Category: art

Now Available: Apprentice of Nothing T-shirts

I just made myself a little batch of “apprentice of nothing” t-shirts, which should be here in about 10 days. I’m taking a couple, and the rest are available–first come, first served–for $20, domestic shipping included. [mon. night update: they’re gone.] They’re American Apparel superfine jersey, not fitted (L, XL) and come in just one style: white text screened on saffron.
[limited edition apprentice of nothing t-shirt]
[update: in the spirit of transparency, I thought it best to lay out the budget and revenue projections for MY saffron-colored project:

Printer: Customink.com [highly recommended]
Batch size: 12 shirts
Total unit cost: $13.75
Shipping expense: free for standard delivery
Total cost: $165.00
Unit sales price: $20
Gross margin: $6.25
(less postage) $1.85
(less envelopes) $0.50
Unit contribution: $3.85
Total units available for sale: 10
Total contribution: $38.50
(less cost of 2 shirts): $27.50
Project Operating Profit: $11.00
(less design expense, $450/hr): $900
(less managment expense, $$900/hr): $1,800
Net profit (loss): ($2,689)

You’re welcome.

“You Ridiculous Apprentice of Nothing”

To: greg.org
From: someone using the name of a recognizable artist of Christo’s generation
Date: 2/20/05, 22:06
Subject: the blog of greg allen!

Allen, the fastidious analysis of Christo’s project you make, the stupid remarks and investigations over his car, his plates, his parties and his private parts [?? -g.o] make you look a moronic paparazzo searching for the Olsen Twins for a cover in “Daily News” or any other tabloid of your choice. Now, you should say that this art is a waste of money, the artists are rich and they should give the money to charity. You really have a lot of free time or either you don’t know to write about art, so waste your time in freaky painstaking accounts of other’s money and stolen photos. Pathetic, laughable, useless, pointless. Shameful and childish. Get a life and write something interesting, you ridiculous apprentice of nothing.

And I thought the Claymates were sensitive.

I Get Around With A Little Help From My Friends

Just to clarify a couple of points: the Christos’ $350,000 Maybach is not part of the $20 million; in fact, it’s not even theirs. It’s being
made available to them by their friend–in the Maybach marketing department. Maybach’s Leon Hustinx, coincidentally, purchased two C&J-C works related to The Gates, which he has graciously made available to the Daimler Chrysler Art Collection.
The Christos’ do not accept donations or sponsors for their projects, preferring to pay for everything themselves. While the Christos’ Maybach 62 is the extra-long version, it was not custom manufactured in any way; it’s safe to call it a common Maybach. Maybach, you may be interested to know, is German for “people’s car.”
Maybach involved in art project [daimlerchrysler.com]
Christo’s Maybach on flickr with the NJ dealer plate obscured, how thoughtful [flickr.com]

The Gates Bill

Andy Towle captured the Maybach and The Gates, image: towleroad.com

Don’t get me wrong; I’m just as giddy as the next schoolgirl [sic] about The Gates, I just can’t see how they cost $20 million. That’s what the Christos say they cost, and it’s a figure which is dutifully reported in every story, but it’s something which I’ve never seen examined or analyzed.
Most discussion of The Gates focuses on their populism; this is not just public art, but an artistic experience given to the people. The back seat of a Maybach seems an unlikely spot from which to promote “art for Everyman,” [to use Michael Kimmelman’s phrase and Andy Towle’s picture] but for underlining the noblesse that comes with your self-proclaimed noblesse oblige, it’s just about perfect [even if it is borrowed].
I don’t think it’s being ungrateful to take a closer look at this $20 million figure. We don’t consider it an act of magnanimity when Paramount ponies up $200 million to provide us with the grand collective experience of Titanic. In fact, I believe the Christos’ consider the budget to be an important aspect of their work. The artists themselves make a big deal about how much their projects cost, how they don’t accept government financing, donations or sponsorships, and how they pay for everything themselves by selling related drawings, models and ephemera.
They also consider the sometimes decades-long process–materials testing and procurement, engineering studies, bureaucratic navigation and and political negotiations–as intrinsic to their work. Their website is full of factoids on fabric, hardware, topographic studies, and the corporate machinery and machinations that underpin their projects. [To see an example, scan developments for Over The River, a project-in-progress.]
Using the Christos’ own descriptions and published reports of the installation, I priced out The Gates. Let me just say that to get to $20 million requires some rather creative–maybe even artistic–accounting. Whatever else they may accomplish, Christo and Jeanne-Claude may have also created a unique approach to the subjective and often arbitrary exercise of valuing a work of art.

Continue reading “The Gates Bill”

Advertisers and Links Of Note

First, I’d like to welcome and give a passionate cry to new greg.org advertiser Kinsey, an American Experience documentary airing Monday, February 14th on PBS. Psst, even though Kinsey’s work is half a century old, don’t tell the Secretary of Education.
Meanwhile, Daddy Types may sound like something Kinsey would’ve been into, but it’s actually a site for new dads. Check that one out, too.

  • Art world news I shouldn’t have had to find out for myself: Damien Hirst works were damaged during a paparazzi scuffle at the Imitation of Christ show at Lever House? Naturally, an Olsen twin is involved. David Rimanelli could give a rat’s ass in Artforum.
  • Completely unrelated: Curator/fashionista/much-taller-than-an-Olsen twin Thelma Golden was appointed director of The Studio Museum of Harlem, rather righteous. [via artnet]
  • Lynne Cooke has a thoughtful, brainy elegy to Agnes Martin in Artforum. Cooke curated the Dia:Beacon show of Martin’s earlier paintings. For what turned out to be her last exhibition–at Pace Wildenstein in 2004–Martin showed works that harkened back to her earliest, formative paintings.

    • All The Vermeers In New York (Plus The One In Boston)

    jost_vermeer.jpgI can’t quite say why, but I had a pretty intense Jon Jost phase when I first moved to New York. I saw his All The Vermeers In New York several times, lured in by the title, but kept there by the film’s demanding and precise construction, and its underlying art-vs-money themes. [That said, I don’t remember it too well; better add it to the rental queue.]
    Anyway, I’m sure–pretty sure. kind of sure. hoping–that when the Whitney Museum put then-Vivendi/Universal chairman Jean-Marie Messier on its board in the late 1990’s, it was NOT it in the hope of adding one more Vermeer to New York City’s collection.
    FBI looking at Messier as part of its investigation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, which netted someone a Vermeer and some Rembrandts [bostonherald.com]
    All The Vermeers In New York[imdb.com, amazon]
    FYI, New York’s Vermeers are at the Met [5] and the Frick [3]

    “Ladies, Step Away From The Bags”

    Artforum’s gossip columnist Rhonda Lieberman wasn’t on the list for artfully poseurish artworld duo [Yvonne Force-Villareal and Sandra Hamburg] Mother, Inc.’s recent Fendi-sponsored CD listening party, so she traded a blowjob for entry. At least that’s how it reads.
    A little context: Mother, Inc. started as backup singers for Fischerspooner. The title quote above comes from the oh-so-vigilant guards watching the sponsor’s display case.
    Hot Commodities [artforum scene & herd]

    Every Building On The Sunset Strip–And Then Some

    When I saw Amazon’s A9 Local yellow pages feature, the first thing I thought of was Ed Ruscha’s 1966 artist book, Every Building on The Sunset Strip. It was the first Ruscha book I bought, and it makes me laugh to remember how I thought I paid too much for it way back when (it’s easily 10 times as expensive now).
    Anyway, using Mikel Maron’s A9 whole-street-grabbing script, I tried all through that weekend to re-create Ruscha’s Sunset Strip. The result was a lot of technical annoyance.
    First, starting from a given address, Maron’s script grabs an entire street–a damn big proposition in the case of Sunset Blvd. (Technically, The Strip itself is only a fragment, the section from Doheny to Crescent Heights, from Gil’s Liquors to the Virgin Megastore.)
    Trying to save the giant series created some odd results: one seemingly random image would intersperse itself all the way along. After trying to edit this one out, the resulting series were suddenly non-continuous. Something odd was happening when I saved the series and then reconstituted it.
    I hadn’t yet cropped the image series at the appropriate intersections, so I didn’t get to try knitting them together into two long panoramas. Actually, I found the A9 images’ redundancy kind of nice; the periodic picture-taking indirectly revealed the (non)movement of the traffic along the Strip.
    Anyway, then I saw Jason pointing to Eric Etheridge’s discussion of Every Building, and I think, better to throw this out to the lazyweb and see if someone can tell me how to figure this out, or just do it and make their own selves net-famous.

    Flavin-esque

    No one rips off quicker than window dressers. They take next week’s ideas from last week’s paper, or they stop by the magazine stand on the way to Home Depot.
    One Monday morning, I passed by Bergdorf’s on my way to work just as they were unveiling the new windows. I stopped dead in my tracks as, unbelievably, two artist friends’ works were ripped off at once: the backdrops were Stephen Hendee’s crystalline architectural forms made of foamcore and black tape, and the designers’ names were printed in the perspectival receding typeface of Ricci Albenda’s paintings. By no coincidence, both artists had been featured in a cover story in art/text magazine that had hit the stands just days before. I called both artists and their dealers that morning, and the whole shebang was gone by the next day.
    So I’m a little less shocked, shocked, than Todd is to find out Saks Fifth Avenue windows are decorated with “Dan Flavin” fluorescent lights. I’m also sure that Flavin’d be rolling over in his grave, if only the last work he completed before he died wasn’t a Christmas light installation in the windows of the then-new Calvin Klein boutique on Madison.
    Flavin on Fifth Avenue [fromthefloor]
    Weird. Why have I written almost the exact phrase three times now? [google: “dan flavin” “calvin klein”]

    Watch Regarding Clementine Close Tonight

    The exhibition that Choire Sicha curated which inexplicably included me, Regarding Clementine, is closing this evening.
    There’s a swanky beer bust [sic] from 6-8, a closing party, to which the less stalker-ish among you are definitely invited.
    Clementine Gallery
    526 W 26th St, Chelsea Arts Bldg, 2nd Floor
    [note: For the more stalkerish, the address is 526 East 26th st, and it starts at midnight.]

    Look At Me, I’m At Art Rotterdam 2005 Feb. 24 & 25

    Assuming they don’t close down all discussions of art, film, and culture before I get there, I’ll be in Rotterdam, participating in a couple of panel discussions around the upcoming Art Rotterdam fair.
    In one debate on Feb. 25, Saskia Bos, director of De Appel in Amsterdam, will moderate as we discuss private and public funding for the arts, particularly for museums. [I’m there to discuss my work at MoMA with the Junior Associates.]
    Also on the panel:
    Claudia Rech, Head of development Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
    Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
    Kees van Twist, Director Groninger Museum, Groningen, NL
    Frank Lubbers, Vice-Director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL
    The other one is still gelling, but I hope it doesn’t involve Islamic fundamentalists. More details soon.
    Art Rotterdam 2005

    On Smithson, Space & Time

    Another cover from Life“the lunar surface photographed by the Apollo astronauts in 1969” yields a comparison to Smithson’s cover for Artforum published just a month later: a distribution of mirrors across a square of parched earth, one of a number of illustrations from his “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Placing these images together, which speaks to an argument about travel as a form of cultural repetition that suspends an experience of the present, demands a great deal of archival legwork on Reynolds’s part.

    -Pamela M. Lee writing about new books about Robert Smithson in “The Cowboy in the Library,” published in the Dec/Jan 2005 Bookforum. She’s referring to Ann Reynold’s 2003 book, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, which draws intensively and creatively on Smithson’s archives at…the Smithsonian.
    The image above is Moonworks, artist Craig Kalpakjian’s 2003 proposal for creating earthworks on the moon. Read about it in Issue Magazine. Craig’s got a show up through Saturday at Galerie Edward Mitterand in Geneva.
    Lee continues:

    In one of the most striking passages of art history I’ve read in a while, Roberts connects a Mannerist altarpiece Smithson studied at length with the abstract sculpture he began making in the mid-’60s, by bridging a discussion of Jacopo Pontormo’s Descent from the Cross, 1525-�28, a deposition image composed around the rotational forms of its sacral actors, to the spiraling forms and crystalline structures of works such as Gyrostasis, 1968. What connects them in Smithson’s oeuvre, Roberts argues, is their attitude toward the deposition of time: Pontormo’s languorous Christ now exhibits a “depositional temporality,” whereas the growth process of a crystal is itself called a “deposition.” It says something about Roberts’ gifts as a polemicist that she can make this leap wholly convincing for the reader. More art history should be written with the kind of imagination and verve displayed here.

    Roberts is Jennifer Roberts, who wrote Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. Smithson’s sculpture Gyrostasis was recently on view at the Hirshhorn.

    On Math & Art In France

    sugimoto_math.jpg

    Although Gustav Eiffel didn’t explicitly use one himself, an American engineering professor has come up with a mathematical expression for the shape of the Eiffel Tower, based on its creator’s own studies of wind resistance, torquing, and load transfer.
    Which reminds me of the photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Fondation Cartier, Mathematical Forms. They are monumental images of beautiful, little plaster stereometric models, which were created in 19th and early 20th c. Germany to illustrate complex trigonometric formulas. Several were published in the NY Times Magazine last month.
    Elegant shape of Eiffel Tower solved mathematically [PhysOrg.com, via archinect]
    Etant Donne: Le Grande Verre by Hiroshi Sugimoto through Feb. 27 at the Fondation Cartier
    Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mathematical Forms [NYT Mag]