Hydroponic Hot House: The Singapore Bien...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, March 31, 2011. Arriving a few days ago in this wealthy city-state at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula in order to attend the third Singapore Biennale, I wondered what type of contemporary arts could thrive in a city whose well-earned reputation is one of fabricated perfection and paternal government control. Could unvarnished intellectual explorations into political and economic realities of modern life flower in an environment of unchallenged censorship and...

How Street Art is Taking its Seat at the...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, February 7, 2011. The website of the Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recently posted a six-minute long time-lapse video of the production of an onsite mural painted by the artist Dalek (James Marshall) and his team of assistants. Created for the exhibition North Carolina New Contemporary, Dalek’s vibrant and kaleidoscopic abstraction of video-game aesthetics slowly assembles in front of the camera lens to the beat of a jazzy...

The Three Ring Miami Art Circus

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, December 7, 2010. I’ve resisted attending the annual art carnival that is Art Basel Miami Beach since my last excursion in 2003. From that trip, during the convention’s second iteration, all I remember is a blur of expensive cars, beautiful women at exclusive parties in boutique South Beach hotels, and an ocean of vodka. (Some figments also remain of a moment when I posed as film director Wes Anderson in order to successfully Jedi mind-trick my way past security into the...

Interview with Gallerist Cristin Tierney

Originally posted on The Ministry of Artistic Affairs Blog INTERVIEW by Randy Gladman Some management gurus say there is no better time to start a new business than in the belly of a recessionary dip. While cautionary conservatism and fearful retreat seem to characterize conventional behavior during bad days, the contrarian view is that economic slowdowns are exactly the right times to gear up for upcoming growth cycles. With world markets bloodied like losing Ultimate Fighters, there are fantastic deals available in almost all categories, from real-estate to service...

The Artists Who Wield Ideas Like Burning...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, November 4, 2010. Contemporary culture is at its best when it is fresh and stuffed with wide-ranging and original ideas. Many of the most interesting contributors to the current arts have a fierce facility with extreme variety. While many of us get trapped in whirlpools where our bright ideas get replayed until they grow dull, great artists move from idea to idea, their notions adjusting in interesting ways at each pivot point. Sometimes the changes they push are vertical...

Inquisition of Conrad Black

– Introduction and Inquisition by Randy Gladman, May 16, 2010 Mexican beer company Dos Equis recently ran a wonderful advertising campaign, presenting “The Most Interesting Man in the World”. In these radio and television spots, a dignified, slightly accented, well-dressed, rough yet sophisticated man is described in impossibly exciting detail. “The police often question him, just because they find him interesting. His blood smells like cologne. His personality is so magnetic he is unable to carry credit cards. Even his enemies list him as their emergency...

Rewind: Dalek

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Winter 2005 Review of exhibibition at both le. gallery and Magic Pony Gallery, Toronto Dalek’s first solo exhibition in Canada introduced Toronto audiences to a Brooklyn-based member of a large underground urban art movement that is attracting attention in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. While the group is still effectively unnamed, the members of this loose affiliation—Shepard Fairey, KAWS, Twist (Barry McGee), Phil Frost, Evan Hecox, Ryan McGinness and others—have exhibited together on many...

Matt Bahen at Moore Gallery

By Randy Gladman. Original Akrylic Content. Published online April 28, 2010. One of the strange and disappointing characteristics of the Toronto art scene is the way our local and national art critics have a knack of missing important exhibitions. In 2004, Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini, hosted a museum quality posthumous exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys, marking the twentieth anniversary of that legendary German conceptual artist’s Difesa della Natura project. While New York City-based Artforum.com offered a glowing “Critic’s Pick” review, the...

The Ministry of Artistic Affairs: Socia...

The Ministry of Artistic Affairs is a new initiative I’ve launched with two partners based here in Toronto. The goal of this program is to provide a unique insight into the art market by curating a series of informative and interactive events exploring multiple facets of the art scene. We had our first event on April 7, 2010, at Show & Tell Gallery in Toronto. Though it was a crappy rainy night more than 70 people showed up to learn about The Ministry and take part in a discussion with NYC artist Greg Lamarche. Through The Ministry, members access a program of...

Artist Inquisitions!!

In this new section, Akrylic asks artists, dealers, consultants, curators and other creative types all sorts of random questions with the intent of shedding light on the way cool people think. Though some of the questions will deal with the art practice+work of these smart people, most of these questions are totally random and cover a range of topics including style, cars, sports, sex, celebrity, food and politics. We hope to add at least one new artist per week with the questions changing over time.  Please click the photo or name of the artists below to reach their...

Viet Art Forum interviews Randy Gladman,...

The important Contemporary Art blog “Viet Art Forum”, based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, recently interviewed me via email.  Viet Art Forum seeks to educate Vietnamese artists on how to promote their careers internationally.   www.vietartforum.com   A Vietnamese version of this article is available too!  It was a lot of fun being on the interviewee side of an interview for a change… PHỎNG VẤN RANDY GLADMAN An Interview with Randy Gladman, by Marc Djandji – March 29, 2009 As I had mentioned before, one of my projects for...

Sign Language: A Brief Explanation of t...

Exhibition Essay by Randy Gladman.  Displayed as wall text as part of “Ryan McGinness: Aesthetic Comfort,” Artcore Gallery, Toronto, September 23 – November 15, 2008. Popular understanding of human history is often given chronological shape by dividing the time we have spent on this planet into various eras defined by our most significant technological innovations. The Stone Age, for instance, marks a broad prehistoric time when humans made their first technological advances, widely using stone for toolmaking. As our ancestors discovered the benefits...

Ryan McGinness – Aesthetic Comfort

Ryan McGinness Aesthetic Comfort Curated by Randy Gladman September 27, 2008 – November 15, 2008 For Immediate Release Artcore / Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Ryan McGinness’s first solo exhibition in Canada. Aesthetic Comfort presents a major painting and sculpture installation by this internationally recognized, New York City-based artist. Ryan McGinness makes work that occupies the stylish space where art and graphic design collide. Influenced by Andy Warhol and mixing digital technologies with more traditional crafts like silk screening and...

The Best Contemporary Art Galleries in T...

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published on BlogTO.com, July 23, 2008 When it comes to the topic of Contemporary Art, it often seems there are only two kinds of Torontonians. There are the culture-junky downtowners who try to visit the galleries at least a couple times a year, in an effort to find unique gems for their collections and to remain cognizant of the heartbeat of the city. And then there is everyone else, the other 98% of our neighbours who don’t know that there are galleries in the city other than the ROM and AGO and wouldn’t have the faintest idea...

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Text Art

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in Contemporary, Text Art Special, vol.21, Issue 13, 2008 We interact with technology hundreds of times a day. We dial telephone numbers, scan our food through supermarket check-out lasers, change the television channel and move our mouse to surf to another web page. We click, slide, dial, push, swipe, turn and type on our machines to communicate our contextual commands, and we take for granted that the device will understand our desires and provide an expected result. The point of interface, where our bodies meet our machines, is at...

Kristine Moran: Dissolution Plan at Ange...

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2005 In her second solo exhibition, Kristine Moran sharpens the focus in her sci-fi paintings, zeroing in on the ideas of utopian theorists from the 20th century—Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Buckminster Fuller—to present inner-city landscapes from an imagined alternative present. While still sprinkled with her signature airborne vehicles and extravagant explosions, these works ponder idealistic urban environments and the social interactions of their...

Ryan McGinness; Art and Entertainment

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published in Strength: Skateboard Culture Magazine, January/February 2002 A small TV in a corner of the gallery projects a video of your worst nightmare. Office hell: A shallow space with white walls and whiter lighting, a nondescript table, and a generic clock, hung low on the wall so it appears in the tight camera angle view. The time is apparently twenty-one minutes past the hour and a skinny dude in a white business shirt sits at the table in obvious discomfort. He looks bad. Hurting bad. As he rubs his hand across his clean-shaven...

Nicholas di Genova at Le. Gallery

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published in Canadian Art Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 2004 ‘Street Art’ exists in heavily urbanized environments from Tokyo to Toronto. Much of it is ‘graffiti’, that pestilence of territorial pissing by visually impaired half-wits who have little creative output beyond barely-literate scratches of their own names. However, an informed eye notices that the seas of scribbled spray paint, stickers and wheat-pasted billboards polluting the sides of buildings are sometimes topped by a foamy sprinkling of intelligent work that...

David Altmejd: 21st Century Werewolf Aes...

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published in C International Contemporary Art, Issue 84, Summer 2004 21st Century Werewolf Aesthetics:  An interview with David Altmejd Interview conducted in Istanbul, September 2003 Montreal born sculptor David Altmejd was the only Canadian artist at the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, curated by the New Museum’s Dan Cameron. Since graduating with an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 2001, he has taken part in high profile group shows at spaces as impressive as Artists Space and Deitch Projects, received glowing...

Kristin Baker at Deitch Projects

By Randy Gladman.  Originally published in NY Arts Magazine, March/April 2004 The crowd at Deitch Projects, one of the few vital galleries in SoHo to have resisted the exodus to Chelsea, had already spilled out onto Grand Street by the time I arrived.  This was the first Friday of the 2003 art season and a grand tour of openings had lead me through scores of packed art houses further West.  Deitch openings, of course, attract a different sort of crowd, one that has more to do with the pinnacle of youth style than contemporary art, and tonight was typical; hipsters...