Read it and weep.

According to my iPhone, I was in Miami for Art Basel and several other fairs this year. And even though I was hiding behind a documentation device, I was totally present and in the moment.

Thanks to Sharon Butler over at Two Coats of Paint for my guest correspondence gig covering this year's fair:

Art Basel Miami Beach #1

Art Basel Miami Beach Roundup

And to the Nashville Scene's Arts + Culture Blog, Country Life, for the real estate to share even more coverage of all things fair in Miami. 

The Miami Art Fairs are Decadent and Depraved
Miami Day 2 
Miami Day 3
Day 4. Be patient. I'll link after it's posted. 

a rose is a rose is a rose

Art Basel and The Great Miami Countdown. T minus 3.

It's Sunday. I had to run out to the mothership yesterday and purchase a brand new usb cable for my iPad. The dog ate the connector off my not-so-old one.

I'm going to be covering the art fairs for a couple of other artblogs this year. I thought it time to branch out, develop a broader audience. Deets to follow with links of course.
I'll also be tweeting live at @maryaddhackett.

Meanwhile as prep work, I made it through maybe 2 hours of online Basel yesterday before experiencing sensory overload. I filtered "painting." At least I think I filtered painting. At a certain point I wondered what I would wear and began looking at random images of previous fair-goers. Lest you think I am an uncultured rube, I've averaged one art fair a year, more or less steadily since I was 26. Leaving a margin of error for exaggeration, that put's me at about 15 art fairs. Still, when the fair is 4 blocks away from your workplace or 2 miles from your studio, it's like picking up a carton of milk on the way home. When it involves flying to Miami, I suddenly feel like I need a bikini wax and some gold-strapped sandals.

Back to Art Basel. The downloading of gargantuan files from the website prevented me winning the most patient blogger award. I switched over to the Art Basel app, which was still kind of buggy, but much better.

Nada Miami Beach is not to be missed. As a preview, I'm crushing on Club Paint, Jane Corrigan, Ryan Mosley and Daniel Heidkamp. I mistook a work by Ariel Dill for Charlene Von Heyl.

More tomorrow.

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Review: Old School. Norman Rockwell at the Frist Center

I saw the Norman Rockwell exhibition yesterday. Ninety percent of the work is illustration, (no judgement, just making a call) but there are maybe three or four paintings that reveal his hand as a painter. The wall text claims "Artists Costume Ball" was possibly done in less than an hour. I have my doubts on that, but still.

Nonw of my students had heard of Rockwell. Not surprising. At first glance, his work appears inaccessible contextually. Probably even at second glance. I'm also not a fan of how he lays down paint or numerous other formal concerns, but as a kid, I was fascinated by some of his work from a book my aunt and uncle owned. Coming across the painting in the exhibition, I remembered it was the triple portrait painting that graced the cover of that book that captivated me. 

As a kid, I was a fan of Picasso and Van Gogh and remember digging the fact that Rockwell had their images painted in his painting. Also, wanting to be an artist at an early age, I was a sucker for any painting that showed an artist in their surroundings.  Ironically, I now have a brass pot for my paint rags. 

With the help of wall text, the exhibition does a good job of contextualizing Rockwell's work and his stylistic migrations. It would be easy to dismiss this exhibition as populist and generational, and indeed it's an interesting juxtaposition to 30 Americans downstairs, but it's worth a look. 

I'm also looking forward to reading Deborah Solomon's new book on Rockwell, AMERICAN MIRROR: THE LIFE AND ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL.

Book review part one and six degrees of separation.

If I ever teach painting again, I'd recommend Eric Fischl's memoir Bad Boy as a way of introducing how the current discourse on painting and conceptual art evolved.

And then I'd wait for a student to complain that I was making them read a seminal essay about painting.* [Rim shot.]

I'd like to refrain from calling it a split between conceptual art and hands-on art-making because I believe the two can overlap in the right hands, but this is where Fischl's account of his undergraduate and teaching experience puts both of these camps into a better perspective. I can't provide a full review yet, but so far the book not only lays out Fischl's history of finding himself as an artist, but it also provides a lucid account on why academia continues to have a split-personality when it comes to implementing an undergraduate curriculum (and ultimately how that split infiltrates the surrounding community.) For anyone who's had to "defend" painting, even passively, there's a shared sense of camaraderie that's bound to be lost on today's students, some fellow painters and possibly even faculty today. More later, but I'm highly recommending it as a must-read.

As for the six degrees of separation- years ago as young artists just out of school, my friend Margaret and I painted the interior of his ex-wife's house in Chicago. After the job was done, we all shared a moment as one of his paintings was hung back on our newly painted wall.



*true story