If Bill Hunt had not told me about Bill Viola’s show at James Cohan Gallery I would have missed it. The show consists of video pieces, for the most part displayed on large panels in darkened rooms. It’s hard to describe the effect of those video pieces. I felt as if I was watching photography unfold in a very unexpected way, with image after image after image appearing - but not in the trivial sense of video being just a set of images. If you’re curious, check out this video (made for a different occasion), in which the artist explains what you see. Mind-blowing!
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The two most exciting things about New York’s New Museum are a) the building and b) the semi-hip abbreviation used when people talk about it: NuMu. Of course, that’s just me, and all I’ve seen at the NuMu was its very first show. Anyway, you have probably heard about the current kerfuffle about the museum, now elevated from Tyler’s blog to all over the web and media world via an article in the New York Times. (slightly updated below)
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I found an interesting quote on Ed Winkleman’s blog. What struck me about it was that while Ed emphasized the first sentence in a paragraph of a review by Roberta Smith (this, of course, because of his subject matter), I thought the last sentence needs to be looked at, too (independent of subject matter): “Ms. Horn’s work has both benefited and suffered from being what might be called “curators’ art.” Curators’ art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant — with clear roots in Minimal and Conceptual Art and not much else. It tends to be profusely appreciated by a hermetic few, curators, artists and theorists, who fetishize its refinements and often take its creators pretty much at their word. Ms. Horn has always had a lot to say about what her work means and how it is to be viewed, and some of it is quite interesting, but artists don’t own the meaning of their artworks.”
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I have a weakness for photorealistic sculpture, and Sam Jinks’ work is right up my alley. Here is an interview with the artist.
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Elizabeth Heppenstall’s Boys made me laugh - to find out why click on the image above to see the actual version (the above image is just a snapshot, and yes it does get even better than that). As Ian Aleksander Adams noted “taking the things that upset you about the world and turning them into lowbrow kitsch” often helps you keep “sane in a way.” Excellent!
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Keisuke Shirota expands photographs by painting around them.
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“I collect second hand tourist guides. Within the century of printed photographs that they contain, I search for plates that have been printed at similar scale, taken from a similar view point. When I find a near match between book plates, I cut and fold the pages into a new single surface.” - Abigail Reynolds
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No, I’m not talking about President Obama. I’m talking about the art that is decorating the White House now, in particular Ed Ruscha’s I think I’ll…. But then of course, this painting perfectly expresses Mr. Obama’s presidency so far.
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“Art that engages with popular culture isn’t necessarily any good - in fact, often it’s the opposite” argues Jonathan Jones
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Painting and photography exist in a very weird relationship; and I’m increasingly becoming convinced that it is photography - and not painting - which has the real trouble figuring out what to do, how to deal with what the other can do. Maybe this is because photography has become complacent: Still the new kid on the art block - easy if all the other art forms are hundreds of years old (or older) - photographers rarely, if ever, venture beyond their narrow confines. These days, for many photographers large prints seem like the most important essence of painting to adopt; and even over that photography critics are throwing hissy fits.
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Tyler Green posted some comments on the National Arts Journalism Program’s National Summit on Arts Journalism (as did Ian Aleksander Adams). After Ian’s post I looked at the project, and Tyler’s commentary matches what I thought, in particular: “however well-intentioned, the NAJP project is a lost opportunity. It fails to address significant recent developments and the realities of contemporary journalism, especially as they apply to niche topics such as art journalism. […] NAJP’s decision to focus on profit-generating models is the result of a misreading of the current media environment. Not even the wealthiest, smartest legacy-media companies have figured out how to be profitable in the fast-emerging digital-first environment. […] for the foreseeable future, it is not realistic to expect advertising and traditional, for-profit revenue models (such as those focused on subscribers) to sustain niche journalism.”
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Tyler Green just published a tremendous series of posts about Gerhard Richter’s paintings “Onkel Rudi” and “Tante Marianne” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4), with today’s post connecting the painting to how contemporary artists are reacting to torture committed under George W Bush.
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Colette Fu’s Photo Binge is probably the spectacularly messiest kind of photo collage (if that’s the right word) I’ve ever seen. There are also pop-up books, which are also well worth the visit.
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“This corner says that the Chelsea gallery scene will be gone within a year with the exception of half a dozen megaspaces, feeder galleriess for Fashionland and ClubLand. It is weird right now to see vast swathes of Chelsea territory which resemble the bad parts of Staten Island dotted by visually claustrophobic Frank Gehry buildings and their spawn. When everyone who still has cash is dancing in the High Line sky and staring into each other’s wealthy windows, then the junkies and whores can seize the streets below.” - story/opinion
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Done in the style of classic Chinese paintings, Yao Lu’s works actually employ photography. More samples here.
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Remember the days when you would receive postcards from friends in the mail (and by “mail” I mean that box that’s next to your door, which these days is filled only with junk mail and bills), maybe because they were on vacation somewhere? I don’t know about you, but seeing them “Twitter” something like “Checked in now. Seats 34C and D” is not quite the same experience as holding an actual postcard - even if the information on it is the same or comparable: “We had OK seats on the flight” (Theorists might now start long discussions about the “tangible”).
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Paddy Johnson over at artfagcity certainly claims it is. I don’t see how I am putting an “awfully positive spin on the value of reproductions” given that most photography books - and this is a photography blog - are well, if not extremely well produced objects. Compared with a $2,000 or $10,000 print a $80 book is in fact not only very much affordable (as an aside, some photography might in fact actually work better in book form) but indeed “a valuable alternative aesthetic experience”, because we’re talking about photography here. If you don’t believe it, look at the photography books I have been reviewing on Fridays on this blog! Some of those books are so well produced and printed that you could cut out pages, frame them and hang them on the wall.
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Today, I got a PR email from a gallery about Russell Young’s Diamond Dust series. “Funny,” I thought, “but doesn’t that really remind me of something?” Oh, yes, indeed: Vik Muniz’s “Pictures of Diamonds” (which you can access on that website if you scroll down to 2004; alternatively, here’s one).
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I found Deborah Hamon’s art work the other day somewhere: Paintings of young girls, copied into photographs (at least the work listed under “photography” - kind of an inverse Loretta Lux, who copied photo portraits into paintings, didn’t she?). In her statement, the artist writes she is “interested in the interplay between reality and fiction”.
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The simplest ideas are often the best. Case in point: Timur Siqin’s animated gif Kerze. If you need a soundtrack along with it, this would be the obvious choice (for those not in the know, here’s why). (Kerze via)
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Dash Snow, “Artist of New York Downtown Party Scene” as one obituary poignantly described him, died the other day, from what seems like a drug overdose. A couple of days later, a friend sent me an email, which included the following questions: “Who is responsible for getting his work into museums? Why Dash Snow? […] What do his tired, shitty Polaroids of naked, drunk, partying friends say about anything? Is there a set of signs or language that he’s developed that imbue his work with insight? What is it that people like? What am I missing?” I am familiar with questions like these - or similar ones. Occasionally, I receive emails with such questions; and often my wife will ask me about photography we’re looking at when she accompanies me on my tours around Chelsea.
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I’m sure regular readers will be aware of Ed Winkleman’s blog. Ed runs a gallery in New York City (well worth the visit, btw), and those who read his blog regularly know that not only is he very passionate about art, he is also extremely happy to talk about it openly, with anybody. Ed’s new (I think also first) book How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery just got published. Given his writing on the blog it looks like the kind of book you want to get if you want to open your own gallery or if you want to find out how galleries actually work. Here is Ed talking a little bit about the book.
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It’s just a coincidence that I found this very interesting post about Arts Stimulus Funding today. Just to give you an idea what this all is really talking about, one of the most important snippets: “There are more full-time jobs (incl. accountants, designers, plumbers, union workers & engineers) supported by the nonprofit arts organizations than are in accounting, public safety officers, even lawyers and just slightly fewer than elementary school teachers. America’s nonprofit arts & culture industry generates $166.2 billion economic activity annually, including 5.7 million jobs, generating $29.6 billion in government revenue, of which $12.6 billion is federal revenue.” I’d be the last person to measure what art does by looking at the money it makes; nevertheless, these are some serious numbers.
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Eric Rondepierre produces his images using decaying old film material and other sources - there are a lot of great images/ideas to be found on his site!
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Well, if they put on a show like Younger Than Jesus at New York’s New Museum, they’ll have to live with reviews like this one. “I’m by no means an educated art consumer or art critic,” writes the reviewer, but maybe it is exactly this kind of review that a show like Younger Than Jesus needs - bringing the well-tested approach of fake news shows (such as the Daily Show) to the art world. Make sure the read the whole review, the best bits are at the end.
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Ed Winkleman just published a post about political art, which is worth the read. For once, I do not agree with Ed, even though that doesn’t mean that I feel compelled to embrace each and every bit of art that proclaims and/or pretends to be political. When I think about photography, it’s straightforward to come up with a large number of artists whose work is quite political, while it still is wonderful art. I don’t know whether he would agree, but for me, Brian Ulrich’s work is one of the examples I can think of (there are many others).
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“So the other day, I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Slate’s editors were, ‘ironically, unable to get permission’ to reproduce Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 for Sarah Boxer’s slideshow review of ‘Into The Sunset,’ MoMA’s exhibition of photography’s role in creating the concept of the American West. [The irony, of course, is that Prince’s work is actually a rephotograph of a Marlboro Man ad, which was probably photographed originally by Jim Krantz.] And so I blithely grabbed an image of Untitled (Cowboy) online, resized and retitled it, and republished it as my own work, 300 x 404, After Untitled (Cowboy) 2003 by Richard Prince, and offered to let Slate show it instead. Though I’ve written for Slate before, they have not, as yet, taken me up on my offer.” - greg.org; also see the follow-up post.
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“Art magazines and art blogs are the journalistic equivalent of studio art, while an art review in a newspaper is like public art. Anyone from any background might happen upon it. Where I write now does not exist in a generalized public sphere. A street sweeper on coffee break will not happen upon a leftover copy of this blog and be drawn into a review. A woman getting her heels buffed won’t find it on the empty seat beside her and be motivated to see an exhibit of which she might otherwise not have heard. For an art critic, the death of newspapers is the death of potential connection to wider worlds. Everyone who reads this blog has a preexisting condition, otherwise known as an interest in art. On the other hand, there are notable benefits. Where I’m writing now, nobody tells me what to do and nobody derides my blog just because it’s a blog.” - Regina Hackett
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“Ever notice how top 100 in the world’ lists are heavily slanted to their country of origin? This is understandable, I suppose, but it does make me wish for one that convinced me of its objectivity.” - Ed Winkleman
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Boston has its fair share of unbelievably bad public art. For example, you wouldn’t be surprised to find something like Robert Shure’s Irish Famine Memorial in the former Eastern Bloc, but seeing it in downtown Boston is a bit of a shock. So when I went to Boston this past weekend and took a walk on Atlantic Ave - previously the site of the Big Dig - just after the sun had set I didn’t expect to find something like those three structures shown in the picture above. At around seven feet tall, they were pulsating with blue light, before changing colours and then emitting dry ice (I made a little movie). Well, there’s some public art I can believe in. If you’re in Boston make sure to see it, because Boston being Boston, once the mechanism is broken it won’t ever get fixed again.
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“The tendency to relegate Art to the distaff side of our identity […] is fully intertwined with our more mythical view of ourselves as wild west cowboys and the widely held opinion that art is for sissies.” - Ed Winkleman
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More talk about art: A summary of a talk art critic Jerry Saltz gave recently.
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This article contains gallerist David Zwirner’s thoughts about the current state of the art market; and I’m still a bit undecided how to react to it, even though some sort of laughter is probably the best reaction.
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(via)
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“In late August 2008, McAllen Arts Council member and Voices of Art publisher David Freeman contacted Blue Star Director and sculptor Bill FitzGibbons to congratulate the artist on his ‘public art commission in McAllen.’ FitzGibbons was perplexed. Unbeknownst to him, an artwork with nearly identical qualities to FitzGibbons’s local ‘Light Channels’ had been installed in an Expressway 83 underpass in the South Texas boomtown. […] Strangely, nobody in McAllen seems to know when exactly McAllen’s lights were installed. Stranger still, the project has never been given a formal unveiling, the idea never credited to any person, and the work never titled.” - story (via)
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Reporting on Two Recessionary Shifts in Attitude, Ed Winkleman notes: “The other trend I’ve noticed (and had confirmed by other dealers) recently is a much more aggressive and, seemingly out of nowhere, clueless approach among unrepresented artists seeking gallery representation lately. Whereas we had been getting about 1-3 artists a month who clearly had no idea how best to approach a gallery either send us a package or email, now we’re getting 1-3 a day calling us up and insisting we give them a show. And we’re not the only gallery reporting this.”
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There’s a wonderful conversation with (in alphabetical order) author, blogger, and gallerist Ed Winkleman here.
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You can blame modern art for many things, but certainly not for our mass culture, right? Actually, you can. “Oh boy,” I thought, when I saw that article this morning, linked to by Ed Winkleman (who seems to be putting the final touches on his book - congrats, Ed!). Usually I find it extremely silly to blame art for things. But of course, it’s tough to ignore statements like “All the shallowness of modern mass culture began in avant-garde art 40 years ago”.
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Despite its whiff of People magazine style reporting (“In the midst of the scariest art downturn in more than a decade, Mr. Gagosian is sticking with his Hermès suits and jetting around on a private plane. Sporting a helmet of silvery hair and looking like a cross between an aging bon vivant and a secret agent, he still radiates total confidence - which, these days, not everyone is buying.”), this piece about art dealer Larry Gagosian is quite interesting.
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“Over the past decade – until, at least, global credit began to crunch our fun – the art world has developed into a high-turnover, high-visibility international activity that everyone wants a slice of. It’s an exponentially expanded system of artists, audiences, art markets, dealers, galleries, curators, critics, collectors, museums, institutes, foundations, biennials, triennials, quadrennials, fairs, auction houses, art schools, prizes, books, magazines, journals and consultancies. […] In recent months, though, this expansion has been tempered by anxiety. The tighter the credit crunch grips us, the louder you can hear the gloating of those who think a drop in auction prices and a swathe of galleries going under will somehow result in the disappearance of the present art system and the resurgence of some kind of prelapsarian art paradise unfettered by the evils of capitalism and what they perceive to be cultural con-artistry.” - story
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“We are afloat in a world in which the endless invocation of theoreticians, philosophers and political theorists serves very little purpose other than to bolster the cultural capital pretensions of an artworld detached from anything other than its communicative connectivity and its obscure economic value in an economy of fleeting and faddish desires.” - source
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The Empire in the form of Ben Street is unhappy about the state of curating (or more precisely what is taken as curating) and strikes back: “Nowadays it’s not uncommon for a curator’s name to be foregrounded in exhibition literature and sometimes announced in forty-point Letraset at an exhibition’s starting point […] It’s a great example of a profession’s lack of clear definition in the public eye being inversely proportional to the amount of flatulent endorsement it acquires from those who should know better.” Regardless of whether you agree with Ben Street or not, this indeed seems to be a topic worthwhile debating (especially since it would be a welcome diversion from the currently so ubiquitous chants of “The end of the art market is near! Repent! Repent!”).
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“With Wall Street in self-inflicted ruin it might seem ridiculous to argue that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Yet that was the position taken last month by art dealers Richard Feigen, Michael Hue-Williams and collector Adam Lindemann in a debate […] They faced artist Chuck Close, critic Jerry Saltz, and auctioneer Amy Cappellazzo, who defended the integrity of the salesroom and the art world in general. This pro-art market team was trounced. […] Here is one losing debater’s perspective on the defeat.” (story)
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I don’t quite know what to make of The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!, which you might have read already. From what I’ve seen and heard so far it looks like the kind of article that provides almost everybody with something, so it’s likely we’ll see many more interpretations. I’ll spare you mine.
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… of what’s going on as far as Sheperd Fairey and his Obama poster are concerned. It has become a true Frankenstory as James Danziger called it, with a counter law suit and people scrambling to fire up Photoshop again. However, you do not want to miss this interview with Milton Glaser (which I found here).
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“I think the market will become more consolidated, more serious, and the people who remain will do so because they truly love and want to support art. Collectors are defying the conventional wisdom that you shouldn’t buy art in difficult times. For them, this is exactly the time to buy. It’s a commitment test. If you’re in it now, you’re not in it for the money.” - Marc Spiegler
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If you haven’t seen this yet…
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This is public art we can believe in: A gigantic, moving spider - The Big Picture has plenty of images; find some more here.
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Found via C-Monster.net, which linked to this blog post: “Most well known for his “Obey Giant” street posters, Shepard Fairey has carefully nurtured a reputation as a heroic guerilla street artist waging a one man campaign against the corporate powers-that-be. Infantile posturing aside, Fairey’s art is problematic for another, more troubling reason - that of plagiarism.” (story; emphasis in the original). The plagiarism claim is hardly new (and Fairey is not the only such case), but unlike many other articles, Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey (can you tell how giddy the author must have been after finding that caption?) provides many examples. Of course, in the end you can still disagree with the claim that Shepard Fairey is plagiarizing, but at least you got something to chew on. (Updated - twice - below)
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Concerning the discussion about Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster (did he or did he not plagiarize earlier work and/or did he violate somebody else’s copyright): The chickens are clearly coming home to roost. After all, we are still missing meaningful discussions about how new art can relate to earlier art (and by that I do not mean rants about somebody “ripping off” somebody else or rants about how artists can do anything they want), we are still missing meaningful discussions about art and money (if an “underground” artist suddenly can make some money is that so bad - is s/he “selling out”?), and we have allowed people to pretty much reduce the issue of copyright to purely commercial aspects (with corporations, most famously Disney, at the forefront of how copyright should be defined).
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