“I am giving a cocktail for a few people, Alessandro, Sozzani, Kontova, Prada (which also gave me a 30% discount!) etc. Much fun: I wishyou were here. I will send you pictures. Love. Miltos”

r.Neen, as we might call Miltos Manetas for the word he famously had coined by Lexico Branding, has put his virtual finger in the digital socket with this book of e-mails selected from his hard drive by his assistant and presented here. He’s the radical outsider who is shifting the center of attention from the official cultural bull’s eye to the artistic periphery, namely Mr. Neen himself. But for all the exciting digital progress, he’s really doing it the old-fashioned way: by making us think hard about who we are and what we’re all about. Is it the contradictions in Manetas’s work that fascinate? Is he a kind of digital Yves Klein? A Chris Burden for the Apple crowd? Or a Greek Andy Warhol? His pseudo-philosophical nomenclatures (like Telic and Neen) seem like amusing fig leaves for chaotic appreciation andartistic vision. But maybe they are more serious than they appear at first. At least this is not an artist who is going to paint himself into a corner, because in Neenville there is no more paint and there are no corners. And while we’re in Neenville, let’s not forget the simple pleasure of being voyeurs, of overhearing certain exchanges with the likes of Vanessa Beecroft or Rafaël Rozendaal. And what about those few places where the artist himself has obliterated text, scratching it out with a pencil? Intriguing…RD (Paris)

Miltos Manetas
Selected emails
Published September 2003

ooking for that perfect present for the art lover who has everything? Got an impossible-to-please collector on your gift list? Or just want to give yourself an emotional lift with a little impulse shopping? Help is here, in the form of Lawrence Weiner’s favorite pillow. Mr. Weiner has outdone himself for this onestar press multiple. It is carefully designed and crafted for long-lasting comfort around the house. Martha Stewart might freak out, but your art friends will be green with envy. At any rate, this politically incorrect pillow is guaranteed to get people talking. It will stir up emotions, and, who knows? Maybe more.
Richard Dailey (Paris)

Lawrence Weiner
untitled (pillow)
Published July 2003

ooking for something new? Tired of art magazines that feed you nothing but a thin gruel of indigestible jargon? Sick of slick promotion from the already successful in the glossies? All alone in the art supermarket, unable to shop naturally? Want to stay tuned in and not sell out or shell out? Or even just ready for a good art laugh from time to time? Keep reading. WE WANT YOU. The truth is, “art” as we knew it is dead and we’d better get used to it. Hence our name, Afterart News, homage to Arthur Danto, the philosopher/art critic who locates the end of art in 1964, when Warhol exhibited those Brillo boxes. Maybe Danto’s not right about the exact moment “art” breathed its last breath, but since sometime around then it’s been everybody looking to make a buck on the back the latest shockwave or else holed up in some corner somewhere, doing what he or she can and hoping for the best. Afterart News thinks there is a better way. That’s why we’re free, in every sense of the word. First, we’ll never cost you a dollar, a euro, a rupee, a yen, or whatever you carry in your wallet. So save your money to support an artist whose work you like, not some journalistic flash-in-the-pan point of view. Or save your money to make your own art. Second, we’re also strictly un-edited by the publisher*. Afterart News writers are free to say whatever they want. We’ve got no critical axe to grind, no school of thought to enroll you in, no ism to elaborate; all Afterart News wants to do is level the playing ground, and give what’s good a chance. Because after all, what’s left after the end of art? More art, of course, and we’re going to have to live with it. So tell us what you think: editorial@afterartnews.com. We’re listening.
Richard Dailey, editor-in-chief