Saturday, November 29, 2008

Our Condolences: Volume 1

Dear Art World,

These dark economic times can be extremely difficult on everyone involved from artists like myself and Jennifer Dalton (she's defying the market and actually doing amazing) to art dealers to important collectors. To that end our respective galleries decided to create a new collaborative project called Compound Editions to market art in novel and exciting (cheap!) ways. The galleries had the brilliant idea of getting Jen and I, long time, bitter rivals, to sit down and come up with a collaborative print. After a couple hours of increasingly morose talk about the bleak future our deeply cynical sides kicked back in and we came up with the idea of art world condolence cards (thanks to Mike Waugh for so gleefully getting in on the concepts for cards).



Hopefully, these dark little reflections will resonate with and bring comfort to the wounded art world. While Jen continues to enjoy art world success and be taken seriously, I felt like I was making the cards for myself. I really empathized with this project and understand your pain. If my career isn't buried in Miami, I hope Jen and I will be able to continue our collaborative efforts to prop up a mirror to the art world. The edition of 100 includes six evil condolence cards in a little black box for $150. You can order them at compoundeditions@gmail.com or buy them in Miami at Pulse, where I will be serving artist-made lemonade and the special 'brown lemonade' with artist Jade Townsend on Friday and Saturday near the cafe. Jen can't possibly compete with that project... well, except when she keeps selling hilarious, critical propositions to rich people.

Finally, I will be posting a coda to the Market Crash print which debuted a year ago in Miami in the next few days. I'm trying to coax the text back from the abyss into something suitable for mass consumption.

-Sincerely,

William Powhida

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dude, you severely overestimate the success of others. I would never have guessed that from your work.

Anonymous said...

When someone who is a success in the big pond mocks those who are getting, have gotten, or will get booted out of it, it makes that big pond dweller look like an a-hole.