SPEED? BALONEY!!! Artists
ART such as "Illegally Blonde" Or maybe me will send in my famed piece,
SPEED ART MUSEUM HIT WITH BALONEY ART
The art scene in Louisville is in a tizzy about a fundraiser scheduled for theSpeed Art Museum on Feb. 5, 2010. To celebrate the museum’s founding in 1927, the Speed put out a call for artists to donate small artworks to an upcoming exhibition, "Louisville 27: Community." All works were to be accepted, exhibited anonymously and sold for $27 apiece to raise money for the museum.
Not everyone thought this was such a good idea. "It's a first," Courier-Journalarts reporter Diane Hielenman wrote. "I'm thinking it ought to be a last, too." Hielenman added that if she were an artist, she might just donate the money to the museum, and keep the artwork. Put-upon area artists also took offense at a gesture that they saw as devaluing their work. A group of artists has banded together to create a Facebook group, "Speed? Baloney!" -- which now has 209 fans -- exhorting Louisville artists to respond with "spicy humor" by submitting works made out of baloney to the invitational.
"The opening two lines of the Speed Art Museum’s first Open Call Exhibition say it all: ‘Do you love Louisville? Prove it with art!’," notes Louisville artistBilly Hertz in a statement. "What the hell does the Board of Directors and its fundraising arm think the artists of this community have been doing for the last three or four decades?"
Responding to the uproar, Speed director Charles Venable took to the pages of the Courier-Journal, addressing Heilenman’s article specifically. Venable notes that the Speed supports area artists by collecting their work, and by offering free admission. He adds that the "Open Call" initiative was not meant to exploit artists, but instead to sidestep the "elitist" apparatus of the art world, offering anyone a chance to show and sell work, regardless of their medium or celebrity.
"The small amount of funds likely to be generated by this event will go to the Speed's education program in which approximately 30,000 children participate annually," Venable concludes. "Some of these children will become the artists of tomorrow."
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