Send her your sexts

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:16:00 +0000

If you've ever sent a nudie pic to your significant other, and you've wondered what the grainy image would look like in the hands of a master portraitist -- a da Vinci, say, or a Caravaggio -- performance artist Karen Finley is about to make your kinky art history nerd dreams come true. From May 23 to May 26, the artist is asking the public to send her their personal sexts, which she will reproduce as a series of paintings in an installation at the New Museum.

The process works like this: for a fee ($200 for a work on paper, $500 for an oil on canvas), the exhibitionistically inclined can arrange brief private sittings with Finley. They'll be given the artist's private phone number and can snap away. Once Finley has received the photos, she'll translate them into a series of paintings to be publicly displayed in the New Museum lobby. After the exhibition closes on May 26, the subjects can take home their work to be stored as a memento of free-spirited youth, or hung in the living room to the chagrin of friends and family.

Finley, a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, has never shied away from controversy. In 1990, she was one of four artists whose NEA grants were revoked on the grounds that their work was obscene. "Sext Me If You Can" is presented by NE 4 In Residence, which revisits the four grant recipients' work.

When we all smelled like teen spirit

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000

RIGHT NOW ON the Bowery you can step into a time machine. It will carry you back to 1993 or thereabouts. It spreads over five floors in a great gleaming building, and to first acclimate you, a line of boxy Samsung televisions broadcast highlights from the year. This was before TVs were flat-screen or LCD or HD, when the initials that stood for high-tech – or any tech – in home entertainment were VHS. Here was a moment before the Internet was big, the World Wide Web did not exist yet (not really), AIDS was still “uncured,” Clinton had just been inaugurated, and it was a watershed moment for art.

This five-story teleportation device is an exhibit at the New Museum called “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.” Ignore the subtitle. It’s from a Sonic Youth album that doesn’t appear in the show and was, in fact, released in 1994. Though, I’ve read some pretty baroque interpretations of why it fits with such a close textual analysis they veer on New Criticism.

Salon.com > new museum

Send her your sexts

When we all smelled like teen spirit