Review by Joanne Hinkel

"ANNE DAEMS: Parsley and Pearls" at Nicole Klagsburn Gallery, New York, NY

Ahh, to be young and beautiful in New York City. Is there anything more divine?

Whereas Nan Goldin captures the gritty, dark underground of New York's young and beautiful, Anne Daems focuses brightly on fresh-faced girls and boys as they glide unaware across the Manhattan streetscape. As the success of Gossip Girl, pricey designer boutiques on the LES, and last year's death of CBGB all attest -- it is this young, beautiful, and decidedly RICH Manhattan that has beat out Goldin's version.

Daems, from Belgium, took these photographs while in a residency here in New York in '05. The several photos on view are from the series 72 girls (and some boys) that could be models (available in book form on Amazon). Capturing the boys and girls as they are en route and unaware they are being followed/watched/photographed -- we don't see faces really, more backs, side profiles, flowing hair, and impatient postures -- she immortalizes a fleeting, unmemorable moment as memorable. There is a rich legacy of voyeuristic photography in New York of course, which starts with Evans and will probably never end. My Googling the topic "subway photographs New York" brought me to this very cool website: here.

Daems' interest in examining that which goes unnoticed carries over to the color-test scribble drawings that have been reworked as large-scale prints. These, shown in conjunction with her photographs, are a strong contrast -- in their sparse quietness, full of blank space, and intermittent color scribbles -- to the could-be models that give the city a quicker heartbeat.

Jolie-Pitt Twins Bring In Big Bread

One of the biggest news stories this week, of course, is that Angelina and Brad sold their baby photos for $14 mil (to People magazine and a British mag), which is the highest amount ever paid for celebrity photographs.

What I don't understand is why people are so desperate to see these pics. Weird. I have no doubt that the babies are absolutely adorable, but they're newborns. They are going to look like newborns -- which is to say like any other baby.

The ever-humanitarian Jolie-Pitts will donate the millions from the sale of the photographs to a charity that focuses on helping children around the world which helps to counter-balance the annoying factor of this whole thing. (Though, a friend of mine recently told me that most of these celebrity charities never really get off the ground, but who I am to say any more on that when I don't really know the facts...)

After reading about all this -- it was the main headline on Yahoo! when I logged in -- I also learned that Jolie got pregnant by in vitro. Apparently the two "couldn't wait" to have more babies and this way they could get knocked up immediately without having "to try to get pregnant."

Why can't they wait? Why do they need so many babies?

At the rate these two are going they may give that 44-year-old woman in Canada who just gave birth to her 18th child a run for her money.

One caveat, though, is that Jolie might have to let go of her sex appeal if she has 14 kids (see pic above).

What Does "Art Not Babies" Mean?

That's simply the title I made up for this blog.

Why?

Well, there are three main reasons, really:

1.) I am a 32-year-old married, educated woman living in New York who is more interested in talking about art than about babies.

2.) I am pointing out that there is overwhelmingly more coverage about celebrities having babies in the media than there is about art or artists.

3.) When this generation of babies grow up, I can guarantee that they will wish that their parents talked more about art than about babies -- and I am using "babies" as a metaphor for all the silly obsessions with celebrities, gossip, TV, in place of serious thoughts.

For each day that I write on this blog there will be two types of posts:

• One having to do with an art experience I have in New York -- a review of a gallery or museum exhibit or public art work, or an interview or interaction with an artist -- or a reaction to art I see online;

• One having to do with that day's big news story about a baby or babies.

--Joanne
"Art Not Babies"

I'm Not Going To Write Anymore, I'm Going To Blog

I know it's the year 2008 and I am seriously behind.

It's really quite ironic that I've been calling myself a "writer" since the new millennium -- the early years of which will forever be remembered in the history books as the dawn of a new era of self-publishing -- and today, July 30, 2008 marks the first day of my so-called "blog." Call me old-school, call me needy of attention, but I've always craved the legitimacy of an official "byline," words that you can hold on to, or at least which appear online in a very public place.

Which is all so very 1995 of me.

Why have I avoided the blog for all this time? Why am I a 32-year-old virgin when it comes to self-publishing? How could I have been a surfer on a decade's worth of dot.com waves and not have washed up on the glorious shores of DIY, online publishing?

I think Hank Moody, as played by the fabulous David Duchnovy, sums up my irreverence (ignorance, perhaps?) for this new kind of writing in way funnier terms than I can muster, in last week's episode of Californication:

[People] seem to be getting dumber and dumber. I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The Internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour a day access to kiddie porn, you know. And people don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking, they text; no punctuation, no grammar. LOL this and LMFAO that. You know it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people psuedo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the king’s English.

Hank's fiery tirade really gets me going in a "Right on!" kind of way, especially the part where he says, "And people don't write anymore, they blog; instead of talking, they text; no punctuation, no grammar." I concur, Hank. You go, buddy! Blogging is like verbal diarhhea (spell checker: please do double-check the d-word, as I'm prone to typing that one wrong) to the proper journalist's fully formed and completely digested bowel movement. Forgive me -- Hank Moody inspires me to be crass. If you've seen Californication, you understand. If you haven't, boot up your Netflix queue and get that show in your lineup: it offers up the best commentary on the dumbing-down, sell-out nature of our Hollywood-saturated culture.

Despite Hank Moody's frustrations, of course, the very hand he that he bites is that one that feeds him: as a washed-up novelist with a debilitating writer's block, his only gig these days is as a blogger for a popular L.A. Web zine.

And so, I join Hank Moody in the blogosphere. Though this practice feels a bit self-indulgent (OK, a lot self-indulgent, but what art form or personal writing doesn't?), maybe this blogging thing is really about self-awareness, sharing the insights, and community. To quote another pay-cable show, Dianne Wiest, playing a therapist, said in HBO's In Treatment (in response to a patient challenging the importance of psycho therapy), "Who would chose to live an un-examined life?" Here I am Hank! If you can't beat 'em, join 'em is the proper cliché to quote, I suppose.

OK. Why is the topic of this blog "Art Not Babies?" you may ask.

I continue to be fascinated by the popular media's and our society's obsession with babies. Brangelina and the twins this; J-Lo and her twins that; Madonna adopts Baby David . Jamie-Lynn Spears -- yada, yada, yada ... The celebrity pregnancy is a new genre of entertainment "journalism." The obsession carries over, of course, to health zines, blogs, and pubs, to women's publications... I suppose I am sensitive to this because I am a DINK (double income - no kids), married woman living in Manhattan and to be in this situation at age 32, you start to feel the world around you question why you are not thinking, baby, baby, baby ... when clearly the rest of the "normal" world is. I suppose in writing this blog, I am embarking on a voyage to figure out why I am so ambivalent about baby-making and why I am so annoyed by our culture's obsession with it.

This blog will feature art reviews, reactions, opinions, interviews, and an ongoing consideration of what art and what babies mean to our society, culture, and American character.
And to me.

Yours artfully,

Joanne