Letter from the Editor

by :

Nando Alvarez-Perez

This past year I’ve heard many friends and colleagues describe a weird and apparently shared sense of time accelerating, a feeling of being barely able to hang on as the world seems to be speeding up around us. It’s a feeling exacerbated, perhaps, by the sporadic experiences of extreme isolation and extreme activity, by the growing asymmetry in our uses of public and private space, and by our shifting patterns of social interaction. This psychosomatic feeling of time compression in a world that would appear on its face, from closures and cancellations to supply chain disruptions, to be slowing down, is one of the lingering contradictions of 2021 that will continue to play out in 2022. The optimism that attended Operation Warp Speed’s hasty vaccination rollout program yielded the equally hasty constitution of a much denigrated but still poorly understood political class in America: the “anti-vaxxer.”[1] And the frank capitulation of the American state to private interests has ensured the prolongation of the pandemic through the hoarding of vaccine technology, yielding new COVID variants in vaccine deprived nations throughout the world. [2]

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In the art world the defining news of the past year was, no doubt, in the words of Tina Rivers Ryan, the Great NFT Wars of 2021.[3] The explosion of NFTs represents art and technology’s increasing "democratization"[4], but also its increasing financialization and inevitable movement towards monopolization.[5] It is not a coincidence that the new digital commodities found their place in the market in a year that also saw the extravagant rise of personal wealth invested in collectible luxury assets, from Pokémon cards to Porsches[6] (not to mention old fashioned art sales).[7]

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The pieces in this issue of Cornelia contemplate endings and beginnings, and ask how the things we hold onto from the end of one world can be used to begin building another. Angel Callander, through a reading of Iris Häussler’s Archivio Milano 1991, questions whether the ideological hegemony of the 1990s ever really came to an end. Dana Tyrell examines personal and cultural loss across two simultaneous exhibitions by Azza El Siddique in Toronto. Erika Verhagen looks at changing representations of athleticism as expressed in the Toronto Blue Jays’ unusual season. Margaryta Golovchenko scrutinizes the role museums play in the legacy of colonialism. And finally Joseph Wachowski takes a look at Buffalo’s burgeoning film industry and its impact on Buffalo State’s film program.

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The pieces in this issue of Cornelia contemplate endings and beginnings, and ask how the things we hold onto from the end of one world can be used to begin building another. Angel Callander, through a reading of Iris Häussler’s Archivio Milano 1991, questions whether the ideological hegemony of the 1990s ever really came to an end. Dana Tyrell examines personal and cultural loss across two simultaneous exhibitions by Azza El Siddique in Toronto. Erika Verhagen looks at changing representations of athleticism as expressed in the Toronto Blue Jays’ unusual season. Margaryta Golovchenko scrutinizes the role museums play in the legacy of colonialism. And finally Joseph Wachowski takes a look at Buffalo’s burgeoning film industry and its impact on Buffalo State’s film program.

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The things we’re holding onto as we go into 2022 are the things that immediately surround us and those local efforts recently won through solidarity and collaboration. Buffalo’s art scene can truly be described as having thrived this past year, with the opening of Rivalry Projects in January, Agatha’s Studio in October, and Kingfish Gallery just this past December. Both sides of the border, we hope, will continue to remain accessible for tourists and collaborators. 

1 Tufekci, Zeynep. "The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think." The New York Times, October 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opinion/covid-vaccines-unvaccinated.html. 

2 Zaitchik, Alexander. "How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines." The New Republic, December 23, 2021. https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines. 

3 Ryan, Tina R. "Will the Artworld's NFT Wars End in Utopia or Dystopia?" ArtReview, December 2, 2021. https://artreview.com/will-the-artworld-nft-wars-end-in-utopia-or-dystopia/. 

4 Liu, Jasmine. "New Study on NFTs Deflates the “Democratic” Potential for the Medium." Hyperallergic, December 3, 2021. https://hyperallergic.com/697239/new-study-on-nfts-deflates-the-democratic-potential-for-the-medium.

5 Locke, Taylor. "Founder Who Spent $69 Million on Beeple NFT: Buying NFTs Is 'even Crazier than Investing in Crypto'." CNBC, April 07, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/07/buyer-of-69-million-dollar-beeple-art-metakovan-on-nfts.html. 

6 Bernstein, Jacob. "Here’s How Bored Rich People Are ... - The New York Times." The New York Times, March 20, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/style/spending-rich-people.html. 

7 Mattei, Shanti Escalante-De. "Contemporary Art Market Rebounds, With $2.7 B. in Sales in the Past Year." ARTnews.com, October 04, 2021. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/artprice-annual-art-market-report-art-world-rebound-1234605607/.