ain’t Fair” was poised to open, on Dec. 2, the previous month had easily seen the worst two weeks in the art market in more than a decade. A tumbling stock market and cascading problems on Wall Street had made buyers scarce, as the contemporary art world pondered the impact of broader economic woes. Ms. Vassell, a former model and a Jamaican immigrant, found herself facing the question of how to build a career in a suddenly contracting industry. Click HERE to continue reading…

2009 really is SHEPARD FAIREY’s year; we’re just living in it. On the eve of today’s press preview of his massive retrospective art show at the INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON, Shepard spoke to CHARLIE ROSE last nite about the intricacies of branding a presidential campaign from street level.

JR’s first installation best viewed with Google Earth…

French outdoor installation artist (call it “street art” if you must) extraordinaire JR continues his epic 28 MILLIMETER: WOMEN Project with the unveiling this week of his most ambitious stage yet in KIBERA, KENYA. Reconnecting with the subjects he photographed over a year ago in the city—one of the largest slums in Africa—at the start of his mission to portray on a grand scale the unseen and unempowered women of the world, the reunion was an especially poignant moment for the artist. With the help of enthusiastic residents, JR managed to cover 2,000 square meters of local rooftops with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, giving them a monumental voice and presence in a city where their own existence is often marginalized. Most of the subjects had their photos installed atop their own roofs and for the first time in JRs global series of installations, the material used is water-resistant enabling that the photo itself to protect the fragile houses in the upcoming rainy season. In order to further spread his message throughout the massive city, JR also encapsulated the local train that runs through the area twice daily with the eyes of local women alongside those of women photographed in Brazil, India, Cambodia, and other parts of Africa whose stories and images reveal a global solidarity of plight and purpose. The pinnacle of the experience, however, comes when the eyes on the moving train align with the static bottom halves of the subject’s faces posted along the train’s embankment, completing the smiling portraits for a split second in rapid succession before moving on to the next village where the experience is repeated. Somehow that stencil art on your local 7-11 will never seem quite so cool again, eh? HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

The future of the art world rears its cute little head…

Today’s insider must-read again comes from Supertouch favorite THE DAILY BEAST where ARNE GLIMCHER astutely expounds on the state of the modern art world and how we got to this point exactly:

BRAVE NEW ART WORLD

By Arne Glimcher

Despite cooling sales, more art was produced in the last decade than at any other time in history.

Once upon a time there was an avant-garde art world in New York where artists created work unlike anything we had ever seen before. A few people loved it, but the general public was appalled. As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists. Then in 1956, Life magazine published a piece on Pollock entitled “Jack the Dripper.” It was the first media interest in avant-garde art. Media interest waned until the ‘60s when Pop Art captured its attention as a celebration of the media itself. If Abstract Expression reached for the sublime, Pop turned ordinary imagery into icons. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol illuminated the transformative power of context and the process of reproduction. Claes Oldenburg’s soft ice-cream cones and hamburgers changed sculpture from hard to soft, from stasis to transformation.

Pop and fashion fused when the haute monde beat a path to Warhol’s Factory door. Society millionaires (yes, there was a time when being rich meant being a millionaire) had their portraits painted by Andy and mingled with artists at Halston’s parties. It was the courtship of art and fashion culminating in marriage and currently rumored to be filing for divorce. There were perhaps 100 collectors of contemporary art internationally back then, and every sale was a miracle. Being there was choosing a life in art. By the 1970s, the Minimalists challenged our perception of the nature of art. Dealers—currently known as “gallerists,” perhaps so as not to be confused with “drug dealers”—supported their artists with modest stipends and exhibitions in which hopefully something would sell. Click HERE to read on…

The biggest issue with skating in a burkha is the fabric getting caught in the wheels…

All the bombs, guns, and tanks in the world can’t change AFGHANISTAN, but maybe skateboarding can. In war-torn KABUL, where women wear burkhas, and school age children roam the streets instead of studying in classrooms (less than 1% of Afghanis attend college) the first skateboarding school, SKATEISTAN has just opened its doors and is teaching more girls than boys how to ollie. It’s also educating young rippers on the finer points of bowl skating in an abandoned swimming pool formerly used by the Taliban for public executions. Take that, Mullah Omar!

Afghanistan’s future rulers in training…

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE:

SHEPARD FAIREY AND THE ART OF APPROPRIATION

As underground art phenomenon SHEPARD FAIREY’s first major museum retrospective prepares to open at the INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON on February 6th, we feel the need to address some of the vicious and unfounded rumors surrounding the originality of Shepard’s artwork that have been floated online in recent years. Though written by a variety of different detractors for a questionable array of reasons, the common thread binding them all—aside from a thinly masked veneer of obvious envy in most cases—is a nearly ubiquitous lack of understanding of the artist’s use of appropriated imagery in his work and the longstanding historical precedent for this mode of creative expression. READ ON: Read the rest of this entry »

January will be remembered as the month “Street Art” became inclusive…

Graffiti writer and artist ESPO (aka: Stephen Powers) weighs in with his thoughts on the so-called world of “street art” with his January design for monthly T-shirt subscription service, T-SHIRT MONTHLY. Subscribe now and wear yours with pride…

ESPO still hasn’t gotten his shirt in the mail…

Espo gets a visit from the Power Rangers…

One thing’s for certain about NYC-based artist, street bomber,  & sign painter extraordinaire STEPHEN POWERS (aka: ESPO), his career moves fast with international shows of his trademark enamel on metal quips firing off around the world at a breakneck pace. This month finds the hightop-faded one debuting an extensive set of new works in “Semaphores of the Soul,” at Brussels’ esteemed ALICE GALLERY where red dots on the space’s white walls attested to the enduring strength of Powers’ market despite the art world’s current economic woes. Local fans flooded the spot where the red hooded power trio known as LES BOURREAUX closed out the night and nearly drew the cops. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »