pshaw

After three presentations at the Venice Biennale (Peter Robinson + Jacqueline Fraser (2001), Michael Stevenson (2003), et al (2005) - CNZ, why did you not keep all the project sites live?) this year New Zealand is being represented by a small contingent of curators, artists, art dealers and a CNZ staffer, who are going to invade Venice surreptitiously and subversively with ... a book.

The 31-ish artists represented in the book (Ronnie Van Hout is a not-confirmed) were selected by a panel of eight curators and visual-arters. Over at Overthenet, you can speculate on which curator nominated which artist (apparently they all got one nomination the others couldn't veto) and then be astounded by the utterly ridiculous timeline that these artists have been given to prepare their artist pages - not to mention the finicky specs provided by the publication designer, Warren Olds.

I like artists. Some of my friends are artists. But if you give 31 artists 10 days to produce 6 pages of images, as 300dpi TIFF files, and think it will happen, either you're on something, or hurt yourself by holding your breath too long as a child.