AFC Weekly: God, Money, and Einstein on the Beach

I was about 21 when I decided to figure out what avant-garde music sounded like. A friend and I grilled a visiting artist who seemed knowledgeable on the subject, and madly scribbled down the names he mentioned. Then we got radio shows so we could look up all the music. It was 1996, so that’s what you did.

Autumn is an exciting time for the Department of Cultural Affairs, a time for the culmination of the year’s budget dance in the ritual mailing-out of checks. From younger organizations like NURTUREart to more established ones like Franklin Furnace, many nonprofits have confirmed receiving a larger grant than last year.

“[Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe] did this long before Breaking Bad was popular,” a Marlborough staff told an eager gallery goer who was busy eating up Stray Light Grey, the duo’s installation. The piece transforms the gallery space into a completely unrecognizable series of dust-covered rooms, like a paean to underground culture. I’ve never heard “artists did it before a TV show” as a selling point, but sometimes we take what we can get in the cultural relevancy department.

This week at the L Magazine, I find my center and spread the gospel. There’s some net art out there that talks more about the soul than about the iPhone. I call it good.

This week, a record two gallery girls worked.

As we found out during a trip to Chelsea this weekend, a Family Business internship entails guarding art on a folding chair, in a roughly 10 x 10 foot closet space. You’re not getting paid, you don’t get a computer, and the gallery doesn’t sell anything, so you’re not exactly making useful contacts. Currently the gallery is packed with instruments, so there’s also a giant gong a few feet from your head which everybody’s invited to hit with a mallet. Sounds just like the “training which would be given in an educational environment” that is legally required of an unpaid internship, hahahahahaha!

But just for laughs, we thought we’d lay out a few academic or training scenarios which Massimiliano Gioni and Maurizio Cattelan had in mind when they tasked a presumably educated young hopeful to guard their art all day.

In a time of dwindling foundational support, museums struggling to find alternate revenue streams often see crowdsourcing as the road to an easy paycheck. How’s that been working out for institutions? Looking at the Hirshhorn’s current campaign, not too well. The museum has received a paltry $500 in donations over the span of five months.

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boy, have critics had a field day, almost universally panning it. With almost 50 works by Warhol and nearly 100 works by artists who have responded to Warhol in some way, the show was bound to cause a stir because really, which artist hasn’t been influenced by Andy Warhol? With this in mind, critics ask: is Regarding Warhol an intelligently curated retrospective that explores important aspects of Warhol’s work, or is Regarding Warhol a celebrity driven, gimmicky attendance boost?

Time to start pursuing that accolade of accolades: having Art Fag City branded on your CV for life. Are you a journalism student with a burning desire to edit everything in sight? Perhaps you love the accomplishment of creating a tidy Excel spreadsheet. Either way, you want this position. AFC is an award-winning publication that hosts some of the brightest critical minds working today. Send your application to internships@artfagcity.com by Friday, October 12, 2012 and nab the best internship ever.