The Art Of Endangered America

a blue whale that is also a hanging chair is covered in mottled blue fabric that looks like bathmats but the dominant feature is its gaping mouth, the seat/opening, which is screened by a curtain of white beads that represents the whale's baleen. a cursed art object several times over by porky hefer, selling at millea bros in june 2025
Porky Hefer, Endangered Blue Whale Hanging Chair, 2018, ed. 3/3 [so not so endangered then?] for sale on 11 June 2025 at Millea Bros

Look, it was already weird to have one nickel for every hanging endangered sea creature chair sculpture South African white guy Porky Hefer made for the Leo DiCaprio Foundation to show at Design Miami in 2018 auctioned my Millea Bros. that turned out to be from the asset liquidation portion of client funds-spending art adviser Lisa Schiff’s bankruptcy proceedings. So the very possibility that we might be at two nickels now is off the charts.

a dark mushroom colored exhibition space with a suspended light grid and black ceiling that might as well be ikea but is at the design miami basel fair in 2018 is strewn with the misguided greenwashing art furniture creations of porky hefer, made as pr for the leo dicaprio foundation. gargantuan and clumsy furniture in the shape of endangered species include from left: a sloth hammock/sling; a polar bear? rug/tuffett, an orangutan lap dance chair, and blue whale and shark hanging chairs with mouths agape for climbing inside. like that one ikea chair in the kids section. anyway wallpaper magazine ran this image by james harris as part of their uncritical design-forward coverage of whatever. unbelievable that it continues to haunt culture solely because the art adviser who helped organize it ended up spending her client's money on her own lifestyle expenses
remember when wallpaper* ran this photo as part of their exclusive report on our culture’s greatest tastemakers assembling for an astroturf design fair in miami? thanks, james harris, for documenting this

And yet, there it was, hanging right in front of us—and behind the Endangered Orangutan Lounge Chair. Casual observers may think this Endangered Blue Whale Hanging Chair is just an Endagered Shark Hanging Chair with a slipcover. Connoisseurs will see it is covered in recycled t-shirt fabric handwoven to look and feel like your grandma’s bathmat. And conservators will note that the baleen curtain made of strings of beads are, according to the condition report, experiencing “active bead loss.” But honestly, who among us wouldn’t want to just curl up in the mouth of a whale for a few days? It worked great for Jonah. Eventually.

a ghost of the american flag by sterling ruby made of acid washed denim as a 2015 fundraising edition for the chinati foundation, trying to sell again at millea bros auction in june 2025
Sterling Ruby, CHINATI FLAG (DNM), 2015, “treated” denim, 45 x 70 in., ed. 100, trying again at Millea Bros on 11 June 2025

Also at Millea Bros [again] is another lot that I think must have come from Schiff: Sterling Ruby’s acid-washed denim flag, made in 2015 as a benefit edition for the Chinati Foundation. Is there any artwork that captures the moment better than an American flag ghost, with its estimate slashed in half since February, with the proceeds going to pay back some collector who got fleeced on the sale of an Adrian Ghenie painting?

In a way, it’s too bad it’s all being liquidated, because these two pieces—and Schiff’s art collection generally—are the fruit of her life as much as her crimes. They’re superlative examples of the kind of art that piles up along the way when you travel the circuit of art fairs, galas, and opening dinners. Fundraising editions and leftover PR pieces, artworks donated to benefit auctions, gift bag swag, and kickback pieces bought on heavy discount from the galleries where you bring your whales. All accumulated in the service of people with actual wealth—for whom the entire system exists—with their expropriated money.

shelves and platforms stuffed with stuff line three walls of a white cube gallery, the accumulated objects and mementos of the artist martin wong, transformed by the artist danh vo into a single work so they could be preserved together, here in the acquisition photo of the walker art center
Danh Vo, I M U U R 2, 2013, like 4,000 things that belonged to Martin Wong, collection Walker Art Center

Maybe all Schiff’s works could have been kept together as a more significant, cautionary gesamtkunstwerkdokument, like how Danh Vo turned all Martin Wong’s tchotchkes into an installation so it could be preserved—and acquired. A Schiff Study Collection would be a snapshot of this frenzied moment, now obviously over. But that would have required much more adventurousness on the part of her collector/investor/client/creditor/victims, who, never forget, were most interested in flipping Adrian Ghenie paintings.

Shang Marble Recumbent Frogs!

a shang marble frog of exquisite simplicity photographed against a black background by sothebys hk
Recumbent frog, marble, 25.8 by 17 by h. 12 cm, Early Shang (pre-Anyang) era, 1600-1298 BCE, sold at Sotheby’s HK in 2022

Look at this frog. Just look at it. A marble frog the size of a good spaghetti squash, carved with exquisite simplicity, with that flat mouth, the rear legs in relief like a pair of wings, THOSE EYES. It’s barely been published or shown—once at the Century Club in 1955? Does that even count?

the side view of this shang dynasty marble frog statue is all legs, the giant rear legs folded flat against the top of the body, the stumpy front legs anchored against the ground, and then the flat, angled under chin, whoever made this 3000 years ago had it going on.
Side view of the Sotheby’s HK 2022/Japanese/Eskenazi/Century Club Shang marble recumbent frog

And then in 2022 it pops up at Sotheby’s HK, out of a private Japanese collection, who’d bought it in 1991 from Eskenazi, and is hailed as an outstanding sculpture from the Shang dynasty, one of just three known Shang marble frog sculptures. Of course it would sell for HKD 28 million (USD 3.5m), almost 10x its original estimate.

Continue reading “Shang Marble Recumbent Frogs!”

Picasso Would Not Have Blogged Dali’s Sea Urchin Photos

 a black and white photo of fascist clown salvador dali standing amid a cluttered studio landscape, with a plaster cast of a greek statue wearing a mask and hood, part of a painting of a vaulted arch, and two large photos on hanging bars of old engravings of sea urchins, by edward quinn, whose massive watermark sits atop the entire image
1957 photo by Edward Quinn of fascist clown Salvador Dali posing with sea urchin props in his studio

The exhausting and endless stream of idiots pouring out of America’s fascist clown car these days makes me hate Salvador Dalí’s attention-grabbing, money-craving, absurdist bullshit even more.

Now every time I have to see, like, Dalí putting a starfish on his head for a 1957 photoshoot about how he’s trying to get a sea urchin to make a painting with a swan’s feather in its mouth, or maybe a dry flower, I can only think of how it distracts from the news that he’d just had another audience with Franco.

So instead of calling him out, and the art world folks who stuck by him for the art, from MoMA and the National Gallery to Duchamp to the whole Suzi Gablik crew who summered in Cadaqués, and then pointing out the admittedly striking photo enlargements of 19th century engravings of sea urchins, should I have followed Picasso’s example, and never spoken or blogged his name or work again?

Anyway, in the five seconds I spent trying to reverse image search the engravings he used, I decided that sea urchins are very aesthetic and should not be canceled because of their worst fans. But also that 18th and 19th century engravers copied and recopied each other for generations, and though the details and quality of execution might vary, the results are basically the same. And in that way, they’re like fascists.

Unbox Your Noguchi Coffee Table

a kidney shaped glass table top for an isamu noguchi coffee table sits among corrugated cardboard and 2x4s in its original crate, awaiting an auction in june 2025 at potter & potter
Mint, partially in box? The wood base has been unboxed for this photo showing the untouched and apparently intact glass top of a Noguchi Coffee Table, from the era before foam packaging, selling 5 June 2025 at Potter & Potter

The Eames plywood leg splint market knows how to handle splints in their original packaging, partly because there are so many of them. The Noguchi Coffee Table market, OTOH, has to be looking at this thing and scratching their collecting heads.

Chicago-based Potter & Potter Auctions has a garageful of Eames- and Herman Miller-related material that must have come from a colleague or employee. There are blueprints, Girard & Bertoia, fabric samples, unsigned paintings attributed (by proximity?) to Ray Eames—and an Isamu Noguchi IN50 Coffee Table in apparently mint, unused condition, in its original Herman Miller crate.

the profile of the 2x4 lumber crate for a noguchi coffee table from herman miller has a paper label with IN50 written on it, and a dot matrix printed shipping address for charles eames in venice california, via potter & potter

The crate has a shipping address on it, twice, for Charles Eames at the Venice studio. It feels like a grail of some kind? But of what? That address has a zip code, so it’s after 1963. And it is printed with a large-format dot matrix printer, which, according to my IBM sources, was not even a thing until like the late 1970s at the earliest. Charles died in 1978.

So unless it’s going straight to a new garage, I assume whoever buys this will unbox it immediately, and end up with a nearly 50-yo coffee table that looks like you just bought it at DWR.

05 June 2025, Lot 38, Isamu Noguchi, IN50 for Herman Miller, mint in box [liveauctioneers via @pwlanier]

Critiquing Modernism & Capitalism, One Hauser & Wirth Show At A Time

Does Hauser & Wirth have a conventional commercial relationship with David Hammons? As Zhou Enlai said when Henry Kissinger asked him about the impact of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to say.”

the zurich branch of hauser and wirth gallery is a white painted warehouse with rectangular columns, tiled in white, a shallow arched brick window and several concrete beams on the ceiling. the 2003 exhibition of david hammons sculptures, which are comprised of wooden shipping pallets stacked with brown cardboard boxes, each screenprinted in red on the sides: made in the people's republic of harlem. the stacks are arranged haphazardly in the space, not systematically. no stack is much larger than a big american refrigerator.
Installation view, David Hammons, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, 2003 via hauserwirth

In a just-published oral history Marc Payot, a president at Hauser & Wirth, remembers the early days:

Continue reading “Critiquing Modernism & Capitalism, One Hauser & Wirth Show At A Time”

One Donald Judd Woodcut

a donald judd woodcut is a horizontal rectangle of solid blue on a sheet of the same ratio
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1988, woodcut, 60 x 80cm., ed.25+10AP, this example is in the Fisher Collection at SFMOMA

I saw this Donald Judd woodcut on its own and was so shocked by its monochromeness I didn’t even recognize it. All I could see was the blue monochrome screenprint edition Derek Jarman may or may not have completed for the letterpress edition of the script for Blue.

I’d wrestled with trying to fix that only partially realized print by remaking it with the aspect ratio of the film, only to get stuck trying to figure out which version of the film to use. And maybe the Judd felt like a Jarman because it’s printed on 60 x 80 cm sheets, which is the same ratio of Jarman’s print—though his was apparently vertical—and which is also the same 4:3 aspect ratio of 1990s TV.

a suite of ten donald judd woodcut prints, five solid horizontal rectangles with 0, 1, or 2 thin lines running horizontally, or vertically, and five inverse, with blue rectangular frames around an unprinted void, but with 0, 1, or two horizontal or vertical lines cutting across them.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1988, 10 woodblock prints, 60 x 80cm, ed. 25+10AP, this set from SFMOMA

But none of this, I think, is Judd’s concern at all. This woodcut was published by Brooke Alexander as part of a portfolio, and that’s how I’ve always only ever seen it. The series of ten prints indexes a rectangle cut by 0, 1 or 2 lines; horizontal or vertical; and positive or negative. The portfolio was made in three colors: cadmium red, blue, or ivory black, in editions of 25+10 aps (each).

But now in this context, it becomes hard to see the one solid print as anything other than a part of a series, the precursor state, the base, for the cuts to come.

David Hammons H&W DTLA: The Making Of

One day you’re wondering where all the stories are about peoples’ experiences with David Hammons’ artwork, and the next, you’re seeing an entire oral history of working with Hammons that almost fills a whole issue of Ursula Magazine.

Randy Kennedy spent almost a year collecting accounts of the many, many, many people involved in Hammons’ massive 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth LA. That show, a culmination of almost two decades of interaction with Hammons and his crew, is already the subject of a whole-ass book. Though that book basically has no words.

The latest issue of Ursula (Issue 12) makes up for it. With thousands and thousands and thousands of words, it could be the most comprehensive account to date of working with and observing Hammons. [Obviously whole books of criticism have been written about Hammons’ work, which is not the same as Hammons working.]

Ursula 12 also includes Linda Goode Bryant’s essay about Concerto in Black and Blue, and this one quote from Ian White resonates with Bryant’s account, too. White, the son of artist and teacher Charles White, was hosting Hammons in 2018 when he was scouting out H&W’s LA space for a possible show. White is alongside Hammons, seeing how he sees:

Because a show for David is not just object-driven. He’s thinking about the space, he’s thinking about how new and existing works will interact, about how the work sits in the space, about whatever is happening around the gallery, out on the streets. He calls himself an urban archaeologist, something to that effect. So a lot of the time when you’re with him, you just wander around for hours. You’re looking for oddities and identifiers of whatever community or culture—or supposed culture—is evolving around you. He’s great at keying into that shit. He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked. Things that, if you bring them to light, give you a different understanding of the world around you.

Literally two minutes later update: Am I going to have to liveblog reading this thing? Can you have a better shoutout for your book than this?

[Stacen] Berg [H&W partner & exec. director]: I think he was waiting for some constraints to be put on him. And if we just kept saying yes, then there was nothing to fight against. Our approach was: “We’ll do anything you want. If you want that space, you can have that space. You want all the spaces? You want the courtyard? You can have it.” I mean, he also carried around a book titled Tell Them I Said No, by Martin Herbert, about great artistic refusals.

OK, this one sticks out. On the one hand, there’s a decades-long cultivation of relationships with Hammons’ intermediaries, then him; which includes a conventional exhibition in Zurich in 2003 [with a misremembering of the text stenciled on the side of the boxes in the sculptures]:

[Marc Payot, H&W president]: …It was never going to operate like a conventional exhibition. There was no checklist or price list. There were no dates and very few labels on works, except the work of others that he included in the show, like Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten and Dan Concholar. The commercial side of the show was very limited and came very late. It would have been OK with us if it had never happened. Most of the work was not for sale and came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York after it was over.

The commercial side is not a show with a price list, but the timeline does not make it any less conventional. The talk at the time was that H&W bought the entire show, which is not just conventional, but traditional. This comment by Payot seems to belie that, but a lot of title transfers can fit behind the statement that most of the work “came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York.”

Conversations: The Best Tailor Makes The Fewest Cuts [hauserwirth/ursula]
Buy Ursula: Issue 12 in print [shop.hauserwirth]

Richard Prince Posters In Marfa

richard prince poster painting is an inkjet of a rephoto of a collage of seven little pictures of posters for sale, with their captions, including a modigliani nude, a fat joint, an acid trip-colored cat, graphics of the world burning and a nude couple embracing, and a poster that says today the first day of the rest of your life, via galerie max hetzler
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2016–2017, inkjet and acrylic on canvas 276.9 x 304.8 cm.,
©[?] Richard Prince Studio, courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa

Turns out Richard Prince has made a lot more than one Poster. Max Hetzler is opening a whole show, today, in Marfa, of “a large body of” Prince Poster works on both paper and canvas. Some of them are huge, like ten feet across. Inkjetted and overpainted rephotographs of collages of the tiny, postage stamp-sized posters and captions. For all their media, appropriation, and cultural content, they also show a lot of interest in scale.

Continue reading “Richard Prince Posters In Marfa”

“What do you see?”

The parking spot I’d vacated in front of our house was still open when I returned from the morning school run. I looked at the sidewalk, the ramp at the crosswalk, the exact same steps I walked yesterday afternoon.

I came in, and as I was posting this, I re-read Linda Goode Bryant’s essay on walking the city with David Hammons:

David’s walks count among his most amazing works. And I think he does see them not only as preparation or ways to find material but as a part of the work itself, along with so many ephemeral things he’s done on the streets, things that maybe only he or a few other people around him ever knew about. On his walks, David pushes beyond the merely observant, even the acutely observant, into something much more profound.

Yesterday, just seconds after I’d parked, and before I’d gotten out of the car, an elderly neighbor fell, and was lying on the ramp at the crosswalk. I was the fourth person to come up on her. Two younger women must have seen her fall, and were kneeling on either side of her.

My hands were full of unwieldy things I should have had a bag for, and as I stood there, I silently asked the third person, who was on the phone, if she was calling 911. And she was.

The fifth person to come to the woman’s aid right then was a nurse, she said, and had crossed from the other side of the street to help. The woman’s spindly hand was bent at a terrible angle. Blood around her mouth, she must have fallen forward and failed to catch herself. She was responding groggily but wanting to move when she probably should not. She rolled herself onto her side, though, as I, with no way to help, left.

By the time I got to my desk, the sound of the ambulance came in the window. I did not recognize the woman, but I thought of the difficulties she’d face, how incomplete or impossible healing can be at her age, how her independent life may have ended at that moment I’d just missed when I got out of my car.

I thought of my own grandmother, proud, strong, in her nineties, doing her thing, until she broke her hip, tripped on a hose on her porch, the home she’d built with my grandfather, which her kids rushed to remodel the bathroom with a walk-in tub, &c., so it’d be ready when she got out of the assisted living center, but to which she never returned, her family eventually waving and pantomiming to her through the window during COVID, telling her to put the phone on speaker. The funeral not even allowed to happen in the pandemic-closed church, but it did anyway, for a few cousins, and the local funeral home couldn’t figure out Zoom so they streamed it on facebook, which entailed getting an entire account. I downloaded the video, but haven’t watched it since.

When I looked at the sidewalk this morning, I wondered if anyone else would notice the dark stains on the ramp, much less recognize them as blood. Only I, and the people who’d stopped to help first, would ever have any idea of how, in an instant, a neighbor’s life was turned upside down, on the corner.

[late afternoon update: it’s about to pour down rain.]

David Hammons Concerto Reviewed

I thought I’d see more organically, but now I’ll go look, but at least/at last Nereya Otieno has an insightful review at Hyperallergic of the restaging of David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue at Hauser & Wirth LA.

AND it explains the phone situation: you have to lock your phone in a bag. Are there swaths or pockets of LA life where this happens now? People moving in and out of NDA/privacy/IP leakage control/be-in-the-moment woo woo zones? Or is it just for once-in-a-generation art installations?

HEADS UP, though, I thought it was on until June 1, but the H&W site now says May 25. Don’t sleep on it.

February was a distracting month, so I did miss Eileen Kinsella’s account of visiting Concerto in Black and Blue during Frieze LA.

Mark Pieterson’s review for Sculpture Magazine is good, if bleak. But then [looks around] how could it not be?

In her account of visiting Concerto for Artillery, Brittany Menjivar sounds a little surprised by the experience of the work.

OK, this review [sic] at Flaunt was either written by AI, or it is a review of the YouTube video Hauser & Wirth posted in April, which has a soundtrack. Because there is no concerto playing in Concerto. [Unless? Was there a Japanese performer playing koto at this opening, too?]

Tomorrow, 17 May at 11AM, Darby English will be moderating an IRL conversation at H&W LA with Jasper Marsalis, Harryette R. Mullen and Joe Ray on the question, “How do we see the work’s darkness now?” Eventbrite says few tickets left.

David Hammons Gets At The Why? Of It [hyperallergic]
Previously, related: David Hammons Lights

Tuymans Jesus and The Second Coming of 1990s Figuration

is this butterfly anime meme where a pale guy with dark hair and glasses gestures toward a screenshot of a david zwirner gallery summer exhibition of 1995 figurative painting in new york, which has replaced the butterfly, as he gestures to say, is this being old?

After overcoming the shock to my psyche of seeing an art world moment I very much lived right in and through turned into an historicized theme for a summer group show at David Zwirner—who, let’s be clear, was also there the first time, and so is, for some reason, partly doing this to himself—I did wonder what the Rubells’ Luc Tuymans painting of Jesus was doing there.

a four by two foot painting of a german actor dressed as jesus, white with very neatly groomed hair and beard, wearing a white robe and red cloak/mantle over his right shoulder, he stands in 3/4 angle, painted from the waist up against a plain, light/dark background. luc tuymans' christ, from 1998, via david zwirner
Luc Tuymans, Christ, 1998, 48 1/4 x 22 7/8 in., oil on canvas, ex-?RFC via DZ

The first time I saw this, I wondered about Tuymans’ source image; a few years after this he’d made some works using Mormon imagery—actually, he took Polaroids of the screen while watching a show on Belgian TV in the late 1990s.

In the 1990s the LDS Church had begun using a newer, more naturalistically painted picture of Jesus with a red cloak, like this one, but the angle was different. It still made me wonder. If Tuymans had used it for source/inspiration, it seemed odd that he’d change the angle and entire composition so significantly. And he did not.

This painting was from a Feb. 1999 show at Zeno X in Antwerp titled “The Passion.” It was a series related to the Passion Play performed every ten years at Oberammergau, Germany.

a photo of a 3/4 view a white german guy portraying jesus in a white robe, with a red cloak over his far (right) shoulder, as published in the 1970 program/catalogue for the passion play at oberammergau, germany, via some ebay seller
image of Helmut Fischer as Christ from the illustrated catalogue for the 1970 Oberammergau Passion Play, via ebay

Turns out Tuymans used the photo from the catalogue of the 1970 production of the actor who played Christ, Helmut Fischer. [update: while I knew the foundational anti-semitic history of the Passion Play, on Bluesky Jörg points out how that anti-semitism persisted, even after Oberammergau’s biggest fan (Hitler) was defeated. Turns out the 1970 production, the first since Vatican II, was specifically condemned by the Pope for keeping newly disavowed bigoted portrayals of Jesus-era Jews. They’ve been working on it ever since.]

While that clears that up, I do still wonder about Zwirner revisiting Circa 1995 New Figuration just as the Rubells are divesting it. This could be driven less by art history and more by estate planning.

Warhol Big Electric Chair Big Lie

an andy warhol painting of a photo of the electric chair at sing sing prison, screenprinted in black onto a monochrome background that looks orange or salmon, but which one art adviser described as pepto bismol, which is a sickeningly bright pink. having not seen this painting myself before christie's disappeared it, i cannot confirm the color, only its significance and withdrawal.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Big Electric Chair, 1967-1968. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 54 x 74 in (137.2 x 188 cm). Estimate on request. Disappeared from the 20th Century Evening Sale on 12 May 2025 at Christie’s in New York

I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

On 11 April 2025 Christie’s announced that Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair from the Matthys-Colle collection will highlight Christie’s 20th century evening sale, with a low estimate in the region of $30 million.

the verso of andy warhol's big electric chair is tan canvas or lining, with the salmon pink pulled around all but the bottom edge, and some museum exhibition stickers on the stretcher. via christies, which then deleted it when they withdrew the lot from sale in may 2025

On 25 April 2025, Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 9 standout lots at auction this May,” including Lot 55A, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair.

These Big Electric Chair works are very rare at auction because most of them are in major museum collections like the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago, so they have taken on an almost mythical quality within the art market, Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art Alex Rotter said.

a white guy in black is standing in a white cube gallery space with his back mostly turned, ostensibly viewing an orange-pink warhol painting of an electric chair that is around six feet wide. this composite image was created by christies to illustrate the scale of the painting, which they announced they'd sell, and which was then withdrawn from sale, in may 2025

On 12 May 2025 the Matthys-Colles withdrew Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair, which did not have a guarantee, from the sale. The lot listing was deleted. Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 8 standout lots at auction this May” with a date of 25 April 2025.

Here, the image is cropped more tightly, which not only makes the chair bigger but almost abstracts it. He’s isolated the chair from the context of a room, so it becomes an everyday object that is elevated as a still life. And what could be a more ultimate still life than a chair that will take the life out of you? It becomes a traditional painting in the vein of 17th century vanitas; a memento mori of sorts.

And yet, the chair is also this transformative object of ending. It can end someone’s life, yet when isolated, is just a chair with electricity running through it. I think that’s the play Warhol wanted to get at. He’s putting this within the canon of still lifes, and the electric chair is the most poignant of all. That’s a very Warholian thing to do, to explore multiple meanings of an object depending on how it’s presented, Alex Rotter no longer said.

In one sense, one might say, it deeply doesn’t matter. It’s just auction house marketing. But things happened.

The painting’s sale was announced. The specialists talked. The painting was marketed. The collectors were praised. The advisers and reporters discussed it. The potential bidders balked at it. The owners withdrew it, and then Christie’s not only erased its traces and actions and publications, it altered them retroactively with no notice.

At this moment this important painting whose comparables are in major museums around the world was put up for sale at a price no one wanted to pay, and so it was withdrawn from sale. The switch was not thrown, the painting was not burned, but it’s perniciously ridiculous to act like it wasn’t strapped in the chair.

Olafur Eliasson Pattern Detection

olafur eliasson triptych of tall narrow stained glass windows, with the center window taller than the two on the sides, but with a uniform gradient of color across all three: fiery reds and browns at the bottom, yellow to pale blues and whites across the center, and darkening blues near the top. photo jens ziehe for olafur eliasson.net
Window for moving light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net

I didn’t notice it when I blogged about it last December, probably because I was so fixated on the heliostat. But a few weeks ago I gave a talk about stained glass, and the prolonged looking at Olafur Eliasson’s 2024 stained glass project, Window for moving light led to a realization.

detail photo of olafur eliasson's 2024 stained glass window for a church in germany shows handblown glass in various shades of blue in overlapping circles of tracery, amidst the gothic trefoil mullions and arches of the window itself, via olafur eliasson dot net
Upper section detail, Window for moving light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net

“The geometric pattern of the stained-glass window installed in the Gothic eastern windows develops from diamonds and squares at the bottom to large overlapping circles above. The glass panels transition in color from red to yellow to transparent and blue at the top, creating a chromatic fade inspired by the palette of Caspar David Friedrich.”

Continue reading “Olafur Eliasson Pattern Detection”

Sheila Hicks Mile High Club

a wide, flattened arch of tan silk embroidered in a checkerboard pattern with the thick strands discernible in each square, shifting to a field of smaller nubs at the curved edge hangs on a white wall. it was originally made to fit the curved walls and ceiling of the upper deck of a boeing 747, where it would be the back wall of a first class lounge area. air france commissioned the panels from sheila hicks, who kept this one until her husband donated it to moma in 2017
Sheila Hicks, Panel for the interior of Air France 747 upper deck lounge, 1969-77, silk on cotton, 51 3/4 × 157 × 2″, a 2017 gift to MoMA from Melvin Bedrick, the artist’s husband

Yesterday art historian Michael Lobel posted Sheila Hicks’ bas relief panel of embroidered silk, four meters wide, which MoMA says is the only survivor of the 19 panels Hicks made for Air France between 1969 and 1977. Lobel has jokingly assigned me the case for tracking down any other remaining panels. So instead of not finding one Jasper Johns Short Circuit flag, I can now not find eighteen back walls from the upper deck first class lounges of Air France’s first generation of Boeing 747s. I am ON it.

Continue reading “Sheila Hicks Mile High Club”