Category: art

After conducting the biggest contemporary auction in Sotheby’s history, Tobias Meyer told Artforum’s Sarah Thornton, “The best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart.”
Uh-huh. This is the market that paid a million-one for a generic Yoshitomo Nara painting just because it’s big. Meanwhile, one of the last Robert Smithson non-sites in private hands–and artist hands at that, the piece was being sold by its original owner, Keith Sonnier–sold for just its high estimate, $374,400 [or $300K+ plus the 20% or so premium].
The market may be smart at the top, but there’s definitely a soft-headed center, too.
Yoshitomo Nara, “Missing in Action,” 1999, est. $200-300,000. Sold for $1.08 million at Christie’s [5/10/06].
Robert Smithson, “Shells and Mirror,” 1969, est. $200-300,000. Sold for $374,400 at Christie’s [5/10/06].

1) Truckload of Missing Art Found in Trailer Park, by Alan Feuer, NY Times.
2) A–
Actually, we have winner right there.

You’d never know it from the market today, but according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, art and money do NOT go well together.
That’s his explanation for why Damien Hirst sucks so bad these days–because he has 100 million pounds–and he’s sticking with it. Same thing happened to Dali and Warhol, the chumps. Got all caught up in the money and the fame and the trappings and neglected the art.
OK… never mind that alongside his sellout portrait factory, Warhol did make interesting and even important work throughout his career. And never mind that Dali was the diametric opposite, a fraud who exploited his early influence and flooded his own market with counterfeits and crap. Who IS Jones’ idea of an artist who doesn’t let making a ton of money bring his art down?

The most brilliant concealer of wealth was Picasso. From his 30s onwards, the modern master could afford the best studios and houses. But when we look at his painting of his studio on his Cannes estate we don’t think of him as rich in the same vulgar way as Dali. This is because Picasso lived for work…

Uh-huh. Because with only 10,000,000 ceramics and that Frankie Goes To Hollywood album cover, the Cannes Estate Period produced some of Picasso’s most important works.
Do rich artists make bad art? [guardian]

Just came across the transom from e-flux:

Serpentine Gallery and e-flux announce Agency for Unrealised Projects (AUP)
For every planned project that is carried out, hundreds of other proposals by artists, architects, designers, scientists and other practitioners around the world stay unrealised and invisible to the public. Agency for Unrealised Projects (AUP) seeks to document and display these works through publications, a developing archive and a physical office, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future.
Unlike unrealised architectural models and projects submitted for competitions, which are frequently published and discussed, public endeavours in the visual arts that are planned but not carried out ordinarily remain unnoticed or little known. The aim of the Agency for Unrealised Projects (AUP), starting from an archive amassed by Hans Ulrich Obrist over the last 10 years and continuing to invite submissions by artists, is to give life to these as yet unachievable plans, by making them available to the public to be disseminated, discussed and most importantly, to be realised.
This is the first in a series of new projects and programmes for the Serpentine Gallery devised by Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, Serpentine Gallery and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects.
The Agency for Unrealised Projects (AUP) will also be the first in a programme of research and collaborations with e-flux, under the name Institute for New Social Research, initiated by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle.

I suddenly feel the need for a more institutional-sounding name.
Forthwith please direct all correspondence to Greg Allen, Managing Director, General Research & Entertainment Group.
Previously: I wrote about HUO’s Unrealized Projects [with a ‘Z’] research last year for the NYT.

That fall the curious flocked to Gladstone’s gallery to watch a film depicting him scaling the gallery walls with the help of ice screws. It ended with Barney inserting the last screw into his anus. Stardom came instantaneously.

Unfortunately, the rest of “Barney’s Voyage,” Julie Belcove’s profile of Matthew Barney and Drawing Restraint 9 for W Magazine, is not available online.
But Randy Kennedy’s profile for the Times is, and he clears up the whole “Bjork and Matthew Barney live in New Jersey!” mystery that had the Noel Coward people so up in arms.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “All art and all cultural production is political.”
The NY Times report on the inclusion of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ works in US Pavilion next year in Venice gives more information on what was included in the Guggenheim’s proposal. Here is what the pieces soud like to me, starting with the “never before realized” work, which will be installed in the entrance courtyard of the pavilion:

“two adjoining reflecting pools forming a figure eight, the sign of infinity” sounds like a pool version of, Untitled (March 5th), 1991, which is two round mirrors, side by side. The LA Times has more specifics, saying the 12′-diameter pools will be “based on 1992 drawings and notes submitted by the artist for the piece, originally intended for the campus of Western Washington University.” Curator Nancy Spector is probably one of only a handful of people who can pull off saying “As someone who is familiar with his sensibility, I like to think I would able to approximate what he wanted to do,” but still.

” his largest light string,” refers to Untitled (North), 1993, a 12-string piece on permanent loan at Bard Untitled (America), a 12-string piece in the Whitney’s collection.

“a suite of 12 framed black-and-white photographs, an inventory of idealized men,” is probably Untitled (Natural History), a work which refers, not to twelve men, but to twelve descriptions of Theodore Roosevelt inscribed on the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History.

“a large paper stack from 1992” is the most intriguing. There are only four stacks dated from 1992. At first, I thought it was a tossup between Untitled, 1992/1993, which features a bird in the sky, a classic Felix image, but really, it’s only slightly larger than the other two. And besides, the date’s unique enough it would have been mentioned. Which means the other piece is the black-bordered one above, which is significantly larger than the rest.
Like that “figure eight = infinity” bit, Carol Vogel provided cleanly didactic interpretations of Felix’s symbolism: “stacks of replenishable paper to represent the inevitability of death, strings of lights to represent dreams of a better world.” So it’s odd that a presumably easy-to-read “symbol” like a black border–which, on stationery and signage, has long signified a house in mourning–didn’t get a mention. Nor did the title: Untitled (Republican Years).

Like death and taxes, the State Department will catch up with you. One day.
From an interview Felix Gonzalez-Torres once did with Rob Storr

For example, here is something the State Department sent to me in 1989, asking me to submit work to the Art and Embassy Program. It has this wonderful quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says, “Besides torture, art is the most persuasive weapon.” And I said I didn’t know that the State Department had given up on torture – they’re probably not giving up on torture – but they’re using both. Anyway, look at this letter, because in case you missed the point they reproduce a Franz Kline which explains very well what they want in this program. It’s a very interesting letter, because it’s so transparent.
Another example: when you have a show with white male straight painters, you don’t call it that, that would be absurd, right? That’s just not “natural”. But if you have four Black lesbian sculptors from Brooklyn, that’s exactly what you call it, “Four African-American Lesbians from Brooklyn.”

Now, ten years and a couple of months after his death, the State Department announced that Gonzalez-Torres’ work has been selected for the US Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale. Nancy Spector, who wrote the book on Felix–no, the other one; the one that Andrea Rosen didn’t write–will curate.
According to the State Department press release, “For the exhibition, Ms. Spector will include a new work, made from a drawing by Mr. Gonzalez-Torres but unrealized in his lifetime.”
As Felix’s Cuban–I mean, Cuban-American–countryman was famous for saying, somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Cuban-American Artist To Be Featured at International Exhibit [state.gov via artforum]
previously: On Politics and Art

I want to love the Walker Center’s Walker Channel video streams even more than I do.
There was a chat between Rirkrit Tiravanija and writer Bruce Sterling, for example [here’s the Walker’s blog post about it]
And Philippe Vergne talking with Dan Graham and his collaborators on his punk puppet opera Don’t trust anyone over 30.
And of course, Tyler was on the edge of his seat, waiting to watch the knives fly in realtime during the Whitney Biennial recap with Philippe and Chrissie Iles.
But unfortunately, the videos just aren’t doing it for me. They’re polite and non-confrontational to the extreme; they capture all of the tedium of a public event–including too-long intros and fawning, populist comments [Philippe actually asked Dan Graham, in his French accent, “Wat de heck am I looking at ‘ere?”]–with none of the excitement of being in the room.
And while the Rirkrit/Bruce dialogue mashup probably seemed great on paper, it didn’t work out. It was obvious that, by personality or arrangement, Bruce was “supposed” to be the “host,” asking questions, but he couldn’t help but launch into his own set pieces about how many laptops he has and how he powers them. Rirkrit, bless his heart, managed to come off as deeply incurious, even though he was presumably there to be asked about his work.
Finally, I don’t know if it’s my NYC-impaired hearing or some self-effacing Minnesota Nice thing about forcing people to listen harder by talking really quietly, but it’s nigh-impossible to hear what these kids are saying. Turn up the volume, people!
So I’ll just wait politely here until these bumps get ironed out. Which might happen sooner if even one other museum in the country had as ambitious an online program…
Walker Channel [channel.walkerart.org]

Joel, an eagle-eyed greg.org reader sends in this tip:

Maybe nobody in the history of advertising had thought to do this, but it would appear that an artist had. Lucy Pullen, a Canadian artist living in Victoria, BC, dumped thousands of superballs onto the streets of Halifax in 1997.

Pullen has shown in London and extensively in Canada, too; not that there’s any monopoly on the idea of a mass ball bounce–we once rolled a dozen thrift shop bowling balls down a very long staircase in college in the middle of the night, a wildly ignorant, dangerous thing to do–but still, it’s interesting to see where and how an idea is manifest.
“2500 Superballs,” 1997, Lucy Pullen in collaboration with Sandy Plotnikoff [iamvariable.com]
Previously: the making of Sony Bravia’s bouncing superball ad

It’s funny how much of the art that was donated to the Artists For Chinati benefit auction next week seems somehow Chinati-esque.
Artists for Chinati catalogue introduction by Marianne Stockebrand
View the lots, which go on sale Mon. March 13 at 7pm at Phillips.

I’ve always wondered why the New York Observer didn’t have an art critic, but mentioning it, well, that’s not how I was raised.
Fortunately, Jerry Saltz was raised by wolves or something, because he doesn’t mind pointing out that the Observer’s art mentioner Mario Naves is an empty, conservative prig. The fact that it comes after a rousing ode to Duchamp’s urinal only makes it sweeter; and it takes “I know you are but what am I?” off the table as a Navesian retort.
There should be more critic-on-critic smackdown events these days; charge ten bucks and raise some money for charity.
Idol Thoughts, Idiot Wind [villagevoice.com]