Blogger of the Week

HyperAllergic

By Molly Heintz

New Yorkers never seem to get enough art. MoMA is packed every Friday evening (when it drops the eyebrow-raising $20 charge for a single ticket). On Thursdays, denizens of contemporary art roam from gallery to gallery in Chelsea to catch the latest openings. No one thinks twice about getting on a train to go up the Hudson to Dia Beacon or down to an art show in Philly. In the springtime, a perpetual stream of art fairs in New York leaves even the most enthusiastic art aficionado exhausted. With such a bewildering array of possibilities, it’s essential to have a guide to the art scene, like the blog HyperAllergic.

Hyperallergic is the brainchild of “husband and husband” team Veken Gueyikian and Hrag Vartanian, who run a Brooklyn-based marketing company called Going Off Script. HyperAllergic launched in the fall of 2009 as “a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about visual art.” Covering a variety of topics related to contemporary art, blog posts include news, events, features on individual artists, and reviews of shows, books and videos.  An opinion column called “Reactor” takes a more critical look at art issues (one of Vartanian’s recent posts “What does SCOTUS Nominee Elena Kagan Have Against Art?” muses on the relationship of  justices and visual art), and a particularly engaging section covers Street Art, from the work of Banksy to the tags most commonly seen in Williamsburg. While much of the content is New York-based, Hyperallergic also goes farther afield to highlight relevant goings-on in other cities with active art scenes.

In 2010, the founders plan to expand the blog into other media, with audio and video features on Hyperallergic Podcast and a research-based print-on-demand publication called Hyperallergic Press. In the meantime, the blog alone is a brilliantly entertaining and accessible resource for those seeking to navigate the wealth of visual art offerings in New York.