28 August 2010

MISS READ: september 3 to 5, 2010

"For the second time MISS READ has invited international publishers and artists to show their artist books at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. As a genre of its own, the artist book reflects contemporary ways of artistic production and publishing to a great extent and also addresses issues of presentation and circulation as well as new strategies of distribution. Presenting a selection of more than 40 of the most active contributors in this field, the festival provides the rare opportunity to encounter and explore the contemporary scene of independent publishing."


more info & program me over at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh i was there, was there, oh i was there, was there. Good that it was, but I am such a mole in a mass. I take things like this so seriously. So i was glad to see how many unique little egos there are, egos full of altruism, giving their idea of a good time to the world. And as many priorities. There are the little publishers that have ambitious walking ideas, ideas that span art and life and urban inanity mysteries very well indeed, but print them with little taste or care, and in their writing style play against the wall of scientific formalism like a hesitant tenyearold dribbler. The small publishers with the most beautiful books and nothing in them. And the publishers that had published bad photos of inane, but symmetric trash already in the seventies.
The point of these gatherings is to watch others socially interact and learn by doing. Especially when most are young people themselves. It is uncomfortable that for me the best thing that can happen is that I highly esteem someone's work to the point that it would seem patronizing to "buy" it, but for them the person is better who gets hysterical about a book and buys it to show their partner something. In the end, it means, as a publisher and/or writer, you like the stupid people better, you feel more happy among people who sillily pretend to admire you than among peers where cross-criticism might be a topic.
Anyway, I could tell that people were having a good time, in that the atmosphere was exciting, a little tense and heavy with too-red lipstick. So I left to preen my cold.
Outside they had pumped the river Mosel through Mitte, and there was all sorts of debris floating on it.