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[Feral]

Gay Art: A Movement, or at Least a Moment

MAYBE it doesn’t signal the arrival of a major arts movement and maybe it is just a symptom of another consumer-driven microtrend, but it would seem that something is afoot in the contemporary art world and it concerns what you could call, for lack of more comprehensive terminology, a burgeoning of gay male art.

You can spot it at galleries like John Connelly Presents or Daniel Reich in Chelsea, or at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, or making a splash in the sales booths at any of the virally replicating international art fairs. It is also, most recently, displayed in “The Male Gaze,” a just-opened group show at the powerHouse Arena in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, that makes clear how a new generation of artists is addressing itself frankly to the varied and mutating shapes of sexuality.

...

“I’m not sure if I’d say what’s happening is a movement or a moment,” said Vince Aletti, an independent curator and photography critic for The New Yorker, referring to the latest iteration of gay culture. No one does.

Yet, as David Rimanelli, an art critic and longtime contributor to Artforum, said, “There is this huge efflorescence of artists right now doing this kind of work.” There are an awful lot of people, gay or otherwise, he added, “making intimate, slightly obscure narratives,” of exactly the sort that artists like Mr. Hug and Mr. Magnan have turned into an a minor industry with K48, their print magazine collaboration with other artists along this loosely federated circuit. Their publication is so polished in its chic, mixtape naïveté that each issue comes with an accompanying CD, a fold-out poster and, lately, a back cover advertisement for Dior.

Works from "The Male Gaze" can be seen at the Powerhouse Arena's web site. (A warning -- it's one of those annoying Flash pages that may not be friendly to everyone's browser. I had no luck at all getting Internet Explorer to open it. Mozilla did it just fine though.)

[berto]

I had no luck at all getting Internet Explorer to open it. Mozilla did it just fine though.)

Mozilla is the same as Netscape, no?

[Feral]

Not quite, but then again the statement is more true than false. My beast has issues with its plug-ins these days. First flash worked fine for me (not that I liked that much). After I got the plug-in for Mozilla that blocks flash items from loading I liked Mozilla much better. Pages load ever more quickly when a bunch of pointless crap isn't being loaded onto the page. If I wanted to actually see the flash bit, there's a simple button to push to allow it to load and play as usual. Alas, Macromedia seems to have been swallowed by the Adobe giant. First Mozilla nagged me incessantly to install the missing (because different) plug in, and now Internet Explore claims to be ignorant of the new plugin. I've condescended to download the thing four times now. It won't take. I'll worry about flash objects on IE when Adobe manages to make the damn thing work.