Even art takes a hit in economic downturn
Tens of millions of dollars of art went unsold at major auctions in Hong Kong and London in September and October. Then with the Nov. 3 start of the important fall season in New York, sales of Impressionist and Modern paintings at Sotheby’s came in more than $100 million below the auction house’s low estimate.
This is pretty disgusting. Marco Evaristti wants public to feed it to goldfish. Pushing the envelope for his fifteen minutes is what this cretin has brought his art to in service of his ambition. What a creep.
Death row inmate gives his body to art - The Art Newspaper
Death row inmate gives his body to art
This is a great essay from a writer that just completed a book about Watteau.
Dancing with Watteau
He understood more than any other great master that we experience life piece by piece, that our most intense experiences are fragmentary, that the center does not hold.
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Clockwise from top left: Shi Xinning’s “Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition” (2000-2001), Wang Guangyi’s “Chanel” (2005), Yue Minjun’s “Untitled” (1998), Zhang Huan’s “Family Tree” (2000)Mao Crazy
There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.
Postcards from Nowhere
It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money. All this sensational commerce is fueled by the anti-aesthetics that were born nearly a century ago among the Dadaists, and have by now morphed into the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koonss stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse. A critic in The New York Times described one of these glistening metal doggies, currently on display on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a “masterpiece.” The artists involved–beginning with Duchamp and including Rauschenberg, Warhol, Salle, and Koons–celebrate, or toy with, a number of apparently contradictory thoughts: that art is nothing; that art can be anything; that randomness and order are the same thing; that art has no particular place in the world; that art can be found anyplace in the world; that art is just another commercial product, like tennis balls and washing machines.
Remembering Rauschenberg (1925-2008)
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Of the dead, speak no evil. But of the works of the dead, it seems to me that we have a perfect right to say whatever we think. And the fact is that Robert Rauschenberg’s work has been protected by a sort of critical silence for many years now–at least what little negative comment there has been is more or less ignored. The merest suggestion that the juxtapositions of objects and images in Rauschenberg’s paintings, sculptures, and prints are nothing more than arbitrary has left one open to the accusation of being a conservative or a reactionary.
Pain as an Art Form - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog
Pain as an Art Form
Jonnie Andersen - Los Angeles Times
Jonnie Andersen takes a look at one of the images she took during a photo shoot in December at the Travelers Motel in Las Vegas. Andersen, 32, spent two years photographing the city’s prostitutes for a hardcover book, “The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology.
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