Month: July 2022

I’m not the biggest Thomas Eakins fan, but I did live in Philadelphia, so I’m at least familiar. I confess, I hadn’t really given him or his work much thought since his 1876 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, was the target of Alice Walton’s surreptitious Crystal Bridges acquisition spree in the mid 2000s. With the help of her secret art adviser, National Gallery of Art curator John Wilmerding, Walton scouted out the most important works of American art held by institutions who were financially vulnerable, indifferently managed, and/or unbound by professional museum ethics–and then she bought it in a flash. It was a shock tactic that worked–until it didn’t, in Philadelphia.

Continue reading “Parodies of The Gross Clinic”

The important thing to remember is when you see an artist doing strong work you admire, don’t be satisfied with the attention they’re getting. See what they put out there. Go to their website.

Pamela Council has remained ensconced in the Times Square of the discourse even after their monumental sculpture, A Fountain For Survivors [above, left], left actual Times Square. I knew they made fountains. Their work has Fountain in the title.

But then somehow only after they tweet a read [tweet rip obv] of the tiktok Pink Sauce project do I realize they’re fluent in the language of the chocolate fountain.

Council’s first [?] exploration of the form was during an residency and exhibition at Rush Arts in 2017. [update: Of the chocolate fountain, yes, but Council points out that their first official fountain work was in wtf is juice/GW Smile, in 2016.] They showed Tenderheaded, which included a chocolate fountain filled with Luster’s Pink Oil, a classic Black hair moisturizer from back in the day, mounted on a vintage quilt. The top of the pulsating pink fountain was grazed by the tips of the rotating silicone tongues on a sex toy suspended from above. It seems to have made a glorious, irrepressible mess.

Tenderheaded was followed by a series of exuberant fountain sculptures, whose multisensory presence insist on their physical experience in the moment, while simultaneously evoking–or exorcising, where needed–memories of the past. A phalanx of Pink Oil fountains held the room in BLAXIDERMY Pink, “a healing space” dedicated to the artist’s 14-year-old self which has been realized in at least two installations, in 2019 and 2021.

The sumptuous, surging form, the materiality of a pulsating skin that toys with solidity until it drops it in a sheet, the combination of beauty and mess, to be drawn in by these objects and only then to discover the powerful psychic work they’ve been set to, Council’s fountains couple the allure of watching them forever with the urge to GTFO.

Pamela Council [pamelacouncil.com]
Previously, related (and after Council had already started pouring): Fountains for the next hundred years

Every time the “The Uffizi sold some NFTs” story flashed in front of my eyes over the last year and a half, my tabs would fill up with factchecking, archival deep dives, and breathless hot takes. And then I would stare at my blog drafts screaming, “lol no!” in my head for a few days before closing everything and moving on. Like the pandemic itself, I keep wishing it was over, while the world around me maddeningly conspires to keep it going.

Money-grabbing NFT stories are all alike; every museum NFT story is money-grabbing in its own way. It does seem like the Uffizi using the existential panic of COVID to minting NFTs of Old Masters was just a datapoint between Global Art Museum dumping the out-of-copyright contents of the world’s museums on OpenSea in the seconds after the Beeple Big Bang, and the British Museum pitching NFTs as souped-up postcards in a gift shop pop-up.

But though the timing was craven, the Uffizi’s venture–or the venture at the Uffizi–was in the works long before the NFT hype bubble. If anything, the company behind the project, Cinello, S.R.L., only tacked NFTs onto the end of their value chain for the promotional hype. [That the NFT-verse only delivered one sale for Cinello before the boom turned to bust shows actual NFT collectors (sic) were not duped, at least not by this.]

Unlike more traditional (sic) NFTs, Cinello’s project is molded in high relief by the Italian cultural institutions they’ve been pressing up against for years. From the cash-chasing hype wrapped in cultural preservationist platitudes; to the distorted view of the digital image tethered to a unique, physical object; to the overpowering obsession with ownership and control, Cinello’s offering was an NFT only an self-interested Italian museum director could love.

What Cinello sells they call a DAW®, a Digital Art Work [Registered trademark]. It is a physical object, a painting-shaped screen showing a high-resolution digital image, with a customized computer on the back, wrapped in a handcarved replica frame, and all encased, it seems, in a freestanding wall [see above]. It is all meant to reproduce the work it references, precisely and at scale, and to provide a fully equivalent experience of standing in front of the real thing.

This object is also embedded in a system of authority, monitoring, commoditization and control that uses technology–hardware, encryption, geotracking, network transmission, proprietary exchanges, blockchain–and legal constructs–patents, copyrights, licensing, contractual restrictions, resale clauses, certificates of authenticity–with equal enthusiasm.

The DAW® features described in Cinello’s patent read like the wish list of a bureaucrat running an Italian museum: DAW® is a perfect reproduction of an artwork. It is uncopyable, thanks to unbreakable encryption. The digital image file can be locked down locally, or served remotely via an unhackable network connection. The DAW® can be geo-locked and timed, so it is only visible at a specific location, or for a set amount of time. By constraining an infinitely reproducible digital image, it can be replicated and sold as an exclusively authorized edition.

But Cinello claims a DAW® is not (just) a reproduction. It is a new, original work of art, imbued with an aura of its own, and sufficient to stand in for the originals. Which is literally how Cinello seems to have started. DAW®s trace back to Cinello’s creation of digital facsimiles of paintings for display in Italian museums while the originals were out for shows or conservation. Then they evolved into exhibition copies of irreplaceable works that would never be loaned. In 2019, Cinello organized what they called the first exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s work in Saudi Arabia; actually, it consisted only of actual-size digital facsimiles.

The convolutions in their flowchart are the complexity their institutional partners needed to justify the deal, but Cinello’s plan remains unchanged from their earlier version: embed itself as the digital gatekeeper for these museums, and lock in their cut as its DAW®s usurp the original art objects’ place (sic) in the networked, digitized future.

It’s worth noting that when the NFT press was hot, Uffizi officials seemed fine to go along with this scheme, lend their institutional credibility, and enjoy the visionary attention. And as soon as things went south, the museum cut & ran: “The museum didn’t sell anything but granted the use of the image—the sale of the digital artwork is all down to Cinello. It is false to say that the museum sold the Tondo copy,” reported The Art Newspaper.

Claiming DAW®/NFTs were nothing more than an image licensing deal ignores the last year and a half of hype, but also the direct involvement of museum directors in signing “certificates of authenticity” for the DAW®s being sold. If all they’re doing is making a hi-res jpg available, why not just release them to the world, like the Rijksmuseum? Or even just to me? I, too, would like to make a full-scale digital facsimile of a Michelangelo, suitable for framing, to put beside my stock photo pool.

The only significant thing I can find about the Nike N110 D/M/SX (DIMSIX) in Black/Blue Hero-Blue Gaze-University Red is that they were released on July 13, 2019. And they were probably the most technically and aesthetically complex shoe available at the moment when someone had the occasion to make them in painted bronze for a 2020 exhibition. Which turned out not to happen until 2022.