William Gallery

"William is a contemporary art gallery located in a garbage can on the 5th floor of 179 Canal street, New York, in a building where Dan Graham helps run a gallery, only 20 minutes in a cab from Michael Werner Gallery, which since the 1980's has exhibited the estate of artists such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Luepertz, Sigmar Polke, James Lee Byars, Francis Picabia, and others. …William is named after a blogger who was recently fired in New York." So says the webpage associated with William Gallery in New York. The word I've heard is that the blogger in question is myself, and that this William Gallery inside a trash can according to Art in America is connected to Art Observations with Jerry Magoo where I used to post material, the only blogger named William connected to the site. I think the notion that I was "fired" from Jerry Magoo is cute in so far as the word fired suggest that I was ever paid. I never got the e-mail on being "fired" which doesn't mean there wasn't one and I had sort of decided around the holidays not to post on Jerry Magoo again because they had switched to a layout that made the text illegible. Also, and this is key, I was never in New York when I was writing for Jerry Magoo, I was in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for part of the time and then towards the end moved back to Las Vegas. I wouldn't say I ever knew the other people involved with Jerry Magoo well and was not part of their "scene" directly. The only well-known visual artist in New York I was good friends with in recent years is Paul Richard, which brings up another point. I've repeated this joke of Paul's in different context a few times but it bares repeating here, which was that because the right-wing radio show host Michael Savage was banned from entering the UK and the film Human Centipede 2 was for a while also banned in the UK, Paul suggested that a little Michael Savage and Human Centipede 2 would make for a great first date. I don't know about a first date, but this joke proved very prophetic for me. What I've done which has gotten the most attention on-line has for the most part has been- a). reviews of extreme and banned horror films like Human Centipede 2 and b.) a libertarian political internet radio show. People that have read my work consistently may have noticed that I stopped running music reviews entirely. That's because it is so very overwhelmingly clear that the most public interest is in either my horror film reviews or in the internet radio show. Nothing I posted on Jerry Magoo ever got hits like the pilot of the internet radio show, and the number of hits I've gotten on the horror reviews far surpass the number of hits I've gotten on Jerry Magoo. So if I was "fired" I really benefited from being "fired" and doing something else. In fact, I kind of doubt even this post will get many hits because I don't know how many people truly care about William Gallery. Certainly no one here in Las Vegas has ever heard of it. So being "fired" from Jerry Magoo or having a trash can named after me is pretty close to totally irrelevant. I suppose it is sort of an interesting anecdote. I think those Jerry Magoo guys are connected to Occupy who just keep getting weirder and weirder. So my response is somewhere between annoyance and indifference. It doesn't have much practical fall out for me either way, because I'm based in Las Vegas and not New York and I actually get more attention for doing other things. This is vital but I can't go into too much detail about it here: Las Vegas is radically unlike New York, and what little of an "art world" exists here is nothing like the New York art world at all. Well, I wish the Jerry Magoo crew good luck in voting for Obama for a second time. To return the favor I've named a used tube of anal lube, a broken Psychic TV CD and stack of MFA brochures and Chelsea gallery invites,"Jerry Magoo". Update 5/25: This video is of some related interest. Because this particular post has something resembling a trickle of interest (though not compared to other things I've work on lately) I'll repost it here: