Show your support for art® – come to a benefit dinner at Saluggi’s Pizzeria on Tuesday, February 24th at 6:00PM. $25 for pizza and beer. We will be holding a silent auction for stuff donated by Cenedella Class students and all proceeds will go towards production and printing expenses for the Spring 2009 catalog.

Saluggi’s Pizzeria
325 Church Street, New York, NY 10013
(1/2 block south of Canal)
Tuesday, February 24th at 6:00PM
$25 per person – door prizes – silent auction

Artist David Cerny’s “Entropa” Opens to Rave Reviews in Brussels

Entropa

Why didn’t anyone realize right away that there was something seriously weird about the new piece of art in Brussels?

The piece, an enormous mosaic installed in the European Council building over the weekend, was meant to symbolize the glory of a unified Europe by reflecting something special about each country in the European Union.

But wait. Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.

Read: NYT: Art Hoax Unites Europe in Displeasure
Official website: Entropa: Stereotypes are Barriers to be Demolished
Latest News: Tisková zpráva Press Release

December 6 through December 24 at The Art Students League of New York Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, 215 West 57th Street, 2nd Floor.

Damien Hirst

“For the last couple of years Hirst has also been painting again — actually painting, as in the kind of pictures an artist produces with his own hand, not through assistants — and always with a sense of Bacon looking over his shoulder. If he continues to go this route it’s a big risk. He’s given no evidence up to now that he knows what to do with a brush, and there are plenty of people waiting for him to fall on his face.”

Let’s make some room for him up on the fifth floor.
Damien Hirst: Bad Boy Makes Good – Time Magazine

Now at the Asia Society through January 11, 2009

“When is it done?” is an issue that most artists struggle with. Two major elements of the artistic temperment – flow and what could be described as its opposite – a compulsion torwards perfection – are so often at odds. While inspiration may come in an instant, an eloquent expression of that inspired moment generally requires considerably more time to make. Often times I work on something and decide it’s finished, only to come back days later seeing nothing but flaws. Other times I see something close to perfection when I revisit a rough sketch I set aside early in the process.

I learned from using my camera is that the first shot is often the best; once you establish that you are taking a picture, you and your subject (if they are aware that you are taking a picture), often change into a self-aware pose of less interest than the moment you were trying to capture.

Something similar can happen with painting. You have an idea, you start to design your composition, and you realize that you are really a clever little bugger and that you are unbearably insightful of the absurdity of the human condition. If you’re lucky, at this point someone will come along and poke a hole in your head to ease the swelling so that you can get on with the business of gessoing your canvas and applying pigments. If your not lucky, well, you’re kinda stuck, things being as they are — you being so brilliant and everyone else being such phillistines or flinstones or whatever it is you call those things with faces that are not you. Alas, they will never understand you.