EVENTS

Selections will be featured for brief periods.

Christie's LIVE - See, hear, bid at live auctions . . . . (View the Video Demo and Sign up) . . . .

Improv Everywhere Freezes in Grand Central Station (video) . . . . Spontaneious Productions . . . . Fluid Associations . . . . Interventions . . . . Creative Time - "Creative Time presents the most innovative art in the public realm. From our base in New York, we work with artists who ignite the imagination and explore ideas that shape society. We initiate a dynamic conversation among artists, sites, and audiences, in projects that enliven public spaces with free and powerful expression" . . . . Art Production Fund - "To get contemporary art to as wide an audience as possible". . . . . . . . "Newsroom 1986-2000" at the Mary Boone Gallery (NYC) - "A new effort from the Polish-born artist Aleksandra Mir . . . . you can watch Ms. Mir working in the gallery almost every day at sizable sawhorse tables, assisted by a shifting cast of art students and buoyed by music pulsing from a boombox. Aptly for today's art market, the group has achieved a perfect overlap of production and distribution (each drawing carries a $10,000 price tag) . . . . (The works) redo the news, reminding us how soon we forget and exaggerating the ephemeral beauty — or at least boldness — of a genre of graphic design and language that we consume and discard on a daily basis. They achieve a goofy, graffiti energy, partly because Ms. Mir draws the outlines freehand and sometimes lets the letters balloon this way or that. Photographs are usually reduced to blurs. The filling-in is done with felt-tip pens in three thicknesses, and while a black-and-white palette is the given, Ms. Mir tolerates quite a bit of free-range texturing, crosshatching, scribbling and fine wavy lines. . . . . The black-and-white drawings produced in this hivelike project are monumental and emphatically handmade blowups of front pages from past issues of The New York Post and The Daily News. Ms. Mir, who lives in Palermo, Italy, selects and groups the pages, often on the spot, from a 14-year archive of tabloid covers currently stored in the gallery's back room.The jumpy drawings, nearly eight feet by five feet, revisit those years while paying homage to the overheated language and myopic focus of tabloid journalism -specifically its highly compressed, go-for-the-jugular headlines. These pithy summations of events both significant and trivial are a form of linguistic folk art. They also make up an essential part of city life: they shout from newsstands, peek out on subways or drop at front doors (along with more decorous daily publications, of course) . . . . . "

National Events Calendar . . . . Major International Art Exhibitions: Biennales - "For such events as the Biennale de Venezia; the São Paolo Bienal; the Cairo International Biennale; Dak'Art - The International Biennale of Dakar, Senegal; and the Cuenca Bienal, Cuenca, Ecuador, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs issues Open Calls for Proposals to all U.S. curators at non-profit arts organizations. Curators are invited to submit applications for artists and projects they wish to develop. On behalf of the Department of State, the National Endowment for the Arts convenes an advisory committee known as the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions is to review these proposals and advise the Department of the project(s) they feel best represents the U.S. at specific exhibitions. The advisory committee is composed of curators, museum directors, artists and others with expert knowledge of American contemporary art and international exhibitions and exchange . . . . Through its participation in major international visual art exhibitions the United States presents contemporary American art in context with the work of artists from other countries. The Department of State supports and manages the official U.S. participation at selected international biennales and visual arts exhibitions. Organized through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Department's support ensures that the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States are prominently presented to international audiences. The Department's Cultural Programs Division manages these presentations, through two separate and distinct means. The first, Official Representation, offers opportunities for American curators at U.S. non-profit arts organizations to submit proposals for review by the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions. In the second, Host-Curated Representation, overseas exhibition organizers submit proposals to the Department through U.S. Missions around the world." - (US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) --- ("WASHINGTON, DC. The US State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) have signed an agreement to establish a committee that will select US artists and curators for international exhibitions. An official with the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs told The Art Newspaper that the committee will comprise 'up to seven people', appointed by the NEA for terms of 'no more than three years'. They will include curators, artists, museum directors, specialists in American contemporary art, and perhaps persons from outside the field as well." - Jason Edward Kaufman for The Art Newspaper)

TED 2008 - Technology, Entertainment, Design. --- "Who are We? (the extraordinary tale of homo sapiens... Answers provided by a paleontologist, a historian, an evolutionary psychologist and a story-teller) . . . . . . . What is our place in the Universe? (answers from a theoretical physicist, an astronomer searching for extra-terrestrial life, a religious mystic and a humorist) . . . . . . . What is Art? -- is beauty just a human invention? (an anthropologist, a painter, a sculptor, and a museum curator) . . . . . . . What is Love -- and why are we so bad at it? (a neurologist, a musician, a novelist, and a sex therapist) . . . . . . . What is Evil? -- and how do we fight it? (a moral philosopher, a war-correspondent, a terrorism expert, and a human rights campaigner) . . . . . . . What are the most Gorgeous New Things being created in our world? (an architect, a boat builder, a windmill designer, a photographer, and a marine biologist) . . . . . . . Are we inadvertently creating New Forms of Life? (an AI researcher, a Web 2.0 pundit, a biochemist, a meme-theorist, a nano-technologist, and a transhumanist) . . . . . . . What are today's most significant Cultural Trends? (a fashion designer, a technology writer, a foreign correspondent, a video-game creator and an epidemiologist) . . . . . . . What will the Future be like? (a scenario planner, an inventor, an economist, and a science fiction author) . . . . . . . What are the Problems I should be most worried about? (an asteroid hunter, a climatologist, a psychiatrist, and a statistician) . . . . . . . Who will be the next President? (Yes, it's 2008. We'll invite the leading candidates) . . . . . . . What will be my Legacy? (a global business leader, an environmental designer, a billionaire philanthropist, a social entrepreneur and a mother) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For the past 20 years, members of the TED community have gathered together to share ideas and passions that are big enough to change the world. In this spirit, we created the TED Prize . . . . Each year we will honor a maximum of three individuals who have shown that they can, in some way, positively impact life on this planet. . . . . We are looking for inventors and entrepreneurs, designers and artists, visionaries and mavericks, protectors and persuaders. . . . . (TED) brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers in Monterey, CA every year for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration. They hear not just the latest ideas in Technology, Entertainmetn and Design, but also Business, Science adn tThe Arts --in fact ANY subject area offering something fresh and i mportant. After four days you gain an understanding of how your own work fits into the larger web of knowledge. And you get the chance to connect with extraordinary individuals who are helping create a better future for us all."

"Art Handlers" - Toiling Behind the scenes of New York's museums and galleries. - (NYTimes 3/23/08)