Craig Kalpakjian Abberation 0189øc 2006 Inkjet transparency in light box 26.5" x 25.5" x 5.25" [large detail of installation]

Fia Backström [large detail of an installation from the artist's continuing project, "Blonde Revolution"]

Elizabeth Dee will be hosting the East Coast chapter [see QED for the West] of Drew Heitzler's provocative and very cool organization of artist materials in a very smart show-and-tell, "Bring the War Home," for just another few days. Nah, of course it ain't political; it's just the air we breathe now.

Holland Cotter writes in the NYTimes today:

It’s called “Bring the War Home” and it’s at Elizabeth Dee Gallery. It is one of the best of the many group exhibitions that have crowded the neighborhood this summer.

Almost all of them were neater, spiffier and more “visual” than this one. But none generated more energy or offered as many options for where new art could go. We could really use those options at a time when the art industry is bankroll-happy, and a lot of new work is enervatingly timid. I like to think of “Bring the War Home,” which closes on Friday, not as the end of an old season but as the start of a new one.

Speaking of the new, I'm very excited by what seems to be a significant movement everywhere of artists coming together, either in collaboratives or loose communities. Regardless of the reasons for this development, and I think they are very much related to disgust with branding in artistic fashions, shameless excesses of greed and the cynical industry of endless terror, I believe it may save our soul and even help to preserve a role for the exploding numbers of artists should the much-predicted collapse of the art market ever materialize.

This movement sometimes carries artists directly into the world where their work is seen and traded, where they may function as curators, as publishers, even as "distributors" of a new kind of aesthetic commodity no less precious for its easy accessibility and, well . . . real affordability.

The artist's presence in the growing market of creative images and ideas is itself a very creative one, and I expect it to enrich our relationship to both the art and the artist. It is likely to change "art" forever.