Hirst may be a big seller, but Banksy and Kate Moss aren’t as big a draw at another recent auction. Read about it here.
Archive for September, 2008
Middle Tier of British art market go unsold at auction
In art market, contemporary art on September 30, 2008 at 6:00 pmBeing an artist is not an easy life
In contemporary art on September 30, 2008 at 5:10 pmA great article in the London Times here, explores how leading British artists got started.
Grayson Perry
Grayson’s tip Hone your personal skills. You can have all the technique and all the originality in the world, but if you’re not much fun to be around, nobody will want to work with you. Go to openings if you can, and meet people.
Tim Webster and Sue Noble
Sue’s tip Retain some doubt and discomfort. Always be asking: “Is this good? Will this be successful?”
Michael Landy
Michael’s tip Be patient. Young people often have bigger expectations now and it’s probably unrealistic. Success happens to people at different times of their lives.
Anya Gallaccio
Anya’s tip Be true to yourself, and resist pleasing the market. It’s easy now to make things that look like art, but actually making art is a totally different thing.
Susan Hiller
Susan’s tip Don’t pursue being artist unless it’s the only way you can express yourself creatively. If you can be a designer or an illustrator, or something else then do that instead, because being an artist is not an easy life. It’s a last resort.
David Shrigley
David’s tips It doesn’t matter whether you’re 20 or 50. Get a website and keep making work – if it’s good, it will find a place.
Doris Salcedo, sculptor
Doris’s tips I believe the most important thing is to be truthful to what you want to do, to your work, no matter what, no matter which obstacles you encounter on your way.
Jonathan Monk
Jonathan’s tip: People who really want to go to art school should go – it doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad. You take your A levels at 17 or 18, and the art education you get to that level is not really similar to what you get at art school. Afterwards, hang out with lots of other artists, go and work in an exhibition context, and something will turn up.
Stick to what you do best. Contemporary art isn’t for everyone
In contemporary art on September 30, 2008 at 4:50 pmA great post by Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes. Read it here.
Does the economic turmoil hurt the art market?
In art market, contemporary art on September 27, 2008 at 10:07 pmBloomberg is reporting that sales are down at Chelsea Galleries.
Cristina Delgado, a New York-based art adviser is quoted in the article as saying: “My clients are sitting tight and they want to see what happens in the next six to eight months.”
Then she adds: “The prices for young and emerging artists have to come down to adjust to a new economic reality.”
Also on the economic front, comes news that the art-collecting wife of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, is selling a $20 million set of rare Abstract Expressionist drawings at a November auction.
And there are many unanswered questions about what will happen with the art collections of these failed investment banks.
Yet, while the “Fat Cats” of Wall Street are imploding, the Russian oligarchs continue to buy up contemporary art, including participating in the recent direct-to-auction sales by Damien Hirst.
Bloomberg also reported that Victor Pinchuk, a steel billionaire, and director of the Kiev art center purchased a Damien Hirst at the recent auction.
I wonder if Russian, Chinese or Middle Eastern billionaires will be buying up the art collections of failed free market capitalistic Wall Street firms?
PBS’ Art 21 too risky for public school?
In Art Museum, contemporary art on September 27, 2008 at 7:19 pm“The foolish insistence of Dallas Independent School District to allow its teachers to teach this pornographic material and leftist drivel is a textbook example of a school district out of control, and an administration that should NO LONGER be funded by taxpayers.”
So quotes a writer from Dallas in response to an article Sept. 22, 2008 in the Dallas Morning News here.
The pornographic material and leftist drivel to which the ignorant writer is referring: ART 21 the exceptional PBS series on contemporary art.
It seems the DISD has purchased copies of the series for middle and high school art teachers to use to supplement their art curriculum.
“But some teachers and parents are concerned that images they consider too disturbing or sexual for the classroom may be acceptable to some art teachers. They also fear that students will take it upon themselves to search the Internet for more information about some artists in the documentary and get an eyeful.”
Seriously? We can choose to be ignorant or we can choose to accept the fact that if you have a teenager and a computer, and you don’t sit beside them every moment they are on that computer, then they are looking at things you probably don’t want them to see.
That said, contemporary art is not one of those things. The real issue seems to be that Kara Walker actually creates art portraying the truth of life for slaves, the sexual abuse, the child abuse. This reality should not be deemed too disturbing for students. It’s important to understand that life can be very ugly and was very ugly for slaves.
Sally Mann is another concern because she photographs her children in the nude. But her photos are beautiful and the Art 21 profile allows Mann to talk about her work and the controversy surrounding it. And perhaps that is the real issue.
In Texas, and other places, they don’t want to teach children to think for themselves. Or to question what they are told. The issue is that if we allow young people to see these videos they might realize that what their church or their ignorant parents believe is not true and that would lead to questioning authority and religion and education. Which, of course we know, turns people into “liberals.”
Maybe this is why American schools are ranked 21 in science and 25 in math. We can’t actually teach our children anything. It might make them think for themselves.
This isn’t actually surprising for Dallas.
Last year, a Frisco elementary school art teacher resigned under pressure after a parent complained that students had seen an ancient Greek sculpture of a nude young man during a trip to the Dallas Art Museum.
I always wonder if the teachers or parents have actually watched the videos before they choose to comment or complain. Art:21 is a great series and an important element for students to realize that art is not just painting, drawing and sculpture.
Soldiers Faces
In Denver, contemporary art, photography on September 25, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I saw Suzanne Opton’s “Soldier’s Face” billboard in Denver during the DNC. It was a powerful statement. The photographer has captured these soldier’s with their guard down. We all get to peer into their eyes and their souls.
“I wanted to look into the face of someone who had seen something unforgettable.” Suzanne Opton said.
The color headshots of soldiers who have served in active duty, beg the question “What happens to people who have seen terrible things that change them forever? Can you see it in their faces?”
The subject’s unconventional supine pose references Man Ray’s Noir et Blanche and Brancusi’s The Sleeping Muse, and are balanced by portraits of Iraqi refugees now living in Jordan, whose worlds have been turned upside down. These images are uncomfortably intimate distillations of the essential humanity of the sitter.
Unfortunatley, CBS Outdoor abruptly refused to post the billboards in Minneapolis — as well as in Miami, Fla., and Houston, Texas — citing concerns that pedestrians and motorists would mistake them for images of war dead.
Benefits of a bad economy
In art market on September 25, 2008 at 9:45 amOne benefit of the bad economy. Less fake art is being imported from China!
Read the Bloomberg article here.
Exhibit Showcases Female Memories, Durango Herald, Sept. 19, 2008
In ART on September 23, 2008 at 10:59 am“The Insistence of Memory,” an exhibit at the Durango Arts Center’s Local Expressions gallery, is a show featuring “five women, five forms, five perspectives not to be forgotten,” according to the news release, also suggesting the show was “fresh.”
“Fresh” and “memorable” for Durango, or the greater art world?
“The Insistence of Memory” is a multimedia installation that explores the nature of the past in the present. I’m not sure whether the artists intended the exhibit to be viewed as one work of art, or an assemblage of five works by five different artists.
The memories in Maureen May’s black ink drawing on plexiglass are dark. A woman sleeps, her hand hanging down below the bed. Beneath the bed are surrealist images of her past – a match, a burning house, a stairway, a girl on a toilet.
Maureen May’s “Going There” is displayed on the windows at the Durango Arts Center.
One thing “fresh” for Durango is the inclusion of an auditory component. Audio is standard fare at museums, alternative art spaces and galleries. The sounds accompanying May’s “Going There” are of night, a creaking door, the heft of footsteps on the stairs, the sound of someone using the toilet, the striking of a match.
“Going There” is displayed in the windows of the gallery and I like that the light coming in gives the work a luminosity and scratchboard feel. But the work would have been more powerful if it had reached all the way to the floor and completely covered the windows.
And even though the auditory component is fresh, it is also problematic. There is only one CD player and headset. All five artists’ works are on that one CD, which is narrated by the downy voice of Nancy Stoffer. It would work better to have one CD player for each artwork. The 20-minute soundtrack is too long for a casual visitor, and there is too much music between tracks on the CD.
It’s too bad the gallery isn’t set up to handle auditory components in art, because they can be powerful. With May’s work, the sound correlates to the imagery and reinforces the discomfort the viewer has attempting to put together the snippets of memory shared.
The verbal element accompanying Karen Pittman’s paintings is an alphabet of words plucked from a thesaurus defining memory. “Studies” and “Work in Progress” are literal titles. Pittman displays an unfinished painting and comes into the center on Wednesdays to paint. The works are all blue abstracts with imagery of female genitalia.
Performance and conceptual artists, like Marina Abramovic, put themselves on display. Abramovic is the art.
An artist painting while others watch seems more sideshow than conceptual performance.
As for hanging unfinished work, Yoko Ono did it in 1965, but Ono’s performance called the unfinished paintings, “instruction” paintings and the viewer was invited to become part of the process by completing them.
It isn’t clear that Pittman’s “Work in Progress” is an ephemeral work. It is simply a bigger painting of the smaller “Studies.”
Sandra Butler takes the viewer back to Lewis & Clark Junior High through her “Can of Worms.” The work is a series of sculptures completed inside lockers. One is a ladder that reaches out of the first locker, the second a Tara Donovan-style grouping of prescription bottles, the third a shower curtain, the fourth a dripping sink and the fifth a window. In the soundtrack, the artist talks about the memories that are “too sad, too painful” – the dog hit by a car, the chemotherapy, the suicide. And she recalls the dripping faucet that ticked like a clock as she tried to sleep.
Jules Masterjohn exhibits wire mesh sacks of rocks in long and short phallic shapes. The rocks, she says, are markers of memory, an overused device. She describes the work as memory ganglia and recounts a childhood story to which she traces her distrust of authority. But there is no synapse between the rocks and the words. Without the words, the work doesn’t express memory.
“The Insistence of Memory” presents five perspectives of memory as the involuntary mental representation of past events. Butler achieves the most mn-emonic value through the dripping water in her sculpture. Memory is not just the representation of past events; it is the organization of cultural artifacts.
The exhibit as a whole is a bit too self-conscious and repetitive in defining memory. It never transforms into something more than the sum of its parts.
artsjournalist@mac.comLeanne Goebel is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the recipient of a 2007 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
Damien Hirst, the Contemporary Art Market, and the Critics
In art market, contemporary art on September 23, 2008 at 9:54 amLast week, on September 15 & 16, 2008, the same days the U.S. stock markets tanked and the world economy appeared to be on the brink, Damien Hirst did something revolutionary. He and Sotheby’s sold $200m of his “art.”
I put that term in quotes, because critic Robert Hughes weighed in on the “tacky” and “absurd” nature of Hirst’s art. Then he followed up by claiming that all that is wrong with the contemporary art world began when The Mona Lisa was toured in 1963 and people lined up to see the painting.
Hirst hit back in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald dismissing the critic as a “luddite.”
Hirst sold 223 lots in a direct to auction sale that bypassed his longtime dealers (some of whom actually bought work at the auction). The BBC reported on some of the prices and what sold and what didn’t here.
According the The Star before the huge sale last week, Hirst had only sold 95 works at auction in the past 12 months. The average price of those works was $475,000.
“The average on the first day (of auction), on Monday, was $2.6 million. The average on both days – heavily weighted to minor pieces, was $910,000. So, in a mature and declining market, they doubled the average price of the last year by combining the two brand names of Hirst and Sotheby’s. It’s staggering.”
Today, Germaine Greer of The Guardian weighed in on the issue, claiming that Hughes just didn’t get it. The art of Damien Hirst is the auction. The marketing. Hughes is clinging to a notion that artists still actually make their art. One of the artist’s Hughes embraces is Lucien Freud.
Lee Rosenbaum tried to clarify the spin provided by Sotheby’s on the results of the auction here.
And Roberta Smith provided the most lucid and accurate analysis of Hirst and his direct to auction approach in The New York Times.
Face it, art and money are deeply interconnected and Hirst is the CEO of a very successful business, churning out mass produced products like butterfly paintings and dot paintings and dead animals in formaldehyde.
Quoth Roberta: “Mr. Hirst claims, fatuously, that he is “democratizing” art, but he is really just expanding his client base to buyers who don’t know much about art.”
She continues:
Outside of Damien World, the auction’s most interesting evidence is less about the growing, “democratized” art market than about the fragmentation inherent in globalism. The art world can expand only so far before it splinters, and that disintegration has started. Whether they are named China, Moscow, Christie’s or Damien World, the various kingdoms of the art world are multiplying into slightly overlapping, more or less provincial spheres, which may have always been the case.
And Mr. Hirst may simply have morphed into the Thomas Kincaid of contemporary art, running a factory that produces major, minor and starter Hirsts. Eventually he will probably cut the auction houses out of the deal, too.
The most interesting tidbit for me in all of this, is that Damien Hirst is happily working alone in a cottage studio at his mansion, making paintings all on his own.
And laughing all the way to the bank.
Meth Lab Alchemy at Ballroom Marfa
In Marfa, contemporary art on September 18, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Entering the “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun” exhibit at Ballroom Marfa is like entering a bad movie set. It is pure fakery down to the plastic chicken hanging from the burned out kitchen oven—and that is why this show works. The exhibit is a labyrinth of assembled rooms, hallways, closets and observation platforms created by young New York and London based artists Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh.
The installation transforms Ballroom’s gallery spaces into a psychedelic fun house of delirium presenting counterculture and addiction as if they were some diorama at a Natural History Museum. Astrological charts hanging in the entry provide a clue to the alchemical transformation suggested in the rest of the exhibit. Each room suggests a state of transformation—beginning with the not so subtle burned out kitchen all charred with the odorous smell of death. It’s shock value at it finest.
The next room features red carpet, white walls, crown molding and gilded frames with hermetic photos of the rich and glamorous involved in esoteric rituals. It vaguely echoes the Upper East Side apartment of Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse from Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby.” But it also says clearly that drugs can be cool or drugs can be deadly.
From the gilded room one wanders into the seedy and hidden meth lab bubbling with concoctions of Sudafed, matches and kitty litter. The alchemy is clear, the transformation of these everyday items into the drug of choice sweeping across America and being mass produced in hotel rooms, apartments and houses in every neighborhood.
The exhibit attempts to channel the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture. Maybe it is the youth of the artists who were born in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s, but this is not peace, free love and mind-altering drugs—and possibly that is the point. What has been idealized is as worn as the shag carpeting and as stained as the furniture. Everything is dank and dirty.
The hippie kitchen with its jars filled with unfamiliar things, overturned and spilling across a table, a refrigerator opening to an empty room where ambient sounds echo is a strange place. Above is a geodesic dome, the ideal design for making more from less. Very Buckminster Fuller. And then beyond the kitchen is a ladder leading to a cramped loft filled with a jumbled collection of toys, clothing and a taxidermy fox. The exhibit made its point and this seems superfluous. This is just more material for the sake of the material and not for the sake of the art.
And then there is the repetition of the fox seen throughout the exhibit—a fox collar on the rich woman in the photograph, a fox tail hat. According to coat of arms research, the fox was a common symbol for the devil during the middle ages. Is it strewn throughout the exhibit to keep visitors on their toes? To remind them to stay alert and resist the temptation of alchemical transformation? It is a subtler reminder than the surveillance cameras and microphones that record and play back into that empty room beyond the refrigerator.
Hello Meth Lab in the Sun is alchemy. It transforms unlikely ingredients into a somewhat mystical experience.
Hello Meth Lab in the Sun: Freeman, Lowe, and Singh
Ballroom, 108 E. San Antonio St., Marfa, Texas
April 5 – August 3, 2008
Tara Donovan at The Met
In Art Museum, contemporary art on September 4, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Tara Donovan (American, b. 1969)Untitled (Mylar) (detail), 2007
Mylar and glue; 96 in. x 10 ft. x 1/2 in.
© Tara Donovan, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Photo: Dennis Crowley
Tara Donovan is known for turning common, manufactured objects into abstract sculptural installations. Her work typically has dimension and substance—a 42” cube made from straight pins or amoebic honeycomb clouds made from Styrofoam cups. But for her current installation on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Donovan conceived of an archipelago of Mylar tape, a web of metallic loops that seems to grow across three walls of the Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery.
Donovan has said in the past that she makes a rule and then repeats that rule. It is not her goal to repeat nature but to suggest nature and science. To create a space where permanently ordered unity becomes graspable.
At the Met, the repetition of metallic loops stretch across long walls, down to the floor and up to the ceiling, but do not breach the structural boundary of the room. It seems that the fingers of the amoebic form would spill onto the floor and reach across the ceiling, but this work is almost more like a giant map across the walls—a bit stark and minimal. Millions of dime-sized loops repeat and reflect the light.
Donovan is committed to process. She seems to have taken Donald Judd’s notion of the specific object and discovered how the inherent physical characteristics of an object might allow it to be transformed into art. In her installation at the Met she explores the multiplication of thousands or millions of Mylar tape loops to generate a powerful perceptual phenomenon with subtle atmospheric effect. Is it an organism overtaking the room?
Then there is the play of light off the Mylar and stark concrete floors of the gallery reflecting off the white walls and illuminating the room. The effect is of being bathed in some strange, otherworldly glow.
Donovan’s work is almost more about light than object. Inspired by the work of James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Donovan’s installation is one that requires silent contemplation and meditation, nearly impossible in the busy Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work may appear biomorphic and organic, but at its core, what Donovan is providing is light and space that impacts the eye, the body and the mind.
One could possible achieve a feeling of transcendence amidst this installation—a oneness with one of the tiny molecules of Mylar. But the three-sidedness of the room is like an open womb, no life can exist in that space, it becomes a pass through venue from stairs to contemporary gallery and the opportunity for contemplation with the art is nonexistent and the work becomes some attempt at a specific object that is not a painting, though it covers the walls and not a sculpture though it is made of dimensional material, not a map and not an organism, but merely millions of tiny loops of Mylar tape without dimension or form or purpose. Appealing, but not quite as well thought out and engaging as other work by Donovan.
artsjournalist@mac.com Leanne Goebel visited New York as a 2007 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant recipient. She is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.
Keeper of the keys: Cordalis runs FLC gallery, Durango Herald, Aug. 26, 2008
In Durango on September 1, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Rita Cordalis, director of the Fort Lewis College Art Gallery, stands in her exhibition space Thursday. Cordalis organizes exhibit shows on a very limited budget.Rita Cordalis likes her job. Designing exhibits is satisfying and fulfills her desire to take raw materials and turn them into something else.
“The way you place it and light it, everything else around it can make that piece shine,” Cordalis said from her office at Fort Lewis College.
Cordalis has been the director of the FLC Art Gallery since 1999. In 2006-2007, she also worked half-time at the Center of Southwest Studies to help them through a busyexhibition year. And she was instrumental in helping to coordinate the traveling exhibit of “The Jewelry of Ben Nighthorse” in 2005.
With an undergraduate degree from Fort Lewis and master’s in museum studies from University of Colorado-Boulder and her own creative aesthetic as a jewelry designer, Cordalis wears many hats. She manages the art office, coordinates gallery exhibits and works with students to teach them the basics of conservation, preservation, art handling and exhibition design. She does it all without a staff, and with a budget that would make even artists cringe – $2,000 a year.
“Our purpose primarily is education for the students. They are our primary user,” Cordalis said. “We reach out to the community as much as we can, but there are a few things that make it difficult for the community to come and visit us, and part of that is the hours that we’re open.”
Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The gallery is not open evenings and weekends. Without funding for a staff, there is no one to keep the doors open. Student interns still require staff oversight and Cordalis is the only staff person available. For Cordalis, running the gallery is a public service.
Unlike larger college galleries that host touring exhibitions and bring in outside work as part of the educational programming, Fort Lewis College doesn’t have the budget to pay for shipping or the rental fees for touring exhibits that average $2,000-$5,000 for even small shows. The size of the gallery also will not accommodate many of the touring exhibitions.
In the past, Cordalis has been able to work with CU-Boulder, and it has funded touring exhibits to Durango. She also will find artists and faculty from other nearby colleges to launch exhibits. She receives five or six proposals a year from all over the country, but often focuses on framed pieces that are easily transported and cost less to ship. Her budget allows only one exhibit of that nature each year.
“I’d love to have a sculpture show,” she said.
Shipping costs are prohibitive for larger works.
“Fortunately, artists like to show their work and we do have plenty of local artists to select from,” Cordalis said.
The gallery will host a sculpture exhibit this year featuring artists from Pagosa Springs.
Since its mission is primarily to focus on students, the gallery hosts several student shows each year including a Senior Art Majors Exhibition, an Annual Juried Student Exhibition and the FLC Art Scholarship Exhibition. A faculty show will open the exhibition season September 5.
When asked why she didn’t pursue more grant funding to help boost her budget, Cordalis explained that grant writing is time consuming.
“I have looked into them, but there are not many available to pay for exhibitions, and most require matching funds,” she said.
She is hopeful that with Hillary Raab, a part-time staff person coming on board two days a week this year, she will have time to do grant writing. But first, she needs to raise money to replace the entire lighting system in the gallery, which is obsolete. She estimates the cost will be more than $10,000.
“It would be great to have a budget,” Cordalis said. “There are great shows out there. It would be great to bring them to Durango. But you need staff, gallery sitters. There is quite a lot of work that goes along. You don’t just hang it up and it’s there. You have to commit someone’s time, full time, to work on it.”
artsjournalist@mac.comLeanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.
