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"Greater New York 2005" to Revisit Previous Group of Artists
The Museum of Modern Art's alternative space, PS1 in Queens, announced today that "Greater New York 2005" will consist entirely of artists from the 2000 exhibition "Greater New York." "We wanted to see what all our artists were doing five years later," said PS1 director Alanna Heiss, "and frankly we're sick of this 'fresh young talent' paradigm." She says she fears that New York is "becoming like LA, where the scene is centered around artists still in grad school" and protested the "increasing infantilization trend" of the rival 2004 Whitney Biennial. At an impromptu press conference, she read the following quote from a 1987 Dan Graham essay as further justification for the Museum's somewhat unexpected and daring project:
According to [Walter] Benjamin, "progress," the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalist myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which "produce a sense of eternal newness." This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superseded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is this very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.Below, images by "Greater New York" artist Michael Phelan, then and now:
Michael Phelan, from the "Driftwood and Dried Arrangements" series shown in "Greater New York" (2000)
Michael Phelan, from the "Bears" series, to be shown in "Greater New York" (2005)
I'm wondering if there is some immutable law that the size of political demonstrations increases with the distance from the reporting country. A New York Times headline today announces that "Hundreds of Thousands of Lebanese Rally Against Syria"--apparently affirming the White House propaganda that the US slaughter of Iraqis somehow caused democracy to bust out all over the Middle East. Yet when hundreds of thousands rallied in Washington and New York against Bush's planned aggression, it was reported as "tens of thousands." Also missing from the headline, but included in the body of the article, was the fact that the week before in Lebanon, a "pro-Syrian march ... also filled the downtown with hundreds of thousands of mostly Shiite demonstrators." Yet when hundreds of thousands rallied in Washington and New York for Bush's planned aggression--oh, wait, there were no such demonstrations.
UPDATE (as I'm writing this). Since it might be less than clear from the opposed nature of the huge Lebanese demonstrations that the most recent protest is a victory for Bush, the Times just changed its headline to the more helpful "Rally Against Syria Appears to Be Largest Yet in Lebanon." O-kay.