Tom Griggs wrote a lengthy article, reacting to a comment I (and others) had to something he had written earlier (all the relevant information can be found in his recent piece). I thought I’d respond. (more)
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Someone told me the other day that the art market in its current form was unsustainable. I don’t know whether that’s true. But it might as well be. A few days later, I found a piece written by Sarah Thornton entitled Top 10 reasons not to report on the art market, which you want to read. Again a few days later, the art world experienced the wrath of Dave Hickey: “Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time.”
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Julie Cockburn works with photographs (alongside other media), by cutting them up and re-assembling them, or by embroidering on top of them.
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Brilliant: A study of art speak (“International Art English” - IAE): “How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?” (via the inimitable Carolina Miranda)
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“Influential Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes has died in New York after a long illness.” - BBC. In a world where the vapidness of the art world is being increasingly mirrored in the writing about it, Hughes will be missed. Watch this clip to get an idea of his fearlessness to call out what he thought needed to be called out: “Isn’t it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can produce?”
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Via LPV Magazine’s Twitter feed comes the link to an article describing the massive role PR has come to play in the art world. All of this easily applies for photography. Over the past few years, we have witnessed an explosion of PR, in part triggered by so-called social media, but also by sites like Kickstarter, where many campaigns result in a flurry of PR emails. It’s a bit like the nuclear arms race where each side is trying to out-PR everybody else. Needless to say, the overall effect is simply that everybody’s is just getting more PR.
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I don’t know how convincing I find this article about Richard Prince and his antics in court. There are quite a few interesting nuggets in it, though, such as this one: “Any case where lawyers argue what is or isn’t art tends to have some kind of critical value, if only because it serves as a kind of plain-English catalog essay reduction. The Prince case goes beyond this, though, and begins to enter the realm of technical support in the artist’s bizarre refusal to defend his works on a basic level, which, regardless of Mr. Prince’s intent, makes a curious statement about them at a time when the courts have, in some instances, become a place for artistic expression.”
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“Much fanfare greeted the $388m made by Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month—its highest total ever. Few seemed to notice that the auction was unprecedented in another way: it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby’s evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie’s sale tallied up to a mere $17m—less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.” - The Economist
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“Internet artists, for all of their digital-native wisdom, should know better than to think .JPEGs are a viable commodity when they’ve seen multi-billion dollar industries like music, film, and newspapers run around like baffled idiots for the past decade trying to figure out why they can’t sell MP3s, MOVs, and PDFs like they used to in traditional media.” - Brad Troemel
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“Art Basel can be read as a Matruschka doll of inside jokes—on the inside, authorities and newcomers locked in a perpetual accusation of nihilism; on the outside, a cryptically silly facade. The aura of exclusion - the gated lounges, the endless line of black BMWs, and the backdrop of raucous invite-only parties - suggests to the casual fairgoer that the art itself is part of an elaborate set, and she is a duped extra.” - Mostafa Heddaya (via)
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I was out of town for a bit over a week, so I only noticed Charles Saatchi dissing the art world in passing, and I missed the art world’s reaction entirely. I’m assuming it was something between a shrug and a yawn. As amusing as Saatchi’s rant might be, it’s about as credible as a Donald Trump rant about the real-estate business.
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“The making of art has very little to do with galleries. These places are, in the sense that they are commercial galleries, interested in a particular and very narrow kind of art that can be displayed within a space in a particular kind of way, they are interested in people who can produce work that galleries can show. And so people produce the kind of work that they can show, they kind of work that sells, the kind of work that wealthy people like - which is problematic. It’s a symbiotic relationship where what galleries, gallery consumers, and gallery feeders produce is intricately linked in an unbalanced but self-replicating chain.” - Colin Pantall
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Ai Weiwei, earlier this year “detained” by Chinese authorities and then released, has written a piece about Beijing and his experience: “This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”
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“Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.” - obituary
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A little while ago, while checking whether a local second-hand book shop had got any new photobooks in (it hadn’t) I noticed there was a largeish pile of German language book, somewhat shoddily stacked on the floor. It’s hard to get German language books in the US, so I had a peek at what they had. Most of it had been published in the 1970s, with a few dating back way earlier. There wasn’t much that interested me, with the exception of some old books by Lafcadio Hearn. I usually don’t buy books in translation if I can read the original language, but a quick glance into these had me get these. Printed in 1921, they all are rather lavish productions. (more)
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Jerry Saltz about what he saw in Venice: “many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. […] It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. There’s always conformity in art […] but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.”
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“More details are emerging about what is thought to be Germany’s biggest postwar art forgery scandal. The affair casts an unflattering light on a leading German art historian who authenticated a fake artwork supposedly painted by German surrealist Max Ernst.” - story
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“From architects to museums, curators to collectors, art fairs to galleries, art advisers to auction houses, everyone has been feeding at the trough of surplus capital emanating from regions where consumption of art is tolerated so long as artists steer clear of political and ideological pronouncements and keep their swords of critical relevance safely in their sheaths. The question was always how long the romance between illiberalism and hypocrisy would last.” - Okwui Enwezor (via)
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Brian Dupont just published the final post of a three-part series on copyright and fair use (part 1, part 2, part 3), which is well worth the read.
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The other day, I asked why stealing a wallet was not appropriation art. Maybe it’s too obvious a question, but unless I’m missing something the number of reactions was rather small (if you exclude a minor flurry of tweets). But regardless, there were some great posts, here’s what I found. (more; updated below)
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It’s a few weeks after the latest Richard Prince brouhaha, and as expected things haven’t changed. The art world has come down on the side of Richard Prince, with the argument basically being that it’s a terrible ruling for appropriation art because it’s a terrible ruling for appropriation art. I might be missing something, but in none of the articles I’ve read any of the defenders of Richard Prince has given an actual explanation of why this particular case is a valid case of appropriation art other than “He took that other guy’s stuff, and that’s what appropriation artists do.” Or “obviously it is fair use/transformative.” Well, if it’s so obvious why not explain it properly? (more)
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Find a wonderful article about John Stezaker, one of my favourite artists, here.
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Guess what, you can now go to an art fair without leaving your own house. In case you haven’t heard about it this is because of the VIP Art Fair, where “VIP stands for - you guessed it! - “viewing in private.” Given the fact that art fairs tend to be affairs straight out of Dante’s Inferno (Level 3 obviously, with the rain and Cerebus replaced by their contemporary equivalents), in principle this is a most welcome development. Needless to say, with most art bloggers being happy to find problems with about everything (you could give them $1,000, and they’ll complain about it not being $2,000, what’s with the old bills?, and somehow they’ll also be able to find a way to bicker about Jerry Saltz) there have been complaints, some justified, others not so much. The site has at times been pretty slow I heard. I played around with the site and looked at some stuff - for photography, this format doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. It’ll be interesting to see when/if galleries will start to add parts of the fair to their websites (the zooming in, for example).
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Phil Defer’s images are produced using source imagery and a knife (plus some glue). Simple and beautiful. Found here.
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You might remember the kerfuffle around Shepard Fairey and his use of that Obama photo for the “Hope” poster. Well, it’s all over now: As Nieman put it, “the big copyright case ends with a juicy little irony that you can read generously (‘work together’) or more cynically (‘merchandise’).”
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“Artists and institutions are increasingly using law as a weapon to protect free speech. But they are beginning to realize that this action is actually contributing to the demise of art. As in the Büchel case, these suits are affirming more and more that art has to be considered property in matters of free speech, and this moves the idea of art away from philosophical or moral principles. (In both cases, the rulings were based on property rights). This brings the realization that the law cannot resolve this alone. So instead, artists should call for the art institution (museum, gallery, periodical) to rethink its relationship to the arts and to artists, and they should do this for philosophical/ethical reasons and not for what is permitted by law. They should pledge a commitment to the idea of art, and consider when censoring speech the damage this would do.” - Charles Gaines
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It’s official, art is a foreign city. The makers of a series of books that includes, for example, Hedonist’s Guide To Beirut now present A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. And it is true, except for the slightly less eccentric dress code, the art world could be easily compared to Vatican City. But still I’m sure people would have expected that it’s more like a foreign country. (more)
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This looks like it was done with Photoshop, but in fact it wasn’t. Lola Dupré uses scissors, paper, and glue for her collages. Here’s a conversation with the artist. (via)
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I was leafing through the new issue of the New York Review of Books when I came across an article featuring images of two busts that struck me. One showed a pretty cool dude, wearing what looks like a ski cap, smiling confidently. The other one showed a bald man pulling his chin in and making some face. I know very little about sculpture, but those two I thought looked pretty cool. They were great studies in portraiture. I figured I might as well read the article about the artist, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. As it turned out, what I had thought were contemporary busts had in fact been made around 1780, by an artist who might or might not have had some mental health issues. Have a look at some of the busts here (they’re on display at NYC’s Neue Galerie until early next 2011!). You can find a couple more articles about Messerschmidt here and here.
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The following quotes were all found in this conversation with Chuck Close (via). Enjoy! (more)
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There is a divide between photography and, well, I suppose we might want to call it image making. Many photographers spend quite a bit of time explaining that their work still is photography even though it violates photographic orthodoxy. At least for a while, Chuck Close seems to have found himself on the other side of that divide, “risking” to be seen as crossing over into photography. It’s all about perception, of course. The divide is fairly useless unless you’re a lazy critic or an academic whose thinking has become as tenured as the career: Permanently stuck in a comfortable position. (more)
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When seeing the Paul Graham article that caused such a stir in the photo community recently (see my reactions here and here), I thought that having the debate only amongst photographers would be less than ideal. So I emailed a couple of art bloggers, and today, Ed Winkleman published his response. (more)
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Blake Andrews comments on my two cents about the Paul Graham article. What I find interesting is that fundamentally, Blake and I aren’t even that far apart, even though we disagree about quite a few things. (more)
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Here is a great interview with artist Jennifer Dalton about the various problems haunting the art world. (more)
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Presented this way, John Gerrard’s work looks like rather boring photography, but it is neither boring nor photography. Using still images as a starting point and then applying video-game technology, Gerrard creates… well, I suppose you could call them movies, even though that brings up wrong connotations. On his YouTube page, the final results are called “virtual sculptures.” (via)
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Regardless of what you think about the whole Shepard Fairey Obama poster kerfuffle, here is an article you want to read (via). I think these two law professors just managed to show parts of the art world how to really approach and think about “fair use” and copyright. Needless to say, as Sergio notes, there are some problems; but the idea of an “altlaw” is - frankly - something I would have imagined coming from some artist’s studio in New York and not from a couple of law professors.
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It’s Photo Book Friday, but I first wanted to briefly mention three books about art that I read recently. In each case, the books have been out for a while, so I’m sure you have heard about them before. (more)
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A lot of Sarah Charlesworth is based on photography, and quite a bit of it is looking at how photography is used. Her series Modern History shows the front pages of newspaper, with everything but (usually) the photos and the newspaper’s name removed. There’s a nice overview of her work here, and an interview with the artist here.
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The Armory Art Show takes the idea that art isn’t a commodity to be sold like the machines and tools on display at the Hannover industrial trade show (that I used to visit as a teenager) and dispenses with it neatly. If any of the Show’s objects at some stage were in the presence of an artist toiling over their meaning and worth (I’m not talking about money here), you wouldn’t know that once you encountered them at the Piers in New York City. Make no mistake, I had no illusions about the Armory Show before I went. So I did not undergo the kind of shock treatment that someone with romantic ideas about the commercial art world would experience if she or he was exposed to such an abomination of the human spirit for the first time. That said, the Armory Show still was a soul crushing experience, where your soul is not only crushed, it’s actually slowly and steadily ground into a fine powder.
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“The last few years have raised important copyright issues and concerns for artists. There are three main factors which have impacted-and will continue to impact-how visual artists relate to each other, to art institutions, and to other intellectual property right holders when it concerns issues of copyright.” - full story
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Art critic Regina Hackett just blogged about this portrait painted by Jesse Edwards (see the artist’s website here). I couldn’t help but think about Rob’s post about ‘fair use’ from the other day again: When or where does ‘fair use’ begin (or end)? When is a use not fair? (updated below - twice)
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Today, I came across a post that made me remember my earlier comments on photo books: Alberto Hernandez’s Hybrid Novels (found here). “A hybrid novel can be seen as a hybrid image-text novel, not a children’s book, graphic novel/comic or gift book but a book where written text and graphic devices such as illustration, photography, information graphics or typographic treatments may interject in order to hold a readers’ interest, adding interactiveness to the book and also giving the printed page a multidimensional visual surface.”
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Colourizing b/w photographs is nothing new (behind me, on my book shelve, there’s a colourized tintype from the late 1800s), but you don’t see it that much any more these days. Florian Merkel has a portfolio of such work, with some rather beautiful images.
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If you’re following art blogs I’m sure you have heard about commercial gallerist Jeffrey Deitch getting hired as director by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art - Tyler collects up some responses and reacts to them here. When I heard about LA MoCA’s decision my first reaction was a bit of surprise, and then I was reminded of what we often get to see in the world of Washington politics.
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I have long been fascinated by collages, and I thought I’ll have a week showing only collage work. Collages, of course, usually involve photography (so there’s a connection with the usual focus of the blog), and at least in principle they’re easy to make. All you need are a bunch of images, scissors and some glue. That doesn’t fully explain why collages might be the most underrated art form, though. After all, to take a photograph all you have to do is to aim your camera and press the shutter. There definitely is something peculiar about collages, and I’ve collected some artists to feature this week. The selection is in no way supposed to be definitive - I’m sure there are artists that I missed. Regular (“pure” photography) posting will resume this Friday - with new photo book reviews. In the meantime, enjoy the strange worlds of collage art!
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“The best criticism is written for only one person. It is up to the writer to decide who this person should be. Of the thousands of art reviews I have written over the last 40 years, the most effective, in my view, have been the great many silently addressed to my sister, Erin. […] Erin is a traveller; she is socially active, interested in art and writing and architecture, and open to new experiences, but not easily impressed. I have always believed that, if I could convince Erin that such-and-such an artwork or work of architecture was worth her attention - if I could argue my way past her flourishing scepticism - then I could convince anyone. I would urge every new writer to adopt this approach—to find one questioning person to write for, framing every review as a fervent message to him or her.” - John Bentley Mays (via)
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Richard Polsky’s I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) sounds like a follow-up of I Bought Andy Warhol, and that’s probably what it is (I admit I haven’t read the first book). It’s not hard to figure out what I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) in part is about, namely how Polsky ended up selling an Andy Warhol painting before the most recent art-market bubble had reached its maximum point of expansion. Of course, it’s easy to sell art works at the wrong time - especially if there is a bubble developing, but you really have to know it’s a bubble to feel better about it. Thankfully, the book is about more than just that, though.
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“The art world is already divided into unknowns, emerging, established, mid-career, international artists, and according to what graduate program you went to, who you’re friends with and your social pedigree. It’s more like a high-school cafeteria.” - William Powhida
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It’s a gray, rainy November day here in Western Mass, and (as corny as that might sound) immediately after receiving a bit of pretty bad news, I came across Ed’s new post, which made things look a little bit better. While I disagree with him about the New Museum conclusions, it’s a very inspirational post. And it’s important to remember that “what among the work being made today is valuable to society must be measured by up-to-date standards… standards that truly reflect their time.” I’ll copy that on a piece of paper, to hang over my desk, so I can use it when people complain about how, for example, photography was supposedly so much more lively fifty years ago. And I hope that Ed’s next book - should he decide to write one - will be about art itself.
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“I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Visual artists are conflicted as to where they stand in relation to copyright laws. To be more precise, there seems to be two camps: those that favor strong copyright protection for artists and their copyrights, and those that favor either a relaxed form of fair use or worse yet, a ‘right’ to appropriate and lift from copyright owners without any legal repercussions. As a friend of mine noticed […] this makes complete sense. Those artists who favor stronger copyright laws are making money from their work, many times substantially. Those favoring ‘free culture’ or, ‘let information flow,’ are usually those artists making little to no money from their artwork. […] Hidden underneath this dilemma is a reality that many artists […] are reluctant to accept: that a viable artistic practice (at least in the so-called ‘art world’) is in fact no different than operating a for-profit business. One can veil or name this what one wants, but the reality is that successful artists […] face legal and business issues similar to those of a bar owner, an employer, a publisher, an Internet company, a shipping company, etc.” - Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
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