On June 28, Paula Cooper Gallery will host the event Artists & Writers for Obama. Tickets range from $1,000 to $2,500, which will get you into a private pre-reception, and there are a limited number of $100 tickets available. Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Franzen are special guests. My Brightest Diamond, who recently performed at the Kitchen benefit this spring, will provide the music. Here are a few of the host committee members, basically the cream of the crop in the categories of “artists” and “writers”:
Laurie Anderson, Lynda Benglis, Chuck Close, Junot Diaz, Mark di Suvero, Lena Dunham, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Glass, Robert Gober, Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, Jasper Johns, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Lynne Tillman and Lawrence Weiner.
Paula Cooper Gallery has a long history of supporting the political left (and Obama is or isn’t that, depending on whom you ask). The first exhibition, back in 1968 when the gallery was still in Soho (and basically the only show in town), was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam and included work by Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre. That show, organized with the help of critic Lucy Lippard, was accompanied by the following statement:
These 14 non-objective artists are against the war in Vietnam. They are supporting this commitment in the strongest manner open to them by contributing major examples of their current work. The artists and the individual pieces were selected to represent a particular esthetic attitude, in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.
In other news, Ms. Cooper recently made an appearance in a really awesome (and large) photo-realist portrait by Rudolf Stingel at Art Basel, which sold for $3 million before the fair even opened.
