With all the Banksy, Fairey hubub this year, all the Darger-loving last year, and the current, frequent calls by curators for art that’s made from a sense of “urgency,” I’m taking away the message that art’s new direction lies in a reaction against (<– always a good jumping off point for a convo about art) academic, heavily conceptual art on the one hand, and factory style, assistant/money-driven art on the other hand.
So, out with the Gregg Crewdson budget, the Jeff Koons assembly line, the Damien Hirst branding, and in with the heartfelt scrawls and scribbles, or hard-won wheatpaste murals.
It’s okay to love Simon de Pury. I’ve said before that hisPhillips Art Expertsite is really fun: it has video and games and contests and lots of color. It’s a great way to rake in the low-brows like myself who love to see the art universe brought down to size, demystified and even made out to be kinda cute. :)
So I say, big deal if Stuart Jeffries gets all fan-club on us, talking about how cool de Pury is: the dude’s just giddy-making with his darling themed auctions and his “elegant, leggy gait”.
“Art is not a bad thing to invest in. Historically, it has outperformed most other asset types.”
~ Simon de Pury
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White Column’s Celebrity Line-Up
White Columns’ 2010 BENEFIT EXHIBITION + AUCTION (on view ON VIEW APRIL 24 – MAY 15,) shows an impressive list of donating artists. Impressive in size, but also in the celebrity status of the artists themselves, with the Turner Prize winning, Toma Abts, famed prankster Maurizio Cattelan, the notorious Billy Childish and David Byrne even.
FINALLY, the pious facade that art marketers apply as protection to their artists, their buyers, their collections, and their reputations, is being — um– noticed.
In April 16th story for the New York Times, Randy Kennedy begins:
“Imagine a market for highly sought-after items in which the makers and sellers work hard to ensure that the items go only to certain buyers, even if other buyers might be willing to pay more. The favored buyers are then expected not to resell the items for many years, even if the values skyrocket. Ideally, in fact, the buyers are expected to give these items away eventually, for the public good. And if the buyers don’t abide by these expectations, they risk being cut off, cast out with the other unwashed wealthy who can afford to buy but have no access.”
Anyone familiar with the art market and the practices of dealers and consultants on the one hand, representing the primary market, and auction houses, on the other, representing the secondary market (traditionally), will not have to “imagine” very hard. Market savvy dealers have always sought to “place” art rather than sell it, seeking to create a prestigious provenance for their artists. And auction houses used to refuse to touch art any younger than five years old, seeing it as a tasteless and destructive practice to sell new pieces in the secondary market.
But it’s really nice to see that the practice, and it’s very elitist, very very naughty implications are finally being brought out into the light.
And in a very amusing tale of what appears to be petty vengeance, a woman scorned, in this case Marlene Dumas, has, it seems, blacklisted one Craig Robins, because he made her look bad by selling one of her works from his collection to David Zwirner Gallery.
When WILL the New Museum bring us something new? I ask you.
It has long been my opinion that art which partners with, or claims to make a creative statement with or about, technology, is usually crap.
And, apparently Rhizome’s Seven on Seven event proved it.
Given 24 hours to come up with a collaborative work, seven pairs of artists and technology experts failed to come up with a single original thing.
150 + people paid up to as much as $350 in order to be wowed by moiré patterns, big concept search-engines and wikis, and — gasp– movement detecting programs. Amazing.
The only charming idea: essentially a GPS and a blog for umbrella swapping.
NOW can we stop thinking the web’s going to give us anything more than variations on search engines and color-sound-movement morphs?
Just got an e-mail from White Columns re: “An Unmissable New York Reading” it opens with a quote from one of the artists on the roster for the event:
“Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.”
~Dodie Bellamy, from ‘Barf Manifesto’
“Urgency” is the latest hue and cry among the avant garde of a yet unnamed movement in the arworld that is pushing a resurgence in subjectivism — drive driven art, passion and necessity as virtue.
Let’s work hard to coin a new term for this so we can amend the text books. I’m putting in my vote for: URGENT art. Too obvious? Duh!
Like the Depends of the creative community, our galleries and pundits, collectors, and even artists, are hoping we can absorb the urgent flow of uncontrolled effluvia that should be drilling into us in the upcoming months. We can only pray for a few Dargers.
Well, we needed SOMETHING to replace “gesture” — and “interventions” just don’t sell as easily as the all blood sweat and tears you can blarf onto a canvas. More for your money: why collect pictures of re-enactments when you can pick up a pack of whimsy at the art fair?
Thing is, I’m rooting for more visuals in my visual art. I think I’d really dig some really poignant, really voyeuristically appealing canvasses. I think I’d prefer them to all the ugly, visually dull, eggheaded, artist-statement-dependent stuff I’ve been forced to look at.
If I can’t have my conceptual art and see it too, then maybe I’ll settle for the inside of somebody’s closet.
Ah: the art web is abuzz because that rascallyMoMA has announced that they have “acquired” Ray Tomlinson’s @, but they don’t OWN it.
Instead, their Department of Architecture and Design has “tagged it” as they say, an option now available to the ballsiest of curators who, in our proud age of electronic euphasia “are [set] free to tag the world and acknowledge things that ‘cannot be had.”
In other words, they can talk about it.
MoMA: “The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy.”
And, getting a whopping lot of press by appropriating this appropriation: well, now, talk about elegance and economy!
For insight into the power grab for other nontangibles: check outpost.thing, Steven Kaplan’s very thoughtful blog. wherein he mentions also Erica Orden’s “Collecting Smoke”(New York Magazine, Dec 28, 2008).
The Art Machine 