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newsletter - fall - 2005
| E-bay art project- August 23 - September 17, 2005 |
With “the ebay art project,” San Francisco painter, installation artist and curator Michael Rosenthal has taken a provocative stance on the always thorny issues of artistic originality and creativity. These issues are more timely than ever in today’s postmodern esthetic climate, which disdains the heroic individualistic artistic vision, and in the digital age, which has dematerialized and desacralized visual imagery to instant availability and infinite cut-and-paste adaptability. Can unique hand-made art objects survive and flourish in a search-engine mediasphere? Is originality desirable or even possible where instantaneity and marketability are cultural norms?
Noticing conventional
"unattributed and affordable" landscape oil paintings up for auction online,
Rosenthal purchased dozens of them (maximum bid: $5), and sent them to
28 artists in the Bay Area and East Coast (selected for their "love of
ideas" and "urbanized sense of irony") requesting professional 'repair.'
The results of these esthetic remediations, serial collaborations between
unknown co-creators, run the gamut of expression from lyrical to haunting,
humorous to satirical. (Samples can be previewed online at www.nupinkgallery.com.)
Viewers will enjoy comparing images of the works before and after, and
will inevitably make personal esthetic choices between original and altered
states, naivete and sophistication, mall and museum, industry and art.
The dichotomies merge and fuse, however: in this show everyone is an artist,
and everyone is a critic - or can be.
Not only will the works be on display; this comprehensive conceptual artwork will also include auction documentation from Rosenthal's transactions with ebay, which, incidentally, has no sponsorship connection to this project. Going a step further to close the thematic loop, Rosenthal has arranged that the artworks be for sale (with a portion of proceeds donated to the gallery), auctioned, fittingly enough, on ebay, with a computer link available to gallery visitors. Thus viewers onsite and buyers online become a part of the larger artwork that is "The ebay Art Project," a simultaneous celebration and critique of consumerism, American-style.
The invited artists include Reed Anderson, Amy Berk, Renee Billingslea, John Brumit, Adriane Coburn, Chris Eckert, Sacha Eckes, Peter Foley, Andy Gouveia, Constance Harris, Katina Huston, Suzanne Husky, Packard Jennings, Marianne Kolb, Lisa Lightman, Jeanne Lorenz, Leah Modigliani, NDFTBK, Michael Pauker, Edwin Schlossberg, Fanny Retsek, Dickson Schneider, Sandra Starkey-Simon, Marta Thoma, Michael Trigilio, Calvin Turnwall, Sieglinde Van Damme, Sarah Wagner, and Annie Wong.
Shown also will be Rosenthal's "Mona Lisa Postcard Project," a collaborative mail art project involving 1000 post cards of Leonardo's international woman of mystery (already famously parodied by Duchamp, Picabia, and Dali/Halsman), which were altered by scores of artists and nonartists and return-mailed for display.
DeWitt Cheng 2005
works/san josé
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