For a while I'd been looking forward to Troy Bennett's solo show Utility Poles at Get This! Gallery in Castleberry Hill. I used to be obsessed with utility poles and was photographing and drawing them regularly. Bennett's pictures are all digital photos and they use digital media's cool, over-crisp rendering to their advantage; from a middle distance they take on the look of precisely-rendered watercolors. This makes them look fragile, vulnerable, and delicate in a way such massive objects are never seen. I have a feeling that the next set Bennett produces will be spectacular, having worked out its aesthetic even more finely, but as they stand, the pictures in this show are already highly engaging and very good.

current music: Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere

Ok, all the cool kids do Friday Roundups, so being a great fan of bandwagons and mobs, I will jump on board.

If I had much more time and some cash lying around I would attend this conference on the importance of storytelling and mythology.

If LA can hold a biennial for only $5 million dollars, Atlanta can, too. We have Coca-Cola. They don't.

If even half of this story is true, then Dale Chihuly is annoying the crap out of me. I'd love to know what Joy thinks of this.

Eva Lake's Portland blog was reprinted with permission. KH's Miami blog was reprinted without it. Guess where all the hell broke loose?

And finally, Young Blood Gallery & Boutique needs a summer intern. If interested contact Kelly.

The mysterious and shadowy ArtsWatch GA just dropped its report on BCA funding over the last 7 years. It's not so much a report as a sketched-out list of numbers. Ok, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

So this report shows a drop of about $67,000 in cultural contracts funding (the kind of funding that local arts groups and individuals apply for every year). This represents about an 11.9% decrease over 7 years. Bad. Enough to get artists' tongues wagging.

But hold on. The overall city arts budget has also been dropping over the past 7 years according to the ArtsWatch GA report. Crunching the numbers, BCA cultural contracts funding represented 12.9% of the 2000 arts budget, and represented 13% of the 2005 arts budget. A slight uptick, or at least an admirable holding of the line.

But wait, don't answer yet! How does the arts budget compare to the overall city budget? How quickly has the city's budget been growing? We don't know because the shadowy and elusive ArtsWatch GA only provides numbers for the city's overall budget for one year: 2005. Not enough information to make any comparisons on.

Well, that's what you get when shadowy, nebulous groups release reports on the internet. You're bound to get a mixed bag. Never mind the fact also that the report considers the BCA budget and "arts funding" to be interchangeable terms, and without a methodology documenting why this is true, the ArtsWatch GA report is near useless.

Still, I whipped out the 10-key and checked the overall city budgets for 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002.

2005: 6.88 billion
2004: 5.07 billion
2003: 3.78 billion
2002: 3.98 billion

So there's your real story which ArtsWatch GA totally missed: even though the city of Atlanta has seen a 58% increase in its overall budget over 4 years in absolute dollars, the city's arts budget has dropped by 12% in absolute dollars over the same period.

The question isn't where $67,000 "missing" dollars went, the questions is why the arts budget hasn't kept up with the growth of the rest of the city budget, and in fact has moved in the opposite direction. Kirsten, Ernesto, what am I missing? What's going on?

UPDATE: 5/25 9am
ArtsWatch GA just released Part 2 of their report-and to be fair, I should have paid more attention to the subject header of Part 1 of the report, which hints that there's more to come. This part has what looks like more methodology info, but I'm off to my sister's graduation in Nashville and won't have time to check it out until the weekend.

UPDATE 2: 5/25 9:37
Ok, just read it. Mostly it slugs the BCA and accuses them of mismanaging the agency's funds. It also bitch-slaps the mayor for not giving adequate support to the BCA. These may all be valid points, but we still got precious little methodology...

Something about art shows on government property that practically mandates that they be uneven, as relatively accomplished work is thrown cheek-by-jowl against work that's not quite ready for prime time. That was the feeling I got at City Hall East's Pin-Up show, now in the gallery whose days are numbered.

So there was lots at both ends of the spectrum, but a couple of pieces I enjoyed were the absurd little medical illustrations painted on aged velum (above) and these sketchbook pages by M. Vega. None of the pages was a masterpiece, but I'm a sucker for obsessive devotion to process, which these sketches showed, pinned to the the wall in profusion.


Plus, this was funny for too many reasons to name:

The new logo has been designed. This probably won't be permanent, but should be chic enough to get us through the start-up phase. That's right, "us." In a few days, I'll know enough to reveal the stable of editors and writers I've put together. Meanwhile the placeholder site is up here.

Friday, I ventured to a new (for me) little corner of town near Georgia Tech where Sandler Hudson was showing work by 4 different artists. I came for Freddie Styles's new work. When I saw the postcard a week ago, I imagined these paintings were ambitious, gestural, wall-sized works. In fact, they are mostly sort of medium sized (maybe 3 by 4 feet), and they felt flat to me, like a warm up or prelude to something else. They played it safe, although a some of the smaller ones gained in intensity by being packed into a smaller space. I was reminded of my own portraiture, the way it would fall apart once I increased the scale beyond a few inches...

Unfortunately, I had to leave before it was dark enough to begin Mark Leibert's projection Bloom on the rooftop. If somebody saw that, please let me know how it was!


From there I ventured out to Candler Park for the grand opening of the Rabbit Hole Gallery, featuring work by Tyson McAdoo. I've seen word of this gallery nowhere other than in Juxtapoz Magazine, so already it had kind of an edgy, we-don't-give-a-shit-about-the-art-establishment feel to it. And it lived up to the expectation. The hipsters caroused as far as the eye could see, leather-clad fetish chicks dancing on platforms and sideburns aplenty. The Rabbit Hole's Arizona street loft space was as much party as art show.

And the work was living, vital, and fun. It won't end up on my wall anytime soon, but still, to me it was what art should be, a kind of visceral engagement in life, be it filtered through anger, contemplation or, as in this case, eroticism. McAdoo's work careens all over that illustration-fine art boundary that has been the buzz of LA the last couple of years. His lovely fetish babes are printed digitally, and a few pieces are emblazoned with his web address. Does that make it somehow not capital-A art? Probably, but I don't care. And my guess is neither does he.

current music: The Polyphonic Spree, The Beginning Stages of...

After yesterday's crosswalk parade, I dropped by the Arts Exchange in Grant Park for their open house and introduction of the new board of directors. The AE is an old Atlanta institution, a multi-arts complex with studio spaces, gallery space, and once upon a time a collection of other facilities such as a darkroom and did I hear "printing press"? (left, Lisa Tuttle)

The AE has fallen on hard times in the last decade or so. And you can tell. The building is falling apart; the art hanging in the hallways is cracked and heavy with dust, abandoned by a previous generation of artists. It's poised for a revival and the open house kicks off a focused period of assessment and planning on how to revive the center.

I don't tend to hang out too long in facilities like this; the rabble rousers that I run with prefer less predictable surroundings. But organizations like this are imperative for the grassroots critical mass they foster, the atmosphere of a constant, low-level hum of creativity that never drops below a certain level. That kind of consistency keeps young artists and recent art school grads sticking around long enough to figure out how to make interesting work. Hence my donation check in the mail now. (right, Alice Lovelace)

Then, leaving AE I saw this:



I think I heard harps.

A dozen or so artists, stemming I believe largely from Ernesto Cuevas's artist think tank discussions, took to the road outside of City Hall East in a sort of artist protest-cum-parade-cum-art performance piece yesterday. The idea was to wait for the walk signals and then do a 25-second procession in front of the captive audience of cars stopped for the red light. Back and forth whenever the walk signal came on. The world's shortest parade.

Jeff D had a sign that said, "Honk if you love art," which turned out to be an excellent gauge of the drivers' reactions. And it all seemed to go over well judging by the almost constant stream of horn honking up and down Ponce. It was actually beautiful to see so many drivers look up from cell phone calls to honk and smile.

Being in Austin last week reminded me of how easy it is there to leverage the power of the small-scale action. A huge number of artists doing many small things adds up to an active, if mostly unprofessional, art scene. In Atlanta, the small scale is often missed or dismissed.

The Crosswalk Parade got at this idea of the small-scale action. It also ironically gave voice to a common frustration that the arts are simply not visible enough here. This is what I've realized in the last 24 hours: that Atlanta isn't so much lacking artists who push the envelope or even galleries that will show them (which is the charge I've been leveling for months), it is mostly missing the communication piece. It is lacking the bevy of small arts publications, the signage, the web sites, and the small-scale public art that most art-literate cities are drenched in. There are few spaces in which to talk about art and so the discussion dies. No buzz, no traction culturally. And the arts take on the appearance of being an afterthought to the life of the city.

This is good news, because that is actually a much easier problem to solve than, say, Austin's biggest problem, which is the lack of a decent collector base and all the gallery, museum, and large-scale actions that come with them.

Now Erik announces he is leaving for Portland soon, which will leave a great big hole in the digital landscape of the Atlanta art scene. Though word on the street is there may be a few candidates to step into those shoes.

All of this has caused me to rethink this space, yet again. I belong in this city for a reason. I'm a gemini, which is in the house of communication. There's a reason for that, I suppose.

Can'twaitcan'twaitcan'twaitcan'twait...

So I'm up all night getting stuff all wrapped up before I hop on a plane for Houston in the morning. This dude is getting married on Sunday so I'll be there for that and then it's rounds and rounds of meetings and connections in my bid to get Code Z off the ground.

Wow, this is different from Electric Skin, which I pretty much just threw up in a couple of hours over a weekend...

Having finally recouped my camera I can now post a few pictures on from the Atlanta Art bloggers' meet-up from last week.

We started out in Darwin's fabulous loft general space, but then moved to the rooftop to take in the scenery and the crisp weather, which was just beginning to turn drizzly.

Here are Voyeur's Ingrid LaFleur and Torkwase Dyson.


Karen Tauches saying, "I give up!" Jason Johnson and Darwin Brown (Greyscale) in foreground.


Hilary King looking suspicious...


The evening's talk was rangy, but fun (note how there is a glass of wine visible in every picture). I didn't imagine that the mood would be so eager and curious, but all night the ideas just keep flowing, not only about blogging but about a number of arts-related projects. So we concluded that art blogs do have several roles to fill in helping to connect Atlanta's otherwise fractured and disparate arts communities. A conclusion we had probably all reached before walking in the door, to be sure, but we were still able to get at some of the hows and whys also.

To my mind 4 things must converge if arts blogging is to make a difference in this or any city:

1. Someone has to step up and produce a daily or near-daily visual digest of the city in the style of, say, Roberta and Libby in Philadelphia. Simple and consistent, usually with quick commentary. Absolute regularity is the fast track to putting a blog on the map. I don't have the temperament for this; I change direction too often.

2. Someone has to do Atlanta-centric postings that step outside of the local art scene's comfort zone--it has to ruffle feathers and name names. The point of this is to take the kid gloves off, stir passion, and therefore discussion. That's how we figure things out. I'll volunteer for that one; I've done it for years.

3. A popular, in-crowd kid has to make a blog that everyone outside of the city respects and links to. This is Erik. People love him.

4. Finally, blogs have to be willing to link to and speak to one another. In other words start having the dialogue we always claim we want. Blogs that operate in a vacuum read like... well, like sites written in a vacuum. That's not interesting for very long.