Monday, March 30, 2009

Here's a short interview that is on another blog...
Thanks for checking it out....
www.blanklandzine.blogspot.com

NO DOG IN THIS FIGHT

Every year I somehow find some friend who works in an office to get me some access to
join in on their NCAA March Madness Pool. I fill out the boxes and pony up the $10 or 20 bucks.
I do this even though I know that I am just throwing away my money , cause I don't know shit about the sport.

This year I don't have a sniff. Not a dog left in this fight. This is really not all that different from the past. It turns out that I have no idea what I am talking about when it comes to sports.

But here is the thing...years ago I got lucky and won a pool. I was still in college and I went to school in Washington DC and hated Georgetowmn and Patrick Ewing and somehow picked Villanova out of spite and ended up wining a pile of money. SO now I am hooked. i still throw my money into the pool even though I know I should just flush the money down the toilet. But winning once has gotten me totally hooked.

Now I am wondering if this behavior is not all that different than my behavior when it comes to how I handle my art career. I mean, I am sitting here right now without anything on my scheduled horizon and I am telling myself, "Just come up with something BIG and you'll be right back in business!" Like I keep telling myself that if I just keep on antiing up, sooner or later I will get dealt a good hand and win all the money on the table.

One of these years I am going to finally decide to sit one of these gambling situations out. But right now I feel like one of those guys in the casino in Vegas looking for the desk where you can go and take some money out off of your credit card.
Because I've had a couple of winning hands in the past, I must get lucky again sooner or later.

DK

Friday, March 27, 2009

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

EXPERT IN MY FIELD


Recently I have had this series things happen to me
where I have been asked by other artists for studio visits or career advice
or have been treated like some sort of expert in my field, and I am not quite sure where all of this change
in perception has really come from. Recently this woman asked me to come over to her
studio for a visit. I was really flattered and of course I said YES. I mean, who wouldn't want to
be told how great you are and generous, just for showing up, while some complete strange tells you her most intimate
secrets and desires. And although I completely played down the value of my expertise, the woman pushed me
for career advice and a how-to as to how-to get a gallery. I had to think fast, so I told her that
the whole trick to getting a gallery was to get someone to know that you exist and what kind of work it is that you do, and then treat them like you have far bigger fish to fry. I said it was all remarkably like dating, and that she should read that book
"THE RULES" and adopt this whole strategy and her career would start to take off like a rocket ship.
I told her she she read up on Dale Carnegie and get a copy of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and
bone up on all of the self-help books that she could get her hands on.
She asked me if I had anything coming up on my own schedule and I told her that recently I had casually
met the European Art Dealer, and now I was channeling all of my "power of positive thinking" and
using what I had learned from watching "The Secret" DVD and that I am fully expecting to be doing a show with that guy soon.
I left her and walked to the subway and I decided to start walking bow-legged because I thought it would give off the impression to those who saw me that I was really much better endowed than I really am.

You know, when I was a young artist, I was really shy and awkward, and
I would never have had the guts to ask any artist for career advice. So I take a lot of pride that everything
that I have actually been able to accomplish as an artist as it has come completely from my own hard work and difficult lessons learned. As far as being treated like an expert in my field, there is one thing that I really believe that
I have become something of an expert in and that is in learning how to
learn from my mistakes.
My problem is that I am still not all that good
at identifying what it is that I am actually doing right.
DK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TU5uB74IGI
Cheeck out the link above...

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Spring Is Here...Time to Stop Hibernating.


I want to start out by saying that I have been delinquent in my work here. I always feel that if you come right out and admit your mistakes, it doesn't make things better, but it does at least end the name calling and arguing about who is to blame. I admit it...I've been fucking up.
I was thinking that the thing that one might call a prolonged failure to blog would be falling off the wagon. Well. That is what I have done here. ANd now I am back on.
I am going to start writing again. And I hope to be regular. As opposed to irregular.

MArch has been a very interesting month for me. I was very excited about all of the art fair stuff and then the show in LA. All of this kind of got the better of me. I have had a little of that post pardon thing going on. Trying to get myself grounded again so I could get back to work. In the past, I usually never had any dry spells when it came to my work. That is to say, I would drink like crazy during my dry spells and push my way through them. So I guess it is fair to say that my dry spells were pretty wet. I have not turned to drinking this time to get through the relative dry spell that I'd been going through. THis was not so difficult really, but the interesting part is that I have managed to squeeze out the beginnings of some new work and now I don't have the piles of shit lying around like I used to when I was drinking up and prolific. Not to say that there was anything wrong with making large piles of work, mind you....

Anyway- It is nice to be back at work here, and I promise that things are only going to get better.
I hope I haven't lost all of those who have been good enough to check in here over the last few months. I hope to hear from you soon. And I am happy to be back.
DK

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

WITH A CHERRY ON TOP


So I wanted to just catch up and report how things went at the art fair this weekend. I was involved in VOLTA-NY.
I had been telling people leading up to the fair that doing an art fair at this time in history, at this moment in the economic shit storm that we are living through, was totally stupid and totally 2006. Art fairs were a thing of the past. A big waste of money. I was hoping that maybe I'd get some attention for what I did and maybe, if I was lucky, sell a couple of things.

Well. The Art Fair was totally like 2006. Miami 2006 as a matter of fact. My drawings were selling like hot cakes and the interest in my work seemed to grow exponentially as the weekend progressed. I had been somewhat upset that a gallery who had been working with me had decided not to include my work at their booth at Armory, but by the end of the weekend, they had heard about the wild fire going on around my work at VOLTA, and I found out that my work was not only up in the booth, but also on the wall of the gallery in Brooklyn. A minor coup by my standards. The other thing that was funny was that my dealer from Brussels had asked his dear friend to work with us at my VOLTA booth. Well, this dear friend was also the wife and partner of a former dealer of my work so suddenly I was back to showing in the fold with people who had left me for dead two years ago. It was quite a come back story if I do say so.

I also ran into a bunch of folks whom I had worked with at a recent gallery that I had bailed out of back in April because I recognized that the dealer was shaddy to say the least. I am sorry to say that all of these people are still trying desperately to get paid by that guy and get their work back. I was really sad for these people but glad that I had good instincts and listened to myself when I cancelled a show and moved on.

I did a performance on Saturday that went really well and sang along to a music video that I had made of Rheinstone Cowboy. The whole weekend was like going to a big high school reunion as I saw folks from all sorts of parts from my past. I even saw an old dealer and his wife from out of town, whom I thought by now had to hate me, and we all made nice and talked about our kids, and this guy's wife even admitted to sneaking a peak at the Toothless Alcoholic Blog every once in a while, while at work.

I told my wife that I was really happy and psyched by all of my successes. And I told her that the best part was that I did it all with out doing any drugs or boozing it up or getting a lap dance. Well she said that she was happy for me, but she didn't see what the big deal was. She said she goes to work every day with needing to drink a sixpack and smoke a pile of cigarettes.
But I still look at tall of this as just some extra mustard on top of what was already a pretty excellent weekend.

DK

Monday, March 2, 2009

Busy/Crazy Week


Dear Friends,
Next week I have a couple of shows that I am happy to tell you about.
I will be participating in VOLTA- NY

7 W34th Street , NYC ,Thursday March 5-Sunday March 8 1-9pm
This is a solo exhibition of my work
Represented by AEROPLASTICS CONTEMPORARY, BRUSSELS....
and at the Grolsch Bar at VOLTA...
I will doing a performance on Saturday afternoon @ 4:15
for further information please go to these links:
www.voltashow.com and also www.aeroplastics.net

and in Los Angeles....
although I will not be there for the opening
I am pleased to announce:
GUILTY PLEASURES
at
JANCAR GALLERY
961 CHUNG KING ROAD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90012


DAVID KRAMER

Mar 07 to Mar 28, 2009

Image:
Disney
56 " X 46"