A Q&A with Yazmany Arboleda 9/24/08

Tomorrow night I will be interviewing the artist Yazmany Arboleda about his work “The Keller Gates Project” at the Art Director’s Club. Last year, Arboleda constructed an elaborate ruse and duped the media into writing about a fictitious exhibit titled the Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama.

The conversation should be interesting, and will explore how the Internet is changing our perception of reality. Earlier this year, I wrote a cover story for New York Magazine about how Facebook Clubs created by Horace Mann students set off a scandal that tore the elite private school apart. Increasingly, what happens in in our digital reality online is shaping our actual reality.

Details about the event are below:

ADC hosts a special Advertising Week event

The Assassination of Art, When Politics and Art Collide
A conversation about ‘The Keller Gates Project’ between artist Yazmany Arboleda and Gabriel Sherman, Contributing Editor of New York Magazine.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
6:30-8:00pm
@ADC Gallery
106 West 29th Street, NYC

ADC Members Free
Non-Members $20
Students $10

Refreshments will be served.

http://www.adcglobal.org/adc/events/calendar/

Inside Lehman Brothers Final Days

I have a piece in this week’s New York Magazine that covers the meltdown at Lehman Brothers. Inside Lehman, the breakdown of order represented on a micro-scale what one might imagine would happen to the city, or country as a whole, if capitalism failed. No one was spared. I report for the first time that Lehman’s former president and COO Joe Gregory was close to filing for personal bankruptcy, after he borrowed money against his now worthless Lehman stock. From the piece:

At the Seventh Avenue headquarters, the Trader watched it all unfold like a nightmare. Managers instructed the staff not to trade. The company blocked outgoing e-mails with attachments. A colleague frantically called human resources to find out if his wife, who was due to give birth any day now, would be covered by Lehman’s benefits plan. With no instructions from the top, the Trader took his colleagues down to a lunch at Pastis.

Read the full piece HERE