Year: 2013

Jerry Saltz recently sounded a death knell:

These days, the art world is large and spread out, happening everywhere at once. A shrinkingfraction of galleries’ business is done when collectors come to a show. Selling happens year-round,at art fairs, auctions, biennials, and big exhibitions, as well as online via JPEG files and even via collector apps. Gallery shows are now just another cog in the global wheel. Many dealers admit that some of their collectors never set foot in their actual physical spaces.

The beloved linchpin of my viewing life is playing a diminished role in the life of art. And I fear that my knowledge of art—and along with it the self-knowledge that comes from looking at art—is shrinking.

Artists and dealers are as passionate as ever about creating good shows, but fewer and fewer people are actually seeing them. Chelsea galleries used to hum with activity; now they’re often eerily empty. Sometimes I’m nearly alone. Even on some weekends, galleries are quiet, and that’s never been true in my 30 years here. (There are exceptions, such as Gagosian’s current blockbuster Basquiat survey.) Fewer ideas are being exchanged, fewer aesthetic arguments initiated. I can’t turn to the woman next to me and ask what she thinks, because there’s nobody there.

Sarah Nardi nods:

Warhol said that an artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have. That’s hard to argue with. I need water. I need to exhale after I inhale. But I don’t need to have a painting on my wall. No one does. But a sense of connection, I believe, is something we all need.

And art serves as a way to form those connections—to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. We need galleries for that. We need thoughtfully curated shows, the juxtaposition of wildly different points of view, and—most importantly—access to living, breathing, working artists. We need to see them standing next to their work, enjoying a well-deserved glass of wine.

So let the champagne crowd toss back their bubbly and move on. And let the faceless collectors appraise pixelated shadows projected on the virtual wall. Galleries serve a larger purpose than sales. Beyond their role as a place where work is sold, they are physical spaces that help foster a culture of real, meaningful connection. They are, as Saltz writes, “social spaces, collective seances, and campfires where anyone can gather.”

(Photo by Celine Nadeau)

There’s an arms race afoot to grow the hottest pepper in the world. Lessley Anderson tasted a top contender, the Moruga Scorpion:

[U]pon popping the Scorpion into my mouth, the tip of my tongue feels like it’s being jabbed by a hundred needles and there’s a heavy burn rolling toward my tonsils. My salivary glands are in overdrive, drool gushes into my mouth and my nose is running. This all from eating a piece the size of a sesame seed.

The Moruga Scorpion, in fact, is at the same Scoville heat unit (SHU) level as police-grade pepper spray. Yet the market is hungry for the superhots, “with hot sauce just behind social gaming and solar panel manufacturing as one of our fastest growing industries”:

There’s a serious commercial advantage to being the official grower of the official hottest pepper in the world. Superhot seeds aren’t commercially available from large seed companies, so heat freaks wishing to grow their own have to buy them online from small suppliers like Duffy and Currie. Being able to market yourself as the record holder is great advertising. Hot sauce makers, who generally contract with one main grower, sell more sauce with a world-famous chile on the label.

“The Superhot peppers are an extremely valuable commodity,” says Dave DeWitt, an author and chile expert who runs the industry’s biggest event, The National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A typical Scorpion pepper pod at a farmers’ market will go for one dollar, notes DeWitt. “Think if you had an acre of these things; think how much money you could generate. Behind marijuana, they have the potential to become the second- or third-highest yielding crop per acre monetarily.”

For all of the superhot lovers out there, DeWitt has 1,001 Best Hot and Spicy Recipes. (And speaking of marijuana, he also put out Growing Medical Marijuana: Securely and Legally.)

(Photo by edenpictures)

On a topic I touched upon here, Harold Pollack, not a big fan of the Tory prime minister, concedes that “Thatcher-era British policies provided a damning contrast to the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations”:

The Thatcher government responded rather effectively and humanely to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Embracing harm reduction measures such as syringe exchange and methadone maintenance, it saved thousands of lives. Indeed the words “harm reduction,” anathema to American drug control policy until the Obama administration, were official watchwords of British drug policy. As Alex Wodak and Leah McLeod summarize this history:

By 1986 the Scottish Home and Health Department concluded that ‘the gravity of the problem is such that on balance the containment of the spread of the virus is a higher priority in management than the prevention of drug misuse.’ and recommended accordingly that ‘on balance, the prevention of spread should take priority over any perceived risk of increased drug use.’ This approach was strengthened by the influential UK Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs asserting in 1988 that ‘the spread of HIV is a greater danger to individual and public health than drug misuse…accordingly, services that aim to minimize HIV risk behaviour by all available means should take precedence in development plans.’

My interview with Vanity Fair‘s John Heilpern is up:

“What have you done for pleasure lately?” I asked.

“You mean apart from the occasional sodomy?” he replied.

We also talked blogging models:

He conducts an ongoing conversation with more than a million people a month about such topics and hobbyhorses as the intransigence of Republicans versus Obama (which he nicknames Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner); the moral shamefulness of government-sanctioned torture; pedophilia and the lost credibility of the Catholic Church; and Montaigne’s essay on why we bless someone who sneezes.

“Montaigne was an early blogger,” he pointed out, for he wrote about everything under the sun. And doubtless Pascal too—for what else are prototype blogs but spontaneous pensées? Sullivan himself was a born blogger before blogs existed. Among the brightest and best of his Oxford and Harvard generations, he was weaned on the old print media of Fleet Street when he left Oxford to join The Daily Telegraph in 1984—an unapologetic Thatcherite and novice editorial writer among the gilded newspaper palaces along the Street of Shame.

“People forget that we churned out an editorial a day at newspapers. When I went to the Telegraph, the editorial conference took place at 4:30, and there was tea afterward, and gin. They’d already demolished two bottles at lunchtime. Copy was due at seven P.M., and you had to write it on deadline, very concisely, very solid.” He began to laugh. “That’s how I learned how to blog—in the most traditional setting ever.”