You¿ll find all sorts of things in Helguera¿s Manual that aren¿t in any other book: the difference between an A-level artist and a B-level artist, how to cure the dreaded ¿festivalist syndrome,¿ how to keep your conviction that you¿re the greatest artist in history, and whether it is ethical for a critic to sleep with an artist whose work she doesn¿t like. This is a very funny book. It masquerades as an old-fashioned guide to the manners and foibles of the art world, written by a savvy twenty-first century artist. But it is clever, and has many voices: snide like Miss Manners, sweet and impeccable like Emily Post, hapless like Bouvard and Pécuchet, earnest like an Art World for Dummies, sharp like Swift¿s encyclopedia of clichés, sneaky like David Wilson¿s fabricated documents for the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Helguera¿s tongue seems to be in his cheek¿that¿s what you¿re meant to think¿but he is often very helpful, and everything he says is true. --James Elkins, author of How to Use your Eyes and Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing. In the process of writing the rules of the game, Helguera also skewers its participants. --Rebeca Spence, ArtNews ¿An artist who dares to look at the big picture ...[Helguera] has a savvy understanding of art history and art audiences, enough to know that a little humor and a bit of irony are sometimes the best tools in an artist arsenal. --Barbara Pollack, artist and writer

Manual of Contemporary Art Style

Reference

Helguera, Pablo

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Jorge Pinto Books Inc.

Un dandy italiano irascible lanza su piano desde su balcón. Un pintor novohispano bebe un elíxir que le permite ver el futuro. Una famosa videoasta siria desaparece súbitamente por las calles de Jerusalén. En 1977 un cura en Sevilla descubre, debajo de un armario, un manuscrito que resulta ser la primera ópera escrita en las Américas. Un compositor negro norteamericano escribe una obra en los años cincuenta que presagia la decadencia del imperio norteamericano. Siguiendo el dictado de Hermes Trismegisto, Giordano Bruno escribe su obra maestra sabiendo que ésta lo conducirá a la hoguera. La vida de un soldado israelí termina en las manos de una niña palestina. Una mujer de la aristocracia de la nueva inglaterra decide morir enterrada en vida antes de descender de clase. Las Brujas de Tepoztlán (y otras óperas inéditas) presenta los casos de cuatro óperas disímiles y oscuras, escritas por compositores igualmente oscuros cuya ficción o realidad nunca es completamente confirmada por el autor. Al entrelazar estas cuatro historias a manera de una fuga narrativa, este libro invita al lector a reflexionar acerca de la gestación de la "obra maestra", la mitificación de la figura del artista antihéroe, y la relación entre una obra, su autor y sus intérpretes. Pablo Helguera (ciudad de México, 1971) es un artista visual. Su obra, que incorpora escritura y performance, varía desde hacer registros fonográficos de lenguas en vías de extinción hasta cruzar manejando por el continente americano en búsqueda del panamericanismo. Es autor del ensayo Endingness (2005) y del Manual de Estilo del Arte Contemporáneo (2005), un libro de etiqueta social para el mundo del arte.

Las Brujas de Tepoztlán (y otras óperas inéditas) (Spanish Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

Jorge Pinto Books

"Adolescence prepares us for adulthood, but nothing truly prepares us for adolescence", says the protagonist of The Boy Inside the Letter. This autobiographical work written in the style of a Künstlerroman -a novel of artistic education- provides a rare glimpse into the mind of a XXIst century artist during his art school years. The novel departs from the author's actual personal diaries written at the time when he was 17 to 21 years old, serving as a day-by-day account of the most important transition of his life, relocating from one country to another, growing from adolescence into adulthood, and looking for the ideal love, while at the same time attempting to navigate the difficult road toward becoming a contemporary artist. In this narration outlining a multiple journey that includes Mexico City, Chicago, and Barcelona, we join the frustrations and desires of a young artist who eagerly awaits to find his ideal interlocutor, his artistic voice, and to make sense of the vast and daunting world plagued by the devils of adolescence, wishing for a better time, hoping, like any other young person, to find someone to understand his ordeal. +++++++++++ Pablo Helguera is a visual artist living in New York whose works and performances have been presented in museums and art spaces internationally. He is the author of many performance text and plays, as well of the books Endingness, The Witches of Tepoztlán (and Other Unpublished Operas), and The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style. +++++++++ Praise for The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style: "Pablo Helguera has written the book we have all been waiting for." -Art Metropole "You will sob, even howl, with laughter." -Flash Art "The balancing act between flippancy and gravity is neither easy to achieve nor to sustain, yet Helguera manages it with ease." -Art Review

The Boy Inside the Letter

Arts & Photography

THE WITCHES OF TEPOZTLÁN (AND OTHER UNPUBLISHED OPERAS) describes the cases of four different and rather obscure operas written by equally obscure composers whose existence, whether fictitious or real, is never confirmed by the author. By intertwining these four stories in the form of a narrative fugue, this book invites the reader to reflect on the conception of a masterpiece, the role that biography plays in turning an author into an antihero or a mythical figure, and the relationship between a work, its author, and its interpreters. PABLO HELGUERA (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist. His work, which includes writing and performance, ranges from making phonographic recordings of dying languages to driving across the American continent (The School of Panamerican Unrest). He is the author of The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005), an etiquette manual for the art world, and the novel The Boy Inside the Letter (2008).

The Witches of Tepoztln (and Other Unpublished Operas)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

"An artist, museum educator, and man about town (specifi cally, New York City), Helguera is an amateur anthropologist of the art world. ( . . . ) [Helguera's] cartoons really do capture the foibles, ironies, and occasional stupidity of the art world with a clarity and economy that only a simple pen drawing and a short piece of text can achieve. They fi ll an important gap. Cartooning is rarely done in the art world ( . . . ) Maybe the problem isn't the humor, but the truth. It may take years of sleuthing for Helguera, the anthropologist, to fi gure out why this is so. In the meantime, Pablo's Artoons can do the talking for us." -From the foreword by András Szántó ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Praise for The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style: "Who but a genius would come up with a Manual of Contemporary Art Style?" -The Guardian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "You will sob, even howl, with laughter." -Flash Art ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "The balancing act between fl ippancy and gravity is neither easy to achieve nor to sustain, yet Helguera manages it with ease." -Art Review +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Pablo Helguera is a visual artist. Some of his past art projects have included making a phonographic archive of dying languages, creating scripted symposia performed by actors (unbeknownst to the audience), building a memory theater, and founding a research institute exploring the global impact of Latin American soap operas. He is the author of ﬁ ve books, including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2007) and the novel The Boy Inside the Letter (2008), published by Jorge Pinto Books. In 2006 he drove from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego with a collapsible schoolhouse, organizing discussions and civic ceremonies (The School of Panamerican Unrest). In 2008 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Artoons

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

On June 12, 2009, the contemporary art center Grand Arts in Kansas City inaugurated a retrospective of the artist Juvenal Merst. A day after the opening, a public panel discussion was held with the closest acquaintances and scholars of the artist's work. The visitors to this event became unsuspecting witnesses of a unique experiment that blurred the line between real life and theater, using the tools of drama and the conventions of academic presentations to provide a reflection about the art world's current state of mind in its various contradictions, its desires, and its conflicts. This edition includes the original text of the play along with an exhibition essay and audience commentary. "Translating stilted art discourse into theater opens a rich vein of satire that Helguera deftly exploits.[...] Helguera's latest effort pulls back the curtain with a theatrical flourish to reveal our collusion - through vocabulary, sartorial choice, gesticulation or egotistical promotion of our hard-earned roles - with the chain of command." Lyra Kilston, Afterall Magazine " A truly brilliant satire in the maximally ambitious form of a Gesamtkunstwerk incorporating every person and object in the space." David Cateforis, Professor of American, Modern and Contemporary art, University of Kansas "Pablo Helguera is [...] a splendid liar, a first-class storyteller, a curious mind constantly in search of stories, a creator of parallel universes and impossible characters living in credible situations, which invariably probe our certainties, intuition, and knowledge [...] On this peculiar and distorted stage, time, space, myth, emotion, interpretation, and a voracious search for meaning create an intimate (slanted, idiosyncratic, devoted, and corrosive) portrait of that revered and wonderful freak show that we know as the art world." Naief Yehya, from the foreword Pablo Helguera is a visual artist living in New York whose works and performances have been presented in museums and art spaces internationally. He is the author of the books The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, The Boy Inside the Letter, The Witches of Tepoztlán (and Other Unpublished Operas), Artoons, and Theatrum Anatomicum (and Other Performance Lectures).

The Juvenal Players. A Play

Performing Arts

"Pablo Helguera is the art world's Herblock. His work satirized the hypocrisy in the world of galleries, museums, collectors and artists and always goes straight to where it hurts the most. Fueled by attitude and based on an intimate knowledge of the subjects his cartoons are witty, sharp and above all highly subversive." Jens Hoffmann, curator and director of CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco "Artoons is the book we've all been missing - an essential read. It is the quintessential art gift - you may begin by offering it to yourself and then to your dearest ones. While it is a deft and witty commentary, it is not simply a book of inside art jokes; it's smart and the drawings and writing are executed with superb style; Artoons highlights Helguera's finest qualities as an artist. I suspect him to be a meticulous observer, who reads and edits the information he collects like a skilled and experienced monteur. [...] Two thumbs up. Way up! Georgia Kotretsos, Bootprint Magazine "Pablo Helguera skewers art world species one by one." Artnews "The foibles, ironies, and occasional stupidity of the art world, captured with clarity and economy." Visual Artists' Newssheet, Ireland Volume 1 was published by Jorge Pinto Books in 2009 and is available

Artoons. Volume 2

Comics & Graphic Novels

Comic Strips

"Indiana Jones and Night at the Museum hardly hold a candle to the true stories in Pablo Helguera's museum 'biography.' Helguera is a natural storyteller. He shares the same propensity for insight, wit, and curiosity as the curators he writes about-the anthropologists, archeologists, and native folks who found themselves anchored to a museum, over long careers becoming specimens themselves, no longer completely in sync with the worlds they came from or the foreign worlds they came to know. Mining the history of a museum, Helguera asks questions of these long-gone curators. The answers, embedded in the archives, are as engaging and enjoyable as any exhibition on view." -Fred Wilson, artist An eccentric American professor imports an entire Buddhist temple from Asia. The first Pacific Northwest Indian anthropologist dies mysteriously on a river shore in Alaska. A former Massachusetts farm boy leads the first American archaeological expedition to the Middle East, where he finds thousands of ancient artifacts but loses his mind because of it. A German businessman uncovers ancient clay dinosaur figurines in a small village in Mexico and ignites a decades-long controversy that is still pits scientists against Creationists, today. What in the World tells these stories and more. It is an "unauthorized biography" of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, an illustrious institution that has played a key role in the history of American archaeology. Taking an investigative approach to the life of the University Museum, Pablo Helguera has unearthed little-known or forgotten episodes from its past, spinning intricate threads that reflect on the role of individuals in forming the culture of museums and their collections.

What in the World. A museum's subjective biography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Las Aventuras de Olmeco Beuys (Spanish Edition)

Drawn in the style of cartoons in The New Yorker, Pablo Helguera's Artoons exist in a category of their own -which has earned him the title of "the art world's anthropologist." While providing an insider's perspective on the workings and contradictions of the contemporary art scene, Helguera's Artoons are satirical, critical, sometimes existential, and always entertaining. "Inimitable: the truth and the beauty, the delusions, the vanity and the reality of the art world." The Art Newspaper, London "To be an art world insider, you need to know of Pablo Helguera and understand his well-observed jokes." Sarah Thornton, author of "Seven Days in the Art World" "Pablo Helguera is the art world's Herblock. His work satirizes the hypocrisy in the world of galleries, museums, collectors and artists and always goes straight to where it hurts the most. Fueled by attitude and based on an intimate knowledge of the subjects his cartoons are witty, sharp and above all highly subversive." Jens Hoffmann, curator and director of CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco "Comic relief - finally!" Allan McCollum, artist "The foibles, ironies, and occasional stupidity of the art world, captured with clarity and economy." Visual Artists' Newssheet, Ireland &gt; Pablo Helguera is a visual artist living in New York whose works and performances have been presented in museums and art spaces internationally. He is the author of the books The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, The Boy Inside the Letter, The Witches of Tepoztlán (and Other Unpublished Operas), Artoons 1 and 2, Theatrum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures), What in the World.  A museum's subjective biography, among other titles. .

Artoons. Volume 3

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Books by Helguera, Pablo