21st Century
Meanwhile, in America...
March 27 2012
Picture: LA Times
...the negative campaigning has even spread to art. Or rather, 'art'. This is called 'One Nation under Socialism', and shows President Obama (that well-known communist) burning a copy of the US constitution.
Hirst, the art market, and keeping up values
March 19 2012
Picture: Andrew Testa/Newsweek
In The Guardian, the writer Hari Kunzru casts a thoughtful glance at Hirst values, and looks at how both dealers and institutions can help keep them up:
If I were Larry Gagosian (usually cited in power lists as the contemporary art world's most important player) and I wanted to help my top client shore up the value of a body of work that was losing its lustre as its fashionable 90s aesthetic began to look tired, and the penny started to drop among collectors that at every other dinner party they went to they saw something on the wall that looked awfully similar to the something on their own wall, what would I do?
Long-term value in the art world depends in a certain raw way on scarcity, but is largely produced through a delicate process by which aesthetic value (determined by curators and critics) intersects with market value, determined ultimately by auction prices. One point at which these two types of value intersect is in provenance. The story behind an object – its past owners, where it has been shown, its place in the story of the artist's career, and so on – confers both types of value. A landmark show, geographically dispersed in an unprecedented way, is bound to be remembered as a significant moment in Hirst's career as a global art star. When that show is accompanied by a critical apparatus, chiefly a catalogue raisonnée (a meticulously documented list of works shown, accompanied by scholarly essays), those works become part of a canon and a magical walled garden of significance is erected around them.
As Francis Outred, Christie's European head of contemporary art, told the Economist, this catalogue "could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume". The pharmaceutical paintings are frankly too financially valuable to too many people for their actual status (banal, mass-produced, decorative) to intrude on the consensus fiction that they are scarce and important. The owners of the 1,100 paintings not in the Gagosian show should be nervous, though. They just lost their AAA rating.
Presumably, the forthcoming Tate show will fuel the beast for a little longer. Meanwhile, even I hear rumours of auction houses actively turning away Hirsts at the moment. There are just too many. And if they all went into auction at the same time...
On Tate's new seeds
March 5 2012
Picture: Graham Turner/Guardian
A reader writes:
To answer your question, yes!
Perhaps the reason behind the Tate/ArtFund decision not to disclose the price is that they are embarrassed. However, as you rightly say, that is not a valid reason. If they believe in the 'work' they must be able to defend the expenditure.
For the ArtFund to collude in this, when they are always begging for funds from their members, is a disgrace.
Strong stuff. I've asked the Art Fund if there was any reason behind not releasing the extent of their contribution. But answer comes there none.
Of course, it is possible that the secrecy is to protect a super low price paid to Mr Weiwei, which would be seen as lowering the market rate for his seeds. But why would the artist want his benevolence to be secret?
It would be interesting to know what the going rate for Weiwei's seeds was before the recent Tate installation, to compare with what they fetched after it. I suspect, in other words, that in return for all that publicity and establishment endorsement, Mr Weiwei owes the Tate a big favour...
Update: it has been hinted to me that the lack of disclosure has something to do with the artist's recent run-in with the Chinese authorities. Presumably, if that is the case, Weiwei won't be selling anything publicly at auction for a while either.
Tate buys Wei Wei sunflower seeds - but won't say for how much
March 5 2012
Picture: Graham Turner/Guardian
The Tate has bought 8m of Ai Wei Wei's porcelain sunflower seeds. More details in The Guardian. But, intriguingly:
The Tate acquired the work with the help of a grant from the Art Fund charity, but has not revealed the price.
Why not? For more on Wei Wei seed prices, see my earlier post.
Update: the ArtFund, which supported the purchase, has put up a statement on their site, but also makes no mention of the cost. This appears to be unusual for the Fund. Their own conditions state:
The Art Fund may publicise the amount and purpose of a grant in whatever way it thinks fit, other than in relation to grants for the purchase of objects coming up at auction or in other cases in which the Art Fund agrees that it would be appropriate to waive this right. The Art Fund will publish the cost of all Art Fund-assisted Objects unless the Beneficiary can satisfy the Art Fund that there is a valid reason why such information should be withheld.
I'm intrigued as to what the 'valid reason' in this case is, if there is one. If public money is involved, it had better be a good one, don't you think?
Guffwatch
March 2 2012
Picture: Christie's
Just as I was thinking 'I haven't done a Guffwatch for a while', along comes Christie's New York with some glorious candidates from their forthcoming ''First Open' Post-War Contemporary Art Sale'.
Here's the introduction to Wade Guyton's Untitled (above, inkjet printed on linen, executed 2006), estimated at $200,000 - $300,000:
A candid example from the artist's ongoing series of "printer drawings," Untitled poses a poignant double query of form and function. By folding the primed linen in half and repetitively feeding it through a large-format inkjet printer, Guyton performs an obsessive ritual that can only be realized by modern means of photographic reproduction. And all the while, the artist is also paying a personal tribute to form by referencing modernism and conceptualism.
Phoney words for a phoney picture. Think of it this way, if Nick Penny wrote verbiage like that to describe Titian's Diana and Callisto, we'd laugh at him.
Still, proof that even those skilled in art guff can sometimes struggle to produce anything meaningful may be found in Christie's catalogue entry for the top lot in their sale, a Hirst spot painting estimated at $600-800,000. The entry is simply a lame and seemingly random excerpt from a 1996 interview with Hirst. Here's a snippet:
Damien Hirst: Imagine a world of spots. Every time I do a painting a square is cut out. They regenerate. They're all connected.
Stuart Morgan: Why are you cutting out squares? Is this a cipher for infinity?
DH: It's an idea of painting and I've always wanted to paint but this is more sculpture than painting. I guess it's infinity.
SM: And in front much smaller versions of infinity, like people dying. [...] How do you feel about nature?
DH: I've seen better (laughs). There isn't anything else.
In case you were wondering:
First Open is the perfect opportunity for new and established collectors who are eager to discover emerging artists and ready to explore lesser-known works by famous artists.
In other words, the not so good stuff (laughs).
More nudity
February 20 2012
Picture: Norwich Evening News
This time in Norwich, where the police intervened to 'give words of advice' after two male nudes by artist Peter Kavanagh appeared in 'SinSins' shop window. The pictures were then removed. And it isn't the first time Norwich police have had to act:
In January, a display depicting a mannequin urinating on a wall had to be taken down from a shop window at clothes shop Philip Browne in Guildhall Hill, after a single complaint to police.
'Now, lot 72, the vaguely dodgy porn...'
February 16 2012
Picture: Christie's
For a while now, Christie's has been doing a nice line in Russian porn contemporary nudes. For example, the above 'Sleeping Beauty, 2009' by Aydemir Saidov is currently on offer at South Kensington (est. £1,500-£2,000). There must be quite a market for this kind of thing, as there's usually a few sold every month. But I wonder if it's quite what James Christie had in mind, back in 1766.
Queueing for Hockney
February 16 2012
Picture: BG
How many living artists can do this?
Hockney at the RA - 5/5 for fun
February 13 2012
Picture: David Hockney, 'More Crooked Timber on Woldgate', 2008, charcoal on paper.
The critics may have disliked David Hockney's show of new landscapes at the Royal Academy, but I thought it was excellent. Not every work will be seen as a masterpiece, but then the exhibition was never intended to be one of the 'best of' shows we're used to. Instead, it is a display of mostly new works, in a new style, of a curiously new genre in contemporary art; a great British painter painting Britain. In that respect we can allow the artist some failures in return for his certain successes.
Above all, the exhibition is great fun. Giant canvasses combine colour, passion, quirky perspective and sharp natural observation with a flair rarely seen these days. You can't fail to leave without a smile. One thing I immediately noticed in the exhibition was the noise. Normally, contemporary art exhibitions are muted affairs as visitors mentally struggle to understand whatever blob, squiggle or lump it is they are supposed to admire, or admit to their bemusement and wander silently by. But at Hockney almost everyone has a ready comment about each picture (in my experience, overwhelmingly positive comments), and the emerging hubbub of pleasure is a delight to hear.
That said, my favourite works in the show were not the paintings, but the drawings, which on the whole are the best works. Some of them are mesmeric, and reveal just how good an artist Hockney can be when he really tries. I found myself reminded of Van Gogh's charcoal landscapes; both artists share a similarly idiosyncratic view of nature, and are possessed of a similarly fluent ease with which to capture it. Happily, I'm not the only one who likes Hockney's drawings, for in Brian Sewell's otherwise damning review of the exhibition, he let slip this rare nugget of praise:
There was a time in the 1970s when I thought him one of the best draughtsmen of the 20th century, wonderfully skilful, observant, subtle, sympathetic, spare, every touch of pencil, pen or crayon essential to the evocation of the subject, whether it be a portrait or light flooding a sparse room; nothing has made me change that view, but Hockney has tried very hard.
So, do go to the exhibition if you can. In the meantime, you can see other recent Hockney landscape drawings here.
Spotmania - the winner is...
January 26 2012
Picture: Art Ruby
Over 600 people have now signed up to take the 'Damien Hirst Complete Spot Challenge' (see all 11 Spot exhibitions around the world, get a free print) - but if you were one of them, and wanted to be the first, then too late: Valentine Uhovski, of website Art Ruby, has beaten you to it.
Here is how Valentine described crossing the finishing line in London:
[...] the final cab ride to Davies [Street] with our driver Peter felt jittery. Maybe it was the realization that this undertaking (comprised of more miles in one week than you’d want to imagine) was ending after a twenty minute cab drive. At Mayfair, [...] we got our historic final stamp, posed for more photos, and then got to absorb the intimate, final spots show, filled with exhilarating, tiny (mostly circa 1996) fellas.
How did it feel to finally end this passage? Well, we crashed for the first time in 8 days at our nearby hotel at Oxford Street. But only for sixty minutes. Then we felt proud, relieved, spent, happy, hopeful and alert… while answering dozens of friends’ e-mails and updating the Twitter board. But art journey will continue tomorrow with more shows here in London…with absolutely no stamps on the line.
Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper's Christina Ruiz is taking a more sedate pace, and has so far got to Athens. There she described how only six Spot paintings are on display, and:
[...] Christina Papadopoulou, who is manning the desk, tells me some are for sale but declines to say which, if any, have sold. My guess is none of them have. There are of course major contemporary art collectors in Greece, not least Dakis Joannou and Dimitris Daskalopoulos, but if they liked Hirst’s spot paintings, they’d own one by now. This global spot extravaganza is designed to appeal to new collectors and they’re probably in short supply in Athens right now. Even those with money will balk at the perceived frippery of spending it on coloured spots as the economy goes down the toilet.
In our gallery, we mark sold pictures with a red spot. But I suppose marking sold Hirst Spots with a spot would just be taking the piss.
New sculpture for the 'Fourth Plinth'
January 24 2012
Picture: James O jenkins, via Artdaily.org
A reader has alerted me to the new 'Fourth Plinth' commission, by Scandinavian art duo 'Elmgreen and Dragset'. 'Powerless Structures' will be unveiled next month. Here's the blurb:
The child is elevated to the status of a historical hero in line with the iconography of the other statues in the square. Instead of acknowledging the heroism of the powerful, however, the work celebrates the heroism of growing up and questions the tradition of monuments predicated on military victory or defeat. There is not yet a history to commemorate here – only a future to hope for.
I'm looking forward to seeing it - it looks like a nice piece of sculpture. Coincidentally, Will Self had a piece in The Guardian recently called 'Why I hate Trafalgar Square'*, in which the only thing he likes about the Square is the Fourth Plinth idea:
Of the recent Fourth Plinth sculptures only Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant has gone any way towards bending the square's rectilinear rigidity. With its subversion of the conventionally standardised representations of the body the square specialises in, and its bright white marble – the albedo of which attracted a good proportion of the flying rats – Quinn's statue made a stab at the flinty heart of the Brit establishment.
Unfortunately it couldn't possibly penetrate far enough. What's needed are cafes all over the gaff, open-air and serving excellent espresso; top-notch strolling and – unlicensed – buskers; Horatio's nob chopped off halfway down; at least one of the lions upended; an open-air market; some good ethnic food stalls; and possibly a snake charmer or 20.
My favourite Fourth Plinth piece so far was Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo - a quite brilliant work which suited the scale of the Square perfectly. But I have a faint hope that the plinth will one day have a permanent statue of the Queen on it.
* I thought only The Daily Mail began articles with 'Why I hate..'?
Why Damien Hirst uses assistants
January 18 2012
Picture: Kyle Chayka/ArtInfo
From an interview in GalleristNY:
“I keep getting this thing about painting your own work,” he said. “You don’t paint the spots and all that shit. I’m doing this other stuff where I’ve got two guys in Italy carving a sculpture out of granite. So I’ve made a plaster, working in the foundry, of two figures. One of them is based on Michelangelo’s Slaves, the other on the sculpture of a female slave by Hiram Powers.
“These two guys are amazing granite carvers and they are working day in, day out. And it’s like two and a half years to make one. And it’s an edition of three. So that’s 10 years, with an A.P.”—Artist’s Proof. “If wanted to do it I would have to go and study for 10 years, five years. To learn how to carve granite. Fucking hell! If these guys live to be 70 they are going to be able to make 12 of these. And that’s their whole careers. And that’s your whole life gone. So you have to get people.”
Michelangelo didn't.
Hockney at the RA: 'what happened?'
January 17 2012
Picture: Royal Academy/David Hockney, 'Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006', oil on 6 canvases.
Alastair Sooke in the The Telegraph is not convinced by the new blockbuster, and gives the show three stars out of five:
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one. Moreover, they resemble the sorts of landscapes that we expect from amateur Sunday painters. Hockney is anything but that – yet whatever game he is playing here eludes me.
The iPad drawings from 2011 are similarly irksome. Some people get excited because they were made using a piece of fashionable technology (a tablet computer with a touch screen). Yet the technique is surely immaterial – as Hockney says, an iPad is just another tool for an artist, like a brush.
I love the bracketed explanation of what an iPad is, presumably for the Telegraph's more disconnected readers. Over at The Guardian Adrian Searle is similarly unimpressed. It all seems a little unkind to me. Here, at last, is a great British painter painting Britain. Isn't that, on rarity value alone, worth praise?
Spotballs
January 16 2012
Picture: Andrew Testa/Newsweek
From Blake Gopnik in Newsweek:
Hirst once said he imagined these works as depicting a kind of alternate reality covered entirely in dots, but I’d say that he’s painted precisely the universe we’re already in. Doesn’t high-school physics tell us that the world is just a void filled with atoms? Hirst’s atomistic artwork captures that worldview, which dates back to ancient Greece, and ignores all the higher-level order that normally attracts and distracts us. Hirst’s spots give an atom’s-eye view of how the world really is, and of how little it’s about human needs or concerns.
Spotmania
January 12 2012
Picture: Kyle Chayka/ArtInfo
Yesterday saw the opening of Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011. The exhibition features some 300 paintings in eleven galleries across the world, from LA to Hong Kong. There are big spots, and there are small spots, there are coloured ones and there are monochrome ones. Five of the paintings are by Hirst himself, the rest were made by anonymous assistants. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Hirst posed for photographs with his fingers up his nose (above). A Complete Spot Challenge has been organised by the Gagosian galleries, hosts of the exhibition; anyone who visits all eleven locations will get a signed spot print by Hirst ‘dedicated personally to you’.
I have a hope that somewhere, in a parallel universe, none of this is happening.
This post has been sponsored by Lemsip.
"All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally."
January 3 2012
Picture: Guardian
In a riposte to those artists who rely on others to make their work for them (Koons, Hirst et al), David Hockney has ensured that his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy is preceded by the above statement. He also said, in The Guardian;
"I used to point out, at art school you can teach the craft; it's the poetry you can't teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft."
Sounds like a pretty accurate summary of what's wrong with art schools these days.
Liverpool acquires a Banksy
December 15 2011
Picture: Banksy.co.uk
Spray a squirt of white paint and an aeroplane stencil on an old building in Liverpool, and hey presto, instant publicity, and a valuable wall. Cue the debates about whether to preserve it or wash it off.
Damien Hirst - there's much, much more to come
December 13 2011
Picture: Prudence Cuming Associates
Artinfo has an amusing article about Damien Hirst's forthcoming 'Spot' exhibitions. In it, Hirst is quoted on the subject of how many works he produces:
[Hirst] gave a bizarre but intriguing anecdote to the L.A. Times about working with Larry [Gagosian]: “I remember Larry once phoned me up, and he said he was worried about my production,” Hirst told the paper. “He said: You are making too many paintings. And then, at the end of the conversation, he said: We need more paintings.”
Hirst's tale does touch on an important question about the upcoming show: what effect will this flood of spot paintings have on Hirst’s market? The artist doesn’t seem too concerned. “I've looked at the amount of artworks I've made in my life: 4,800, not including prints,” he told the Times. “I know Warhol did 10,000 not including prints, and Picasso did 40,000. So I have a way to go.”
Yikes.
Things you can't quite believe they meant
November 23 2011
Picture: Damien Hirst/Prudence Cuming Associates
You will be able to see the skull in a completely different context, without the hype and speculation. We all think we know this work through the media. But if you are actually with the work, and can experience it, smell it, and I shouldn’t say this, but touch it – it will be very different.
Chris Dercon, director of Tate Modern, speaking as part of the hype and speculation over the forthcoming Hirst retrospective.
Art History Futures: the £100k kid
November 13 2011
Picture: Telegraph
Twelve pictures by nine year old Kieron Williamson (above) have sold for over £100,000 within ten minutes of his latest exhibition opening. Kieron, who lives in Norfolk and sounds rather like a young Tom Gainsborough, said:
I think these are my best paintings yet.
I don't know whether his work is a sound investment (yet), but it's nice to see people getting excited about a young artist who can actually paint. You can see more of his work, which is genuinely good, here.
