Bill Rabinovitch is curating the 2014 Whitney Counterweight entirely from work posted by artists to Facebook. He feels this makes the 2014 Counterweight contemporary with our times, and consistent with how artists now present work. This year in addition to the art & new ideas for this radical Internet based survey -- there will be video, cutting edge new media, music, and poetry, plus a live Artists Talk on Art (ATOA) symposium at the posh downtown NY Law School, April 4, 2014 at 6:00PM. The talk will cover the early Counterweights and a summation of what the Counterweight accomplished toward it's goals this year - with an invitation to Whitney to offer a live response.
Bill says, "Whitney Counterweight 2014 is totally internet based, strictly an invitation show, about both art & ideas -- the ideas big, the artists formidable, exciting & compelling… and predicting it will again be successful solidly vanquishing the Whitney Biennial as in the past, but this time with new agendas.
"It's time for artists to regain the territory they relinquished to the system -- where they've mostly become mere replaceable cogs producing indifferent art for market. A primary [theme] will be the issue of quality over quantity and what that means in terms of new thinking, feeling and drive in moving things forward toward a more meaningful art world capable of creating positive change.
"Our 1977 Whitney Counterweight Manifesto sounds as good today - more than ever:
"It is the belief of the Whitney Counterweight that artists should be, realistically, responsible and adequately equipped to initiate change, redefine and liberate new movements in the world in which we are one of the working forces. We artists are our own gatekeepers and it is from us, not the anterooms of creation, that new visions and new movements arise….American art by definition includes several aesthetic realities, several cultural realities and a broad geographical representation. We are responsible for our times."
