Best Trend

Atlanta’s art scene has experienced a changing of the guard over the past couple of years: The collective has become king. And while the twenty- and thirtysomethings behind the city’s nascent art co-ops, galleries and organizations have displayed remarkable entrepreneurial savvy, and ushered in a new generation of nonprofits, they’ve also shown that they know how to party. ART PARTIES such as Dashboard Co-op’s launch event at the cavernous Blue Tower Gallery, Dodekapus’ mad art show-cum-ice-sculpting-rave, BurnAway’s fundraising extravaganza, and round two of the underground local art and music fest ARTlantis are a mere sampling of the past year’s social calendar. The parties ring with the energy of those who are making up the rules as they go. What’s more, the art is good and just keeps getting better. We’re not saying an art show has to have fire dancers to be fun ... but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt. less...

AFFORDABLE ART is showing that, even if big-time collectors aren’t doing enough to support the big-money artists in town, there are a number of galleries and shops — Young Blood Gallery, U*Space Gallery, Sabra Gallery and Yo Yo Boutique & Gallery, as well as retail enterprises like Beehive Co-Op and T-Shirt Construction Company — that have figured out that one of the best ways to support artists is to treat their work like retail and actually sell it. less...

A new generation of artists, DIY types, post-feminists, lowbrow fans and out-of-the-box thinkers are erasing the usual high vs. low art world hierarchies, but no where is that tendency more evident than in the rise of INDIE CRAFT. Local groups like craft blogger Garth Johnson (www.extremecraft.com); the monthly Kraftwork neo-handicraft fair at Young Blood Gallery; and the grrls at the Indie Craft Experience, which staged a craftapalooza at Eyedrum in June, have incorporated aspects of indie-rock counter-culturalism and Bust magazine-era newfangled feminism to create something new and valuable in the homemade, the recycled and the crafted-with-love. less...

Atlanta’s cultural creatives have been boo-hooing about the divisiveness and geographically buckshot configuration of the local art scene for too long. But finally, somebody decided to do something about it. This year, members of the Atlanta Gallery Association (AGA) organized a galvanizing event, ATLART (04), dedicated to promoting collaboratively staged lectures, tours and art openings to up the Atlanta art profile on a local and national level. ATLart (04) did the unthinkable: forging alliances between prissy Buckhead galleries and unwashed alternative art spaces in a citywide mixer of commercial galleries, museums and non-profits that will hopefully ignite a collaboration trend. ATLart (04) made Atlanta the city too busy networking to hate. “www.matregallery.com” less...