Thought experiment.

NYTxAPEXART collabo-

Take one suggestion for diversity from Roberta Smith and add Alanna Heiss's idea that there should be a balanced matrix of shows at any given time in a single venue. Mix. What does this equal?

I'd work that museum/gallery/alt/venue/platform. What curator wouldn't? A model where the space shows a multitude of shows simultaneously would be the only way to make Heiss's idea that no show should cost more than 10K possible. A scheduling nightmare with the added bonus of increased advertising costs. It would cost more and return less for the investors.

And let's be honest, the average show at a MOMA/MFA/LAMOCA is 10-20% cost on art and the rest goes into keeping the doors open, the show guarded, the coffee free trade, and the advertisements on buses, NPR, and in Art Forum.

If you did an ambitious schedule of 10K show 20 times a year, it would cost 200K. The MFA spends more than that on staples.

Besides the reduction on return, what is keeping this from happening now? The fashion of traveling uber-shows? Partially. The institution would have to be fast, agile, dynamic-- whatever you call it, it would have to be less conservative. And when art is involved, for some reason, people get uptight.

You'd need a pile of historians to double check facts for the 50th time before it was released to the public so XXX didn't embarrass themselves. The schedule would have to be go through 28 changes before approval. Et cetra.

We need a better art machine to sponsor a venue this awesome.

Mastery is no longer having the distraction of learning

Thank you to Matana Roberts for this article.

Hopefully, without sounding completely politically tone def, one could take black avant-garde and insert contemporary visual artist, and you have a 99% similarity. It takes so long to develop mastery. Academia is always staring at you-- come for the tenure, stay for the ego fluffing. The long days alone. The missing road map. The newness of what we do. The constant reinvention of the wheel.

It's tiring.

Without a supportive and active community to help guide you through the complications of art, you are sunk. If visual artists were to create more opportunities, (like x-initiative, IPCNY, Dieu Donne, Apex Art, and others) outside of just NY, we could come together more often and support each other.

We need each other.

You couldn't go down to 52nd St., NYC anymore to find and try to sit in with the greats. There were no more epic after-hour jam sessions. There were no more lofts where you had the time and the space to work out your ideas. Those of us on the ground who missed that era and didn't believe that the university could give us the keys to the new music were forced to solve the arcane equations on our own, without the proper information and guidance from our elders. For me, it became about following a faint trail of breadcrumbs through the rare magazine article, and obscure record stores and bookshops, then piecing the findings together as best I could to form a cogent history.

This is the same distance between those of us who make work, or try to put work up in public and those who teach. There has been cries of curator art, but I'd argue that those are misdirected. This trend may be university trained curator art.

Without just bashing the ivory tower, our chance to make our own world is now. Let's get working.

Tapetronic

Holy crap.