Hit Repeat

Eight weeks into Greater New York Cinema, P.S.1's 20-week sidebar highlighting the past five years in film and video, comes a reprise of Brooklyn-based Jessie Stead's 2006 "structuralist road movie," Foggy Mountains Breakdown More than Non-Foggy Mountains. The title refers to the blistering 1949 banjo instrumental by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which is iconic hillbilly Americana, and used as the score to Bonnie and Clyde's car chases. Stead's film is a chase of sorts: the personal pursues the universal, as Stead mixes enigmatic diaristic texts and Super-8 footage of globetrotting dalliances with renditions of the infinitely diffuse song: the original recording; MIDI versions found online; abstracted covers and antecedents, composed and performed by the famous and non-famous alike.

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Juicing the Independent

Curator Howie Chen and artist/attorney Jason Kakoyiannis have launched a new series of programs called "Juicing the Equilibrium: Critique, Value, Markets, Prices," which aims to jolt the market-critical capacities of the art world with shots of academic, para-art world realities. The two sum up the project's goals in a question: "How can the robust analytical tools and models of the social sciences—whether they be data driven, behavioral, network, or quantitative-be utilized to mend the deteriorating ability of critical practice to narrate its own complex reality?"
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Before They Were Winners: TVTV in New York

There are people who make a living of critiquing spectacle, who pump unspectacular phenomena with predictable criticisms of their meanings, consequences, or perceived lacks thereof. Virtually immune to this practice is the life of the Academy Awards, the pure spectacle that falls to earth in the form of kaleidoscopic critique: the most superficial, the most banal, and, perhaps the most interesting, impressions and speculations by the honored stars themselves. However it's usually only the less interesting, over-choreographed red carpet interviews and acceptance speeches that are seen and heard, rather than the shrewd, juicy obsessing that must go on in private.
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