After a week of intensive art fair coverage on our parallel fair blog, we're pleased to post Brent Burket's scattershot impressions of The Armory Show. An excerpt follows:

I always pay attention when I'm unusually hungry for a certain piece of music. It always reveals a little bit about where my head and heart are residing in a given moment. Crossing 9th Avenue on my way to the Armory I was overcome by the desire to listen to the biggest and dumbest song I could find on my iPod, Fish's live version of The Heart of Lothian. Turned out that having the barrel-chested Scotsman in my ears was a perfect way to prepare for the annual goofy-ass grandness of the Armory. Onward!

Continue reading Big, Dumb, and Beautiful.

Dear readers, please see our supplementary blog for art fair coverage this week. New content will be going up as the fairs open and progress.

This Wednesday marks the opening of several major New York art fairs. ArtCal Zine will covering several of these, likely with daily content starting Wednesday. We're also announcing today our first international contributor, who will be writing on contemporary art in Paris for the next few months. A review of Candida Höffer's current photo exhibition at Yvon Lambert Paris will be published later this week.

Rice and Beans
Alison Knowles and Charles Curtis
7:30 Tuesday 25 March 2008
Miguel Abreu Gallery - 36 Orchard Street New York, NY

Tomorrow nigt at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, founding Fluxus member Alison Knowles will be presenting Rice and Beans, a new musical performance in collaboration with composer Charles Curtis who will be performing the piece. Alison Knowles writes:

I will do a poem titled Mantra for Jessie (some help in sleeping). It is a juxtaposition of sound and color in a literal narrative poem. In my mind it is a lullaby. I remember Simone Forti my friend in California who says her mother used to read her recipes to put her to sleep. This Mantra appears in a pamphlet put out by the Great Bear series of Something Else Press, 1979. The pamphlet is titled More by Alison Knowles.

Charles will play a score I made for him entitled Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. He will also play a pieces by John Cage and Morton Feldman from the 1950s.

Lentils were eaten from the wild before domestication. They are the oldest bean in existence first found in the Franchthi Caves of Greece in 1,100 B.C. They appeared in the Bronze Age and then India and Ethiopia as well. Beans are the first food associated with the poor. Documents in tablet form with recipes have been discovered, but most recently in a rock crevice on cliffs off the Pacific coast what may be an ancient vestment has appeared. Its origins are completely unknown. It is made of paper melded with muslin containing red lentils, a tangle of cords and black curled marks perhaps some primitive language. Egyptians imagined it was sufficient to eat lentils to enlighten the mind and open the heart, and perhaps as well to make music!

Here at ArtCal we seek out under recognized and under represented galleries and venues for contemporary art, specifically promoting the best emerging talent from those fields. Launched November 18th, 2004, what began as a listing service has seen significant growth over the last three and a half years. In 2005 we added images to the site's features, as well as RSS and iCal feeds. At the time, no other art listing website offered such tools, so I imagine the technology made heavy Internet users extraordinarily happy; as an active blogger it certainly made my life a lot easier. ArtCal continued in its Internet pioneering only a few months later hiring me as their listings editor - clearly a high point in their services! Since that time, we launched our newsletter on March 30th, 2006, our beautiful redesign on August 28th 2007, and most recently, ArtCal Zine, the flagship event and reviews publication which debuted on October 4th, 2007.

As ArtCal embarked on 2008 we asked our readers to tell us a little bit more about themselves, and are now ready announce our findings. Through the course of this survey we learned a number of interesting facts, not the least of which is that you all go to a lot of openings! Of those polled, only 5.2% said they didn't go to any receptions at all, where as 50% said they attended at least 1-3 each month, and 31% attend 5-10. 13.3% of you seem to have lives solely centering around openings and arrive at more than 10 throughout the course of 30 days.

ArtCal subscribers tell us that while they use a large number of publications to keep abreast of art openings, over 80% rely on email announcements to inform them of openings. Let this be a warning to all you who have blogs and assume you've told your friends merely by posting an event notice. It turns out email is still the most effective means of reaching an audience, and certainly a good reason to subscribe to our weekly newsletter if you haven't already. Nearly 43.3 percent of our audience have post graduate degrees, closely followed by those 32% with college degrees. We also suspect most of you are sexy, though SurveyMonkey.com has no scientific means of measuring this, except to tell us that 62.5% of our readers are between the ages of 25 and 44. Generally speaking that age bracket is hot, so congratulations everyone who hits that mark. Also congratulations are in order to the 42.8% of you who live in Manhattan. As a member of the 26.6% of Brooklyn dwellers, I look enviously upon you. Interestingly 11.6% of our readership lives outside the United States, which I think indicates an extremely invested demographic in the arts.

Speaking of which, it should not go unmentioned that an extremely high percentage of our readership are also collectors. Of those surveyed, over 49% said they planned to fill their homes with art. Given that 94% of our readers attend one or more openings per month, that we receive over 103,500 page views over that same time period, and that our audience is largely made up of upper middle class well educated readers, we are undoubtedly a desirable, and influential bunch. We are also growing. ArtCal newsletter subscribers hit 2000 in January, a number that continues to climb. Based on your feedback we will be adding a number of new features over the course of the next few months. Our aim as always, is to build upon and improve a service we're already really proud to offer all of you.

Dear Readers, Artcal Zine will not be posting new content this week due to the upcoming new year and related holidays. We will resume programming in early 2008, and in the meantime wish you all a happy new year.

Artcal Zine will be withholding new content today and tomorrow, in observance of the national holiday. We will begin posting again after the weekend.

We recently relaunched ArtCal with a new design and this zine as the flagship site for the Culture Pundits advertising network, and we're seeking input from our readers. Please fill out our short survey. We thank you for your time in answering the survey, and helping us make ArtCal a better resource.

We will share the highlights of the survey with our readers in a few weeks.

Watch this space. The ArtCal Zine arrives this week.