The world’s going to hell. I’ve got a deadline piece I’m stuck on. And my Google Voice number is set to expire unless I use it. So there’s no better time to put out a call for you to call in and share a bit of art-related writing or text that’s sticking with you right now.
When I first tried this exercise last spring, I thought it’d be a great way to find amazing or thought-provoking writing people have been saving up. But I also found it a good way to share something as I came across it, just placing a quick call, and leaving a voicemail. So.
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with: * your name or handle [optional], * you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not a whole thing] * the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough recordings, I’ll compile them into one mixtape and put it out here. So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
Call 34-SOUVENIR today, tonight, whenever you read something good.
It was nice to start seeing emails from Patrick Parrish in my inbox again, but it was not until he posted his speedrun of the recent design auctions in NYC that I realized how much I’d missed his design blog, MONDOBLOGO, in my online life.
Here is Parrish’s photo of Marcel Breuer’s lights reflected across a Ron Arad chair, one of two that didn’t sell at Sotheby’s. He also has photos of a private dinner being set up in the gallery, which used to be the Whitney Museum of American Art, then the Met, then the Frick.
Listening to Luc Tuymans’ interview with Ben Luke on A Brush With… in the car yesterday, I was fascinated by his regular use of a cinematic or almost narrative framework for making his shows. Which sounds distinct from making paintings for a show, although there are apparently paintings that function a specific way in a show, as a start, or a coda. But there is also a crucial structure or sequence, a context that is somehow foundational to a show and the work in it, yet which is unarticulated, or seemingly completely unacknowledged.
And what struck me was that after the show is done, and the works are sold and scattered, this vital structure disappears forever. The paintings are set adrift, left on their own.
Working toward a show and planning a show is not unusual; it even makes a lot of sense. Considering how works in a show will be situated and seen in space and time is also extremely normal. But there was something oddly specific about Tuymans’ discussion of his narrative approach that set it apart; it stuck, but we all moved on.
Then toward the end of the conversation, Tuymans talked about preparing for a show, and then a dealer came and picked some works to take to an art fair, and in the process, wrecked the whole show.
[I’m paraphrasing here, partly because the transcript is not readily available, but mostly because Tuymans also made a throwaway comment about not being “a primadonna, and I always meet my deadlines,” and I am past a deadline on a piece I’ve been stuck on, and typing just to type is a way to break the jam, but also, I’m hoping feeling called out by someone who’s always sounded arrogant to me, and who, frankly, I did kind of imagine as a primadonna, will also get me finished on this damn thing.]
Anyway, Tuymans then said he switched to making art fair work, paintings which exist on their own, conceived as orphans, and void of whatever the narrative structure or context of a show might give them. He went on to say they weren’t exactly lesser works, but…a different priority. [This feels important to get right, and I’ll come back and add the actual quote after a relisten. UPDATE: OK, here.]
Ben Luke: “When you make a work for an art fair, does it differ at all in terms of… do you approach it differently from the subject matter point of view?”
Luc Tuymans: “Yes, because it’s a singular work, or singular works, that are somehow related to what I’m thinking at that moment what could be relevant or not, but it has a different stance. I mean, it doesn’t have the same priority, let’s put it that way, as a show.”
But there is a whole unspoken category of Luc Tuymans Art Fair Paintings, and maybe looking at them alongside/in contrast to his real paintings will be a productive exercise as curators construct narratives of their own.
Ry Rocklen, Soft Cover A to Z, 2011, nickel- and copper-plated found phonebook, selling at Rago today, 10 Dec 2025 [update: for $1,700, a nice deal]
My incredibly chic landlady at business school used to compare something great to a nickel rocket. One time I asked her where that phrase came from, and she had no idea.
That has nothing to do with anything, really, except Ry Rocklen somehow nickel-plated a whole-ass phonebook, and it looks incredible.
It was kind of overshadowed by the massive trophy altar Rocklen showed it with at Untitled in 2011, but on its own, this feels like the more enduringly interesting object.
“The limited-edition knit blanket rendition of the cover of issue no. 56 (Spring 1973), featuring Meditation on the Theorem of Pythagoras by Mel Bochner (1940-2025) that’s supposed to start shipping December 15th, but isn’t guaranteed for holiday delivery? Yeah. Yeah I am.”
Barkley L. Hendricks, Steve, 1976, magna, acrylic and oil on linen, 72 x 48 in., collection: the Whitney
The way Steve simultaneously inhabits a physical space and floats entirely free on a monochrome picture plane is my favorite thing about this Barkley Hendricks painting, but I’m posting is here now because Hendricks painted it with the color of the year.
Little Plume (R) and his son Yellow Kidney (L), in their lodge with an analog clock, 1911. Curtis removed the clock from published versions of the photo. via wikimedia
The general contours of Edward S. Curtis’s decades-long struggle to produce his 20-volume photographic epic, The North American Indian, are not the issue, though much of the details hit differently now than they did when I was a dewy-eyed child. This 2012 Smithsonian article does a fine job of laying out the top-line WTFs, like destroying his glass negatives to keep his wife from getting them in the divorce. And selling his $75,000 Kwakiutl restaged documentary to the American Museum of Natural History for $1,000 during WWI.
But what I was not prepared for Curtis’s Hollywood era.
In 1920, a broke 52-yo Curtis moved to Los Angeles, where he shot celebrity portraits, and took promotional film stills for his friend Cecil B. de Mille. Here is a hand-colored portrait of Anna May Wong, which sold at Christie’s in 2002.
I don’t know who that Barry Diller-looking guy is blocking him, but Charles DeRoche, who played Rameses, clearly did not have final edit on this photo. Also DeMille and Theodore Roberts as Moses. photo: Edward S. Curtis, via CHS
This is the only one that has the filmmaker in it; the rest are all posed or captured moments of the world of the film. But this one, too, of course, feels staged.
Curtis may have dismissed his commercial and commissioned work, but it still embodies his process, techniques, and aesthetic choices. Curtis has been criticized for his staging and manipulation of his North American Indian images, for the romanticization and exoticizing of his subjects, and for ignoring the active oppression and cultural violence Indigenous people were experiencing throughout his project.
The Hollywood work feels like a perfect lens for recognizing what’s going on in photographs, Curtis’s or otherwise.
I’m kind of pressed atm, and have never been happier to ignore Art Basel Miami Beach. When Chris Rusak sent along this photo, and wondered about the Clyfford Still-ish paintings in the background, though, I had to stop for just a moment, and think. And feel. And ache.
Because from the label, we learn that Koen van den Broek conceived this project “as a tribute to David Anfam (1955-2024), the renowned American art historian and authority on Abstract Expressionism. Through his work, van den Broek explores the visual, spiritual, and art-historical resonances between Vincent van Gogh and Clyfford Still—an intellectual and aesthetic dialogue that Anfam consistently foregrounded in his curatorial practice.”
And Gallery Baton brings them all the way to Miami only to end up—but no. Actually, no. A 10-meter wide suite of four 2.8m tall, Skittles-colored abstractions generically titled Season A through Season D, that reference two art historical giants while assiduously ignoring the resonances the memorialized scholar actually laid out, are actually the perfect backdrop for a CNBC Inside Wealth report on Beeple’s corral of oligarch-headed, NFT-shitting, murder robot dogs.
JP Morgan Chase just announced another $4 billion headquarters in London, Koen, hope you get that bag.
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, exhibition catalogue cover, via Artists Space
Today is World AIDS Day.
In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts canceled a grant for an exhibition at Artists Space of artists responding to the AIDS crisis. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was organized by Nan Goldin, and the catalogue contained essays by Goldin, Linda Yablonsky, Cookie Mueller, and David Wojnarowicz. The Wojnarowicz essay’s political, non-artistic content, was the initial stated reason for the cancellation of the grant.
Artists Space has an extensive archive of the show, including the entire catalogue, and reporting and documentation of the NEA censorship scandal that engulfed it. David Wojnarowicz’s published statement about the grant cancellation is read here by a computer-generated voice.
Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger, 1987, concrete 16,5 x 24 x 4,7 cm, with a new antenna, ed. 8/18, selling at Lempertz in Köln on 5 Dec 2025
Every Weltempfänger is unique, but some are less unique than others. In 1987, pretty early into her World Receiver project, Isa Genzken made an edition of 18 these shortwave radio-shaped sculptures of cast concrete & antennae. They’re identical in shape, presumably made from the same mold, and so are distinct in their individual surface finish.
Isa Genzken Weltempfänger, 1987, installation view at Musix, Köln, via Galerie Buchholz
They’re also always described as registered in the Genzken Archive at Galerie Buchholz, so they’re confusing, but not shady. Could this Weltempfänger edition be related to something else Genzken was up to in 1987? Like, maybe her first show with Buchholz? Titled Weltempfänger? In late 1987 Genzken installed a now-iconic table full of various Weltempfängerin the window of Musix GmbH, a music supply store down the street from Buchholz’s gallery in Köln. Maybe this edition, like the tablescape, was an early experiment in how best to send Weltempfänger out into the world.
[ACTUALLY ASKED UPDATE] Never mind. Thanks to Galerie Buchholz for confirming Genzken did indeed make the edition for the Kunstverein. The brochure also notes Genzken’s participation in the 1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster.]
Richard Serra, Untitled, 1971, crayon on paper, 11 1/4 x 10 in. sheet, bought by the Landys at Swann, being sold by the Landys at Rago
Is it a vortex? A bouquet?
I wish Kathy or Doug Landy had shared some insight from their 20 years of living with this wild little Richard Serra drawing. It’s signed on the back; it came from Salander O’Reilly, and it’s been publicly sold before. Yet this seems to be the first time the Richard Serra studio, at least, has heard of it.
10 Dec 2025, Lot 121, Richard Serra, Untitled/Linear Composition [sic], 1971, est. $3-5,000 [ragoarts]
Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?
I couple of weeks ago I got a report of a Wade Guyton in a sick crate at Matthew Marks. Seemingly cast metal, heavy-looking as hell, they seemed to sculptural—and, again, heavy—to be just actual crates.
Anyway, about 42:00 in, after an extensive conversation about these bronze and aluminum cast tube sculptures Guyton is showing at Francesca Pia in Zurich—yikes, showed, in what turns out to be Pia’s final show—HUO suggested Wade might be open to even more sculpture, which led to the crates, which are, in fact, frames.
Guyton always hated giving suggestions for framing his canvas works, while acceding to the necessity to protect them. And because they always looked great in the crate, he made frames by having travel crates disassembled, cast, and then welded back together.
“Because” is doing a lot in that sentence, mostly misleading. Because there is absolutely no logical, causal flow from “looks great in the crate” to “cast meticulous, bespoke crates from aluminum.” That is entirely artist logic. And it’s absolutely perfect.
For two whole years, it really seemed like the only way to show a Guyton was on a sweat shop clothing rack. Suddenly it feels weird if you don’t have it in one of these hulking crate frames. Wade first showed the crate/frames last winter in Gisela Capitan’s little storefront space in Cologne, but maybe Marks will be supplying them, now, too, just in time for Christmas.
People are afraid to even Swiffer their Cady Nolands now: Four In One Sculpture, 1998, ed. 5 of 20, was just sold, dirt and all, for $35,560 at Sotheby’s
When Ian saw Cady Noland’s1998 edition installed in the old Sarabeth’s space on Madison Avenue last week, he realized it was [also?] a text work. It has at least seventeen As, with perhaps some spares:
Meanwhile,
the bidding on this was so weird; it seemed like it suddenly flipped to no reserve, then a $4,000 bid was withdrawn, and for a brief moment until it got back on track, I did wonder if I’d get it for one crisp dollar.
I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.
But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.
NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.
In retrospect maybe it was obvious that the mindblowing work of an artist who challenged so many expectations of what art could be ends up so invested in defining what it’s not.
In the beginning was the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Catalogue Raisonné, with its work works, and its two catalogue appendices: Additional Material and Registered Non-Works. These included some variations of works; some works that were shown and later declared non-works; non-works that were originally sold or given as works; and works he gave to friends that turned out to be non-works.
Then there were the photographs and snapshots given to friends, a warm sea of images Felix and his friends soaked in, and from which he drew so many of the images he used for puzzles, billboards, and other works.
There was the book, or book projects, which the artist approached as a work as he made and selected images, his collaborators reported, but which nonetheless do not make the CR.
There were the unrealized works, some of which were realized posthumously.
Then there were the exhibition copies, which are not stacks or candy spills, or billboards, non-persistent, certificate- and ownership-based works whose temporary realizations are called manifestations. Exhibition copies are copies outside an edition, of puzzles, for starters, which turned up among the complete set of puzzles first presented for sale at Basel, and then shown at the National Portrait Gallery.
Speaking of which, there were also the exhibition copies of snapshots, which were not works to begin with, and which were a surprise, frankly. But if the Smithsonian wanted to borrow the light string Christmas cards Felix sent me, I’d look for a workaround, too.
Archival Material Associated with Felix Gonzalez-Torres Project for the Cover of The Paris Review, Fall 1991, sold at Sotheby’s from the collection of William Georgis and Richard Marshall
To all this is [now?] [also?] added Archival Material. So far, one example has come to public/market attention, and if it were any other artist, it’d be tempting to call it a study or a drawing. In March 2024 Bill Georgis sold the collection he and longtime Whitney curator Richard D. Marshall had accumulated over their many years together. It included numerous works artists made or gave Marshall to be used for the cover of The Paris Review, a side hustle Marshall had from 1975 until around 1990.
images of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ covers for The Paris Review No. 120, Fall 1991, with, and I quote: Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988 and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Unquote. THE DOLPHINS ARE HALOS
Though the cover Felix designed was for the Fall 1991 issue. As the signed note indicates, Felix had an idea for a portfolio for the magazine, but was content with just the cover—clocks on the front, dolphins on the back. The color sample is from Duron paint [not Pantone], and based on vintage issues I’ve seen online, the ink faded pretty dramatically.
It seems worth noting that though the drawing is signed, Sotheby’s does not attribute it to Felix, just describing it as “Archival Material associated with Felix” &c. &c. Two objects Christopher Wool made for Marshall for the cover of the 1989Whitney Biennial are also labeled as “archival material,” but Sotheby’s at least lists Wool as their maker.
All three archival material lots sold, and both the Felix and the best Wool sold for more than 4x their estimates. Whether it complicates ownership as a defining feature of Felix’s works, the market seems ready to handle these objects.
How they enter into the larger discussion of the artist’s work and what they reveal about his practice remain unclear. Finding out how audiences might respond to Archival Material would probably involve them turning up more or less at random, and somewhere besides an estate auction.
[Mail Call Update] I knew that Felix had not contributed any content for the interior of The Paris Review. I did not realize an illustration of a Donald Moffett work accompanied the table of contents. Glory, 1991, does not appear elsewhere online, though a similar bowling ball with a single, similarly sized hole, Untitled (You You You), 1990, is in the collection of the Walker Art Center, a 2015 gift of Eileen & Michael Cohen (the first owners of “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass).)
Felix’s works, meanwhile, are captioned as Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988, without the quote marks around “Untitled”, or the work’s more expanded date range (1987-90); and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Besides being the only mention I can find describing the dolphin ring motif as a halo, this double dolphin halo [!] design corresponds to no other work, non-work, or published additional material. Perhaps there is a new category of lost works, or lost non-works, remaining to be explored?
