While you the Bad at Sports listener only get a taste of it, the interview portion of this week’s show demonstrates precisely why Richard needs to be present to be a jerk for these things or they devolve into chaos. Luckily our cut rate production staff pulled it together and it sounds something akin to coherent. This week Duncan, Amanda and Chris Walla, talk to, or at least try to talk to Steve Lacy, Anthony Elms and Philip von Zweck about Steve’s show at VONZWECK, Academy Records, and lots of other stuff.. 

ALSO

Emily Heath and Christian Kuras from Bad at Sports London check in. 

AND

Mike Benedetto reviews Goundhog Day in time for Groundhog Day.

Also

The BAS video of the week: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pj66XgK3NvE

Duncan and David Michael Coyle interview Terence Hannum, artist, critic, musician and all around swell guy about his forthcoming show in the MCA's 12 x 12 series "Evocation"

This week, The Bad at Sports Staff Meeting intro! Michael Velliquette joins Amanda and Duncan in review shows galore, heck maybe even yours. Don't miss it.

We are doing a show from CAA, if you are interviewing, being interviewed, presenting, or just there for the non-stop action and fun, we are looking to get brief reviews of the experience from you! E-mail us and we will set up a meeting place at CAA to record.

Holy guacamole fun times! This week Kathryn Born interviews Natalie van Straaten. Mark Staff Brandl talks about Jeff Hoke's kickass book-website-museum Museum of Lost Wonder. Mike Benedetto gives a DOUBLE FEATURE REVIEW. Lastly there is a special bonus treat at the end of this week�s show, it is a surprise.

Natalie van Straaten has been a professional writer on arts subjects for more than 30 years and founded Chicago Gallery News in 1983. A curator, educator, administrator and organizer, she serves on various arts advisory boards and is a frequent juror in art competitions. She served as Executive Director of the Chicago Coalition for Arts in Education (1983-1986), and co-directed an art gallery for fourteen years.

Shamelessly and apologetically lifted from Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Every now and then, a book comes along that's almost impossible to categorize, like Hoke's beautifully illustrated gem, a strange marriage of alchemical lore and psychology, science and "wonder." Hoke, an artist and a senior exhibition designer at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, writes that the eclectic museums and curiosity cabinets of the 1600s inspired him, and that he wants to return us to a time before "science became a belief system unto itself," a time when artist-alchemist-scientists were able to search for inner truth via mystical experiences and experiments without being ridiculed. Guided by the Greek muses and lured by his lovely color illustrations, readers are beckoned into seven "exhibition halls," named for the stages of alchemical transformation from base matter to divinely inspired knowledge. Each exhibit also includes a pull-out interactive paper model, such as a "Do-It-Yourself Model of the Universe" in chapter one, where Hoke playfully addresses various creation myths. The chapter on dream states, visions and hypnosis is particularly fascinating. This is a book to linger over; it gradually reveals itself as a sly philosophical meditation on human consciousness, bringing in concepts from Tibetan Buddhism and quantum physics.

Coming soon! Rodney Graham!!!

 

Duncan and Terri talk to James Elkins about his books, criticism and more! Mike Benedetto provides an utterly hilarious movie review and public service announcement.

From Mr. Elkins' web site:

James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer.

He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. He also teaches in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, and is Head of History of Art at the University College Cork, Ireland.

His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes).

Current projects include a book called Success and Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting, another called Writing about the World's Art, and several edited books: a series called "The Art Seminar," one called "Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art.," and edited books on W.G. Sebald, representations of pain in art, and the university-wide study of images.

He married Margaret MacNamidhe in 1994 on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, off the West coast of Ireland. Margaret is also an art historian, with a specialty in Delacroix. His interests include freshwater microscopy (with a Zeiss Nomarski differential interference microscope), optics (he owns an ophthalmologist’s slit-lamp microscope), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano, and winter ocean diving