Flavor of the Week

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 2, 2004 | permalink |  |  

I live in Miami, FL, and we've hosted a branch show of Art Basel for the past two years with the predictable result that we've now got more galleries opening up here. Generally speaking, this is a good thing: more galleries means more support for artists, etc. in the long run.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 9, 2003 | permalink |  |  

repost from The Miami Art Exchange

After more than a century of gradual development we have arrived at a point in time where all our desires, interests, beliefs, and thoughts are carefully tallied and counted through polls and marketing analysis to better sell us anything that we might happen to have a passing fancy for. This situation has resulted in a simultaneous creation and destruction within our collective psyches. The past has become as much a close world as it is a world before. The meaning which invested itself in all aspects of our arranged human world are now as meaningless as stones. We do not exist with the density of meaning which invested the worlds of our ancestors. This is what we have lost, destroyed by the need of manufacturing and consumption to always provide new goods, new services, even if these goods and services are themselves unnecessary, or even wasteful, of our lives and our money. The goods are produced, so there must be a market for them, consumers willing and able to pass over their currency for whatever thing it is that is sold.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published October 16, 2003 | permalink |  |  

Michael Mills reviewed the Plugged-In show: "Art Light. In Hollywood, art in the dark is only the beginning" in The New Times Palm Beach. I guess he doesn't get it:

"A pair of short movies by Michael Betancourt, shown on two adjacent television screens with their own sets of headphones, strikes me as more annoying than anything else. One, She, My Memory, features loud vaguely ethnic-sounding music and jittery camerawork, while Telemetry (Excerpt) includes something like a color equivalent of white noise as a visual, paired with some music that starts at a low volume and gradually builds to a near-deafening crescendo. It's sort of like a scrambled TV channel you've stumbled upon while channel-surfing."

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 19, 2003 | permalink |  |  

repost from The Miami Art Exchange [pdf]

There is a set of engineering issues that are common to all technological arts in the digital age: sampling,fragmentation and reassembly, data compression and expansion... and the glitch. We like the glitch, not because it formalistically reminds us what we are seeing is an artifact (it does), but because in our encounter and by developing our relationship to the glitch, we can enter into a dialogue with our technology on its own terms, negotiating for points of contact between what we-as-audience will accept and what we reject as technological failure, as an interruption to our fantasies of dominance, power,mastery.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published June 13, 2003 | permalink |  |  

My work with movies has gradually developed towards shorter and shorter pieces, but not out of some need to purify and reduce the excess materials in my work. Instead it was the inevitable result of considering the question of duration versus the viewing habits almost all of us have when confronted by popular culture. I gradually reduced the length of my movies from a desire to explore issues closely related to duration.

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