The Art Angle

If you are in New York this month, I have to insist that you make it over to the 41 Cooper Gallery at Cooper Union in the East Village, where an absolutely thrilling group show is on view through October 31. The exhibition looks at the history and continued resonance of Guild & Greyshkul, a storied gallery that operated from 2003 to 2009 in SoHo. It features work by more than 70 artists, famous and obscure, younger and older, including Mariah Robertson, Dana Schutz, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Ryan Johnson, B. Wurtz, Ryan Muller, and Valerie Hegarty. Some exhibited at the gallery, and others were part of its extended network. The show was organized by Guild & Greyshkul’s three intrepid artist founders, Anya Kielar, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Sara VanDerBeek, at the invitation of Adriana Farmiga, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Yuri Masnyj, its associate dean. All five have work in the show. Sara VanDerBeek recently came by the Artnet News offices to discuss how she and her colleagues built Guild & Greyshkul as young artists in New York. She spoke with Andrew Russeth about how they made ends meet (spoiler alert: it was not always easy), why they decided to pull the plug, and the advice she would offer to someone opening a space today. It’s a conversation about a brief moment in time that I think gets at issues that many artists, curators, and dealers are confronting as New York becomes increasingly expensive and its art scene in some ways becomes more and more averse to risk.

What does it mean to make art on the internet? It's not a new question, but it's far from a settled question. From very early on in the history of the World Wide Web, artists leapt in to start experimenting, and very shortly after that, the organization Rhizome was born. Dedicated to digital art, it quickly became one of the most important advocates and keepers of its history. Last week, Rhizome celebrated its 30th birthday with a gala that brought together the luminaries of online art, both present and historical, and an art show titled "WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!" showing web-based work by Lorna Mills, Rafaël Rozendaal, Maya Man, Kim Asendorf, Luke Shannon, and many other names you either know or should know. This was the perfect time to talk to Michael Connor, longtime co-director of Rhizome. Ben Davis speaks with him to get the history of art online in all its chaos, and to asks him where he thinks it might be going next.

This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen. Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went vertical in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible, and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. A follow-up film, called The White Album, won the Golden Lion for Best Artist as part of the main show of the Venice Biennale back in 2019. And this month, Jafa is back in Venice, this time in a two-person show called “Helter Skelter,” curated by Nancy Spector, pairing him with the famous artist Richard Prince, also known for using found and appropriated imagery to disorienting effect. That show opened alongside the Venice Biennale at the Prada Foundation, and was one of the few things during the opening weekend that everyone could agree was a must-see event. Jafa has also curated a show currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Less Is Morbid,” a deliberately packed display of his favorite art. He is also one of the winners of this year’s Art Basel Award, to be honored at that fair. In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa sat down with Ben Davis to discuss his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.