PISS about town 001: Downtown Art Schlep (PART 2)
PART 2 with another show or two and the things we saw that were art, but better than the stuff we didn't mention.
Hey wicked pisser,
Welcome to PART 2 of PISSING about town 001, your short and sweet overtime account of all the other things we did (and what we bought!)
Annals of day at Dashwood
Checked in to say hi to the wonderful Miwa Susuda of Dashwood Books and to poke around the shop since I’m always looking for things that slip through the crack I can afford! The first time I ever went there, she and I commiserated about dealing with the British and urged me to move to New York as soon as possible.
It’s fun to find the uncut gems of Dashwood with, funnily enough, about the same success rate as finding them out and about in America-at-large. Susuda has a fun edition of
out right now and very humbly asked what moisturizer I use even though she clearly knows better. I then gave a speech about CeraVe while buying Picasso’s Assholes for $25. It was well worth it, and preferable to seeing the Gagosian show which only featured one of Picasso’s many assholes…“A Foreigner Called Picasso,” Pablo Picasso @Gagosian 21st until FEB 10, 2024
This show was curated by two people who know Picasso very well, Picasso-heads if you will. They had a lot of work displayed in chronological order in rooms showing the development of his style from early works to his stalwart cubism.
The most interesting thing was the bull-man tapestry which was the only work outside Picasso’s usual media. And it was nice, but did he really make it himself? No one had an answer really. The tricky part about these works in particular is that once you see any “non-western” art, especially from across Western Africa, you begin to understand where Cubism came from, and it’s just less impressive. He was better with a pen sometimes, like this special edition of Avant Garde “Picasso’s Gravures” from January 1969:
“Picasso in Fontainebleau,” Pablo Picasso @MoMA until FEB 17
Infinitely more interesting, exploring the work he produced in the garage of a rented villa in Fontainbleau in 1921. It’s a gentler Picasso, showing the processes behind his large-scale painting from the time.
Things we saw that were nicer than the art we won’t mention!
Name a gallery you think would hang this on the wall if it was painting about consumerism and advertising stripping away our humanity:
A great line-up at Codex Books. All wicked pissers should read In Praise of Shadows (available here in PDF form), in which Jun'Ichiro Tanizaki complains about western toilets and ruminates on the beauty of lacquer and gold in the candlelight.
Pretty swan on the floor on Chambers St. I hope she’s still there.
Ok, that is all. See you downstream!
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