Ok we are testing out the new address. You can get to the new Henri Blog from here. We are hoping to make reading a bit easier on the eye, and be patient as we iron out the kinks. Our first posting is part one of our art and entertainment discussion. So - adjust your rss feeds and come back to visit at our new site!

My new favorite pass time in Venice was to look at wonderful paintings, and then enjoy a caipirinha while contemplating what I'd just seen. There was a great cafe by the Ponte Dei Pugni that allowed for people watching and Brazilian imbibing. Of course the propronents of AA will tut tut my unwinding endeavor, but so what, I'm a grown person making a choice. This link to Maria's cookbook will give the recipe. I will tell you that the cachaca (I don't have that spiffy "c" character to make the last sh sound) is lethal! But the drink is so tasty you don't realize you're looped until you stand for the first time.

The exotic factors were off the chart. First - I'm in Venice - which to me is one of the most exotic places I could be. OK, I know - it's Europe - Italy in fact - tourist destination par excellence. Well to me, it's as fascinating and different as the dark side of Mars - I'm an American - everything beyond the mall is freakin' exotic - including New York City. Second, Italy seems fascinated with anything South American - there are large segments of Italian desendents in Brazil and Argentina - just as there are here in NY. In fact judging from the wacked out TV shows I saw, culturally, Brazil and Argentina are much closer to Italy than America. There's nothing like watching a rehearsal of Argentine Tangoist on the portico of the Pantheon to amp up one's exotic factor.

Third, Venice is a hodgepodge of old cultures, east and west, colliding together on these wild islands - all influenced and controlled by the changing of the tides. Everything flows with the water. High tide, low tide, acqua alta - whatever - you have to deal with nature in a way cities usually don't. I believe that's part of the charm of Venetian painting and what makes it so visually strong. Venice is a female city - it produces a different sort of artistic experience. After a day at the Scuola Di San Rocco sitting with Tintoretto and having a painting conversation about space, form and composition, my Pugni cafe was a further break into a deeper more physical exoticism. I easily get caught up in the mood.

I keep thinking of the show at the Fortuny. Which was truly wierd. There was a lot of wild work from nearly every era and culture mixed with a heavy late 19th Century sensibility - all of it truly decadent in that Victorian / Freudian way. The palace is a crumbling wonder and has a real thickness to it. If you can - sit on one of the divans and soak up the atmosphere. I normally don't go in for this sort of stuff, but it really was distinctive. The museum had also mixed and matched a lot of new work with old - it worked. Interesting afternoon. I guess on this trip I kept stumbling over really exotic ideas, visions, tastes and experiences. I hope the same happens for you.

We've run into so many snags as we try desperately to update our site. Still we soldier on...In the meantime there have been a few interesting posts by Charlie Finch regarding art & entertainment. He's been on fire lately. We particularly liked his post on looking. "...But, for a long time, our world of art has robbed looking of its wonder...," and "... The mind is already made to decide, the eye is not invited in, the spectator blindfolded from room to room. Just as one cannot turn on a ballgame without hearing endless droning about salaries and steroids, one cannot go to a museum without wall texts, backstories and tales made of money." These are the coded display techniques of today's art world that send me into the stratosphere. Henri keeps a cooler head - I tend to stomp a bit. But we both agree that with so much art to see there simply isn't much to look at - however there's an awful lot to read. The constant critical droning on blogs, art news services and in the larger metropolitan papers sends us to the galleries only to be dissappointed time and time again. It seems that even though there are a bucket load of galleries - the support systems that have sprung up around this art business is 5 times as large. Christ, the endless parade of supporters appear like ants at a picnic - all promoting the same 10 shows and galleries - consensus is achieved and all is right with the world.

Yesterday I went to the Met and had an average viewing experience - mainly because of the crowds in the Dutch painting show. I was trying to contemplate a canvas by Hals when a room guard entered and started yelling at the top of his lungs about cel phones and pictures - I was so startled I jumped at least 3 feet. Suddenly the room was filled with the sound of people logging off their phones. Painting exists in a different time zone I think, and this enforced transition from the audile tactile world to a visual one was soundtracked by the cacaphony of bit stream jingles. As those little lit LEDs went to black I thought most of the works on the walls were done by candlelight.

I had an inedibly unpleasant and overpriced experience in the Met cafe - DO NOT ORDER ANYTHING FROM THE GRILL - I can not vouch for anything else except to say - if that's what the Met cooks do to chicken and burgers I shudder to think what they do to pasta and fish. I shall NEVER eat there again. Back in the Modern galleries Roberta is right about the Dekoo in the special collection show - fabulous. And Gorky just keeps gets better as I get older. After walking downtown a bit I got to really see 2 marvelous Caravaggios at a special show at the Salander OReilly gallery - they also had a few Tintorettos (hmmm...) a Titian (hmmm...) - a really fantastic El Greco and an even more fabulous Goya. All seen at close range and spot lighted for my enjoyment. Made the afternoon. Thanks to my good friend Mark Wiener for scoping the show out!

When I returned to the studio I was greeted with the latest Modern Painters. What has happened to that magazine? If I had an out house I would hang it for use - though Charmin it ain't. Today I read the first real reviews of the season in the Times - and could it be more predictable? The problem with reviews are they are more about reportage than about critical thinking. The Times especially has honed this writing style better than others, but why their critics carry so much weight in the art world is beyond me - their tastes are narrow and 20 years too late. I suppose this is a holdover of the mid 20th century when newspapers mattered. Not so today. News no longer exists - we live in a post-news-world. What we have is not reporting but confirming - confirmation of other confirmations that something of note is happening - I call this the Orson Effect - the first instance of mass delusion caused by a blind public believing the false news and confirmations of that news heard on their radios. So in the art world one blog confirms another blog's good taste - then passes it on to another blog for confirmation. Consenus is the objective - whether there is actually anything of truth to be confirmed is irrelevant. Consensus exists so that the blogs can exist.

Yep, this is a blog as well... so believe or not.

In Rough Trade we speak about the Creole - the colliding and mixing of disparate forms creating something new, exciting and unexpected. In the 21st Century it is how we will engender a new form of Art. We will collide ideas of modernism and mix it with the post-human. For Abstraction it will move us beyond bankrupt Postmodern academicism and allow us to express our emotional lives in new visual ways. We will be out in front of the programmed systems, out beyond the examination of technique and deep into the rougher areas of our existences.

We live today with the horrible example of the corporatization of a segment of our population. The destruction of New Orleans by Hyper-Nature and Programmed Corporate Systems has become the 21st Century proving ground for the redistribution of suburban retail economic theories, wealth distribution, social eugenics and vacuous governmental privatization. The Creole, the population, the lived life has become a rootless cultural diaspora in America. Sent to camps and projects across the country this population remains unable to return to their homes - forced out by the Postmodern economic programs of 'reconstruction.' In the years to come we will begin to feel this clash between Creole life and cultural programming across the nation - this is Rough Trade.

This play between the lived and the programmed is everywhere in America. In our painting world 21st CenturyAbstractionists have had to go underground. Discredited by the 90s Academics and intellectually lost to the Hedge Fund Shoppers abstraction is having to remake itself. Let me make the distinction between the seasonal movement that has just occurred(abstraction as a style of painting) and real abstract thought. Abstraction can and does connect with lived visual experience and it will create images that engender emotional involvement - beyond the sterile examination of physical limitations or intellectual codes. It refuses to be a part of the current gallery fashion parade and product development programs. New visual ideas are making their way into the cultural matrix. They are based on the lived experience, the visual experience and the remain abstract. This is the exciting part of Rough Trade and we will be examining this in depth shortly. For now Peeping Tom on Henry Rollins' show will give you a taste of the electronic world as a Creole experience.

Well - sliding back into the NY Groove is difficult - especially when germ infected. I look like a swollen otter and feel like hell. I've been polishing up a promised article on art and entertainment, and was struck by 2 recent articles discussing just that. First Charlie Finch lays out the fact that the art world has come to mimic Hollywood - a charge we have made here in the past (Thanks Charlie! I always feel like you get it.) And second in todays Times - Roberta discusses the recent Aaron Young spectacle at the Armory - who doesn't always get it, but really, really, really wants to (majesty of the empty building - puhleese.) "Several hundred denizens of the spheres of art and fashion were in attendance, observing from raised balconies and bleachers. Watching gladiators at the Roman Colosseum was not a far-fetched analogy. The performance was followed by drinks in the Armory’s baronial Tiffany Room and dinner on long tables with black tablecloths, courtesy of Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s and the designer Tom Ford."
The Times also documents the thing with one of their patented slide shows. In the corporate world this is known as branding synergy - in the service this is known as a cluster fuck.

I've been very precise about the connections between art and entertainment in my upcoming post so I will leave off commenting for now. You'll just have to read the links and have your Entertainment Tonight pump primed. So much to do and so little time....