FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

{CTS} creative thriftshop is proud to announce artist Eric Doeringer’s curatorial masterpiece I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me is set to open at the The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA project space) on January 14th 2011. This exhibition will include some twenty of the most well known emerging artist working in New York and will feature several event performances and lecture series. Acclaimed critic Jerry Saltz tweeted on opening night this “should be expanded to a museum show”!

We welcome in a new year of art with the exhibition I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me -- featuring artists whose subject matter is the art world.  The title plays on Joseph Beuys’s infamous performance I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the German artist inhabited a small gallery alongside a coyote. Organized by “bootleg” artist Eric Doeringer, I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me explores the fraught relationship between emerging artists and the established art world.  The exhibition title can be read as either sincere or sarcastic, as these artists all have “love/hate” relationships with the art world.  They desire to participate more fully and to be recognized but are simultaneously repulsed by some key aspects. There is a critical or iconoclastic character to much of the work, but also a great deal of reverence.  Despite their criticism these artists clearly love art.

Many of the artists in the exhibition use forms of mimicry to challenge the hierarchy of art world.  Some make work based on pieces by earlier artists, others emulate institutions such as museums, galleries, and art magazines.  A few choose to comment more directly, addressing their criticism of artists, critics, and galleries by name.  Others take a more documentary approach, charting the history of their forebears and/or contemporaries.  However, these works are not impartial accounts - they are personal and critical responses to the art (and the art world) of the 20th and 21st centuries. Like Beuys and his coyote, the relationship between these artists and the art world is constantly shifting - sometimes friendly, other times adversarial,  with the constant threat that someone might get bitten.

I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me will open on January 14th, and in observance of the Art World, it will close on March 5th during the weekend of the Armory Show in New York.

An illustrated publication that includes a curatorial essay will accompany the exhibition.

group show featuring artist: Conrad Bakker, Marc Bijl, Jennifer Dalton, Eric Doeringer, Nancy Drew, Bill Drummond, Alex Gingrow, Grennan & Sperandio, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Charles Gute, Nate Harrison, Pablo Helguera, Dan Levenson  / Little Switzerland, The Matthew Higgs Society, Loren Munk, Filip Noterdaeme, Laurina Paperina, William Powhida, Ward Shelley, Jade Townsend

Events and Performances
Friday, January 14, 2011- Opening event performance                                                           
Saturdays January 15-March 5, 1-6 pm
Thursday, February 3, 6:30pm
Thursday, February 17, 6:30 pm                                                                                          

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For more information, or for press inquiries, please contact michelle@efanyc.org.

about artist: Eric Doeringer is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist.  Much of his artwork deals with the practice of copying.  Doeringer has exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, MUSAC, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Prague Biennale 2, the Bruce Museum, and the Currier Museum of Art.  He previously curated “The Matthew Barney Show”, an exhibition of fan art and memorabilia held at Jack the Pelican (New York) and boca (San Francisco).  Doeringer recently completed the VLA Art & Law Residency