Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Interview with a (very likeable) Smartypants

I am so impressed with this interview of the artist William Powhida by Paddy Johnson (aka the ArtFagCity blogger) that I simply have to repost it. Powhida is known as a bit of an artworld smart-ass, perhaps best known for his "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality" for the November 2009 cover of the Brooklyn Rail. He also co-curated #class with Jennifer Dalton in 2010, which was a fascinating (and fantastically idiosyncratic) freeform event series in Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea (one of the events was one of my colleagues, Zoe Sheehan-Saldaña, gift-wrapping, in her handmade paper, things that gallery visitors randomly brought in).

Discussing everything from struggling to career shame, the interview is smart questions, even smarter answers.


1 comment:

Beth Tondreau said...

Smart. Very smart. Speaking of smart, in her lecture on November 1, Marian Bantjes alluded to her writing on the blog SpeakUp, prompting my lecture buddy to write on her notepad, "You have to write to be visible."

Writing doesn't necessarily solve all of the problems of being an artist and making a living, but it does seem to open up opps.


"Working as a critic, developing relationships with art dealers and other artists, was really helpful in creating some opportunities for access. When the work became relevant to more than my own personal narrative, it opened up into a dialog about being an artist; my experiences could be fodder, but so could all the other experiences that other artists were having. It [the struggle] was really starting to inform the work."