As a symbol of the loss of virginity, the lady has let one of her shoes fly into the air
{ Fragonard, The Swing, ca. 1767 | It is considered as one of the masterpieces of the rococo era. }
art category
Hey you got me rocking now
Is fashion art? Really, the more interesting question is “Has art become fashion?” So far that is still the ugly unaskable. Fine art makes a critical stink about being compared to fashion because it knows how close that gets to admitting what really controls its revolutions—the market.
artwork { Anna Gaskell, Anagram, 2003 }
Toilet seat’s coming down
{ Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986 | Jonathan Monk, Deflated Sculpture no. II, 2009 | See also: Mark Leckey’s Made in Eaven }
Related:
{ Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966 }
Down where your paint is cracking
Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity. The theory is based on the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill. Rather, there is a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits without having the debilitating symptoms.
Mental illnesses have been around for thousands of years. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them. If they were wholly bad, it’s argued, natural selection would have seen them off long ago. In some cases the advantage is clear. Anxiety, for example, can be a mental illness with severe symptoms and consequences, but it is also a trait that at a non-clinical level has survival advantages. In healthy proportions, it keeps us alert and on our toes when threats are sensed. (…)
“There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness,” says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University.
The rush associated with a high
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Chuck Close Soho was rats and rags and garbage trucks: There were occasional wars between one Mafia-owned waste-management company and another, during which one would burn the other’s trucks. There might have been twenty artists—or people of any kind—living between Houston and Canal; you could have shot a cannon down Greene Street and never hit anybody. But we all lived within a few blocks of each other: Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Phil Glass. artwork { Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-68. | acrylic on canvas } |
Mary Boone So anyway, I was sitting in my office crying, and Jean-Michel Basquiat comes in. And he was so sweet! He was so upset I was sitting there crying. He put his arms around me and he said, “Mary, don’t worry. I’m gonna be much more famous than Julian.” And then he walked out, and he came back in with a huge watermelon, which he plunked on my desk, and we ate. photo { Jean-Michel Basquiat photographed by Edo Bertoglio } |
{ Early days in NYC, as remembered by a baseball star, a porn king, two supermodels, a mayor, and other plucky transplants. | NY mag | Continue reading }
The broken glass and the rusty nails where the violets grow
Art prices plunged during the first quarter of the year as cash-strapped collectors looked to unload works by postwar masters that had earlier boomed in price along with the stock market.
The Mei Moses index shows art prices fell 35 per cent in the first quarter, having held up during earlier months of the financial crisis.
The overall index fell 4.8 per cent last year.
The decline accelerated as people who lost money in the financial crisis, including victims of the Madoff fraud, put up works for sale, often at a loss, several art world insiders said.
The worst year on record for art investors was 1991, when prices dropped 41 per cent, said Mr Moses, who has collected data going back to the 1800s.
Victory Boogie-Woogie
To understand Mr. Gagosian’s success you need to understand that the postwar art world is basically a stock market with a couple of thousand really valuable shares. Few people have any idea where those shares are located, because they’re hanging in the homes and sitting in the warehouses of collectors, who, for obvious security reasons, tend to keep their holdings well-guarded secrets.
If you want to spend $30 million on a de Kooning, you can check what’s in the catalogs of the coming Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales. But if you don’t find what you want, you’ll probably call Mr. Gagosian. One of his talents is simply ingratiating himself with the richest collectors in the world, which gives him access to their homes, which allows him to take note of what great works are where. By all accounts he has an excellent memory, but his secret weapon, if it can be called that, is the lowly camera, which he’s been known to use on the Q.T. (…)
In many instances, Mr. Gagosian is effecting trades in which none of the parties know the identity of anyone else. Collectors say they typically receive calls from him saying something like, “If you want that Francis Bacon, you need to give me your Lichtenstein and the two Basquiats.” Who is on the other side of that trade, or whether the Bacon came from Mr. Gagosian’s private stash, is never discussed. (…)
Mr. Gagosian worked briefly in an entry-level job at the William Morris Agency before decamping to sell posters on the sidewalk near the U.C.L.A. campus. (…) By 1980, he was showing Sol LeWitt sculptures and work by Richard Serra, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle. Mr. Schjeldahl, the art critic, attended the Salle show and found an “aftershave-ad-handsome” owner who said he was giving the art business two years to prove itself. Then he’d try real estate. (…)
Ms. Bortolami isn’t alone in believing that Mr. Gagosian has achieved the contemporary art market’s version of too big to fail, though for reasons that have nothing to do with toxic assets. The glamour and networking energy that he has brought to the business added a zero to the price of just about everything, Ms. Bortolami says. If his business were to fold, the new buyers he brought to the market, as well as a lot of added, buzz-laden value, would disappear along with him.
artwork { Francis Bacon, Self-portrait, 1971 | oil on canvas }
‘If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.’ — Aldous Huxley
Patty Milich, a state employee, spent five months trying to give $80 to painter Rick Stitch.
An unassuming arts administrator, Ms. Milich leads a double life as California’s official art sleuth. The job tracking down abstract expressionists is an unintended consequence of a little-known 1977 law designed to cut artists in on the profits from the resale of their works.
When a work of art is resold in the state, or by a California resident, the seller must set aside 5% of the gross selling price to pay the artist. The law applies to any resale of $1,000 or more within 20 years of an artist’s death, so long as the sale isn’t between dealers.
In theory, the law is a boon for artists. In practice, it means Ms. Milich sometimes must spend months trying to deliver paltry sums to people who have faded into obscurity, moved abroad or simply don’t want to be bothered. (…)
Millions more due artists may have leaked out of the system. Many buyers and sellers don’t know about the law; others simply ignore it. Some sellers deliberately pick locations outside California to sell their works in order to avoid paying the royalty, arts lawyers say.
photo { Lucia Nimcova, Curator, 2007 }
‘Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.’ — Mary Quant
{ Martin Kippenberger | Untitled, 1983 | Self Portrait, 1988 | Oil on canvas | Saatchi Gallery | more }
{ Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1989 | Books bound in linen, wood bookcase, metal, plastic, electric light bulb, silkscreen ink on cloth | Untitled (Jim Dine), 1991 | Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed paper }
{ Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992 | Pencil and crayon on hotel stationery in painted wood frame | Zuerst die Füße, 1990 | ArtNet | more }
For the past decade, the world has been dominated by a chilly mix of Warhol’s use of culture as material, Richter’s ideas about photographs and abstraction, and Richard Prince’s notions of appropriation. It’s an international style that too many people use to produce art that looks like other art. Kippenberger’s work is powerful enough to scatter that aesthetic weather system. It’s deeply imprinted with received theories about reproduction, popular culture, and photography, but it never feels like it comes out of a cookie cutter. He created his own theory and then blew it to bits. (…)
Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at the age of 44 from cirrhosis brought on by his prodigious drinking, was a live wire. He spoke in pungent aphorisms. He called exhibitions “a running gag.” Art schools were “the most stupid of all educational institutions.” The art market was like “screwing your dick to the wall.” (…)
He led a peripatetic life. Early in his career he settled in Florence, trying to become a film actor. Then he moved to Berlin, where he co-founded the gallery/crash pad “Kippenbergers Buro,” ran a nightclub, and started a punk band. In one memorable incident, he went into a bar and acted like a Nazi until patrons beat him up. Then he painted a picture of himself, battered and bandaged. (Another aphorism: “You may behave like an asshole, but you must never be one.”) Later on, he grew wealthy, having inherited 700,000 Deutschmarks from his mother, who had been killed by a pallet falling off a truck.
{ NY mag | Continue reading | Wikipedia | Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, March 1–May 11, 2009, MoMA, NYC }
