A Surprise Steinbach, Michael E. Smith's Sublimity, Lucy Lippard, etc. [Collected]

Installation view of Haim Steinbach's Mothers, Daughters, Children (with 37 Stories About Leaving Home by Shelly Silver), 1997-2011. Metal shelving, sand, wood and metal tables, wood and metal chairs, LCD TV, galvanized bucket, and latex balloon, dimensions variable. In "Entertainment" at Greene Naftali, New York, March 3, 2011.Photos: 16 Miles [more]

• "His first exhibition was with André Breton ... and his last years were spent with Keith Haring and George Condo," curator Laura Hoptman says of "idea machine" Brion Gysin in a conversation with Marina Cashdan in a new La Revue Blanche-inspired publication. [The White Review]

• "We can't help but be impressed by the three shows produced thus far by the former Citibank art advisor and freelance curator Jeffrey Deitch in his closely watched new space on Grand Street," John Good writes in "Nari Ward at Jeffrey Deitch Projects," an Artnet review published in 1996. [Artnet via Edward Winkleman]
  
  
• Four hours at the Armory. "You can drink champagne from nine in the morning until four at night," says one gentleman. Adds a lady, "The contemporary is very fresh, very alive." [Paper Monument]
  
  
• Chris Sharp on Michael E. Smith's recent exhibition at Clifton Benevento, one of my favorite shows of past last year: "It seemed as if the entire exhibition had issued from some defunct civilization whose resources had been entirely exhausted, and the artist, sifting through the rubble, had taken it upon himself to experimentally explore potential alternative resources. [K A L E I D O S C O P E]
  
  
• William Powhida, An Incomplete and Biased Guide to Some Critics, 2011. [Hyperallergic]
  
  
• Paddy Johnson points out that the two artists who took Gavin Brown's car for a spin, mistaking it for part of Rirkrit Tiravanija's current show at GBE, do not seem to have been too apologetic about the mistake. Writes Johnson, "... I’d make sure my apology was front and center..." [Art Fag City]
  
  
• Greg Allen reads Richard Prince's deposition from Cariou v. Prince, which stems from his 2008 "Canal Zone" show at Gagosian. In it, the artist mentions to Cariou's lawyer that he gave a copy of Spiritual America IV (2005) to Brooke Shields because "I'm a, you know, agreeable guy." [Greg.org]
  
  
• Here is a really nice style guide from the Association of Arts Editors. Dropping articles in titles to preserve syntax still terrifies me, but I'm going to do it in the item below. [AAE Style Guide via Image Conscious]
  
  
• In case you haven't heard, which is doubtful: Tyler Green's Art Madness has begun. I'm voting frequently for Claes Oldenburg's Store (1961), which is seeded number 39. [Modern Art Notes]
  
  
• Lucy Lippard is presenting a lecture on the evening of Thursday, April 7, at the School of Visual Arts. Its title is "Ghosts, the Daily News and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography." [SVA]
  

Recent New York Video Art Survives (on the Internet)

Still from Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, on view at Alex Zachary, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

There is always a sense of sadness after watching a great work of video art in a New York gallery: barring a miracle, one is unlikely to see it again any time soon. We can snap photographs of our favorite paintings or sculptures and revisit them later (however imperfectly), but time-based work disappears after a show ends. Thankfully, the redoubtable media archive UbuWeb has been uploading just that type of work at a ferocious pace, including many works that were on view just this past season. Here are three favorites from that bunch, plus one classic New York-art documentary

1. Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010: This was the sleeper-hit of the the past year. After debuting at Alex Zachary, it made an encore performance this summer in Berlin, the setting of much of the film. While occasionally impenetrable, Okiishi's reworking of Woody Allen's 1979 panegyric to New York should be remembered as an elegiac document of a particular time in the contemporary art world, as it struggled through a recession and expanded into new cities.

2. Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007: This gem appeared at Invisible-Export's "A Vernacular of Violence" just a few months ago. A man applies a poster in a French subway. Then he applies another. And another. A slow-motion, highly mediated depiction of extreme destruction begins to appear, as commuters — unaware — go about their business.

3. Brion Gysin, Demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software, 2010: This computer-generated poem is not the most thrilling section of the New Museum's current "Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" show, the first U.S. retrospective of the artist, but watching the program slice apart a short text by Gysin and write out all of the possible permutations of its contents isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes.

4. Nigel Finch, Arena–Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988: Shot the year before Mapplethorpe died, this hour-long documentary includes footage of the photographer at work and features interviews with some of his subjects (not all of the enamored of his work). "Pay attention," gallerist Robert Miller says, when asked to define Mapplethorpe's artistic message. "Time's going by."