by Jerome du Bois
Last week the world's largest art fair took over Miami Beach. Art Basel attracted record numbers and everybody who was anybody and so forth. Publications including The NYTimes, NYPost, The Wall Street Journal, Style, Vogue, artnet.com, and artforum had blogs and multiple posts going on about it. The local blog Critical Miami, of course, covered it four or five times, with plenty of pictures.
Phoenix gallerist Amy Young --azcentral.com's latest blogger-- went to Art Basel, too.
At least she implied it in a comment on her new blog, dated November 20th.
That's the last time she has posted anything there. Art Basel Miami Beach ended Sunday. She hasn't posted a single word or image about her visit on her blog. Maybe she didn't go. Maybe she changed her mind. But if not . . .
Apparently neither she nor the following people considered Art Basel --the crassest, flashiest, most overblown, overrated, bombastic, carnivalesque and dumbed-down American art/world convergence-- worth covering:
Online Plaftform Coordinator Sky Schaudt, and Online Producers Laurie Merrill, Randy Brickley, Rose A. Tring, and Ralph Zubiate. (I've sent them all emails. And no, we'd never go there, we think it's the Titanic of the art world, but that's not the point.) Didn't they have a spare laptop she could use? Or would she, even?
It makes you wonder why the smart folks at the online Republic offered her a blog, and why she accepted. It's as if some executive in that ossifying organization had "get art blogger" stuck on his or her screen, and just wanted to get that nagging reminder off there. The person didn't really have to be serious, he or she just had to be there . . . occasionally.
If so, Amy Young fits the bill.
Besides Art Basel, she also missed covering the closing of Scott Sanders's Paper Heart sleazoid venue, the tattered flagship of Grand Avenue. Now all the microphone hogs will have to disperse back to all those coffee joints with the punny names. Personally, I would like to have had her ask Scott Sanders why, after the city saved his sorry ass with a low-interest loan last year, he didn't take the rescue and the year to change the business strategy that drove his thang into the dirt. Well, hell, leopard, spots. Still, it was a story, and she knows the players, too.
Amy Young has also ignored a pretty interesting $2.4-million-dollar public art story which she could probably get some inside dish on: Janet Echelman's giant airborne jellyfish (I mean saguaro blossom) that ate the taxpayers' money. First it was flying, then it was gone, and now it may be flying again, because Andrea Norman and Susan Copeland and their twee-ass "experts" got "furious," and their "passion" just might carry the day. (Where's the airsick bag, by the way? Oh, okay, I see it there, up in the air.)
Again, it's not something we would cover, except to point out the obvious waste of everything in the overblown emptiness of the actual sculpture itself. It's just that if these dingalings --Young and the Producers-- think they're blogging, or even covering the arts, I'm here with a sharp stick to remind 'em different.
Just like with those questions Catherine and I have for all of those downtown Phoenix art people, still awaiting answers a couple of posts ago.
Comments are open.
Posted by Jerome at December 11, 2007 04:45 PM | TrackBack