930 Forums
=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: jkeisenh on November 08, 2004, 11:22:00 am
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so... since the Art-O-Matic opening is friday, the schedule should be out any day now. Rumor has it WSC is not playing, but does anyone know who is? Any predictions?
i'm so excited!
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I predict Exit Clov will play, they will be spectacular (or is it amazing?) until about the fifth song, at which point they will jump the shark, and begin to suck.
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BigYawn (http://www.bigyawn.net/) is promoting the December 3rd Artomatic show.
"BigYawn returns to promoting shows in DC on December 3rd, when we take over Art-O-Matic. Well, we are only taking over the music stage, but we tend to be a little dramatic. We are extremely excited about this night of amazing DC bands. Performing on the 3rd will be French Toast, (the sounds of) Kaleidoscope, Exit Clov, The Chance and at least one more surprise band. Also, spinning all night will be DJ Wren from the 9:30 Club. What's great is that there will be a bar serving beer and wine. What's even better is that admission is completely free! Plus you can peruse the grounds of the former National Children's Museum and check out hundreds of DC artists' work. It's a win-win situation. More details to come..."
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Originally posted by chimbly sweep:
so... since the Art-O-Matic opening is friday, the schedule should be out any day now. Rumor has it WSC is not playing, but does anyone know who is? Any predictions?
i'm so excited!
WSC is not playing. Olivia's side project is, I forget the name, and the date, but i know they are opening for the Carlsonics along with a band made up of some ex-members of Jonathan Fire Eater. No, not the Walkmen.
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Originally posted by Bags:
BigYawn (http://www.bigyawn.net/) is promoting the December 3rd Artomatic show.
"BigYawn returns to promoting shows in DC on December 3rd, when we take over Art-O-Matic. Well, we are only taking over the music stage, but we tend to be a little dramatic. We are extremely excited about this night of amazing DC bands. Performing on the 3rd will be French Toast, (the sounds of) Kaleidoscope, Exit Clov, The Chance and at least one more surprise band. Also, spinning all night will be DJ Wren from the 9:30 Club. What's great is that there will be a bar serving beer and wine. What's even better is that admission is completely free! Plus you can peruse the grounds of the former National Children's Museum and check out hundreds of DC artists' work. It's a win-win situation. More details to come..."
You heard it hear first, you can also add Thee Snuff Project to our December 3rd bill.
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BTW, the space this year really is awesome. And the performance stage is in a very elementary school-ish auditorium. Pretty cool.
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Originally posted by Rhett Miller:
I predict Exit Clov will play, they will be spectacular (or is it amazing?) until about the fifth song, at which point they will jump the shark, and begin to suck.
And all those people had such nice things to say about you last week...why prove them wrong?
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Here is the opening weekend line-up...
Friday, November 12, 2004 Opening Night
The Lucky Bastards
Laura Burhenn
Lazy K
The Hint
DJ Scout Wanderer of Reclining Buddha
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Factory Incident
Soft Complex
A.Mays and Skilled Hands
Faraday
DJ Bill Spieler
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Lejeune
Sumac
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Yes, they are the same people that used to have nice things to say about Washington Social Club.
Originally posted by redsock:
Originally posted by Rhett Miller:
I predict Exit Clov will play, they will be spectacular (or is it amazing?) until about the fifth song, at which point they will jump the shark, and begin to suck.
And all those people had such nice things to say about you last week...why prove them wrong? [/b]
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I'm heading over for opening night as part of Meet In DC group (http://www.meetindc.org)! I know 20 people signed up saying they're willing to go!
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Originally posted by redsock:
Originally posted by Bags:
BigYawn (http://www.bigyawn.net/) is promoting the December 3rd Artomatic show.
"BigYawn returns to promoting shows in DC on December 3rd, when we take over Art-O-Matic. Well, we are only taking over the music stage, but we tend to be a little dramatic. We are extremely excited about this night of amazing DC bands. Performing on the 3rd will be French Toast, (the sounds of) Kaleidoscope, Exit Clov, The Chance and at least one more surprise band. Also, spinning all night will be DJ Wren from the 9:30 Club. What's great is that there will be a bar serving beer and wine. What's even better is that admission is completely free! Plus you can peruse the grounds of the former National Children's Museum and check out hundreds of DC artists' work. It's a win-win situation. More details to come..."
You heard it hear first, you can also add Thee Snuff Project to our December 3rd bill. [/b]
Wow, scratch that. Apparently only minutes after confirming the gig, Thee Snuff decided to call it quits. Go figure...
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Originally posted by redsock:
BTW, the space this year really is awesome. And the performance stage is in a very elementary school-ish auditorium. Pretty cool.
Reds....you just blew it right there. :roll:
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The Lucky Bastards
Laura Burhenn
Lazy K
The Hint
Anyone know anything about these bands? And also where is the grounds of the former National Childrens Museum?
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Originally posted by LonnieBeale:
Anyone know anything about these bands? And also where is the grounds of the former National Childrens Museum?
The corner of H and 3rd NE.
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Originally posted by Jaguär:
Originally posted by redsock:
BTW, the space this year really is awesome. And the performance stage is in a very elementary school-ish auditorium. Pretty cool.
Reds....you just blew it right there. :roll: [/b]
Oh come on... you can see bands play at club whenever you want. But to see established bands break down and play more unsual venues, that's something. Plus, we're not gonna let the sound suffer. Besides, what it the 930 club but a large auditorium?
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Woo-hoo! They're starting to get the calendar up... and it includes:
11/18 The Carlsonics
http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp (http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp)
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Originally posted by chimbly sweep:
Woo-hoo! They're starting to get the calendar up... and it includes:
11/18 The Carlsonics
http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp (http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp)
yayyy!
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the music end of this thing seems to be really badly put together so far
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Originally posted by meeper_99:
the music end of this thing seems to be really badly put together so far
please explain...
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AOM Opening Party
November 12, 2004
Artomatic, Washington's favorite art, music, theater, poetry, dance, and film extravaganza will open November 12th! We start at 7:00 PM and go until 1:00 AM.
Artomatic 2004 Opening Party
Come as your favorite Artist.
Come as a piece of Art.
Come as you are... just come!
Come to Artomatic 2004's Opening Party and go art wild. Hit the door, grab something to drink, plunge into the best arts party D.C.'s seen since the last Artomatic opening. Drench yourself in art in this open showcase for regional arts. The thousands of works, hundreds of performances, and dozens of educational presentations and discussions, make Artomatic DC's most exciting, unpredictable arts event.
WHAT: Artomatic 2004 Opening Night Party
WHEN: Friday, November 12th, 7PM-1AM
WHERE: 800 3rd St. NE -- corner of 3rd and H St., NE. (Use of metro is encouraged. Access from Union Station on the red line or take the X-2 Metro Bus. Limited Parking available.)
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Artomatic 2004: Hanging Is Too Good for It
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page C01
Here's a fine idea. Let's find an abandoned school and then invite local dentists to ply their trade, free of charge, in its crumbling classrooms, peeling corridors and dripping toilets. Okay, so maybe we won't get practicing dentists to come, but we might get some dental students, hygienists and retirees to join in our Happy Tooth festival. What the heck, let's not be elitists here: Why don't we just invite anyone with a yen for tooth work or some skill with drills to give it a go. Then we can all line up, open wide and see what happens.
I'll be at the front of the line.
After all, it could hardly be more excruciating than this year's Artomatic, the fourth edition of the District's creative free-for-all, which opens tomorrow. Organizers have gotten about 600 local "artists" -- anyone who could ante up the $60 fee and 15 hours of his or her time, in fact -- to display their creations. They're on show in the sprawling, scruffy building in north Capitol Hill that once housed the Capital Children's Museum and several charter schools.
The result is the second-worst display of art I've ever seen. The only one to beat it out, by the thinnest of split hairs, was the 2002 Artomatic, which was worse only by virtue of being even bigger and in an even more atrocious space, down by the waterfront in a vacant modern office building.
I won't dwell on the art. And I certainly won't name names. No one needs to know who made the wallfuls of amateur watercolors, yards of incompetent oil paintings, acres of trite street photography and square miles of naive installation art that will be polluting this innocent old building for the next three weeks. There's something for everyone to hate. The rest are works only a mother could love.
There may just be a few decent things hidden in the mix -- with so many thousands of objects on display, the law of averages says there must be. But three hours' worth of looking didn't spot too many. Some of the glasswork looked all right. (Glass is such a gorgeous medium it's hard to screw it up, and you need some basic training even to begin to work in it.) There were a few political one-liners that had some heft. But with works hung pell-mell and cheek-by-jowl in every corner of five floors of shabby rooms and corridors -- lighted by fluorescent tubes and the cheapest clip-on floods -- anything good was bound to get obscured by mediocrity. There's not even an attempt to keep like works together, or to craft oases of somewhat more polished art.
I don't blame the people who made this work, bad as it mostly is. This is, as they say, a free country, and if someone wants to mess around with art supplies at home, then only their nearest and dearest have the right to complain. It's the basic premise of this show that is so badly at fault.
You'd think that the purpose of a public exhibition would be to give the public a fair chance of seeing interesting art. Or you might think that it could serve emerging artists, too, by giving them a chance to learn from the best work that's out there. But what useful purpose is served in showing work by anyone who wants to have it seen, however awful it may be? How can an art exhibition be counted as anything other than a dismal failure when it's so bad overall?
Or worse. A show like Artomatic, in theory organized and stocked by lovers and supporters of fine art, is actively insulting to all the genuinely talented artists who have managed the long slog to a professional career.
For almost the entire history of Western culture, art was not conceived as something just anyone could or should make. Imagine living in Renaissance Florence and telling one of your Medici pals that you were going to have the family altarpiece painted by Joe Blow the baker, who felt like giving it a try. It would have seemed a joke. An Artomatic would have seemed sheer lunacy. Ditto if you had lived in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, Gainsborough's London or the Paris of Monet. For most of the last 500 years, dentists have been seen as less professional a bunch than artists.
But somehow, over several decades now, we've bought into the nutty idea that fine art matters so very little, and is such easy stuff, that everyone and anyone can make it. (Actually, the idea has disappeared almost entirely among the kind of art professionals and intellectuals who suggested it in the first place, around the turn of the last century. The idea of art-by-anyone at first met with stiff public opposition, even ridicule; I'm only sorry it finally managed to catch on.)
Real, worthwhile art, the kind that says something that hasn't been said a million times before, requires carefully honed, hard-to-acquire skills -- sometimes manual, always visual and intellectual. Almost all artists worth the time of day know what's come before them, understand what's being made around them, and then -- against the odds and with terrifically hard work -- manage, every now and then, to make an art object that can contribute to the larger cultural conversation.
There may be a remote chance that such a person has been laboring unrecognized in a garret somewhere in Washington and that only Artomatic could have coaxed him out of hiding. But it's about as likely as finding a genius cavity-filler lurking in our dental open house.
After all, there are already lots of institutions dedicated to finding and displaying novel talent in the arts. Several alternative and artist-run spaces in the Washington area -- DCAC, Flashpoint, Transformer and others -- consider almost anything that comes over the transom. Their organizers tell me that the problem isn't a surplus of submissions; programming tends to suffer because they have too few options to choose among.
Despite public perceptions, the art world isn't anything like a closed shop: Curators, dealers and critics are always on a desperate hunt for new makers of new kinds of art, and they'll take it absolutely anywhere they can get it. Well-known mid-career artists are the ones who tend to face neglect; the hot young things that no one's seen before are where the action is. I guarantee that anyone with talent who might be discovered at a show like Artomatic would have had a fine chance of being discovered anyway.
What the District truly needs is more displays of carefully selected, quality contemporary art, so that local emerging artists -- and, just as importantly, their public -- would have more and better examples of how serious creativity can work. As things stand, too many local artists, as well as a few of our dealers, get attention they wouldn't get in any city where they faced some decent, savvy competition. The region needs its artistic bar raised another notch or two. Whereas Artomatic, of course, removes the bar entirely and invites anyone and everyone to stroll on in and strut their stuff.
It's not as though we are a society that fiercely discourages the making of art, one that needs an Artomatic just to make sure anything gets made at all. More art schools turn out more trained artists every year, and they all have to compete for a slice of the same meager pie of patronage, funding and public attention.
Artomatic costs more than $100,000 to put on, drawing funds from the artists themselves as well as from the public and private sectors; it absorbs major gifts in kind and vast amounts of volunteer time; it gets plenty of media coverage and pulls in tens of thousands of visitors. And all the money and resources and attention that go Artomatic's way are, by definition, not going to serious art that needs a boost, and deserves a higher public profile. Artomatic isn't only good for nothing. It's bad for art that matters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41463-2004Nov10.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41463-2004Nov10.html)
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And, like all good art shows, the controversy begins. I went in 2002 and thought it was a very cool event...And some of the music events look to be pretty cool.
[edit -- ggw posted the Post article just as I did...see above!]
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As an FYI, this is a much easier listing of the music at Artomatic than on the official website:
From the W. Post (http://mp3.washingtonpost.com/holidays04/artomatic04.shtml)
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I attended the 2002 Art-o-matic and I have to agree with Gopnik---it sucked big time. There was aLOT of bad art...a handful of decent stuff, but, oh so much crap.
Maybe the music is different (?)
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The Lucky Bastards sound like Elvis Costello fronted by a large rastafari fellow.
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Originally posted by chimbly sweep:
Woo-hoo! They're starting to get the calendar up... and it includes:
11/18 The Carlsonics
http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp (http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp)
Is anyone going to this tonight? Is the "Union Station Stage" actually at Union Station, or is that just the name of one of the stages at the 3rd & H location?
I'm tempted to go to this rather than Elefant, since it's free and it will probably end earlier.
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Originally posted by Bombay Chutney:
Originally posted by chimbly sweep:
Woo-hoo! They're starting to get the calendar up... and it includes:
11/18 The Carlsonics
http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp (http://www.artomatic.org/event_calendar.asp)
Is anyone going to this tonight? Is the "Union Station Stage" actually at Union Station, or is that just the name of one of the stages at the 3rd & H location?
I'm tempted to go to this rather than Elefant, since it's free and it will probably end earlier. [/b]
It is at 3rd and H.... it is the main atage for music, in the auditorium. I'll be there.
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I'll be at the Carlsonics. (look for pink helmet in hand)
And to the Washington Post-- psha. It's a democratic installation. And as we've recently seen, sometimes democracy can f*ck up. But it's still important.
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Originally posted by chimbly sweep:
And to the Washington Post-- psha. It's a democratic installation. And as we've recently seen, sometimes democracy can f*ck up. But it's still important.
it's appears that dada was right. bring on the exquisite corpses!
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I met Brandon, formerly the singer for much-missed Canyon, at the J Mascis show and he said his new band is playing at the Dec. 3 show, so my group of Canyon-loving friends are going to show up and throw down our support. I can't remember what he said they're called, but they must be one of those listed. The Canyon shows at Iota were some of the best performances I've seen of any band, much less from a local band, in the last few years.
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Oh yeah, should have mentioned that... the final line-up for the December 3rd show is:
Potions Toll (featuring John of Metropolitan)
The Chance
Brandon Butler (and friends)
Exit Clov
French Toast
(The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope
w' Kosmo DJing all night
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Is this the death knell for Metropolitan?
Originally posted by redsock:
Potions Toll (featuring John of Metropolitan)
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Originally posted by econo:
Is this the death knell for Metropolitan?
Originally posted by redsock:
Potions Toll (featuring John of Metropolitan)
[/b]
nope... John wanted to play but Saadat is on tour with Travis Morrison. So we happily took his side project...
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Originally posted by redsock:
December 3rd show
w' Kosmo DJing all night
Well that's the clincher, isn't it? ;)
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Originally posted by redsock:
Oh yeah, should have mentioned that... the final line-up for the December 3rd show is:
Potions Toll (featuring John of Metropolitan)
The Chance
Brandon Butler (and friends)
Exit Clov
French Toast
(The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope
w' Kosmo DJing all night
Same night as Blonde Redhead :(
I'll be there tonight!
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Well, interesting show last night. The sound is SUPER loud. The Carlsonics were sounding pretty good, except for their arty 10 minutes of droning. (They admitted they were trying something new for Artomatic.) Neither of the first two bands were anything special. You all should really go to a show, at least the BY show on the third. If for no other reason than just to see if we can actually get 6 bands on stage on time. It should be interesting. But of course, we've got some cool bands too. A little something for everyone.
Anyway the space is cool, lots of good times to be had. Hey Chimbly, how did your version of Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance go?
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Originally posted by redsock:
Well, interesting show last night. The sound is SUPER loud. The Carlsonics were sounding pretty good, except for their arty 10 minutes of droning. (They admitted they were trying something new for Artomatic.) Neither of the first two bands were anything special. You all should really go to a show, at least the BY show on the third. If for no other reason than just to see if we can actually get 6 bands on stage on time. It should be interesting. But of course, we've got some cool bands too. A little something for everyone.
Anyway the space is cool, lots of good times to be had.
I was there, the sound wasn't as loud as the last time I went on Sunday night, but yes I agree! I always enjoy a Carlsonics show, it was nice when they shut the overhead lights leaving only the string of red lights on stage to light up the entire space! I anxiously await their next album which has a very tentative release date of 2/05.
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Originally posted by redsock:
Hey Chimbly, how did your version of Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance go?
Shamefully, the chain tension's still not right, so the chain skips from time to time, but aside from that we're all good.
I thought the show was OK. The acoustics in that place are similar to a tiled bathroom, really. Quite loud at times.