Bangkok, Thailand. 25 January, 2023 (2566!).
Happy Various New Years!
I’m late for the Western one, but less late for the Serbian Orthodox one, and just about on time for the Chinese one! Year of the Wabbit!
Here in Thailand it’s 2566 already, and Yaowarat is going strong, and for all the economic and social troubles it’s going to be a great year for art, I can tell that already.
And while I do wish I could have attended Art SG, and I might but probably will not make it to ARCO Madrid this year, I think the big new trend in art will be more Art closer to the People.
If you live in the West it might be easy to be jaded and see the global rich continuing to cast their insatiable maw upon millenial figurative painters from Basel to New York and back again.
But there’s so much more going on! (For a bit of the jaded take, seasoned with a lot of love and optimism, you should check out Jerry Gogosian’s Art Smack podcast.)
Over here, we still have the Bangkok Biennale going, and it’s showing lots of great art to lots of people every day for free!
And we have more and more exhibitions and events, more and more public interest in art, and thanks to the surging revival of tourism, we can hope to have more and more of the kinds of art sales that really help local artists – by putting food on the table, and art on the wall!
We also have a marked increase in high-level patronage of contemporary art in the last year. I will eventually write more about that, but for now let’s just consider that, thanks to the Central Group, the immensely talented Kawita Vatanajyankur may be the most-viewed artist of her generation, worldwide.
On my end, in addition to making art and seeing shows, I have plans to do more writing. I will soft-launch my newsletter Several Artists soon, and build from there as time allows.
Everything else deserves its own announcement when something happens. Including just editing more pictures to put on this site – if you are subscribed to the news feed you will see them go up. I’ve always been bad at Documentation Day.
And on that note, here’s an “AI” “painting” of a “rabbit:”
Now go read yourself some Jerry Saltz!