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Filip Noterdaeme is the founding director of the Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), which art critic Tyler Green once called the “wittiest critique of big American museums.” You may have seen Noterdaeme and his museum booth near the High Line Park in New York City, where he frequently invites strangers to sit for a chat with he and his “Director of Public Relations,” a taxidermied coyote named Florence. It’s an exercise in relational aesthetics that I experienced by chance on a sunny Saturday in May walking back from a couple of Chelsea galleries.
At the time I met Filip, I had already confirmed interviews with art fair directors Amanda Coulson of VOLTA and Cornell DeWitt of PULSE These are two of the major satellite art fairs, or fairs that open concurrently and along side the major fairs like Basel, Armory and Frieze. Amanda and Cornell are accomplished art market professionals.
After meeting Filip, I immediately thought he would be ideal to conduct the interviews. I was even more convinced after learning that he not only operates HOMU, but is also an art history and cultural studies professor at the New School and NYU, and a museum educator and consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. We met, and I managed to convince him to participate.
Amanda and Cornell did not know who Filip was when the interviews were arranged. Nor where they aware of his reputation as a well-informed art market critic, a topic central to his performance art, which he debuted at the Armory show in 2005 and has been well documented by publications including The New York Times. We interviewed Cornell the day before PULSE opened as the show was being installed. We interviewed Amanda at Filip’s HOMU booth in Chelsea after meeting her at a restaurant down the street. The result is, in Noterdaeme’s words, “a candid portrait of the new playground of the rich where art has become profitable currency and the party never seems to end.”
- Scott Chappell, co-founder / editor
