Listen to the incredible poetic artistry of Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which appeared on his first album Pieces of a Man (1971).

My favorite paragraph is undoubtedly this one:

“The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.”

My apologies to Jean-Jacques David's "Le Serment du Jeu de paume" (1791)

As the New Museum controversy rages on, people are finally asking questions that we should periodically be asking of our arts institutions. The reason they haven’t come up before was probably because for the last six years we were all too busy watching the art market swallow the art world.

Well, now is as good a time as any to republish this inspiring paragraph from the new third edition of Karsten Schubert book titled The Curator’s Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day (emphasis mine):

The museum [aka Louvre] was to play a central role in the formation and development of the new society; yet when it opened to the public on August 10, 1793, the first anniversary of the Republic, none of this was obvious from the displays. They looked suspiciously pre-Revolutionary and resembled, in the words of the playwright Gabriel Bouquier, ‘the luxurious apartments of satraps and the great, the voluptuous boudoirs of courtesans, the cabinets of the self-styled amateurs’. A few months later Jacques-Jacques David elaborated the point: ‘The museum is not supposed to be a vain assemblage of frivolous luxury objects that serve only to satisfy idle curiosity. What it must be is an imposing school.’ It seems that from the outset the museum and its critique went hand in hand.

More thoughts to follow.

Episode: The Camel

The auction houses should be required by law to tell us who bought what, but, more importantly, transparency would be in the best interests of the auction world because more people would get involved and it would be more fun!

Unfortunately, “fun” is the last thing that art world elitists are looking.

Read the whole article on Artnet, which is chock-full of other conflicts of interest that make the recent New Museum affair seem tame by comparison.

For all but a handful of the chosen, the prize ethos is corrupting. Pitting artists against one another as if they were gladiators is inherently insidious. And every year lots of artists waste lots of time applying for prizes they have little or no chance of winning.

More disturbing, the prize ethos subtly promotes naked careerism. A prize certainly dresses up one’s resumé, as Trecartin and the Dufalas discovered this year. But embellishing resumés, while creative in its own way, can become a substitute for genuine achievement.

I think this renewed taste for art prizes is part of the new marketing of art as entertainment and not enlightenment. It is a transition IMHO that has been seriously happening for about a decade — though if someone disagrees, let me know since there are obviously people out there with longer memories than me. The Pruitt Awards at the Guggenheim is another manifestation of this culture, which seeks to fashion a Hollywood-wannabe culture out of the “art world.”

Jake Dobkin is a legend in the New York street art scene. A dedicated street art photographer, he has recently been reevaluating his work in the field and posted the following text on November 4, 2009, as a caption to the image above, which has the distinction of being his 10,000th upload to Flickr.

I’ve reproduced his text in its entirety (no edits) because of its historical interest:

I got interested in streetart back in 1997, when I spent a couple of weeks in Paris and saw what was going on there with stencils and posterwork. I’d done some graf in high school, and when I got back to the states, I did a year or two of streetart work myself uptown. You can still see some of those stencils today, 12 years later. But it wasn’t until 2003, when I got my first digital camera, that I started seriously documenting streetart.

These 10,000 images are what came out of that work— six years of walking, skating, or riding my bike around the city, looking for new pieces, and tracking stuff down online. For the first four years, it was pretty solitary work— I didn’t know that many people who were interested in it (not even my friends!) but I still enjoyed it. The last couple of years were more interesting, as I got to know other streetart documentarians working online (particularly Katherine, Becki, Ray, Steve, and Mike) , and started getting to know some of the artists in person. That added a new dimension to the work— sometimes a little painful (remember that time I started beef with Cake by telling her to make bigger pieces, or when I accused everyone of holding out Revs locations on me, or when those herbs at Bombin’ Mag were on my jock every day for three months talking about how wack streetart is?) but mostly entertaining and interesting, and the competition to get the best picture or the first picture really elevated the work.

Most of you know that me and my wife are having our first kid this month, and between that and running Gothamist, my free time is starting to get a little thin. So I’ll be stepping back from this streetart work starting today. Not stopping— I’m still going to be shooting for artists that I’ve become friends with and respect (don’t forget to email me!), and I’ll try to get out on the old bike every couple of weeks for a few hours. But I’m not going to be getting up first with shots any more. Maybe focusing on a small number of quality shots will make the pictures better. I’d also like to do some more behind-the-scenes shots, so if you’d like me to shoot your studio, or go out with you on an installation, let me know.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Streetsy.com— it seems a shame to shut it down, since I’ll still be doing some posting, but if I’m going to keep it up, it makes sense to change how it works. If you’ve got any ideas about that, let me know.

And thanks for clicking on these shots all these years. I hope you’ve enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed taking them. And I’d like to thank Marc and Sara at Wooster Collective for introducing me to so many new artists, sending me thousands of visitors, and letting me play a small behind-the-scenes role supporting their work at the site.

-Jake

Links mentioned in the text but not hyperlinked:

• Streetsy.com;
• Gothamist.com; and
• Bombin’ Magazine.

A few weeks ago I blogged for Hyperallergic about the iBlanket campaign, which launched a New York campaign to raise awareness about homelessness in cities around the world.

At the time, I warned that they were stepping on some major street art toes with their approach. They covered up a well-known Shepard Fairey spot and replaced it with corporate-seeming Apple-spoofs.

Turns out that soon after they went up (about a week), the iBlanket posters were already pulled down and a new Shepard Fairey poster dominated the wall again.

Thanks to Veken for photographing the spot’s transformation.

ANOTHER FAIREY SURFACES

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, you may also want to know about a new Fairey I spotted on Eighth Avenue, near 28th Street. It was late on Saturday night on my way to a karaoke bar in Koreatown.

A man walked by me as soon as I finished shooting this and I heard him saying “…that’s fuckin’ disgusting…(listening)…pigeons washing themselves in some street puddle…” into his cell phone. When I made eye contact with him he lowered his voice.

Watch the 11 second video on Flickr.

This is one of my favorite works from the season, and it’s on display during BETA Spaces in Bushwick tomorrow.

Sharon from Two Coats of Paint tells us a little about Moyse’s show, “The Otherside:”

At Norte Maar this month, [Jason] Andrew has installed [six] paintings by Bushwick artist Brooke Moyse. Moyse makes thinly painted landscapes with the slightest hint of horizon. “Many of the paintings develop around a specific historical work of art,” [she writes in her statement.]

While tackling Poussin, Constables, Bellini, Holbein, and Lawrence Weiner may sound like an appropriation nightmare, Moyse steers clear of obvious historic references. Her paintings seem to fit into two groups: interiors and landscapes. The smaller works feel like sketches, while the larger canvases are fully formed and ambitious. “Forest M.E.” is the centerpiece of the show, and my guess is it’s inspired by Holbein since it comes across as regal and poised.

More about BETA Spaces on BushwickBK.