San Diego’s first Beyond the Border International Contemporary Art Fair (BTB ICAF), scheduled for September 2-4, 2009. The 3-day contemporary art fair will be held at The Grand Del Mar, San Diegos newest luxury resort in Coastal North San Diego County. The event will showcase over $4 million in artwork by prominent national and international galleries coupled with sponsors such as Maserati, Modern Luxury Media, Qualcomm, Christie’s, The American Institute of Wine and Food, The California Bipolar Foundation, and many others. Over 3,000 qualified new and established collectors are anticipated to attend over the three days. Among the artists displaying their works is Mexican artist Barry Wolfryd, who has maintained a portfolio at absolutearts.com since 2007.

IMAGE
Barry Wolfryd
Title: Building Trust
Year Created: 2007
Medium: Painting Oil
Width: 57 inches
Height: 63 inches
Depth: 4 inches
Price: US$ 9,000

View more of Barry Wolfryds work in his portfolio at absolutearts.com absolutearts.com/portfolios/b/bwolfryd

Wolfryd will be represented by IAO Projects, exhibiting large and medium format oils on canvas plus works on paper. The artist, originally from Los Angeles, California, presently lives in Mexico City. His work incorporates cultural relics, products, idols and icons, including familiar commercial tags with which he uses to show is fascination and repulsion for the empty idealism in the contemporary world.

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability.

Sometime between when I finished the critique and when it went live online, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?

Before arguing why I see this as a gross overreach of the National Endowment for the Arts and its mission, a brief background on the conference call is needed.