Conference ‘09
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Conference 2009: Keynote Presentation: ARTSTAR Panel
The “art-reality” TV series ARTSTAR attempts to do for the art world what other shows have done for pop singing, fashion design, and filmmaking. ARTSTAR offers an intriguing, tense, and sometimes hilarious look at what it takes to make it as an artist in New York. Season one of ARTSTAR premiered on June 1, 2006 on GALLERY HD, part of the VOOM collection of high-definition television channels and season two in 2008.
ARTSTAR challenges aspiring artists to impress gallery owners and a team of top critics, collectors, curators and artists. The ultimate goal: to be named the next ARTSTAR.
Created by Christopher Sperandio, co-produced by Abby Terkuhle (former MTV president), and hosted by Jeff Deitch, ARTSTAR is an artwork + TV series, which blends relational aesthetic and reality TV.
This show attempts to do for the art world what other shows have done for pop singing, fashion design, and filmmaking. Additionally, the show offers an intriguing, tense, and sometimes hilarious look at what it takes to make it as an artist in New York.
Panelists
Carlo McCormick
Carlo McCormick is senior editor of Paper Magazine.
Bec Stupak
Bec Stupak is an artist living and working in New York. She graduated BA from Sarah Lawrence College. As VJ Honeygun, Bec was a pioneer VJ at raves during the nineties.
In 2000, Bec became Art Director of New Media at Atlantic Records, but the art world called. In 2004 her work with assume vivid astro focus was featured in the Whitney Biennial and in 2006, Deitch Projects gave Bec her first solo show, “Radical Earth Magic Flower.” In the same year, she starred in the Artstar reality series on the Gallery HD Network. At the same time, she started another phase of her work; directing music videos for a diverse set of clients.
Bec’s subjects cover a broad range of artists from Amanda Lepore to her most recent, a Barbie music video choreographed by Beyoncé Knowle’s “Single Ladies” choreographer, JaQuel Knight. Another of her more recent commissions was to create a short film for Barbie’s 50th Birthday celebration at New York’s fashion week.
Bec is also an actor and appeared this summer in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.
Travis LeRoy Southworth
Born 1979 in Honolulu, Hawaii; Travis LeRoy Southworth currently lives and work in Brooklyn, New York. he received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and a BFA from the University of Arizona in 2004. His work has been exhibited at the Artist in the Marketplace 29, the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Center for Curatorial Studies at the Hessel Museum of Art, NY; the Chicago Cultural Center and the SCOPE Art Fair in Miami.
In 2008, Southworth’s work was accepted into the Drawing Center Viewing Program and he was a participant of the TV show ‘ARTSTAR: Season Two.’ Southworth recently received a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and is working on a window installation for Mixed Greens Gallery in New York due to open in January of 2010.
Christopher Sperandio
BFA in Printmaking, WVU 1987
MFA in Studio Art, University of Illinois, Chicago, 1991
Sperandio’s collaborative art work explores the numerous margins between mass and museum cultures. His work takes the form of comic books, television, painted installation, and web sites.
Sperandio has had two solo shows at American Fine Arts, a New York art gallery. He has produced new collaborative projects for museums and art centers in many countries; and with institutions such as MoMA/PS1, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Fantagraphics Books, and DC Comics. Sperandio is also the Creator and Executive Producer of ARTSTAR, a reality television series based in the New York art world, airing internationally and in the US on GalleryHD, part of the VOOM Network.
His work appears in numerous survey books especially concerning relational, interactive and collaborative art. Chapter ten of Arthur Danto’s book After the End of Art is dedicated mainly to Sperandio’s collaborative project “We Got it!” Sperandio’s works have also been discussed in the New York Times, Art In America, Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, Sculpture Magazine, The New Yorker, ArtReview, Art Papers, Soap Opera Weekly and others.
Sperandio is a founding member of KartoonKings, a media company engaged in the production of comic books, animations and films. Kartoon Kings is dedicated to the production and creation of works of art and to the extension of art across audiences and media boundaries. Kartoon Kings is in partnership with Sperandio’s long-time collaborative partner, Simon Grennan. Sperandio is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Rice University, in Houston TX.
