art is the new CSA

Maybe I’ve been Northern California brainwashed, but I really like the idea of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). You pay a weekly or monthly fee, and local farmers create a box of delicious fruits and veggies and deliver it to your door every week. I haven’t signed up for one yet because I’m way too broke for luxuries such as this, but local, seasonal, fresh produce delivered to your door every week sounds pretty awesome.

So how about local, seasonal, fresh ART delivered to your door? The Compound Gallery in Oakland has a new service called Art In A Box, which follows that exact CSA model. Each month subscribers receive a new work of fine art by a different local artist, all in a variety of mediums (ceramic, printmaking, painting, collage, digital prints, etc.) and most of them live and work in Oakland or San Francisco.  AND it’s only $30-50 a month. Good luck finding cool art cheaper than that anywhere else.

And yeah, ok, art is totally subjective and what if you get something crazy one month that you just can’t justify putting up on your walls? You could give it away as a totally passive-aggressive gift, OR Compound Gallery will be sponsoring subscriber events where participants can get together and exchange artworks. Phew.

Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas

Vegas, baby! SFMOMA is preparing a new exhibit when Frida Kahlo leaves at the end of September (seriously, why does that exhibit follow me wherever I go?) and taking its place will be Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas. From September 18, 2008 to January 4, 2009, two recent video works, Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 (2005, 13 min.) and Stephen Dean’s No More Bets (2003, 7 min.), will be shown in sequence on facing walls. Barbieri’s photography seriously makes famous landscapes look like toys (those are two of his above), a magical lego-land that’s unsettlingly out of scale.

Keep reading for more on both artist’s and photos of their work