Nearly a year after Paul Schimmel’s controversial departure from MOCA as the museum’s long-standing chief curator in 2012, Schimmel has come out with his head high above water. Hauser & Wirth has announced that Schimmel will join the gallery as a full partner alongside Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth, and Marc Payot to help establish a Los Angeles space. That space, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, is set to open in 2015.

In our opinion, this is the best step forward for Schimmel, who will be freed from the mire of controlling directors and boards of trustees. More generally, it signals a new direction for institutional curators, who typically stick to museums, and raises the bar for curatorial decision-making outside the non-profit realm.

The Los Angeles Times confirmed the news about Schimmel’s new role with Schimmel himself, who has remained relatively tight-lipped since leaving MOCA. “I think it’s going to be quite different in the respect that it will be done on a larger scale, have fewer exhibitions and a combination of selling and non-selling exhibitions,” he told Jori Finkel for the Times. He went on to add that the space will have an exhibition schedule similar to that of a museum, three to five per year.

The global gallery, too, emphasizes that Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will be more than a gallery.  Instead, the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will be poised as a “cultural center”, with an emphasis on educational programs, as well as exhibitions. In addition to multiple locations in Zurich, London, and New York, the gallery plans to open a similarly minded exhibition space, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, at a transformed farm building in Somerset, England. Sources tell us the New York location has been reaching out to non-profits about their interest in building educational programs in the city as well.

For all intents and purposes, the Los Angeles branch seems to have the spice of a non-profit with the burden (or good fortune, depending on how one looks at it,) of having to sell art. That distinction, between selling and not-selling, seems to be one of the few differences left between galleries and museums; but with Schimmel’s transition into the commercial world, that significance might be waning. There was a time when the influx of capital into galleries was thought to impede upon curatorial scholarship and creativity. But that alone hasn’t turned museums into a haven: plagued with shrinking government and foundation funding, managing the personal interests of trustees, and relying on commercial sponsorship, the day-to-day operations of museums don’t leave much room for a focus on curating.

Schimmel saw all of these changes take place during his twenty-year-plus tenure at MOCA. Quite simply, the museum world he entered in the 1970s is by no means similar to the one we have today. Not many curators end up joining commercial galleries (MoMA’s John Elderfield, an exception), and that path’s untested. But with Schimmel’s new venture, there’s a light at the end of this odyssey. Homeward bound, he can avoid the push-and-pull of boards, sponsorship, and funding, and focus more on what curators want: art.

• Stop making fun of China’s knock-off architecture. [The Atlantic Cities]
• “The contemporary art market is far ahead of the stock market at least in terms of its frothiness, but, I’m starting to see music sheets on how cheap equities remain based on a traditional, but academic yardstick like the risk premium,” writes Martin Sosnoff. So much of this sentence doesn’t make sense—what is frothiness? There are two more pages where that comes from. [Forbes]
• In the latest issue of e-flux, Martha Rosler takes on Artspeak. This “gobbledygook”, like Triple Canopy’s popular International Art English spoof from 2012,  is a joke, but, for Rosler, that’s not a reason to give it the brush off: “jokes are often a cover for hostility, and the more elaborate the joke, the more powerful the hostility may be”. Also to look forward to, plenty of of piquant, Rosler-esque anecdotes ranging from restaurant menus to Gullivers’ travels, all in order to get to the sham of our current word salad.  [e-flux]
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art wins a major award from the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and with it, a rebuke. Tyler Green has a great report on how the AIC’s award is meant to pressure IMA President Charles Venable into re-evaluating the targets of his cuts. [Modern Art Notes]
• The Hirshhorn’s Director Richard Koshalek resigns amidst allegations that the board was not wholly supportive of his vision. That vision spans the range of museum expansion, from “bubble” architecture by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to large-scale projects, like a new education center and Richard Serra installation. According to City Paper’s Kriston Capps, the museum board will determine the bubble’s fate later this month while Koshalek will serve out his term through the end of the year. (Personally, we’d like to see a naming contest of the bubble before the project gets scrapped.) [City Paper]

[Editor's note: We invited Copenhagen-based artist Sophie Dupont to spend a month with us in NYC. As the final portion of her residency with AFC she produced an image essay on dance and spirituality.]

Leonardo Da Vinci. Circling the square. The circle is the shape traditionally assigned to the heavens and square to the earth. When together, heaven and earth—spirit and matter—are symbolically combined.

Sufi Whirling. A physically active meditation which originated among Sufis.

Loie Fuller (1862-1928) Dancing Serpintine Dance

Bhavacakra - Wheel Of Life. It is believed that the drawing was designed by the Buddha himself in order to help ordinary people understand the Buddhist teachings.

The Double Creator's Star.A diagram of the internal lines of force which hold matter in form. It is a sign seeking permanent enjoyment of abundance.

The Grail. It represents that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, between good and evil.

Oldest type of Labyrinth, Finland.

Shamanism and Animism are traditional belief systems which consider the entire universe to be alive and interconnected. Shamanism in practice is used to heal and enlighten, using ceremonials which can include rhythmic music, mind altering drugs and mythic journeys into the subconscious.

AA Bronson, during the making of “Flesh of My Flesh” in collaboration with Elijah Burgher (photo by Elijah Burgher).

Joseph Beuys adopts the subject position of the shaman to reclaim art's restorative healing powers.

Copper is one of the best physical conductors of electricity and heat and is therefore used for healing and rituals around the world.

"The use of color and simplicity of the lines is so calming for me". Agnes Martin.

Circles on an old Arabic astronomical drawing.

Louise Bourgeois

"I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement." Isadora Duncan.

Doug Aitken knows celebrities. Musicians. Filmmakers. People with money. Sometimes their ideas fall down on him like fruit from a tree—he once found inspiration by overhearing discussions at a dinner party. Now, with “Station to Station,” a three-week-long project set to debut this September, Aitken will host a road trip-party on a train, and it might involve art.

The private, 10-car Amtrak train will be loaded up with artists and musicians trekking across the United States. At each stop, the passengers will disembark and take part in events such as “pop-up tents at each stop housing local craft food and design purveyors”. The train itself will be decorated with LED lights, like some sort of glowing Christmas tree. It’s sponsored by Levi’s.

According to Rosalia Jovanovic at ARTINFO, more details about the passengers, locations, and the artists and musicians involved, will be announced within the next two weeks. She wondered, even, if this idea was too preposterous to take place. Currently, a trailer for “Station to Station” exists on the Doug Aitken Workshop Vimeo page, but it’s password protected.

We don’t doubt Aitken’s proclivity for teamwork-driven spectacle. And it looks like the title of the piece may have been brewing with Doug Aitken for some time. In a 2004 interview between Doug Aitken and Pierre Huyghe for BOMB Magazine, he mentioned his interest in the “station to station” concept:

DA: When I look at your work, I see that sense of continuous transformation. There is a place-to-place, station-to-station quality to it, where the viewer is taken into landscapes of temporal experiences.

So, he liked the “station-to-station” bit in Pierre Huyghe’s work. Now he’s doing that, too.

All-star designers Experimental Jet Set say the W they’ve used for the Whitney’s logo represents “the heartbeat of New York, of USA.” It “encapsulates” a “dialectic between the ‘old world’ and the ‘new world’. Does this dialectic need to be encapsulated because it’s in the middle of the ocean?

Artspeak does the firm a disservice, but so too does its decision to illustrate the differences between these two worlds through the use of stereotypes. The line drawn W isn’t just a convenient way to introduce variation of line and typeface, but it’s a familiar gesture to the abstract geometric lines that are commonly used in art.

And if we know anything about art, it’s best represented by abstract animated lines.

Art21's intro

Art21, available for viewing here.

But if this is something you like, here’s where you can get it.

Abstract animated lines aren’t all bad. The Walker’s vision for line usage includes padding for text, adding an overall energy to a generic template. Here, the line more closely resembles text than imitation of geometric abstraction, and is therefore more successful.

And an office favorite, the marriage of lines and identity:

No way, I’ve become…I’ve become a subway seat…I’ve become public transportation! I’m sad, and crying (if that’s even possible), when two stops later, a beautiful woman with a huge ass walks in and sits down right on top of me. Oh wow, maybe this isn’t so bad after all!! Mmmm. Right then and there she farted right on my face…Maybe I spoke too soon!!!! :/

This is a typical excerpt from my latest download, Body by Body’s “TG-30,” from Klausgallery.net’s new series Klaus_e-books, edited by Brian Droitcour. The title refers to thirty transgender (TG) fantasy fiction mini-stories, scrupulously paced with advertorial collage, icons, and GIFs. It’s a page-turner.

“TG-30” covers the bases: man-to-woman, dog-to-man, zombie-to-girl. The punctuation is so casual enough to double as actual Internet fiction. “Buddy rubbed his now human nose against Mary Ann’s neck affectionately,” writes Body by Body. “’Omg, I’m so glad you’re a human now!’ Mary Ann said to herself.”

While sexy, many of the gender (or species) swap scenarios revel more deeply in identity-sharing, where, after some playful protest, characters dive into their own dreamlike logic. Some are more cathartic; a daughter accepts her dad as a hot Latina, and a down-and-out stripper gives birth to a baby man who loves her. As adult fiction goes, the stories offer plenty of variety to keep you reading (I did it in one sitting).

What sets “TG-30” apart from the TG fantasy fiction board TG Storytime (equally varied and engrossing) is its moments which take stock of what we’ve just read. TG’s often happen as a result of uploads, downloads, or hacks, and the computer becomes a tool for a sort of experience exchange. Those stories are often followed by the image of a small nucleus evoking the iTunes “Genius” option. The nucleus, a symbol for a computer’s ability to pre-empt taste, contains a tiny heart: Mac and self are one. (In that way, there’s an affinity with another standalone, Ryan Trecartin’s work process documentation in his magazine spread “Web 1.0.”)

For the most part, characters seem fine with being enveloped. Toward the middle of the book, we come close to breaking the cycle, but then quickly fall back into complacence. Jessica surveys the brands in a health food store, which she heard about on the Internet:

In the current state of the decay of our societies, it is necessary to re-invest in a certain number of lost practices. But faced with the kind of panic that seizes people faced with the abyss, one tries to reassure themselves with the return to pseudo-rural traditions, which would be a possible refuge for quality in agricultural products, whereas in reality one only liberates the inventiveness of advertising to rehabilitate the same industrial shit.

Jessica, still, was a sucker for designer water.

What could be more Internet? Half-remembering some protest, and diving in anyway. “TG-30” doesn’t moralize. It even lets you get off on it.

• The Creative Time Summit has announced Lucy Lippard as their keynote. As we mentioned on the blog last year, she’s no longer a practicing curator and is a poor speaker. High-profile participants include Vito Acconci, who’s also no longer a practicing artist, and Jimmy McMillan, who, well, okay. He’s a mayoral candidate and founder of “Rent is Too Damn High“. Awesome. [In the Air]
• The world has been gifted a new e-book: “Owning Online Art: Selling and Collecting Netbased Artworks”, available for free download as a PDF. [Owning Online Art, via Jennifer Chan]
• World domination alert! This week marks the launch of the first Art Basel-owned edition of the Hong Kong art fair. Now collectors get Christmas three times a year. (Everybody else still has to share just the one.) [Art in America, The New York Times]
• “Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them.” Brian Eno on the future of art making. [Brainpickings]
• “Shit-on-the-ground.” “Eye-sores.” Those are the words used to describe Mark di Suvero’s red i-beam creature, which was installed this month on the green surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge. Haters want it removed, but duh, the sculpture is big. [Curbed]
• So, congratulations to Mark di Suvero for winning the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for outstanding artistic achievement! [The New York Times]
• 12th grader Sabrina Brady takes home the Doodle 4 Google prize. The prize includes $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook, and a $50,000 technology grant for her school. Her image is on the front page of Google today. [Google Blog]

Outside "Get This! " during the opening of In Unison. Images courtesy of Lauren Cunningham

Is the Atlanta art scene shrinking? With Fay Gold’s closing in 2009, Solomon Projects and Kiang Gallery in 2011, and Emily Amy following in 2013, it’s easy to get that impression. These galleries were fixtures of the Atlanta scene for many years (Solomon Projects was in business for 18 years, Fay Gold for 29 years, and Kiang for 20 years). But many in Atlanta don’t believe these closures are a harbinger of things to come. They argue that the city’s professional art world is more complex than the survival of these galleries. After all, the city is dominated by non-profit organizations and commercial galleries have always taken up a small part of the Atlanta’s art landscape.

“[The rash of gallery closings] was never solely about economics, especially with the older galleries. It really felt like an older generation sort of retiring as one,” Atlanta-based artist Craig Drennen told me over coffee. Drennen is a professor at Georgia State and Dean at Skowhegan, and he arrived in Atlanta in 2009, when galleries began closing at what appeared to be an alarming rate. “Maybe the downturn in 2008 caused them to shut a year earlier than they would have anyway, but it seemed like it was coming.”

That’s a loss, whatever way you look at it. Scott Ingram, an Atlanta-based artist who worked with Nancy Solomon’s gallery for nine years, reflected on the space, and described the gap left in its stead. “Solomon Projects was an international gallery in Atlanta, that no one here ever fully took advantage of. [Their Director] Nancy was consistently showing artist like Jerald Ieans, Wendy White, David Humphrey, Janet Biggs, Ridley Howard, and Leslie Wayne.” It was one of the few contemporary art venues in the city.

“The economy was a small part of why we closed. The lack of being able to look out at the future and being able to see a growing base of contemporary art collectors was a major factor,” Nancy Solomon told me, after reflecting over her 18 years in the Atlanta art scene.

Perhaps indicative of the problems Solomon saw when closing her space, few new galleries have opened in Atlanta. That problem might be endemic to the city itself; it lacks a centralized gallery district and few collectors willing to invest in contemporary art and local, emerging artists. It makes it difficult for new galleries to establish any real footing.

Atlanta as a city is physically difficult to navigate. Without a grounded, established system of galleries, it makes it hard for anyone to find existing art venues. “I do think that Atlanta’s lack of center, lack of contiguous neighborhoods and its extreme sprawl make it more difficult to track and participate in any cultural activities,” Brian Dettmer explained. Dettmer is a Chicago transplant to Atlanta and currently has been based here for 7 years. He is one of millions who make Atlanta into the metropolis it is today, an international city with a constant flow of new arrivals. “Over half of the metropolitan population isn’t even from the South and it seems that people (artists and galleries) move in and move out just as quickly.”

The flux of the population is reflected in the gallery scene. Places pop up organically when rent is fair and disappear just as quickly. Since it’s a driving city, location is of little concern, but it’s still hard to bring in viewers without a gallery district; it gives people a central location to see art.

Attempting to find new ways to deal with this, outfits like Jennifer Schwartz Gallery and Saltworks have switched to smaller spaces or shifted their focus to working online. “I had 3,000 square feet, which was a lot more than I needed…but I was in highly visible area.” Gallerist Jennifer Schwartz told me who has also been trying to cultivate art patrons amongst those new to art collecting. Her company, Crusade for Art, organizes guided gallery tours and events in an effort to build relationships between the emerging artists she shows and those new to collecting.

The opening crowd at Get This! in Atlanta. Image courtesy of Lauren Cunningham

Gallerists here have to work hard to educate their audience and nurture interest in contemporary art. Located in the Atlanta’s Westside district for 8 years, Get This!, does just that. Gallery sitters actively engage visitors in conversation about the work, and their regular exhibition videos and artist talks generate a lot of discussion as well. Community based programing and an interest and willingness to talk about art is common amongst most Atlanta professionals.

Still, there remains a disconnect between support through participation and support through money spent on actual art objects for Atlanta artists. The city’s event culture of non-profit fundraising often sees mid-career artists donating their work to organizations rather than receiving direct support.

Until recently, those problems had been compounded by a lack of institutional interest in contemporary art. Michael Rooks, curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum since 2010, has worked to change that though, bringing several Atlanta artists into the High’s collection. Rooks’ latest show, Drawing Inside the Perimeter, gives these local artists a vouch of support that can translate into real life support from collectors.

Solomon sees the museum as being a key component in improving the collector situation in Atlanta, saying “The importance of the museum is to educate the community, the collector base, and the collectors of the future about the art of our day. The lack of contemporary art programming at the museum has set back the development of a strong collector base.” With Rooks, thankfully, that may be changing.

Shu Lea Cheang, "Brandon", 1998–99. Collection of the Guggenheim Museum, and the museum's first acquisition of Internet-based art.

Late-night Googling takes you places. Who knows what I was searching for originally, but I ended up finding it with Jon Ippolito’s “10 Myths of Internet Art”. I probably read that list in school once, and blessed be, it’s online. In 2002, Ippolito wrote “10 Myths of Internet Art”, a heroic apology for Internet-based art. At the time, he served as Assistant Curator of Media Art at the Guggenheim Museum.

More than ten years later, some of the myths Ippolito brings up—it’s difficult to sell a website as art, internet art must be online, and net art tends to be about splashy tech—are still in place. Some, perhaps, to a lesser degree than they were a decade ago, but none of the myths have quite gone away, making it a list worth revisiting.

To give a sense of where we are, and where we remain, we’ve reprinted Ippolito’s 10 myths below.

Myth Number 1: The Internet is a medium for delivering miniature forms of other art mediums.

Myth Number 2: Internet art is appreciated only by an arcane subculture.

Myth Number 3: To make Internet art requires expensive equipment and special training.

Myth Number 4: Internet art contributes to the “digital divide.”

Myth Number 5: Internet art = Web art.

Myth Number 6: Internet art is a form of Web design.

Myth Number 7: Internet art is a form of technological innovation.

Myth Number 8: Internet art is impossible to collect.

Myth Number 9: Internet art will never be important because you can’t sell a Web site.

Myth Number 10: Looking at Internet art is a solitary experience.

 The full-text, here.

Clothes for Heroes Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hard living is sexy. It’s rugged individualism, and freedom. It’s long nights and gnarly mornings. It probably requires a big dick (or at least acting like it’s big). That’s punk rock, and it’s a cultural phenomenon that touched most aspects of living in New York and London, particularly in the mid- to late-70’s.

It makes sense, then, that The Metropolitan Museum of Art would chose punk as a subculture worth exploring. Punk is a movement everyone can relate to. What makes less sense is that curator Andrew Bolton decided to focus solely on punk’s influence on couture, an art form that has little to say about the movement. To that end, he’s transformed their special exhibitions wing into what looks like a high-end SoHo shop. Room after room of mannequin rows, each dressed in 1970-s to present day, produce a kind of homogenized aesthetic no punk would stand behind.

To be fair, exhibition has its own allure. Two mannequins wearing blackened fluffy wigs and bright red punk couture stand on either side of a vertical screen. On it, stars like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten perform silently. It’s the first installation of the show, and it sparkles with the kind of newness that makes you want to buy whatever it is the Met’s selling. One room in, we learn it’s the lore from a painstakingly recreated 70’s era bathroom at CBGB’s.

That story is hardly told, though. Viewers get a label explaining that the punk scene in New York began to develop at this music venue and bar, which hosted such bands and musicians as Richard Hell, The Ramones, and Patti Smith. One install later, we’re looking at more mannequins in wigs.

We also see a recreation of Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistol band manager Malcolm McLaren’s London boutique SEX  As the wall labels tell it, the store is largely responsible for bringing modern punk into the mainstream, but the installation doesn’t function any differently than an image in a catalogue. We see a rack with a lot of T-shirts on it, one with an image of blue tits on the front, another with two drawn images of men, one without his pants on. Viewers can’t go through the clothes rack themselves, so the installation offers little more than a floor plan to the information presented on the wall label.

The rest of the exhibition is divided into four sections organized by do-it-yourself processes. “DIY Hardware” presents a hallway of ridiculous gowns. Huge gold safety pins hold together a black Versace dress, providing a prime example of punk-gone-rich. The only thing rude or aggressive about this is its garish display of wealth, and much of punk’s aesthetic came out of extreme poverty. Two Zandra Rhodes gowns filled with tasteful holes ribbed with zippers suffer from the same problem, but they’re nothing compared to the Dolce & Gabbana nonsense at the end of the hall. It’s a fluffy black chiffon dress complete with a lock-and-key chastity belt. It’s unclear what influence punk had on this garment, if any.

“DIY Bricolage”, a room of fashion that resembles Duchamp readymades, is arguably the strongest in the show. In the far corner, there’s a paper bag t-shirt dress, a dress in the shape and materials of an envelope, and a plastic bag bodysuit; each are defined by designer house Maison Martin Margiela’s inventiveness with materials. Even the dress made of cellophane looked sexy enough to make me want to wear it.

Granted, he’s no Alexander McQueen—the Met may never top his 2011 show—but he’s a essential inclusion in what might otherwise be a boring show. Here, even McQueen himself falls flat; his famed splatter painting dress shown just two years ago, has no life in part because the show fails to include the video that shows its making. The video though, might reveal the truth; punk didn’t influence the making of this dress much. It just happens to fit in the room dubbed “DIY: Graffiti/Agit Prop.”

The final room, “DIY Destroy”, is arguably the most disappointing of them all. A dress by Comme Des Garcons attaches a stuffed snail-shaped piece of fabric to the crotch of a coat dress. It’s ornate but doesn’t exactly breathe the inventiveness-from-necessity for which punk became known. Another coat by the same designers is transformed by piles of other coats sewn onto it. It smacks of work produced by a designer burdened by a looming deadline.

Overhead, Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus rings out complete with horns and a choir. It’s the first time we hear music in the show, and in keeping with its missteps, it tells us little about punk.