The un- and underinsured at MoMA's PS1

Greater New York at PS1 has an interesting event this Saturday (June 19) with Dr. Maria Raven talking about Obama's public health insurance option as part of the GNY exhibition's performance series. Good friend and great doctor Eamonn Vitt is part of the crew. Eamonn has been running a program for some years now where he exchanges medical care for artists and takes payment in artworks.

Speaking of Greater New York, here's some photographs of ICI's Kate Fowle installing the Rotating Gallery at PS1 today - her show "the backroom" is part of the GNY exhibition.

Saturday June 19 at 3pm

Dr. Maria Raven, MD/MPH will be giving a powerpoint presentation this Saturday at PS 1 as part of programming organized by Greater New York artist Lucy Raven related to an art-for-medical-care health clinic run in collaboration with Dr. Eamonn Vitt for artists later this summer.

The talk will be making sense of Obama's health care plan, and discussing what it means to the un- and underinsured. For the last few years, Dr. Raven has been running an incredible pilot program at
Bellevue—now expanded to several hospitals around the city---to improve care and reduce hospital admissions and ED visits for patients with frequent, suboptimal use of the health care system. She is an advocate for public health reform, and she's a fantastic speaker on the topic. The talk will be brief, with time for questions after.

The Portrait of a Lawyer

Idiom Magazine's Sam Biederman's thoughtful, personal essay on subject-artist-viewer relationships in the Joel Sternfeld photograph Barefoot Attorney (1989) caused a stir this week. Biederman's father happens to be the subject of the photograph and so the essay offers access to the usually-silent subject. Almost as soon as the piece was posted, Idiom received a strongly-worded email from Sternfeld via his gallery, Luhring Augustine, asking for the illustrating photograph to be removed immediately (from the journal's website, and apparently everywhere else, because it's disappeared from the Art Institute of Chicago's online collection too). It seems that Sternfeld didn't like the mystique of his image transgressed by his subject's autobiographic details. 


I wrote a thesis on Sternfeld's Hart Island series and met him in the process (an engaging man). For me, Biederman's essay only serves to highlight the contested nature of subject and subjectivity in photography, without contesting the enduring beauty of Sternfeld's work. It's a shame the artist didn't see it this way too.

Mociun

Went to a book launch for the excellent Lines & Shapes design series tonight on the way home which my friend C's work was part of, and it made me think of last Easter weekend. Some pictures taken in early April for the upcoming fall/winter Mociun line below. Her textile designs are influenced by Bauhaus, Bourgeois and baking. A fine triumvirate.

Did Holy Moly start an art blog?

Just got switched on to this blog by a friend in L.A.  Cathedral of Shit is "sporadically posted art gossip/updates/news/unfounded gossip and hard idle chitchat. Speculation welcome."

Not necessarily hard news then, but the art world takes itself far too seriously to necessitate anyone else doing so on its behalf.  Interesting open letter to the Tate posted a few scrolls down the page, protesting the recent program "No Soul for Sale" organised by  artist Maurizio Cattelan and curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni at Tate Modern in London.

Apparently (or possibly "allegedly" is a safer bet) a fair few of the particpants were paying to appear in the iconic Turbine Hall, resulting in said letter from which an excerpt:

"Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?"

The hidden gem of this conversation is the lone comment at the end that points out "if poor unpaid artists are the elephant in the room, then interns are the elephant’s dung."  Too true, yet how to resist the hegemony we're all part of, unwittingly, unwillingly, or otherwise? Apparently not through the NSFS program or Tate.

And on a lighter note:

Mark Bradford @ MoMA a week ago = best artist talk I've seen in ages. Read about how he went from hairdresser to MFA grad to MoMA guest in NY Mag.