Not since Christo’s “Central Park Gates” have we had an installation so impressive. Olafur Eliasson’s four “NYC Waterfalls” have come to NY Harbor. There are bike tours, boat trips, and water taxi runs, to go up close to see the falls [think Niagara Falls “Maid of the Mist”], but if you prefer to stay dry, you can view them from spots in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island as well.

Check out the official websites for locations, times, pictures, and other details.

The Camera Club of New York is a long lived organization that has been around for over 100 years. It is THE club that helped photography gain acceptance as an art form. The movement by Alfred Stieglitz was started right here in our city. It became a forum for the advancement of the new art form with lectures given by some of the world’s famous photographers, Steichen, Atget, and Avedon. The Camera Club is steeped in rich tradition that makes me proud to be a New York photographer. I went to see their new space recently at 336 W. 37th st. They have juried exhibitions and some of the best darkroom rental rates in the city; provided that you sign up for at least 3 months or a year. The Camera Club is for serious photographers who want a forum to present their art and a place to create it. I urge anyone who has even a remote interest in photography to go and view their exhibition space or attend a lecture.

When I recently saw the poster for Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, I had no clue that the opera had been composed in 1980. With the Metropolitan Opera now trying to reach out to a younger crowd, posters that would be saved for the newest indie pop record was plastered in the Lower East Side on a phone booth.

I’m really freaking glad I saw it. Tickets are pretty expensive, but if you look closely, they have standing room only space that sells for as little as $15.

I’m so IN for peace. And so IN for Philip Glass. By the by, the image to the right is not the poster I saw. The poster I saw had the background image of Gandhi and a foreground filled with yellow letters exclaiming something along the lines of “what if an opera led you to non-violence” or something like this.

The machine was designed by 2 M.I.T guys told me the host of the space. Go to Houston and Orchard to experience this music-making machine. What happens is that you input a few keystrokes via a laptop into the machine’s glands. And for the next few minutes, it churns out a song using ping pong projectile balls hitting xylophonic keys, wine glasses being spinned and a few different percussion instruments along the bottom half.

The space is unique and very fun to try out. And after all is completed, you get e-mailed your videos.

(NOTE: I am in no way promoting drinking or Absolut. I am a proud supporter of people that have enough money to sponsor cool interactive art installations like this one. I mean monarchy was no good but it sure gave the world a ton of art, right?)

The New York Times building right across Port Authority (take the subway A, C, or E to 42nd street) has an amazing display which randomizes the day’s news, obituaries, wedding announcements, and numbers as they appear in the TIMES.

The screens have a Bose surround sound system on the bottom and cool sounds/effects are created. There are even digital waves of information that shoot across and around the room. It’s pretty magnificent. See the video below for more info.

James Pernotto, Youngstown based artist on Youtube.

I have been giving a lot of thought to my future as an artist. Should I move back to NY full time, split my time between two cities or move somewhere else like L.A. or Philly? In spite of the fact that my income/ potential income from my work has gone up and I now have a bio that seems a bit impressive, I’m in a situation worse than ever before because the costs associated with staying in the city with the kind of space, I feel I need to push my work still far exceeds what I make. Even more depressing is the fact that, this situation now seems to be shared by people who, most artists would consider wildly successful. The 475 Kent building for example housed at least one artist with work in a Whitney Biennial and I also had a friend who celebrated her Whitney debut with an eviction notice. (She now lives upstate)

The video above is about an artist who decided to move back to his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. His studio is to die for and he been given the honor of a major retrospective at the town’s most prestigious venue which from what I can see, he really deserves.

The choice would seem, simple enough– just keep my NY gallery relationship and live somewhere else. But, the sad truth is that art world still revolves around a few major art centers at least as much as it did before. I learned a lot by looking at artist’s bios when I had a gallery in Pittsburgh. Even the most prestigious local exhibitions rarely lead to connections or shows out of town or got any out of town press and this seems to be true of most other cities as well. The result seems to be that more and more artists feel trapped in the city by a desperate need to stay connected, even though this often limits their happiness and ability to do work. The current “business plan” of many artists I talk to now involves staying in the city just long enough “hook up” with dealers etc… and then leave.

The Times indicates there may be hope for the tenants of 475 Kent Ave. The article looks at the buildings history with more depth and context than most other stories. What comes out is a history similar to that of many other informal/non-legal artist buildings in NYC, a history which shows the tremendous value that these tenants added to the property.

“Painstakingly, foot by foot and floor by floor, the three began breathing life into 475 Kent. Colonies of rats were chased out and puddles of pigeon droppings mopped up. Windows were unsealed to reveal startling views of the Manhattan skyline, and of the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. Pipes were stretched; walls were built.
Word spread, and more artists followed. Ms. Masters moved from Dumbo in 1998, building studios on the seventh floor using money that she said she received from a different settlement with Mr. Guttman. The boxy, soaring building soon became a place where ascendant and established sculptors, writers, filmmakers, musicians, printmakers and photographers worked, collaborated and thrived, and became enmeshed in one another’s lives.”

The residents of this building were not responsible for the city’s failure to provide safety in this area over the years. They also were not responsible for the lack of transit and infrastructure investment that made such a potentially valuable area undervalued and they certainly were not the creators of the antiquated zoning laws that barred mixed use residential development in the area. In fact they were one of the major groups to see the areas true value and unlock that value by deciding to live there. Now that the city has woken up to the value they helped create, its pure injustice to kick them out.

The just solution, for most of these buildings is at minimum some kind of buyout situation, which recognizes long term residents as de-facto co owners of the properties they helped make so valuable.

One of my favorite blogs, is written by an anonymous NY art collector. He points out that one of the major contemporary art fairs, Pulse may have had to make a $30,000 payoff to the former superintendent of a Manhattan Armory. I hope nobody found something like this in their bed.

I made a sad attempt to cover PULSE last year. It was one of my favorite NY art fairs.

A very good friend of mine; Saira Jacob is having her second public exhibition of paintings. The exhibition opening is today. Details below. More samples of her work on www.sairas.net

Hope to see you all there.

I am in NYC for most of the week and hope to post on some shows I saw including my show which just closed at D’Amelio Terras Gallery.

James Kalm has a you tube video which highlights the increasingly thankless and frustrating task of trying to document shows in spite of the proliferation of no-photography policies at many galleries and museums. It’s a very strange, situation since most artists I know want people to see their work and also since the vast majority of online art press is very positive.