In art, as in love, things can get a bit messy when the Internet is involved.

In the old days of aesthetic courtship, the rules were simple: artist toils in obscurity; gallery discovers artist; the Whitney calls and they fall in love at the Empire State Building. Gallerists were the gatekeepers to the art world, and finding an audience meant first finding a curator who thought you had child-bearing hips.

But with a new breed of artists publicizing, exhibiting and selling their work online and elsewhere, the commercial gallery system is set for a jarring realignment, says curator Scott Chasse:

As the tumultuous world of commercial galleries continues to scramble for readjustment to today’s
sales-savy artists, alternative methods of display are at the forefront of a battle, a battle which The
Distillery Gallery* has deemed: “Artageddon.” … Embracing alternative venues, social networks, street campaigns, and other creative outlets for their work, these artists are helping to shape the future of art commerce.

The show, which was on display in September, featured work from 20 artists without gallery representation, including many of the “street” artists who contributed to the Paint It Now exhibition last fall.

Jarrett Golz	Daniel Benayun
Michael Dacey	Corey Corcoran
Morgan Thomas	Ryan Lombardi
Kenji Nakayama	Josh Falk
Scott Chasse	Thomas Buildmore
Nick Z	Robert daVies
Judith Uehling	Sheryl Pace
Vanessa Irzyk	Dana Woulfe

After being delayed for a month because of some legal tie-ups, Edo G’s new album with Masta Ace is coming out tomorrow, Nov. 3.

Really loving the new one-shot video in support of the album with Ace and Edo making their best “hard” and “grimey” faces, respectively.

Arts & Entertainment, the new LP, features collaborations with KRS-One, Posdnuos of De La Soul, Large Professor & Do It All of Lords of the Undeground. Here’s a partial track list from Kevin Nottingham:

1.) Hands High (produced by M-Phazes)
2.) A’s &E’s f/Marsha Ambrosious (produced by Baby Dooks)
3.) Fans f/Large professor produced by (DJ Supreme One)
4.) Little Young produced by (M-Phazes)
5.) Ei8ht Is Enough (produced by Frank Dukes)
6.) Good Music f/Posdnous of De La Soul (produced by DJ Spinna)
7.) Pass The Mic f/KRS-One (Produced by Double-O)
8.) Reminds Me (produced by DJ Supreme One)
9.) Rounds And Round f/DOITALL of Lords Of The Underground (Produced by DJ Supreme One)
10.) Over There (produced by M-Phazes)
11.) Here I Go f/Jamelle Bundy (produced by Rain)
12.) Dancing Like A W.G. f/Chester French & Pav Bundy (produced by Pav Bundy)

This spray-painted Sentinel at 510 Lincoln St. is facing an uncertain future after the property owners received “negative feedback” about the mural, though we’re not sure from whom.

An X-Men-themed graffiti mural that turned up in Allston a few weeks ago may be on the chopping block, according to a commenter on Bostonist, who says the landlords are planning to whitewash the piece because they’ve received “too much negative feedback.”

Max Pearl chatted with the artists while they were working on the “Text Men” piece on July 25, and they told him they obtained permission from the property owners, the 500 Lincoln Street Partnership, to spray-paint the piece on the back of an auto body shop in the complex.

The Bostonist commenter says that police told the artists they would need a “permit to occupy the sidewalk” to complete the work and asked them to leave after they had been at the site for about 9 hours. Max says that the group had already obtained a permit from the city and warded off a few earlier visits from the vice squad. It looks like they were finishing the top right corner when they got the boot.

We called up the auto body shop and they weren’t too keen on discussing the subject, so it looks like the wall may, in fact, be going back to this soon.

[tab:Profile: A. David Lewis]
By Valerie McQueen

A. David Lewis has taken on Boston’s evildoers in the shadows and trenches of the Big Dig. He’s overcome Mother Nature and navigated hell and high water to find his way home. In 31 years, he’s encountered madmen, tyrannical dictators, and God himself. So, I should have known when he challenged me to a game of online Scrabble that I wouldn’t stand a chance.

But Lewis, who beat me by nearly 100 points using two- and three-letter words, has practice fitting small words into even smaller places. A man of medium stature with short, brown hair and a scruffy face, illuminated perpetually by a toothy smile, Lewis is Boston’s resident comic book writer and graphic novelist. He’s garnered notice from critics and fans with his thought-provoking and colorful works, which retell myths and religious fables with a sometimes controversial twist.

Having written several comic book series and a critically acclaimed graphic novel, The Lone and Level Sands, Lewis is one of a new breed of writers who employ the interchange of words and images to tell a story. His latest project, Some New Kind Of Slaughter, finds him paired once again with illustrator mpMann, whose artwork helped boost Sands to a Howard E. Day Prize and three Harvey Award nominations.

“That’s just how I think,” he explains as he straightens out the Captain America t-shirt that he is wearing on the last day of classes — a dare from the students in his English Composition course at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science. “Novels and prose writing are sensational, but when I need to explain something creative, it takes the form of the interplay between words and images.”

Lewis isn’t the first author to breathe life to his writing over a canvas of color and constant motion. In the 1980s, the graphic novel scene exploded and gained respect as an alternative to prose writing. Works like Art Spiegelman’s critically acclaimed Holocaust narrative, Maus, and Alan Moore’s dystopian Watchmen compilation, which traces the superhero’s fall from grace, established the comic medium as a serious, effective, and meaningful way to tell a story.

Lewis, who is Jewish, says he was dismissive of organized religion while growing up in Framingham, Mass. He was best friends with his rabbi’s son, but he still believed the practice of organized faith was a show.

So instead, he found solace in comics and reading became his spiritual diet. Alan Moore’s From Hell became his Torah and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series his Talmud. Instead of the afterlife promised to Jews, Lewis was interested in the immortal life that comic book superheroes were afforded — printed permanently in ink and able to outpace death in every plot twist and miraculous revival.

“I believed that the questions he was asking of literary texts were ultimately religious; they had to do with the biggest questions, the broadest horizons.”

At the urging of his Shakespeare professor at Brandeis, where he studied English, Lewis began his journey into the comic industry by writing papers and giving presentations at comic conventions. He contributed so many articles to the International Journal of Comic Art that they offered him a position on the editorial board.

During the year after his graduation, Lewis spent his days working in advertising and his nights working on his comics and articles. Though he went back to school and got his masters in English literature, his appetite for learning — for words — was still unfulfilled. Then one afternoon, in the middle of a snowstorm, Lewis ambled into the Boston University Religion Department, where he met Professor Peter Hawkins.

“I don’t recall why he came to Religion rather than UNI [University Professors Program] — fate?” Hawkins, now a professor at the Yale Divinity School, laughs. “I believed that the questions he was asking of literary texts were ultimately religious; they had to do with the biggest questions, the broadest horizons.”

Lewis soon began his PhD in religion and literature at BU, and he continues to approach these questions in his work. His stories range from the tale of a young man trying to thwart an American genocide in the Empty Chamber to a retelling of the Book of Exodus through the eyes of the Pharaoh. The Lone and Level Sands, published in 2007, was a controversial account of the Jews’ flight from Egypt that gained him notice as a graphic novelist through the honors it received. However, some Judaica shops refused to carry the book because of his sympathetic treatment of the Egyptians.

“I’m fascinated by myths,” he said. “I like seeing how much I can stretch out a myth and its parameters.”

Like the characters he creates, Lewis refused to be discouraged by this plot twist in his own life. For his first wedding anniversary in October, he gave his wife, Rima, a comic loosely chronicling their first year of marriage. He is now looking forward to working on a new comic set in Boston in the 1940’s baseball scene. Rima, who jokes that she often does the casting for pretend movie versions of her husband’s books and has already chosen Tom Hanks for the upcoming baseball story, describes Lewis as a consummate multi-tasker.

“I’ve never been a very disciplined writer,” he laughed. “I’ll be lying with an idea or some research for a long time and suddenly it’ll reach a critical mass where I have to get it all out.”

The third installment of Lewis’ four-part series Some New Kind of Slaughter will be released this winter. The series continues to explore flood stories drawn from several cultural and religious traditions — an investigation all the more relevant in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and with an environmental disaster looming.

[tab:Images: Some New Kind Of Slaughter]

[tab:Related Links]
» Caption Box – The Comic Book Stories & Scholarship of A. David Lewis
» Some New Kind of Slaughter Production Blog
» Wikipedia: A. David Lewis
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