James Elkins and the crystal something-or-other.

No, no, But James Elkins is back to talk with Duncan about the Stone Summer Theory Institute, the Art Phd. and why your sorry ass is going to be in school forever.

Stone Summer Theory Institute at SAIC: What Is an Image?

From July 13-19, the second annual Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will present a forum for some of the world's foremost art theoreticians to address unsolved issues in the field.

This year's Institute is focused on three fundamental questions: What is the nature of the visual? What are images? What are pictures?

A combination of public events and private discussions, the Summer Theory Institute invites fifteen young scholars to explore issues in art conceptualization with renowned international scholars, artists, and authors, this year including Gottfried Boehm, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, and Marie-Jose Mondzain.

ALSO: WEST COAST PEOPLE READ AND OBEY!

In conjunction with âOpen for Businessâ, Brian and Patrica will interview Renà de Guzman live in public at Triple Base Gallery on Thursday, July 10th at 5:00 PM. The raw interview will then be posted to the site as that weekâs show.

Renà de Guzman is the senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. Previously, he was the director of visual arts at San Franciscoâs Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).

Go. Go now.

The intro and outro are extra creepy this week. Highlights(?) include Duncan talking about some fantasy involving wearing tight short shorts and Teena McClelland!!! Tom Burtonwood interrupts the recording by shooting rubber bands. Chaos!

After Richard and Duncan are done making a mess of things, the real pros come in and present a fantastic report from Basel.

Lamis El Farra, emerging artist, and the EuroShark Mark Staff Brandl, seemingly perennially emerging black sheep artist, traverse and discuss the entirety of the King of Art Fairs, Art Basel. Yes: the Fair Itself, Art Statements, Art Unlimited, Scope, and the Solo Project. They only missed Liste and Print Basel. Sorry, but all the rest was already enough. Of course they were at the VIP opening (ahem) and managed to talk to more people than you can shake a stick at: artists, gallerists, museum directors, curators, critics, art magazine editors, fair organizers, all the hangers-on, âerâ, important elements of the international artworld.

Also, Philip Vvon Zweck talks to Angee Lennard about Spudnik Press! Be sure to check out their website for info on classes.

Sadly the excellent Cheryl Donegan exhibition at He Said-She Said has closed, but be sure to check out the spaceâs website at http://hesaid-shesaid.us.

This episode is Mohan free. No Mohans were harmed in the making of this episode.

This week: Duncan, and a panel of superstar critical thinkers, Lori Waxman, Kathryn Hixson and James Yood discuss, Highlander, Artropolopolopolis, Robert Storr vs. the universe, and regionalism in an action packed, smack down of art critical smartness.

To digress for a moment, in googling everyoneâs name to minimize errors I was astonished to find that there once was a Chicago Art Critics Association. Sadly their website was last updated in 2006. It seems to have died of disinterest. I wonder if the meetings entailed âBeat-itâ style knife fights, alas Bad at Sports missed the boat there. 

Only Duncan will be amused by the opening song, as he knows there can be only one, and only Kaveh Soofi and Dominic Molon by the closing song.

Joseph Mohan. There Duncan, I said it.

Tony Matelli has always been interested in the underdog. He has become well known for his hyper-realistic sculptures often depicting characters and things just barely getting by; things nearly dead, hopelessly lost or otherwise totally unwanted. These sculptures serve as metaphors for our own social malaise and our general struggle for survival. They mimic inner states of desolation, panic, ambivalence and despair; frequent conditions associated with trying to locate ones self within our social world.

Tony Matelli has exhibited extensively in the US and in Europe. His work was most recently seen in â5 Billion Years,â? at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Into Me/Out of Me, at P.S. 1 MOMA New York, travelling to KW Berlin Institute of Contemporary Art. Upcoming projects include Evolution: Tony Matelli/Alexis Rockman, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Still Life, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, and Die Macht der Dinge - The Power of Things, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin.

Also Duncan tries out his acting chops, with mixed results.

This week: Duncan and Britton Bertran talk to Kavi Gupta and Christian Viveros-Faune from Next Art Fair.

Much fun is had by all.

Shaun OâDell makes drawings, videos, music and sometimes sculpture. His work explores the intertwining realities of the human and natural orders. OâDell has exhibited his work at many venues, including the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Whitebox in New York, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. OâDell received his MFA from Stanford University. He is the recipient of the 2006 Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute, 2005 Artadia Award, 2004 SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a 2002 Fleishhacker Foundation Award. He is currently teaching at University of California, Berkeley and California College of the Arts, and is the co-organizer of The New New Masses, a lecture series on Art and Politics. 

SHAUN OâDELL
We Remember the Sun
Susan Inglett Gallery
522 W. 24 St.
New York, NY 10011

February 15th - March 15th

Holy guacamole am I sick this week, yuck. One of the joys of having a child in daycare.

Terri and Joanna give their book review of Eeee Eee Eeeee by Tao Lin . The "shitty drawing of novels."

Duncan rages about how F-ing angry he is at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in order to make up for it, rumor has it that he intends to increase his donation to them. If you work in development, please make a note of Duncanâs generosity and contact me at badatsports@gmail.com and Iâll pass along his phone number. He really wants to talk to you ASAP.

Laura Letinsky has exhibited her color photographs in numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Casino Luxembourg; The Nederlands Foto Institute; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Her series of still-life photographs, Morning, and Melancholia, has been shown at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York City, Copia, Napa Valley, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto. More recent and upcoming exhibitions include Time Was Away at the Art Institute of Chicago, I did not remember I had forgotten at the Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, and Hardly More Than Ever at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society and the Shine Gallery in London. Her work is collected by LaSalle Bank Photography Collection; Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Art, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Letinsky received her B.F.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and her M.F.A. from Yale University 1991.

NEXT: Kathryn Born talks to sculptor Sabrina Raaf.

Sabrina Raaf is a Chicago-based artist working in experimental sculptural media and photography. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Mejan Labs (Stockholm), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Opel Villas Foundation Art Center (RÃsselsheim), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), San Jose Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Graz, ISEA (Helsinki), Klein Art Works (Chicago), The Lab (San Francisco) and Painted Bride Center (Philadelphia). She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 & 2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, www.lab71.org, The Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The music in this weekâs show is in honor of Duncan and the shady company he has been keeping.

For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth marketâand at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenolâs indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at whatâs happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is the co-editor of Punk Planet, the Best American Comics series editor, and the author of Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People. She has written for Bitch, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The Onion, The Progressive, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZâs radio program 848. She lives in Chicago.

I will mail 5 bucks to the first person who can identify the name of the artist and title of the song used to close the show, it has bothered me for years that I donât know who it is.

From the Leo Koenig Site:
Leo Koenig opened his gallery in 1999 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There, he presented both promising young talent and established, historically significant artists. Within a year, the gallery moved to Manhattan, first to a space in Tribeca, then to Centre street in soho, where we were for 4 years. In August 2005, we opened our new ground floor space at 545 West 23rd Street in the heart of Chelsea.

For six years now, Leo Koenig Inc. has been presenting a surprising mix of fresh exhibitions, anchored by a well-learned tradition of publication. Ever vigilant that the artist's work be seen in an appropriate context, the gallery has been dedicated to producing catalogues with penetrating essays, and limited-edition artist books.

With a focus on painting and sculpture, Leo Koenig Inc.'s current roster includes some of the most internationally renowned emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. We are pleased to represent the following artists:

Next: Brian Andrews, Marc LeBlanc and Patricia Maloney discuss the BioTechnique show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which Brian Andrews thinks is utter crap.

Intuit is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1991. Our mission is to promote public awareness, understanding, and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition.

Toward this end, Intuit strives to discover, document, maintain, preserve, exhibit, and collect examples of intuitive and outsider art; and to operate a permanent facility in which to pursue such activities.

Intuit defines "intuitive and outsider art" as work of artists who demonstrate little influence from the mainstream art world and who seem instead motivated by their unique personal visions. This includes what is known as art brut, non-traditional folk art, self-taught art, and visionary art.

Next: Terri and Joanna talk to Gretchen Kalwinski and Eugenia Williamson from Literago.org

Literago.org is intended as a portal to news and information about literary goings-on in and around Chicago. The site features a curated calendar with a corresponding weekly newsletter, news and photos, post-event write-ups, and the occasional essay about the state of literature in Chicago.

Duncan talks to the delightful Ryan Schultz of Navta Schultz Gallery in Chicago about running a gallery, art fairs and the trajectory of the business.

NEXT WEEK: The Festival of Elkins!!!

From Scott McCloud's website (www.scottmccloud.com)

"At the age of 15, I remember telling my friend Kurt Busiek "I've decided to become a professional comic book artist." It was the Summer between 10th and 11th Grades. My previous decision to become World Chess Champion had proved impractical, but this time I knew I could pull it off and a year and a half out of college, I finally did.

Today, I'm probably best known for:

• Understanding Comics. A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication along the way. Understanding Comics has done well in stores, is in over 15 languages and, while not universally liked, is about as close to it as I'm ever likely to see. A favorite of interface, game and Web designers despite the fact that it doesn't mention computers once. (Published 1993).
• Reinventing Comics. The controversial 242-page follow-up to U.C. advocates 12 different revolutions in the way comics are created, distributed and perceived with special emphasis on the potential of Online Comics. Nearly every page seemed to step on somebody's toes, and the debates in the comics industry over comics on the Web have gotten increasingly heated since its publication. Reinventing Comics is the only book I've ever written that's been actually described as "dangerous." (Published 2000).
• My Online Comics. They're all here (or at least linked to from here). Take a look.
• Public Speaking and Teaching. Click to find out more.
• Zot!. My first series ran for 36 issues at California's Eclipse Comics. Though ostensibly a superhero story, Zot! had an alternative flavor and featured some unorthodox storytelling and compositions. "A cross between Peter Pan, Buck Rogers and Marshall McLuhan" is how I usually describe it. (1984-1991)
• My Inventions. Over the years, I've created a number of strange, comics-related, um... things. Enough that I decided to give them their own section of this site. Check it out.
• My Other Comics.Though not numerous, I have done other printed comics including 1985's Destroy!!, a 12 issue stint writing Superman Adventures, in the mid-90's, a bizarre and generally disliked graphic novel about Abraham Lincoln, some mini-comics, short pieces, and various comics-style articles in magazines like Wired, Nickelodeon, Computer Gaming World, Wizard and Publishers' Weekly.

Depending on who you ask, I'm either comics' leading theorist or a deranged lunatic, but life continues to be very interesting for me and the ideas that I've raised continue to provoke reactions throughout the comics community and -- increasingly -- beyond it. Pick up Understanding Comics (or look for it at your local library) to begin finding out why."

ALSO: Mark Staff Brandl checks in to review art with his students from the Central European Bureau!

Lastly Duncan and Joanna act wacky and Joanna has some interesting ideas.

The following bio is shamelessly stolen from the Hyde Park Art Center, please don't sue us:

In the tradition of Modernist painting, Judy Ledgerwood paints monumental abstract compositions that explore light, color, and structure. Her paintings are formal, decorative, and tranquil while simultaneously being highly personal, optically challenging, and inherently subversive. In her compositions, she creates a dialogue that is uniquely feminine but also powerful and authoritative. Early in her career, Ledgerwood began incorporating traditionally feminine pastel colors into her landscape based paintings in an attempt to challenge and undermine the historically male-dominated tradition of gestural abstract paintings. Today her compositions include circular motifs typically associated with the decorative arts tradition. In the 1970s many feminist artists identified and celebrated circular patterns as being connected to female identity. Ledgerwood acknowledges this tradition through her continued use of dot motifs, which she identifies as her form of non exclamatory mark-making. Ledgerwood is the recipient of a Tiffany Award in the Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Illinois Art Council Award and two CIRA Grants from Northwestern University. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Swissbank New York. Her degrees are from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, BFA, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA.

If that werenât enough, crack open a diet coke plus and sit down for Mike Benedetto who is joined by Tony Fitzpatrick as they review the new Jodi Foster Revenge thriller The Brave One during which they use the phrase âCharles Bronson with titsâ?. 

And for you Encyclopedia Brown sleuths out there, allegedly there is a secret message from Tony Tasset hidden somewhere in the show.

If you listen to one freaking episode of BAS this year it sure as hell better be this one.

Bilingual focuses on artwork at the intersection of painting and drawing, film and video, encompassing both conceptual and process-driven approaches. The artists in this exhibition are acting as visual linguists or interpreters, breaking down one language and reconstructing it in another, holding the sense of the structure together with an understanding of both.

Bilingual will feature works by Shira Avni, Kylie Baker, Wafaa Bilal, Jeremy Blake, Eddy De Vos, Terence Hannum, Jay Heikes, John Hiltabidel & John Grant, Jo Jackson, William Kentridge, Patte Loper, Joshua Mosley, Sabina Ott, David Reed, Peter Rostovsky, Alison Ruttan, Jason Salavon, Marcelino Stuhmer, Fraser Taylor, Jim Trainor, and Scott Wolniak.

Joanna and Terri talk to Doug Fogelson from Front Forty Press about art books and lots of other neat stuff. Front Forty Press is a small publisher focused on artistic projects. A Front Forty project is one that embodies uninhibited creativity and deals with current topics. The work can be functional, political, ecological or simply expressive. What matters most at Front Forty Press is the cultivation and communication of ideas.

AND Mike B. has a rant to offer.

This exhibition is the most serious and comprehensive look at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture to date, charting their intersection through works of art, album covers, music videos, and other materials. The exhibition addresses the importance of specific cities such as London, New York, Los Angeles, and Cologne; rock and rollâs style, celebrity, and identity politics in art; the experience, energy, and sense of devotion rock music inspires; and the dual role that many individuals play in both the sonic and visual realms. This exhibition is curated by MCA Curator Dominic Molon."

Brian Andrews and Marc LeBlanc are joined by Patricia Maloney and they discuss the new season of shows that recently opened in San Francisco.

You are mentioned in this episode, seriously, no name drop list this week because you know you are in here, someone is talking about you, maybe something good, maybe something bad, youâll just have to listen.

Mike B. is back with 28 somethings later.

Artist, Art Historian, and Dean,
of Faculty and Senior Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She is the author of numerous articles and several books with many foreign editors. Her book publications include: The Invisible Drama: Women and The Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; and most recently, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art.

Prelude to published interview taken from the book, Conversations Before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik.
âIn 1994, Carol Becker was appointed dean and vice-president for academic affairs of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having been a former chair of the graduate division before that. She received her Ph.D. in literature at the University of San Diego, where she was a protÃgà of Herbert Marcuse. A lecturer in women's studies since the late 1960s, and a writer on psychoanalytic theory and cultural politics, she has been mulling over the obsolete attitudes and strategies of the art world for a long time, particularly the issue of the artist's responsibility to society, which she claims is a sensitive issue that makes everyone uncomfortable, defensive and insecure. Becker feels that many artists simply refuse to address the issue at all. Artists often choose rebellion, which alienates them from their audience, and then become angry at the degree to which they are unappreciated. In part this is a consequence of the way we educate students in art schools, envisioning the artist as a marginalized and romantic figure who, she claims, operates "out of what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle while the rest of us struggle within the Reality Principle." Students need to think about their work, she feels, not in isolation, but in relationship to the public and to an audience that has not been addressed in art school pedagogical situations. American art students, like most American college students, Becker claims, have not been trained to think globally or politically about their position in society. In a sense, art has seceded from American culture so completely that it has lost its effectiveness and become a subsidized bureaucracy of self-serving specialists.â?

Brian and Marc with critic, writer, and all around interesting guy Julian Myers on rock and rioting.  

Terri,  Joanna and Danielle Egan-Miller talk to Arik Verezhensky proprietor of Gemini Fine Books & Arts, Ltd. A collector and dealer in rare and amazing art and books, and art books, and maybe a few books on art. 

To top it all off the show wraps up with some obscure Japanese Hip-Hop, Richardâs new favorite genre of music.

To wit:

"Jim Duignan is an artist and founder of the Stockyard Institute, a project that draws attention to the visionary status of youth and people through the arts in a variety of Chicago neighborhoods. Stockyard Institute publishes AREA Chicago Arts, Education, Activism, a biannual publication in Chicago.

Jim begins his âresidencyâ? at the Art Center in preparation for Pedagogical Factory, an exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in Gallery 1, opening this summer. Heâll be at the Art Center on Thursdays in the Second Floor Studios on the west side of the building. Stop in for a chat with Jim to find out more about his project!"

Jeff Wall, people! Canadian superstar Jeff Wall is interviewed by Duncan and Richard when he was in Chicago for the opening of his huge new show at the Art Institute of Chicago:

Jeff Wall

June 29-September 23, 2007
Regenstein Hall

Jeff Wall is considered one of the most acclaimed and influential artists of his generation. He uses state-of-the-art photographic and computer technologies to make pictures that evoke the composition, scale, and ambition of the grandest history paintings. This exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Wall's nearly 30-year career.

Next, Jonathan Messinger and Zach Dodson the force behind Featherproof Books, an indie publisher based here in Chicago talk to Terri and Joanna at the Printers Row Book Fair.

Finally, Amanda is leaving for New York! We say our fond farewells, but not goodbyes to Amanda Browder who has taken a position with the New York office of Bad at Sports.

Duncan and Marc LeBlanc talk to Caleb Lyons of Old Gold Gallery and formerly of Art Ledge. 

Duncan talks to artist Lisa Boumstein-Smalley about her new show at the Alfedena Gallery.

Brian Andrews and Marc LeBlanc talk to Justin Hansch about Justinâs Museum of Contemporary Art. We collectively apologize for the crappy sound quality on this one but we are working to correct the problem.

Sarah corrects BAS on their grammar.

Richard spent a lot of time chuckling to himself about the music cues in this weeks show.

German artist Jana Gunstheimer combines her academic training in ethnology with a refined figurative drawing practice to observe and comment on aspects of her own culture. Gunstheimer responds to the transformations she sees taking place in contemporary German society including postindustrial desolation, drastic unemployment, and rising levels of aggression among people of her generation by way of a semi-fictional organization she calls Nova Porta. Complete with a logo, Web site, and an actual membership, the organization offers  People without Social Function a semblance of structure through group cohesion and rigid hierarchy.

Adopting impenetrable rituals, tireless evaluation procedures, and managed leisure, the organization's stated goal is risk management and its activities are driven, if not wholly fabricated, by the artist. Under the conceptual framework of Nova Porta, Gunstheimer effectively parodies hierarchical structures, bureaucracy, and, most importantly, society's need to define oneÃïïs worth in terms of work.

Focus: Jana Gunstheimer is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. In one all-encompassing installation, the exhibition features exquisitely rendered, photo-based grisaille watercolors on wood panel, a large-scale paper cutout, a site-specific wall drawing, and a newspaper intervention work that all reference the initiatives of Nova Porta, adapted to the specific context of Chicago.

"Gaylen Gerber's work often incorporates the artwork of other artists in its realization. Gerber asks other artists to cooperate with him and let their work be installed against the ground he provides. In doing so he focuses our attention on a central aspect of perception, which is that to perceive something at all you must first be able to perceive it as distinct from its context or background. By positioning his work as the contextual ground against which we see another work of art, Gerber draws attention to the permeability of the distinctions between object and context and fundamentally questions the stability of perception itself. Gaylen Gerber has exhibited widely including recent exhibitions and cooperative projects at the Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, Luxembourg; FRAC-Bourgogne and Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland; and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Photo Caption 

Exhibition view of Gaylen Gerber's 2006 Mudam exhibition featuring Gerber's work with Kay Rosen, Sam Salisbury and Remy Zaugg. Zaugg's text roughly translates: and if, as soon as I act, I was not being anymore. Photo: Jean-Noel Lafargue."

The closing song goes out to Duncan.

Next, Kathryn talks to Paul Klein about the screwed up stuff going on with public art funding in Chicago. Paul is working of some interesting activist stuff and we will post a letter/manifesto on the recent events, on our blog. 

Then, Mark Staff Brandl checks in from the Central Europe Bureau!

Last, Mike Benedetto, with another Art Superstar Cinema Spotlight. The Supertsar is Monique Meloche. The movie is Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar. Might made his own bed music for this bit. Wow. 

Wow, what a whole lot of show.