Tag: Cat

HENNESSY YOUNGMAN, AKA CURATOR

THIS YA BOY, HENNESSY YOUNGMAN, AKA MR. AKA's, AKA THE PHARAOH HENNESSY, AKA HENROCK THE MONARCH AKA THE PEDAGOGIC PIMP

Critic, performer, painter, and lecturer,  Jayson Musson has made a splash on YouTube with his alter ego, Hennessy Youngman. In a series he calls ART THOUGHTZ, Youngman sits in an “alabaster alcove” and delivers laugh out loud funny art critical patter to his audience which he addresses as “Internet.”

The videos which pretend to dispense advice to novice artists and lay people, but which contain a meta-level of art (and art world) criticism, have launched him from relative obscurity to courted celebrity. Recently he has been much sought after for lectures and tours at universities and cultural centers.

So it should be no surprise that, having just begun, he is already “giving back.”

Invited by fine art photographer Marilyn Minter to show work at FAMILY BUSINESS (opened in February by Larry Gogosian, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni) Youngman has turned curator, deciding to open the floodgates and let all of his fans rush on into the sacred white cube.

Any and all who bring work to 520 W. 21ST ST in Chelsea, NY will be in Hennessy’s  “IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD”  show; no exceptions.

“IT’S MY WAY OF GIVING BACK TO/ AND THANKING THE INTERNET FOR SUPPORTING AND WATCHING MY SHIT.”

Drop Off Dates:
FRIDAY 3/30 – SUNDAY 4/1
10AM- 7PM
Artwork in every media will be accepted and Mr. Hennessy himself will be there to take them from you.

IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD:
OPENING RECEPTION TUESDAY: 4/3 at 6PM.
CLOSING 4/16

THE ARTIST’s INTENT

Pretty pretty big dick talk talk.

Recently, reading an article on NewsGrist, a blog that mixes equal parts of arrogance and naiveté, I came upon the usual blah blah about inarticulate artists and the ineffable meaning of their awe inspsiring creations. Add to this a wholesome  toot of tired and foggy hot air about Pollock and what did he mean by x,y, or z?

All this wearying nonsense went toward commentary on the Richard Prince case, childishly insisting that Richard Prince’s cocky and deliberately bungling deposition claiming that he meant nothing should simply be ignored while the rest of his deposition, i.e. anything supportive of his fair use claim, should be paid close attention to.

I marvel at this “inarticulate” artist argument— especially as regards Richard Prince, a self named bibliophile who wrote a screenplay and who’s written prose is not only proficient but downright poetic.

The argument that artists would or should need coaching is silly as well. ALL defendants need coaching. EVERYONE who speaks or debates in public has talking points. There is nothing unique to artists that should absolve them of having to make sense.

A fair use defense is not a matter of defending the “ineffable” — we are cultural grown-ups and well beyond such assinine and childish beliefs.

If a defendant wants to claim fair use, they have to prove fair use and that hangs largely, especially in this case, on Transformative use. That’s the way the current practice works.

I happen to think that transformative use is useless anyway: that’s a better argument. Frankly the spirit of copyright law is to preserve the incentive to create. ANd bottom line, these days, that speaks to markets: markets of IDEAS, of INFLUENCE, of ATTRIBUTION, and of MONEY.

So PRACTICE is the issue if you dont’ like coached answers and you don’t like judges mucking about in issues of meaning –practice needs to be changed with regard to transformative use. Remember that transformative use is NOT written into law. Courts can and should pay more mind to market issues and less to “meaning.”

But as things stand, Prince messed up big time by being a cocky inarticulate asshole.

Transformative Use is Useless

‘Transformative use’ is just mucking things up.

That’s what I think.

Providing a pivot for the Cariou v Prince case and the only real point of interest no matter what the pundits say, transformative use, instead of the fog-clearing test that it was supposed to be, has become the main particulate in a legal fog of war that has lasted three years now.

Thus far, the dueling Cariou v Prince briefs have added new certainty to my theory that transformative use is a singularly unhelpful notion.

Read the rest on Hyperallergic

Will Round Two of Cariou v Prince Change Art Law Forever?


You're going to see a lot of this guy -from Patrick Cariou's Yes Rasta

Go ahead, expect more of these sweaty headlines with question marks in them. Because, with the now rather infamous Cariou v Prince case up for appeal sometime this year, we are facing another deluge of half-informed, and angrily contentious, punditry which will wash over the raw, dry, factual sands of more professional reports like a tsunami of histrionics.

Drowning in the madness will be all those bleeding hearts who root for the little guy, and the sundry art world know-it-alls who root for controversy, along with the fastidious fence straddlers like myself who can’t do right by anyone — and, let us not forget, the stalwart naifs who insist on seeing appropriation as flat out theft.

In the background, lawyers toil away, building sand castles of the driest, rawest, facts they can muster.

It is no wonder that the case has captured the attention of so many. It involves a lot of money, after all, and it pits an underdog, Patrick Cariou, against an art star, Richard Prince, and his giant posse of star-makers and lawyers. It also comes after artists had become cocky, with most copyright infringement cases settling without trial, and often to the mutual benefit of defendants and plaintiffs.

At base the issue is this: Richard Prince’s team must prove that district court judge Deborah A. Batts ruled in error when she decided against Prince’s fair use claim. Patrick Cariou’s lawyer, Dan Brooks, must argue that the ruling did, in fact, use the correct legal standard.

Brooks will file his opening brief by January 25th. Faced with the formidable 135 page appeal filed on Oct. 26, 2011 by big guns Boies, Schiller & Flexner, and a nearly 50 page amicus brief filed on behalf of Richard Prince by the Andy Warhol foundation, plus similar briefs from Google and a consortium of museums (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Art Institute of Chicago), Brooks will have to answer five newly refined points of contention.

  1. That contrary to the first circuit court’s decision, the Canal Zone works that use Cariou’s photos are indeed transformative in every sense established by art history and accepted artistic practice and constitute a fair use of those images.
  2. That Prince’s “intentions” do not factor into the meaning that his work may or may not have since it is the viewer and the context of a work that give it its meaning.
  3. That contrary to testimony, Cariou did not lose any marketing opportunities due to Prince’s use of his images; indeed, his lawyers argue, his book prices soared after the initial bout of litigation.
  4. That the first circuit decision, if upheld, will create a “chilling effect” on future creative work, and thereby will override the very purpose of the fair use exception which is intended to protect free speech and works of social value.
  5. That, in the Batts decision to protect the copyright holder, Patrick Cariou, the rights of the appropriation artist, Richard Prince were unduly impeded, as her ruling overreached in lumping all of the thirty paintings under one ruling.

In Part One of this Three Part series, I set up a virtual dialogue between Dan Brooks (Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP.), Patrick Cariou’s lawyer and Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School.

In Part Two, I will discuss the five points above in greater detail. In Part 3, I will part the waters.

Read the rest and look forward to Parts TWO and THREE on Hyperallergic

Olek’s Appeal Verified by My Interview with Jonathan LeVine

JON_LEVINE_120_FPAGE-590x258

“The charges are not that serious. In NY it would have been a really minor incident.”

When I decided to phone the Jonathan LeVine gallery which represents Olek, I knew that they would have been fielding calls all day. Since word had gone live via the Jerry Saltz page on Facebook, three or four articles, including my own, had hit the air overnight. But Jonathan LeVine took my call. It felt good to have an opportunity once and for all to clear up all the doubt, and also to learn where Olek’s representation was in all this.

What follows is a transcript of our phone conversation:

TAM: Did Olek call you right away after the incident happened?
JL: I think I learned about it pretty quickly after it happened. After she got out of jail.

TAM: So when she called you, was she distraught?
JL: No I haven’t spoken to her on the phone. It’s all through e-mail.

TAM: Oh. Hmmm. I see. So you’ve never spoken to her on the phone.
JL: No, I haven’t spoken to her on the phone.But we’re in contact with her all the time. We just represented her in a fair. I mean, she just signed a bunch of prints for us so it’s — it’s definitely her that I’m in contact with if that’s the question.

TAM: [Laughing]Yeah, well that is DEFinitely the question.”
JL: [Laughing] Well it’s definitely her.

TAM: It’s the question that’s on top of everybody’s minds.
JL: This isn’t a hoax. I mean it’s legitimate. And she doesn’t have money and it’s very expensive to deal with the attorney.

TAM: Right. But people are confused, like about how she was able to set up that page which they think looks very elaborate — it has a bunch of links for PayPal and stuff like that— Did anyone advise her that this might not look good?
JL: Well, initially — this conversation was going on for a while– and her attorney was saying that maybe — she shouldn’t say much about it. So her attorney advised her not to  do it. But she didn’t have any other way so her attorney said okay you can do this.

TAM: Do you have any details of her case that she’s not put online?
JL: No. I mean I can’t say anything. I can’ t say anything more than she said about it.

TAM: So you KNOW more you just can’t SAY more.
JL: That’s correct.

TAM: So you are clear about the incident and how it linked to her arrest.
JL: Yes. Yes I am. As a matter of fact I helped her find her attorney through some of my contacts in England.

TAM: So is there a fundraiser maybe coming up?
JL: You know hadn’t actually thought about that. Because this thing initially–we weren’t supposed to talk about it so– it wasn’t even until last night that she posted it.

She was debating about whether she was going to make it live or not. So I guess it went live last night. I come in today and have a whole bunch of people calling me.

TAM: Well it went live last night because it kind of went live on Jerry Saltz’s page.
JL: Yes. That’s right.

I think we’re probably going to give it a couple more days. You know. See what goes on   before I start talking about that–because it just went live and I want to see what happens. And also we need time for a little organization to put togther a fundrasier. I’m not opposed to it at all. Someone asked about it on Facebook and I hadn’t really thouhyt about it all because this all just happened [snaps fingrs] just like that.

I’m just going on the advice of what she tells me to do and what her attorney is telling her to do.

TAM: Right. Well, just now I e-mailed her and she just said I’m tired of this and if people don’t believe me then they can’t help me. But I really think that people are so used to being scammed and this sounds so much like a million of them.
JL: Sure.

TAM: Really and people can’t help but want the details.
JL: Sure….

TAM: And they also want to know who they’re defending.  I mean if the charges are that serious…you know then—
JL: I don’t think that the charges are that serious…but I just think that she was just treated in a certain way.

And in New York, I feel that it would have been a really minor incident. And for whatever reason it turned into something bigger than maybe it should have.

TAM: Wow. That’s horrible for her.
JL: It is. It is pretty horrible. It’s kind of a messed up situation. I really — I don’t  want to say too much because I can’t.

TAM: Right okay… is there anything else, when I write this story up, that you’d like to put out there to clear things up?
JL: “I would just say that it’s legitimate. And she’s just in a situation that’s unfortunate. I guess what happened is she didn’t have any contacts there and so she didn’t have an attorney to call and she didn’t have money for that either so I guess she just ended up with just what was given to her.

TAM: So why didn’t she have any contacts? Is Olek that much of a loner?
JL: Well, if you’re in England and you get arrested…and she lives in the US she’s Polish. I don’t even know if she’s been there before. She doesn’t know a lot of people there. And at first maybe she thought is wasn’t going to be that serious either.

TAM: Right. And did they take her cell phone away?”
JL:  I don’ know what they did. I don’t know anything about getting arrested in England.

I can’t really speak for her because I didn’t ask her any of these questions. I didn’t like interrogate her to see what the hell happened. You know it’s more like ‘this is what happened, this is the situation’  ‘oh okay ’ —So I immediately contacted somebody that I know that helped her find a suitable attorney.

TAM: Right I see.
JL: And that’s where she’s at right now

TAM: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much. This has actually cleared up — well, a LITTLE bit …[laughing] it’s still a mystery.
JL: I’m sorry I can’t give you any more information. But I can say that it s legitimate. I can say that here it would have been something minor but –you know– she got a bad attorney and now she is in a situation.

TAM: And is it safe to say that you’re still talking to her about this and about when you can release information?
JL: Yes. Absolutely.

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Postscripts:

The Jonathan LeVine Gallery has posted Olek’s appeal on its site

Updates Regarding Charges and Trial Date

CIVILIZATION and its DISCONTENTS

Civ

CIVILIZATION and its DISCONTENTS
OPENING RECEPTION:
DATE: Saturday, July 23rd
TIME: 6 – 9 PM

NARS GALLEY • 88 35th Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn NY 11232
Visit: http://www.narsfoundation.org/homepage.php

ARTISTS:
Steffi Homa
Nancy Drew
VanillaRoyal
Kikuko Tanaka
Olek

Civilization protects us, unifies our efforts, and broadens our perspectives. It provides protection as well as the comforts afforded by a shared history and the developments of science. And yet, as Freud pointed out in his seminal work, the price we pay to be a part of civilization is often more than our spirits can bear without resistance or resentment.

With dada, Pop art, appropriation, and minimalism, artists found ways to stand in the margins of society, and to make images that defied its restrictions while leveraging its iconography. Stepping out of the space cleared by these past genres, new artists are looking into even more extreme methods of breaking free, not only borrowing from the trappings of our civilized world, its symbols, memes and ceremonies, and advertisements, but also treating meaning itself as material for color, texture and mood.

These artists create a new aesthetic that works because it defies context in favor of pure form and free association.

The artists in this show will present works that are simultaneously loaded with insinuation and free of meaning. Breaking away from the constrictions that are entailed by “making sense,” this new art can make bold with the aesthetic joys that came to civilization at a great price. They come off, therefore, as audacious and rude, like children taunting the librarian.

Because they harken to familiarity without the price of full understanding, and they wink at cultural constructs that “look” like those that are usually loaded with meaning, they can play with “originality” and create “inspiration” seemingly by sheer hap.

Color can be arbitrary, or evocative without ties to any coherent plot or meaning. Rythyms and symbols, borrowed at random can be collaged together to produce a mood or a feeling of meaning that is all the more ecstatic for breaking free of the rules.

If you’ve ever worn a T-shirt from a place you’ve never been, or felt elated by a song the language of which you did not understand, or dared to display a button for its color without paying mind to what it says, then you get it.

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The Five Artists

Stephanie Homa: A young East german-born British artist working mostly with paint, Homa’s imagery and playful sense of humor are definitely on the cutting edge of micropop with its freewheeling use of borrowed and salvaged cultural symbols.

Says Steff of her own work:
“The playful spirit displayed in my work reflects the personal playground of a wild and sloppy mind where I set the rules. I reject restrictions and conventions so that my work drifts between evolving and dissolving its own concept and philosophy – resulting in an everchanging hologram of curiosity.”

Nancy Drew: A seasoned artist of note, Nancy Drew was represented by Roebling Hall in its heyday, and was included in Open House: Brooklyn Art Today at the Brooklyn Museum.

She has recently embarked on a series of paintings remarking on celebrity and time, and female iconography. Simultaneously, Drew is still continuing to playi with pornography, celebrating the theatrics, the beauty and the thrill of the genre. 

Growing up in an Ab Ex world, Drew takes advantage of a language of gesture and form that belongs to that male dominated genre, but she decorates her paintings with glitter and softens them with flocking, producing images that are at once bold and feminine.

VanillaRoyal: VanillaRoyal uses fetish and fantasy iconography, playing them off of each other in an attempt to jog the mind free of easy and habitual associations. The visual language in fetish and fantasy genres is built with motifs that are deceptively simple, while loaded with existential meaning. Both fetish and fantasy have a dominant iconography that is extreme and colorful, and that plays with polarities like good and evil, dominant and subordinate.

By manipulating the similarities and the tensions between these extremes, VanillaRoyal manages to create dreamlike scenarios that address sexuality vs. childhood, freedom vs. enslavement, joy vs. pain — giving the viewer a world of ice cream and chains. At once charming and threatening, these polarities conjure disturbing dialog.

Olek: Olek’s by now famous crochet art has become a meme of its own. Speaking as much to labor and to effort as to time and process, Olek’s objects, performances, and video are instantly and universally understood and empathized with.

Says Olek,  “With a miner’s work ethic, I long to delve deeper and deeper into my investigations. My art was a development that took me away from industrial, close-minded Silesia, Poland. It has always sought to bring color and life, energy, and surprise to the living space. My goal is to produce new work and share it with the public. I intend to take advantage of living in NYC with various neighborhoods and, with my actions, create a feedback to the economic and social reality in our community.

Kikuko Tanaka: An ambitious painter, sculptor and performance artist in the mold of Matthew Barney, Kikuko Tanaka’s work plays with psychological, socio-historic, and pop references (From Disney to Dostoyevsky!) using them to defy traditional story-telling and the tired and unquestioned values embedded therein.

Says Tanaka:  “I follow my whims and impulses. I also borrow some motifs from existing literature and artworks, both to express my empathy toward them and to take pleasure in deconstructing them within my context. Most of the time, I’m trying to make bad jokes through my work.”

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NARS (New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation) presents its first every Emerging Curator Project Show, with Civilization and its Discontents, a show by 2011 selected curator Cat Weaver.

Civilization and its Discontents: July 23 – August 28th
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Friday: 1:00pm – 5:00pm
Saturday – Sunday: by appointment between 12:00pm – 6:00pm
  Please call the NARS office to set up an appointment at 718-768-2765.

BITS: Prince’s Jokes (Explained) & $treet Art

It’s Not Funny if You Have to Explain It

RICHARD PRINCE Untitled Joke Painting, 2009 Collage and acrylic on canvas. 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm.) Signed and dated “R. Prince 2009” on the reverse. ESTIMATE $350,000-450,000 PROVENANCE Gagosian Gallery, New York Photo via Phillips dePury & Company

Phillips dePury has topped past unintentionally funny catalog copy with a new gem describing Lot 30 in it’s upcoming Contemporary Art Auction.  Lauding Richard Prince’s “Untitled Joke Painting,” dePury opens with this dubious gusher:

“Richard Prince’s Joke Paintings have remained a constant high point within the artist’s output for over two decades.”

Mm-hmm: Yes. Yes they have remained the high point. Sadly.

Then, having prepped us with the bad news, dePury goes on to do the WORST thing you can ever do to a comic: they EXPLAIN his joke!

“The work is technically lush, utilizing both acrylic and collage. The centered block letters read, in nine rows, “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name. Again, I never had a penn.” Prince’s obvious joke is corroborated by letters cut in half, and even missing with respect to final “y” in penny. One must assume that he did not have enough to his name even to get the text set correctly.”

Yeah. Heh heh. That must be it.

Oh, but there’s a leetle bit more: in case you missed that other funny…

“Interestingly, the joke Prince prints across the present lot is entirely unrelated to the subject of nurses, and thus the viewer might be left wondering what the connection is between the subject and its background. …If what he has collected also amounts to the oeuvre he has amassed, perhaps it’s simply natural for one piece to pratfall over another.”

Thank you. We might otherwise have assumed that Richard Prince just had a few nurses to get rid of.

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“Street Art” is Just a Word for “Emerging Designer”

We’ve all seen it. Shep, Damien, Banksy… they started out hanging from the eves with a spray can, and ended up hawking t-shirts and limited edition art objects online.  Yet even the advent of “Mr. Brainwash” didn’t really force us to just come out and SAY it.

But hell, now it’s time: The streets are just a starter kit for emerging artists with “urban” flavor: the goal is a corporate brand like OBEY or Objective Criteria.

Still, The Guardian sought out, Jeffrey Deitch, for the final word on street art as “big business.”

“Today, somebody does a tag in Russia, China, Japan, or Africa, a friend photographs it and within a few hours it’ll be viewed on websites all over the world,” says Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which recently opened a major show on the subject. “I think you can make a good case that street art is now the most influential art movement of the past 30 years. The penetration of urban culture is huge, and it’s influencing everything from skateboard design to high fashion. Some of these guys have even been hired to design Louis Vuitton handbags.”

BITS: Bad Luck Angels and Angry Catholics

LITTLE ANGEL  IN JAIL (AGAIN)

LA 2, in better days

Angel Ortiz, aka Little Angel, or, better known as LA II, or by his elaborate LA ROC tag which decorated many of his collaborations with Keith Haring, has languished in the shadows of his collossally famous mentor for 2+ decades. And now, he has been arrested for grafitti one time too many (three occasions) in a short period, and faces a felony charge.

Since his youthful adventures with Haring, Ortiz has waxed obscure, finding himself unacknowledged by Keith Haring’s dealers and biographers to the extent that he claims to have found some of his collaborations with Haring in sales and auction catalogs without any attribution to him and without receiving any compensation.

An unwieldy personality, Ortiz, who was very young when he began working closely with Haring, never managed to parlay his 15 minutes of fame into anything big enough to satisfy the star treatment he got when he toured with Haring at the age of 15. Promised that Haring was setting aside a trust for him, Ortiz found, upon Haring’s death, that no such fund existed. He has never recovered from this disappointment, nor from his subsequent struggles for acknowledgment.

This arrest comes simultaneous to receiving a VIP invitation to “Art in the Streets” where one of his collaborations with Haring is on display. It also comes upon the heels of a recent show at Dorian Grey Gallery, a rarity for Ortiz who has not shown often in the United States.

It is arguable that Ortiz has done fairly well. He even has a following in Italy and sells his works for prices between $500 and $5,ooo.

But a, perhaps bitter, Ortiz has been more than a little self-sabotaging. He has, for example, been arrested for painting an unauthorized mural on an Urban Outfitters in the East Village despite the fact that he is one of the company’s official artists.

He was also arrested recently for spraying the Kenny Sharf mural at Houston and Bowery Streets, a site he is fond of tagging ever since he added flourishes to the Kieth Haring trubute mural that occupied the wall in 2008.

However, these charges, which ironically add up now to a felony are not the worst of Ortiz’s rather startling list of past arrests, some of which have been for drug charges and car theft.

The story of Angel Ortiz is a sad and complex one. So young when he attached himself to Keith Haring, he was exposed to fame and to a world of promise which he found subsequently withheld for various reasons, many beyond his control. It has been argued that Ortiz’s influence on Haring was pivotal to Haring’s development and to his later, more decorative and intricate style. Indeed there are those who continue to champion Angel Ortiz and who feel a great deal of indignation over how history has treated him.

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ANGRY CATHOLICS DESTROY ART (AGAIN)

The most famous be-fouled toy cricifix in the world

Spew artist, Andres Seranno’s ‘Piss Christ’ met with violence yesterday at the museum of contemporary art in Avignon, France, when two crazed Catholics, not happy with mere spray paint, pulverized the work with instruments of violence, including an ice pick and a hammer.

It’s not a very original move. Paving the way for this quaint Catholic tradition, a copy of “Piss Christ’ was similarly demolished by two OTHER angry Catholics in 1997 as it hung in a museum in Australia.

Always ready to pick a fight when accused of idolatry, sensitive Catholics have been decrying the ‘Piss Christ’ ever since Seranno first emptied his bladder on it. But these holy renegades did not stop at ravaging the controversial photograph; they went on to vandalize another of the museum’s holdings before they ran away.

“I’m disgusted, Yvon Lambert, director of the museum told France Info, “Two works, dammit! They attacked the Piss Christ, that’s one thing, but they also attacked a beautiful photo of the hands of a nun. The ignorance of these people is unbelievable. ”

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Addendum:

The painting of a nun’s hands to which Mr. Lambert refers, is another work by Serrano, entitled ‘The Church(Sœur Jeanne-Myriam)’: it has been revealed that the work was damaged in a struggle as museum guards tried to pry a hammer away from one of three (3) assailants. I had cited two in the story above.

There is speculation that the attack may be connected to protests held outside the Collection Lambert the day before. They were demanding that, Serrano’s ‘Immersion’ as it is properly called, be removed from the currently running  “I Believe in Miracles.” show. The museum will continue to display the works in their damaged state.

You got TV all over my artwork…

Right: Colbert to Serrano, "You made me Charlie Chaplan!" Left: detail of Shep's stencil work

Got a piece of art with some TV sticking to it?  Call the fun-loving specialists at Phillips de Pury.

When Abdi Farah won the Bravo reality show, Work of Art, his 2010 “Baptism” went to auction at Phillips de Pury, selling for $20,000.

And now that Steve Martin has declared Stephen Colbert’s re-worked portrait, “a viable artwork” that “could be auctioned,” well: Phillips de Pury has snatched it up.

Created during a segment on The Colbert Report intended to promote guest Steve Martin’s latest book, An Object of Beauty, the portrait was gazed upon by Frank Stella, sprayed by Shepard Fairey, and then doodled upon and signed by Andre Serrano.

Asked what he’d done to improve it, Fairey told Colbert, “I made your agenda as an omnipotent quasi-fascist orator, and shaper of our politics and culture, that much more obvious as manipulation.”

In the brave company of other works of similarly dubious heft, like those of Donald Baechler and Dan Colen, Colbert’s mash-up will be on the block tomorrow. Though the Phillips de Pury  site describes the collaboration in hilarious art-speak,  the estimate is not ironic at $100,000.

Profits will go to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity designed to connect donors with classrooms in need.

Have Your Cake: Armory 2011

Armory 2011Not just to be traditional in hating the big ones, but just to be hands down honest, I have to say that the 2011 Armory show was pretty dull going. And that, despite Marjorie Strider becoming the new Tom Wesselmann even while the old Tom Wesselmann is still squeaking out dozens of tiny tin farts in the form of those homely little steelcuts.

I didn’t really hate Strider so much before I saw her tryptich and then wandered through a forest of Mel Ramos while contemplating the sad little Wesselmanns that were keeping lonely vigil on narrow, barely examined walls. The thing about Strider is that she’s on a tribute bandwagon but all I see when I look at her vapid models is the lack of design, something Wesselmann had going in spades. Mel’s just a boner machine and that’s swell, but, dare I ask, is it STILL art? I mean, at best this sort of thing was sort of politically, and socially clever, a way of  “having your cake and eating it too” — but now, it’s just “eating it.”


A 1976 Tom Wesselmann, Study for Bedroom Face at Hollis Taggart Galleries. Not that I would ever have dreamed of saying this, but really, for a bit of hammer over the head symbolism and some swell Matisse-like P&D appeal, Wesselmann had it. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries

Marjorie Strider, the new Wesselmann: Green Tryptych at Hollis Taggart. Dumb stuff. Photo Courtesy Hollis Taggart Galleries

 

This lovely deeply textural 1979 Pousette Dart, Red Oasis, also courtesy Hollis Taggart Galleries

Theme #2 this year was TEXTURE, with a good deal of the newer work being so irresistable to touch that there were signs warning one not to. I found that most of my photos of these works were awful, so I snagged this one, below, from the Galerie Thomas site.

A continued respect for Pousette Dart and Gerhard Richter were also indicative that a love of texture may be ongoing trend. So Holis Taggart had Strider, but also a Pousette Dart room as well, and it was salon full of those cakey little bakeys, old and new, most of them petite (oldies cranking out tiny newies was a subtheme, I must say, with many sub-sized John Chamberlains and not a few teensy Stellas clinging to the walls like exotic bugs).

Theme #3 would be Tricky Optics: A lot of wires and tubes played tricks on my eyes, (and my horrid camera), there were many lovely pieces of drilled and molded acrylic, and acrylic layered on canvas and also on enamel… chunky colorful and textural, these layered works were just about the only pieces that were flattered by the awful lighting and industrial feel of the Armory.

Marta Chilindron, Fire, 2010 at Cecillia De Torres, LTD.

The cleverest work I saw was also the dullest. It attracted a good deal of attention due to Juan Genoves’ use of paint as a bas relief medium, creating weensy beensy people out of charming colored blobs. Very dear and eye-catching, but ultimately pointless.

 

Juan Genoves' Little Paint-built peeps climb on the canvas of Magma, 2009 at Marlborough

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