Quick Facts
Biography
Lee Klein (born November 30, 1965) is a poet, curator, essayist and writer on the arts.
Career
Klein is the author of the "World's Biggest Shopping Mall Poem" about the taking over of reality by consumer culture. This poem was published by Linear arts in 1997 (ISBN 978-1-891219-00-9) in a limited edition followed by "Financial Surrealists Take the Train" (ISBN 1-891219-52-9) in 1999.
As an essayist he has written for PAJ (Performing Arts Journal, formerly Johns Hopkins now MIT Press) including a featured piece on art after nine-eleven "Art on the Eve of Destruction" which arose from his notes for a lecture he gave at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania in 2002. Other articles he penned for this journal include "Dennis Oppenheim: The Artist as Toymaker and the Viscious Amusement Park of the pre-millennial baroque" ; "The Poetics of Removable Presence in the Work of Damian Loeb", and "Bonfires of the Urbanities: The Public art of Barnaby Evans". He has written catalogues or catalogue entries for artists including Roberto Azank, Brian Gormley, Peter Bradley, Tyrome Tripoli, Salma Arastu and Heidemarie Kull.
As curator and essayist he combined the two roles to animate the concept of "Hypertexture." as it applies to plastic arts and curated two exhibitions therein ("Hypertexture" in July 2003 and "Hypertexturalities" from September 8 – October 7, 2006). These exhibitions included the work of leading artists David Reed, Fabian Marcaccio, Pia Fries, Jamie Dalglish, Ed Kerns & Elizabeth Chapman, Rick Hildenbrandt, Stephen Wilkes, Mark Milloff, Roy Lerner, Will Pappenheimer and Ron Janowich & Merijn Van Der Heidjin at the Florence Lynch Gallery in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
He is a contributing editor to "A Gathering of the Tribes" literary journal, for whom he interviewed art critic Dave Hickey as well as artists David Medalla and Mahi Binebine.
In 2006 Artforum magazine wrote of his interaction with artnet editor Walter Robinson at a party for BOMB magazine.
As an actor he has appeared as art critic Clement Greenberg in Bill Rabinovitch's spoof "Pollock Squared" and the 2013 short "Counting" created for the "Winter Film Awards" by Massimo Crapanzano and Chin Yu. He has been a contributing editor to NIGHT and continues to contribute to l'Etage Magazine,NYArts magazine and M: the New York Art World.
Klein is now a tour guide for the Gray Line double-decker bus company in New York City.