Category: art

First, get a Titian, and ten bottles of wine.

Christie’s is selling a rare, early Titian that belonged to the Marquesses of Bath next month for £15-25m, frame sold separately:

Please note that this lot is displayed in a loan Venetian sixteenth-century carved and gilded cassetta frame from Arnold Wiggins & Sons, which is not being sold with the picture, but could be acquired separately. Please ask the department for further details about this and the picture’s original frame, which can be viewed on request.

Now, the Titian was stolen in 1995, and recovered at a bus stop seven years later, so maybe the frame’s seen some stuff, which is fine. The point is, though, maybe I don’t get behind enough 500-year-old paintings, but this Titian is mounted into its loaner frame with the corks from like ten bottles of wine, and I love it.

I sometimes worry about posting too much stuff from auctions. But then I’ll see two works I haven’t thought about in a long time, and have never thought about together, and it only happened because they both happen to be for sale the same day.

In the early 70s Michael Heizer made a show, and maybe a series, of Sandblasted Etched Glass Windows. Peter Freeman had one installed at TEFAF NY 2019, and it really worked, like Heizer drawing on a framed landscape.

Seeing this one in a freestanding frame at LA Modern’s upcoming auction immediately made me think of Duchamp’s Large Glass, though, which felt new. Indeed, it’s as long as the Large Glass is tall, but the other dimension is bigger. Heizer’s Larger Glass.

Meanwhile, I had not kept up with Pae White’s work for a while, but I definitely remembered seeing the Summer group show this sculpture was in at Petzel in 2003. There were several of these distorted Plexiglas sheets in different colors, leaning on the walls like crack-addled McCrackens.

It’s interesting to see the install shots from 2003, where the mirror backing is more evident, the opposite of Heizer’s window.

Especially because it’s listed as an element of the work, the solvent made me think of Warhol’s oxidation paintings, which I happened to have heard mentioned on podcasts twice in the last couple of days: Blake Gopnik talking about handmade [sic] Warhol on The Art Angle; and the Nota Bene Boys discussing a sublime oxidation painting install in an NYC private collection.

And now when I imagine White pouring her solvent onto Plexi on the floor, and Heizer waving his sandblasting gun around, there’s Warhol and his assistants, too, hard at work, or working hard.

[update: auctions are still not partial to such abstractions; neither sold.]

Europe: it really is the little differences.

It was during the entirely normal activity of researching some Enzo Mari modular shelves that I stumbled upon the absolute licensing mayhem of the Art Design by hb Collection Limited Edition Europe Andy Warhol Foundation Wardrobes, Cabinets, and Cupboards. The first one I saw is above, half of Warhol’s 1966 work, A Set of Six Self-Portraits silkscreened onto the varnished MDF door of a wardrobe. In addition to Warhol’s signature—AND the 1997 copyright credit for The Andy Warhol Foundation, Licensed by MMI [putting a pin in that for later]—silkscreened on the bottom of the drawer like you do on any piece of furniture containing licensed imagery, I guess? In addition to this, there is also the label inside, with the edition number, 405 of 500, and eight metal hangers.

If there were only 500, it would be enough. But there are 500 OF EACH.

I have to study politics and war so that my son can study baseball and coaching the college swim team, so his son can study poetry, painting and music, so his son can also study painting of an occasionally quite similar style to some of the late works of the son one son up that yet somehow goes unremarked, so that his son can study art dealing and opening a gallery to show the son one son up from him but also the son two sons up from him, though only the works that looked like Picasso, said Allen Goss Twombly (1860-1954) at some point, apparently.

In his Brooklyn Rail review of Maurizio Cattelan’s Sunday, Andrew Paul Woolbright makes an observation that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else, but which feels like it is central, even foundational, to the work:

Composed of gold plates perforated by bullet holes, Sunday’s surfaces seem to swell, making them formally strange—somehow both ballooned-up and torn-through. Their self-violation as a luxury surface is produced by an uncanny shockwave of physics. Freud defined humor as an important act of transgression, and it is the separation of the audience from what went into making the sixty-four gold-plated panels that is transgressive: in a top-secret invite-only warehouse in Queens, through trick doors and passcodes, Catellan led a group of collectors and art-world VIP’s into an underground shooting range where marksmen fired on the gold plates, an act that detourned the process of violence by making it into an exclusive event.

If he hadn’t made a solid gold toilet named America, I might not have believed it, but I think Cattelan’s project was over months ago.

And so the gold-plated, bullet-riddled wall is just the morning-after detritus of a happening where people thrilled to be party to the spectacle of violence.

I updated Firefox the other day, and when it restarted, it did not give me the option to restore my previous session. So I lost the like 100+ tabs in five thematically grouped windows that I’d been holding onto, some for years. Others were fresh, things I was going to blog about. Now they’re gone, I’m sure they were going to be the best blog posts I’ve ever written.

Oh, actually, here’s one I’ve already written around: In 2021 I wrote about the signed exhibition poster from Cy Twombly’s 1974-75 show at Lucio Amelio’s gallery in Naples, which featured the swagged out artist striking a pose next to Castor and Pollux’s backsides. Amelio and his shows were instrumental in both the development of Twombly’s boat motifs, and the subsequent completion of Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) after two decades in the artist’s studio—and Amelio’s AIDS-related death in 1994.

This copy, ed. 56/80, belonged to Twombly’s friend Donald Baechler, who died in 2022. Much of Baechler’s collection was sold at Stair Galleries last fall, but for whatever reason, this one piece hung back. It’s a slightly weird thing, and it’s weird to see it twice.

And that reminds me, in that same auction are several highly unexpected 1970s, student-era paintings by Richard Prince, which are being sold by a former friend and Nasson College classmate. Among them: this self-portrait with a toilet flush valve coming out of his head, so either an oblique Duchamp Fountain reference, or a stoned unicorn Jesus, who am I to say? The longer it stares at me on my screen, though, the more i want it.

Choire Sicha wrote about his friend Eric McNatt, who sued Richard Prince for copyright infringement after Prince used McNatt’s photo of Kim Gordon—which he shot for Paper Magazine, which paid him $100—for Prince’s own Instagram portrait of Gordon.

As Choire put it so well, “Everyone involved here is still an outsider punk kid in their own mind.” Well, as it turns out, when the settlement was announced, I realized a friend of mine from way back in the day was McNatt’s litigator from Cravath, and I don’t think he has ever thought of himself as an outsider punk kid, then or now.

But Choire’s point observation is still useful, because some outsider punk kids in their own minds still hustle to survive, making $100 for licensing their now-famous photo a second time, and other outsider punk kids in their own mind testify in their depositions to making $45 million a year. So it really is the little differences

The Portrait of Kim Gordon | Why Eric McNatt Sued Richard Prince [vulture]

In January—and not even the beginning of January, either, it was the 28th, so barely three months ago—a “Cranbrook Academy Modernist” silver bowl and saucer, listed as “produced by a student under Harry Bertoia,” in 1942 sold at an estate auction for $370, only barely more than the scrap value of its 410 grams of silver. Never mind that they had a date of 1941 and Bertoia’s monogram engraved on the bottom.

They just turned up at Wright, where it’s instantly $1,600. I thought it was just a quick and easy flip after checking its listing in the Harry Bertoia catalogue raisonné. But the bowl’s entry there has up-to-the-minute provenance and a patina that’s cleaner than January’s, but duller than Wright’s. So maybe it was the monogram that led to the attribution, which led to spotting the pieces in a 1942 Cranbrook installation photo, which led to the creation of the newest CR entry for hollowware, updated Feb. 29. Nice hustle all around, I guess, now if we can just figure out who the FDB monogram belonged to, we’re set.

[update: sold for $4,788]

Previously, artist silver-related: Thank you for your silver service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat