Category: art

Katya Kazakina reports on the market for Sterling Ruby’s artwork, how one series, his spray paintings, being more popular than anything else kind of force fed the market for the rest, and how his galleryhopping left collectors stuck with mid stuff they’d only bought to get the big one. But even when one comes up, it’s still the size that is a problem:

Ruby’s paintings are very large. Let’s face it, most collectors are not like Rosa de la Cruz, who bought SP113 from the Pace gallery in 2010 for $155,000 knowing that her specially built Miami  space could accommodate it (and plenty of other massive works). It’s more than 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide.

“It’s so large that it’s going to be a limiting factor,” Levin said of the work. “There’s no way this painting will fit into most apartment buildings.” Christie’s pre-sale estimates, $250,000 to $350,000, reflect this limitation, he added.

I was going to suggest a few collectors go in together and buy Rosa’s Ruby. But I have never been able to get excited about Ruby’s work, even if it was to chop it up. So just let it all go the way of the bullshit private museum bubble they were made for.

The rapture of this lot essay [christies]
Sterling Ruby’s New Paintings Sold for $550,000 Each at Frieze New York. Are They Worth That? [artnet]
Previously, related but better: A Domestic Proposal: At Home With Voice of Fire
Chop Shop, 2016

Thinking of Frank Stella on the weekend of his death, I kept coming back to the scramble to get Carl Andre out of Rikers after he’d been arrested for the death of his wife.

One criminal attorney, Gerry Rosen, had met with Andre at Rikers, then headed back into the city to piece together the $250,000 needed to get him out before nightfall. Paula Cooper and another art attorney, Jerry Ordover, who’d also handled Andre’s divorce, scrambled, too. It was Ordover who thought to ask Frank Stella, who had been one of Andre’s oldest and closest friends.

After Rosen brought Andre checks to sign, and sorted through the phone messages his wife had written down for him, he spoke with Cooper, who thanked him and said they were going with another attorney: Ordover. Cooper, Ordover, and Lawrence Wiener drove a certified check from Stella to Rikers, where they spent hours waiting for his release.

Re-reading this incident in Robert Katz’s book, Naked By The Window, I had not realized that this ride back to Manhattan was where Wiener had asked, “Do you know what happened?” and when Andre said no, that was it. Cooper is the last member of Andre’s reverse SWAT team still with us; I hope someone will ask her about it.

I also did not realize that the most substantive offer of help Rosen had received while visiting Andre at Rikers was an immediate offer of $100,000 and a referral to an art lender—from Andrew Crispo.

Previously, related: Speak, Muse
Wiping The Floor

I opened Colby Chamberlain’s [non-paywalled dropbox link October essay, “On Collaboration” immediately, but I confess it took me a couple of days to push through the sneaker drop connotations of the title and actually read it. You, though, should not wait.

Colby takes a historic look at Artforum and other art institutions—PS1, mostly, as proxy for a vaguely self-determined “art world”—as places where critique and opposition happen within the institutional context. “Collaboration,” he writes, “is a patchwork process of working with rather than working against, of temporary solutions and improvised repairs.”

Ultimately his essay poses the question of whether Artforum will still be a site of collaboration and critique after the recent editorial and staff upheavals at Artforum over opposition to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. That his essay is published in a journal formed almost 50 years ago from a previous editorial upheaval at Artforum, is, perhaps, a sign of hope.

Colby Chamberlain, “On Collaboration”, October 187 [tinyurl/dropbox]

I admit I had no idea, but it’s at least a little reassuring to learn no one was more surprised to discover Andy Warhol made portraits of Bobby Short than Bobby Short himself. It turns out he made at least nine, and they were among the very first photobooth portraits Warhol made, in the Winter of 1963.

In the catalogue raisonné the cabaret singer recalled going to the photobooth with Warhol—also Warhol drawing his feet—but said they never talked about portraits or a commission. the nine paintings of four images of Short were found in Warhol’s studio after his death.

Short apparently didn’t know about the paintings until the CR editors came calling; did he ever get to see them? Short died in March 2005, just weeks before at least three went on public view for the first time, at Shafrazi. Another turned up at Christie’s in 2006. The two known photobooth strips Short made do not include any of the images Warhol used for the paintings.

Warhol made his photobooth portraits in the Summer of 1963, beginning with Ethel Scull 35 Times [later Ethel Scull 36 Times when Warhol threw in another painting.] Short was next, then socialite Judith Green and Warhol himself. In this moment Warhol was also working on his 13 Most Wanted Men mural for the 1964 World’s Fair and on his first films—which would soon include the photobooth- and mugshot-influenced Screen Tests.

There is no Bobby Short Screen Test. Short was a voracious collector of famous friends and an absolutely masterful namedropper, and a longtime family friend, yet we heard boo, and Warhol gets zero mentions in Short’s biographies or papers. Was Warhol a little too downtown for Short’s crowd, or was Short just not a Factory type? Or was their relationship—or maybe it’s better to say their interaction—not the kind of thing one publicized back then? Maybe we should reserve judgment until we see the feet pics.

15 May 2024, Lot 142: Andy Warhol, Three Works: Bobby Short, est. $600-800,000 [update: seems like they were withdrawn] [phillips]
11 Nov 2015, Lot 330: the same three works not selling at Bukowski’s for EUR600-700,000 [bukowskis]
Previously, Bobby Short-related: The Little Apple; Monkey Bar by Joe Eula

At a moment when it really felt impossible to even think about art, much less write about it or make it, being asked to write the Sandler Essay gave me a chance to figure out how to do just that. So I’m grateful to The Brooklyn Rail, editors Alex and Charlie, and to Blake for the rec.

Unfortunately, this morning, it’s only gotten easier to imagine what kinds of violence and oppression authoritarianism can unleash, even on those who have felt immune to its threat. But there’s art around us, made by artists resisting autocracy, that can affect and teach us things we desperately need to know.

When I put in Tania Bruguera’s warning from early April, where she said, “I think it’s the beginning,” I worried it might be alarmist. It turns out, it was optimistic to think of what’s happening now as a beginning, and not just an acceleration.

Meanwhile, here is where I take blogger’s prerogative and use another of Geraldo Viola’s amazing photos of Caetano Veloso wearing Helio Oiticica’s Parangolé P4 Cape 1, 1968, which we couldn’t find a high-enough-resolution version of.

Art & Autocracy [brooklynrail.org]

This morning on the good social media, Kevin Buist mentioned that the Museum of Vancouver had a Tobias Wong exhibition last year. All We Want Is More ran from November 2022 thru July 2023. Obviously, I missed it, but there is a virtual tour, and I had to stop and post this, because the first thing you see is Glass Chairs Nos. 1 and 2 in a plexiglass box.

The wall text notes that Wong’s appropriations of other people’s works—in this case, Donald Judd’s 84 chairs—”were not always welcomed or understood and provoked heated conversations about notions of authorship.” Also, because he “had always found Judd’s chairs uncomfortable,” Wong made his chairs “slightly higher.”

The label for the chairs reads: “Initially prototyped in 2002 for the now defunct, New York-based T for Troy [sic?], in 2004 Glass Chairs nos. 1 and 2 went into production with Twentieth, a high-end design store based in Los Angeles. Twentieth granted MOV a one-time license to reproduce the chairs using Wong’s design specifications. “

This is an unusual piece of information for a wall text, but they also have a making-of video that shouts out the mount maker, so maybe that’s just how MOV rolls. What’s important is, rather than borrow some, someone at MOV just ordered some glass and glued these chairs together.

Not to provoke heated conversations about notions of authorship, but Judd’s chairs are 30 x 15 x 15 inches, and Wong’s chairs are 31 1/2 inches tall and 16 inches wide, and the glass is 3/4-inch thick. Which means if the seat is 16 inches square, the shelf underneath—the chair with the shelf is No. 2—is 16W x 15 1/4 D. Whether there is two pieces on the side [No. 1] or one piece on the front [No. 2], the other vertical glass pieces are 19 x 16 inches, and they are set under the seat.

Here is an 8-minute YouTube video on how to make a glass display case with the Bohle UV bonding system. It looks just like the chair! Why not try it at home today?

The Arthur Jafa – Theaster Gates conversation in Tank 96 led me to much more Gates content, including this fascinating discussion by Gates, Yuko Kikuchi, and Hiroki Yamamoto, about mingei, the intersectionally problematic folk art aesthetic of Japan conjured in the early 20th century by Soetsu Yanagi. [The Gates hype was in anticipation of his show, Afro-mingei, which opened at the Mori Art Museum yesterday.]

Despite mingei‘s origins as nationalist propaganda, and its “double Orientalist” emphasis of primitivism while appropriating Korean ceramic traditions, and its gender-biased gatekeeping that continues a century later, Gates et al still manage to make aesthetic and cultural meaning from engaging with it. And that problematic faving paradigm comes in handy.

Continue reading “Theaster Gates, et al”

What was going on in 2016 that I missed an entire Richard Prince copyright infringement lawsuit? It makes no sense!

Well, it kind of makes sense, because it lasted for about five minutes before it was withdrawn, and it never reappeared.

Continue reading “Sid Litigious: The Forgotten Richard Prince Lawsuit”