Get 'em while they're hot!

New Atlanta art blog "The View from the Edge of the Universe" is touting a Beate G�tschow edition being offered through the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The print is an edition of 30 from the Museum's Fine Print Program. The c-prints measure roughly 12"x19" (though I see no info about this on the MoCP site) and run $300. Prints are also available by Yolanda Andrade, Shimon Attie, Helen Sear, Toshio Shibata, and Alec Soth.

Though I'm skeptical of their value as an investment vehicle, it's great that the Museum is making affordable editions such as these available. My wife and I were happy to take advantage of the low-cost giclee prints done by Edward Burtynsky for his mid-career retrospective at the Canadian National Gallery in 2003 (now touring).

I included G�tschow in my list of the best of 2004. That was based on a review in New York and visits to a few Web sites. A couple of weeks back I was able to drop by Danziger Project and see her work for myself. G�tschow's images suffer from an "uncanny valley" problem. The spliced together images are often close to seamless, but not quite close enough, so there's this weird vibe you get from them that's absent in the work of Loretta Lux, whose cut-and-paste work is more obvious. Of course, verisimilitude is only part of the point, but it's enough to put me off. Plus, I don't know enough about the landscape painters she's supposedly playing off of to know whether that's interesting, important or both. Unfortunately, I'd probably leave her off the list were I to do it again now. There's a lesson for you kids: never make up your mind about an artist by what you see on the Web.