CURRENT VIEWING: WHEN THE FAIRYTALE NEVER ENDS: FORD PROJECT : 57 W 57th St (NEW YORK)

Michael Aert's "Misala": 2009 at Ford Project's " When The Fairytale Never Ends"
At the preview for "When The FairyTale Never Ends" , the inaugural exhibition at the freshly minted FordProject space, I swear I kept seeing the well appointed ghost of James Truman veering around corners...hovering in front of the Henry Drager... air kissing impossibly glossy dowagers. Not that James Truman is dead. But he is well out of the global publishing game now, despite having seen all this coming. By this , I mean the increasingly strange and seductive inter-twine between art and fashion. Convened in a duplex penthouse space above the Ford Women offices, Ford/Project is going well out of its way to avoid any obvious association between the Ford modeling brand and now this off-shoot, the Ford art brand.There is no sign of Hanne or Rose or Julia or Sigrid drifting amongst the crowd. Instead it is clear that curator Lara Pan has managed to distill the idea of Ford in this first exhbit into an abstract meditation on materialism, youth as commodity, infantalism and the primal fantasies lurking beneath the tropes of fairy tales. At one juncture Altpoint Capital 's CEO Guerman Aliev ( the mastermind behind the FordProject gallery initiative )stops in front of a Michael Aert work and runs through the idea that "Misala": 2009," reverses the monolithic implications of the oblesik by questoning its interiority and rendering it as a form with a modular nature. My eyebrow arches up...this is not the kind of spiel you expect from CEOs. But if Mr Aliev brings a lively mind to the Manhattan gallery game and a challenging brand proposition to the Ford name, then an interesting new permutation may well emerge. As it stands Ford Project director, Tim Goossens, (formerly a curator for P.S. 1/MoMA) and managing director, Rachel Vancelette, (formerly of the Barbara Gladstone and Yvon Lambert galleries ) certainly wheeled out the big players that Weds night. This venture it seems will not be half-hearted. Big bets on the upcoming Neville Wakefield exhibit (titled "Involuntary") for maximum provocation points.

Participating artists in "WHEN THE FAIRYTALE NEVER ENDS" include:

Michael Aerts, Eleanor Antin, Valentina Battler, caraballo-farman(Leonor Carabello), Henry Drager, Wim Delvoye,Braco Dimitrijevic, Eagleton-Enright, Kent Henricksen, Natacha Ivanova, Robert Lazzarini, Panni Malekzadeh, Paul McCarthy, Vincent Olinet, Gretchen Ryan, Kenny Scharf,