December 2005 HUGO BOSS PRIZE SHORTLISTThe Guggenheim Museum has announced the shortlist for the next $50,000 Hugo Boss Prize, and like the Whitney Museum with its announcement last week of the artists in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim journeyed down to Florida during Art Basel Miami Beach to unveil its Boss finalists, throwing a gala at the deluxe Setai Hotel on Collins Avenue. Most of the finalists, who are surprisingly young - some have hardly any exhibition record at all - make work that is performance-based. Perhaps best known are the kooky German performance artist John Bock and melancholy UK video poet Tacita Dean; others on the list are the hot young Puerto Rico-based duo of Jennifer Alora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Mexico's Damin Ortega, known for a trilogy of works involving an anthropomorphized Volkswagen beetle, and Tino Sehgal, who conceived the happening in the German pavilion of 2005's Venice Biennale in which guards conversed with visitors about free market economics; and finally, at least one wild-card candidate - 2001 School of Visual Arts grad Ada Ruilova, known for DVD installations with a Gothic-bohemian flair. (New Yorkers can get a look at Ruilova's Countdowns on the Astrovision Screen in Times Square, courtesy of Creative Time, Dec. 20, 2005-Mar. 6, 2006.)
