( Very late) Absence Apologies

.

.
Hello stangers !!
-----------------------


We want to public apologize for this looooooooooooong absence.
 It´s been a while since we last communicate with you...We´ve being doing some changes , and we are very excited about this. These changes are in order to become a better project with higher objectives, and in order to do this,we have to re-arrange the whole system we´ve been working on.Collaborators are the most important part of the publications and offices at New York.We are developing a new working system for them to be easier to keep up the amazing work they accomplished these last months.

We are moving out too!! : Mexico´s Chapter will be moving abroad to Europe and new projects are coming together We had great response from abroad mexican and european collegues that will be working next to us.The Embassadors Project (TM) shuttled too in several european cities. All of these have to be decided by us founders. It´s a tough process, but interesting one.
Changes are always for good.


Other changes:

The Pigmy Deer Network life cycle ends.
After almost two years of intense work and dedication. Its time to say Goodbye.
A new era begins and this project helped us re-thinking this new phase.Thanks for believing and creating. All members of The Pigmy Deer Network will be now part of Las Bellas Artes Org. Catalogue for further publications and projects.

Art+Culture+Critique Magazine will publish normally again on November 2010.


THANKS FOR ALL !!!
WE ARE VERY HAPPY WITH THESE NEW CHANGES.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOYALTY , AND FOR KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH US.


LAS BELLAS ARTES NEW PHASE....
AS GOOD AS IT GETS !!

Thank you for being part of this project.


Las Bellas Artes Org.
Creative Directors and Founders
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Newsletter on changes and abroad projects :send us an email to iloveart@lasbellasartes.org with the subject: Newsletter .
--
If you want to collaborate in our projects and receive information about them, send us and email to the same adress with subject : Collaboration

( Very late) Absence Apologies

The Roca Brothers

If they were rock stars, their name would be “The Roca Brothers”

Spanish chefs known as “Los Hermanos Roca” of the catalan restaurant “El Celler de Can Roca”

Joan, Josep and Jordi. The first one, is the mind salty. The second, liquid mind. The third, the sugar mind.

The gastronomic sense is a family heritage. Their mother has already mentioned in the spanish newsletter “El Pais” as “Mother of three stars”.

She is the part of cooking with love, discipline, and in a meticulous way, despite doing from a humble family food restaurant.

The Roca brothers have been awarded with three stars from the Michelin Guide and its gourmet acquis, has gems like:

-The adaptation of the Calvin Klein perfume Eternity.

-Cherry Soup with shrimp and ice cream of its bone.

-Cigala smoke Curry.

-Mussels Riesling.

-Dry Gambini.

They have brought the world of gastronomy techniques like:

-The perfumecocción: Exact cooking of crustaceans with a slight fragance.

-The fragrance: Food odor. Capturing the volatile soul of a perfume.

-The chromaticism: Monochrome plates. Each color evokes a mood and the elements to make the dish called agreed in the evocation of this state.

-Distillates: The concept is to eat dirt, eat other things never before possible.

-Kitchen of emotions: Creating moods, interrelating the psychic and sensitive description of the elements that make up the dish. A logic.kitchen.

From here It follows the following unprecedented list:

-The flavor Earth gives us melancholy.

-The flavor of milk, tenderly.

-The taste of pink, femininity.

-The lemon, joy.

-The mint, euphoria.

-The leather masculinity.

The pepper, aggressiveness.

These are the new icons of a cuisine that goes far beyond the stove. A food you want to convey, lead, and discover...

... a multisensory experience, beyond what we conceived to be edible

The Roca Brothers

The figurative rebels: The Stuckists Manifesto

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
By today, everyone and their mothers know about the Young British Artists. At the highest stage of that manic episode called Cool Britannia, these kids came to terrorise the world of arts as we knew it: Tracy Emin with her crafts, her honesty and her soiled sheets; Damien Hirst, like his animals in formaldehyde, drowned in spirituality; Chris Ofili, talking about the black identity and its stereotypes with the aid of poo; Jenny Saville and her monumental paintings of monumental women; Sarah Lucas playing with food and comparing it to sex organs; and so on. We are also quite familiar with Charles Saatchi (collector in love with the movement) and the Turner Prize (which has been awarded to several YBAs through the years). They are a group against the classical notions of art. They are – or at least were during the 90s – a revolutionary combo. It’s impossible to be against the revolution, isn’t it? Against counter-culture? What would that be? Counter-counter-culture? Quite hard to pronounce, but it exists.

The Stuckists battle anything the YBAs represent. They think conceptual art is a joke. They’ve reported Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading to complain about his excessive power in the art world. They may protest outside Tate Britain dressed as clowns, but they take themselves seriously.

One of his founders, Billy Childish, used to date Tracey Emin in the 80s. She once told him he had no future as an artist; and that his poetry, paintings, and self, were “Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!.” In 1999, Billy took this insult and shoved it up her arse.

Along Charles Thomson, he released a manifesto “against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist”. Through 20 statements, they try to explain who they are, what do they aim for, and why are they so upset with contemporary British Art.

The first statement says that “Stuckism is the quest for authenticity”. Painting is their medium of choice, a way to self-discovery trough “a process of action, emotion, thought and vision”. Their model of art is holistic, a way the conscious and the unconscious can meet, without resorting to the “egocentric lie” of modern abstraction. More bluntly, they assume that “artists who don’t paint aren’t artists”, that “art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art”, “the Stuckist paints pictures because pictures is [sic] what matters” and that “[i]f it is the conceptualist’s wish to always be clever, then it is the Stuckist’s duty to always be wrong”.

The Stuckists don’t care about prizes. To them, success is getting out of bed in the morning and paint. Their duty is to explore their neurosis and innocence through painting and display. Not as career artist, but rather as amateurs, unafraid to fail.

To them, “painting is mysterious. It creates worlds within worlds”; and gives us access to our unseen, inner reality, in ways that existing objects from a material world never will.

They don’t consider themselves a movement, but an international non-movement. They don’t see themselves as an ‘ism’ because they are stuck. They talk about the failure of Post Modernism, which now “has given way to trite cleverness for commercial exploitation”. Brit Art, with its powerful political and social sponsors, is not as subversive or avant-garde as it claims.

They replace the white cube in favour of musty museums and comfy homes. They swear they don’t play games of “novelty, shock and gimmick”; and give emphasis to “process over cleverness, realism over abstraction, content over void, humour over wittiness and painting over smugness”. They are also against elitism in universities, and demand that all college buildings offer adult education and recreational use to those who live in the community they are guest in.

You can agree or disagree with them, but I have this little doubt: if they swear they are not into “novelty, shock and gimmick”, why do we remember them for their protests rather than for their artwork? Maybe it’s because most humans pay more attention to sensationalism than work. We can easily recall pieces by YBAs because they are sensationalists themselves. I mean, showing off the list of people you have slept with could be fresh tabloid material. This isn’t new: everyone knows about that self-portrait where Vincent van Gogh has his ear bandaged. Why? Because he chopped it off! What about La Giocconda, by Da Vinci? What’s NOT about her! She’s surrounded by more rumours than facts! And I could go on for hours with hot gossip about “masterpieces” and “great artists”, but my name is not Giorgio Vasari.

Anyway, shall we believe this people that they are honestly all about painting and not fooling around? I just don’t know. Publishing a manifesto is an act of attention seeking itself. It’s not bad, of course. We all love our two or three seconds in the spotlight. :)

The figurative rebels: The Stuckists Manifesto

EL Pariente

So I wrote this a while ago, I thought it would be nice to share it with you...


A couple of days ago a friend took me to a restaurant that is in the middle of the road from Monterrey to Saltillo, called “El Pariente” (which means something like The Family Relative, but its like the “pal” or “mate” expression in english), when I was coming down the car I realized that I was in the middle of nothing, I saw this façade that could have been from a brothel, but the smell of the place reminded me it was a restaurant.


The interior of the place was very different; it had large concrete tables and chairs, it was very clean actually, I was just beginning to discover the place when a person appeared in front of me and told me “Chicken or meat pal?”, my first reaction was to say “meat” and me and my friend sat down in the first table we found available.


It wasn’t even a minute when dishes of meat started to pass to our table, accompanied with our very own charro beans “to make it better pal” said the waiter, and then he said “ 600 coke pal?” and yes a 600ml coke was my election.


Let’s eat!!!, I was just beginning when I realized that there was no cutlery in our table, but a quick overview of the place make me understand the situation, in the restaurant “El Pariente” no cutlery is used, so like an animal I just started to take the juicy meat and take it to my mouth, the strange thing was that I felt completely natural doing it, just because all the people in the place were eating in the same way, we were sharing a secret and enjoying the sin of eating without any decency.


Not one of the employees of “El Pariente” wear any uniform or distinctive item, their only characteristic was that they referred to every customer with a truthful attitude of service calling you “pal”, some of them were cleaning the place, others cooking the meat and others just taking the food were required. The thing is that all worked in the most natural way, projecting more than a service an authentic personality, making you feel in a special place more than just in another business. There are a lot of things to learn from places like these.


In cities full of franchises that do the same thing in different ways, full of host’s with false smiles waiting inside every door, its about time to ask ourselves, is this really what customers want? or better yet, is this the way that a business is going achieve success?


Though I have to admit that the meat was not really good, I have to finally say…What a good taste does the authenticity leaves.
Miguel Melgarejo

EL Pariente

iCurate

A curator's job is highly unknown. In Spanish, the word for curator (curador) can also be translated as, literally, “healer”. Can you foresee all the misinterpretations and confusions this may lead to? Most people will be biased into thinking that a curator is a restorer. It kind of makes sense. I used to think this way. If there's an old, damaged object, we can say it is somehow sick, so a healer (curador) would come in very handy. But, as I later learned and as you know, a curator is not a restorer or a conservator. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the keeper of a museum or other collection”, coming from the latin curare, “to take care of”. On more practical basis, it could be taken as the person in charge of giving meaning to an exhibition in a museum.

But, who is this people? Who made the curator a curator? What institution has the power to appoint a person to be the one giving meaning to our museums? This are very worn

-outed theoretical questions that still arise when talking about this matters, and that probably will never come to an end.

Some museums are starting to come with what could be taken as metacuratorial processes. Let's see what's going on at the ever-museum-example, the Louvre. Nowadays, they offer a series of thematic trails. You can choose to

follow the A Lion Hunt or the The Da Vinci Code trails. While they might be presented as an inocent topic-tour developed by educators, what they really are is a curatorial script based on the public's needs and interests, skiping thematic rooms or expert-curated orders.

Even so, this approach still comes from the museum itself. Meanwhile, a global phenomena has been growing in our computers. Yes. The so called information highway. The web of networks. The goddamned Internet. With it's growth, experts are no longer needed. Why buy the Brittanica Encyclopedia when we have our own community built Wikipedia? The impact of the Internet on the experts' downfall can clearly be seen in the music industry. Anyone with Internet access can open a Blogger account and become a music critic. Many times, a way better and far more interesting music critic than the institution-appointed ones. So, farewell Rolling Stone Magazine, hello Club Fonograma.

Is there such a trend in museums? Sure. Publications like The New Yorker offer their readers podcasts about exhibits that you can take along with you in your iPod. So does Slate Magazine, going as far as subtitling their section The Commentary Museums Don't Want You To Hear. Emerging groups like Art Mobs are threatening to remix MoMA. And there you go: you pay your fee at the museum's entrance, plug your earbuds into your head, and start walking following a curatorial guideline that might be not only different, but straight opposite to the museum's curator idea.

This article was never intended to be a manifiesto to overturn curators. Is just a reminder to them. A warning sign. Are they listening to the public? Are they responding to the visitor's needs?

iCurate

Las Bellas Artes // Open Call // Video

Las Bellas Artes // Open Call // Video