People have been writing to us and some of the emails have been very nice, very polite requests for links to new blogs and sites.
Margaret Mayhew, who used to be part of 2SER’s Artichoke team before the show got the axe, wrote to let us know that she has a new exhibition coming up but she was too scared to tell us the details in case we were mean. Ms Mayhew writes:
After your roasting of Shane Hasseman’s video/felt piece I chuckled – and then saw him striding down king street (without the bag). He wasn’t meeting anyone’s eye and didn’t return my hello, so I’m scared of sending you details of my show which opens on Tuesday – coz not sure if the oeuvre is ready to face the slings and arrows of fate and published opinion.
What’s really disturbing about that email is that we thought we gave Hasseman’s show a pretty good write up, but now he’s a shattered figure sans bag. Mayhew did provide a link to her new blog Art & Mayhem. We wondered if it was going to be another one of those “I did a painting on Monday and it was good” artist blogs but thankfully it’s a lot more entertaining than that and so much like the art life we all know and love:
It was Friday night and I’d had two really appalling gin and tonics at manning bar. You think it would be impossible to stuff up a G&T – but some people are up to any challenge. Consequence of sipping G&T on a wintry sunset even when crap: love of universe, open to anything…
Bob Abrahams is an artist from Western Australia who dropped us an email to say that he was impressed by our blog and maybe we’d be interested in a link to his own Visual Art Notes. Thanks to Bob.
Meanwhile, an American artist named James W. Bailey “cordially” invited us to view his blog Black Cat Bone – Burning The Flesh Off Modern Art. In his personal description Bailey says he is
…an experimental artist, photographer and imagist writer from Mississippi. His art focus includes Littoral Art Projects that explore the fleeting moments of cross-cultural communicative intersections; film projects, including the short film, “Talking Smack”; “Wind Painting”, a unique naturalistic art practice inspired by the vanishing Southern African-American cultural tradition of the Bottle Tree; street photography centered on the hidden cultural edges of inner city New Orleans life; and “Rough Edge Photography”, a hard-edge non-digital photographic style that celebrates the death of 35mm film through the burning, tearing, slashing and violent manipulation of chemically developed negatives and prints.
And what does being an ‘experimental artist’ actually mean? It means stalking women on the DC area subway system, taking photos of them [most without their knowledge] posting them on his website and then explaining how he “fell in love” with each and every one of them. We hope the experiment is a success but with such icky shades of Sin City we doubt it.
Meanwhile at The Art Life, no pictures? What’s the story? There’s what’s called a “technical problem” and we haven’t been able to fix it. This is the downside of free online blogging – like a Japanese backpacker stranded in the desert, when there’s a real problem there’s no support or if it comes it takes days to get there. If anyone knows the intricacies of FTP, Hello or Blogger photos, we’d appreciate an email to the usual address. In the meantime, it’s back to links.
Finally, last week we gazed upon the Esteemed Critic‘s face for hours and wondered, is that really him? The answer is YES:
Is that REALLY John McDonald?
Yes it is 63% [26]
No, but it really looks like him 37% [15]
total votes: 41
