Legwork

Dear Diary,

We did not come up with the subject for this issue. Virtuosity was the theme of the conference Prekäre Exzellenz, which LW had the opportunity to attend in Berlin last June. And this was just the beginning: it didn’t take long to find out that virtuosity also happened to be a leitmotif of this year’s steirischer herbst, a contemporary art festival in Graz, Austria, a festival that bizarrely plays a distant, yet significant role in LW history. This was what it took for us to realize that virtuosity is on people’s minds and even holds a prominent place in discourse.

Issue 004 reacts to the current situation of virtuosity obliquely.

We are happy the way things are shaping up with this whole highfalutin’ virtuous virtuosity story.  We never really bought into the overwhelm wrought by virtuosity and its accomplices: immortal geniuses and perfectionist masters of objects-in-themselves. That said, this issue has been rather fun.

In a true story of the Judson Dance Theater, artist and writer Daryl Chin delivers a sharp-witted clear-cut account of the splendors and miseries of an oft-glorified, supercreative 1960s New York City bursting with original originality.  Here friends hanging out and making things together and (not) being forgotten are taken seriously as the core stuff of art history and understanding the personalities that make it.

We enjoyed strategizing our market presence and value virtuosically together with Doug Popovich, a NYC-based brand and marketing communications geek and artwife (he even has a rhinestone belt buckle that reads: Kunstfrau).  A visual correspondence with the Zeitgeist of the visual arts materializes through images of artist Alex Auriema’s recent work Economy of Dissonance, which is now on exhibit at Transcient Spaces (a project organized by Uqbar art space) in Berlin.

Caleb Waldorf reflects on The Public School as a somewhat virtuosic fluctuation between practicing space programming and theorizing it.

Of course, our Intellectual Trend Digest, a.k.a. LW’s TrendMatrix evolves around the spectacular genius of branding. The ride was rad.

Love,
Legwork

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