Art history futures - 3D printing
June 18 2012
Video: Reason.com
Quite incredible. More details here.
Guffwatch - how they do it
June 18 2012
This is invaluable - a former intern at Sotheby's, Alice Gregory, lifts the lid on those impenetrable contemporary catalogue entries:
After a few months on the job, I was assigned a new duty—writing the essays that are printed beneath and between the reproduced images in the sale catalogue. [...] The essay copy is mostly a formality, but it plays a role in the auction house’s overall marketing strategy. The more text given to an individual piece, the more the house seems to value it. I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades. I described impasto—paint thickly applied to a canvas, often with a palette knife—almost pornographically and joked with friends on Gchat that I was being paid to write pulp. Pulp was exactly what I was writing. It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace. Through its catalogue copy (and for a time, through me), it makes one small concession to the art world’s native tongue.
The £670,000 Greek fake at Sotheby's?
June 15 2012
Picture: Artinfo/Sotheby's
Readers may remember the case of a Greek art collector suing Sotheby's for selling him not one but two alleged fakes. Now, Artinfo reports a court has found against Sotheby's with regard to one of the pictures, the above 'Virgin and Child' (above) sold as by Constantinos Parthenis for £670,000, and has orderd the auctioneers to pay Diamantis Diamantides £950,000 in damages. Sotheby's are appealing against the decision, and say:
"It stands to reason that an auction house which sells art worth billions of dollars per year and relies on its reputation to secure consignments and purchasers would not put its business at risk by knowingly selling forged works."
This is a cut and paste response from their previous denials of the case. At the same time, the market for Greek art has fallen through the floor. Pictures are struggling to sell for a fraction of what they did before the 2008 crash. So, paradoxically, Mr Diamantides' pictures are worth more as fakes (if he can indeed force Sotheby's to repay him his money) than they are as the real thing.
Come to London - buy Old Masters!
June 15 2012
Video: MPW
If you like Old Master paintings, then London in July is the place to be. Especially if you want to buy one. All the catalogues are now online for the Old Master auctions; Sotheby's here, Christie's here, and Bonhams here. I'll post on these sales in more detail once the viewings are open. The top lot of the week is John Constable's The Lock, the sale of which has already been guaranteed.
Also tempting you to London is Master Paintings Week (29 June-6 July), where the city's best dealers open their galleries for extended opening times, and put on a series of exhibitions. To help guide you round the galleries, you can download the Master Paintings Week app here. At Philip Mould & Company we shall be having an exhibition of British royal portraits. And finally, there's the Masterpiece fair in Chelsea, where we shall also be exhibiting.
No other city offers the Old Master enthusiast so much in one week, and I hope to see some of you around. For me, it's by far the busiest week of the year; preparing 2 exhibitions, viewing 6 auctions, and hopefully buying and selling many more pictures. So if I look a little bit zonked, forgive me.
Art history futures - marketing your child prodigy
June 14 2012
Video: Agora Gallery/via Art Daily
Regular readers may remember the debut 'show' in New York of four-year old artist Aelita Andre, whose paintings fetched thousands of dollars. Now the prices must be going up, for, aged five, she appears in this glitzy film, complete with health-spa music, to advertise another New York solo show. I hope Aelita sells lots of pictures, now and in the future. But seeing the video above, it's hard not to feel sorry for the kid.
Art history futures - pyscho interactive machines
June 14 2012
Picture: Galerie Rudiger Schottle
Introducing Rodney Graham's Mini Rotary Pyscho Opticon, 2008, available this week at Art Basle:
The so called “Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon” by Rodney Graham is a kind of readymade—a replica of a freestanding kinetic op-art sculpture used as a mechanized back-drop for an early 1970’s Belgian television show on which the band Black Sabbath appeared performing their song ‘Paranoid”. The work comprises a large spinning disc behind a wall with five holes cut in it. The disc contains five discs (each containing a black and white op-art pattern) which are visible through these holes while the disc spins, creating a crude ‘psychedelic’ optical effect. The apparatus was designed to be pedal-powered by a bicyclist. Therefore the work has a high finish and is interactive. In an exhibition context viewers will be able to operate the machine. The Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon is designed by a master bicycle designer.
Yours for £180,000.
Is the future of art history 'digital?'
June 14 2012
Picture: NoMatter/Freakingnews.com
The fabulous Kress Foundation has published a new report; Transitioning to a Digital World - Art History, its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship. Alas, it isn't particularly well written (for example, it would be helpful if it started with a definition of what it is meant by 'digital art history'), but a central summary reveals:
The findings reveal disagreements in the art history community about the value of digital research, teaching, and scholarship. Those who believe in the potential of digital art history feel it will open up new avenues of inquiry and scholarship, allow greater access to art historical information, provide broader dissemination of scholarly research, and enhance undergraduate and graduate teaching. Those who are skeptical doubt that new forms of art historical scholarship will emerge from the digital environment. They remain unconvinced that digital art history will offer new research opportunities or that it will allow them to conduct their research in new and different ways.
Who are these art history Luddites?! I'm guessing none of them read this blog. Can anyone seriously think art history will not be advanced by 'digital' means - ie, the ability to find information quickly, and use high-resolution images? Or am I just being a geeky art history blogger?
Versailles in 3D
June 13 2012
Picture: Versailles 3D
An incroyable new website.
Update: Didier Rykner at Tribune De L'Art spots a few howlers in the narration.
'It's a no-brainer'
June 13 2012
Picture: BG
The CEO of digital art specialists s[edition], Robert Norton, has written an article for Wired magazine calling on the UK government to persuade museums to abolish reproduction restrictions. Regular readers will know the arguments well from my earlier posts, but Norton also focuses on Yale Universty's experience in liberating itself from the copyright beast:
Now is the time for the coalition government to act boldly and herald in an equally exciting new chapter for the visual arts online: to scrap licensing fees for public-domain works of art. These quasi-copyright assertions and licences are the digital equivalent of museum entry fees, and they prevent us from using, learning from and simply enjoying these art resources.
A digital renaissance in the visual arts is under way. Improvements in screen resolution coupled with faster broadband and more sophisticated digitisation technologies will create compelling ways to access and experience art online. New initiatives such as Your Paintings, a joint effort by the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC to catalogue the UK's collection of 200,000 oil paintings, or the Google Art Project, which has now attracted over 150 museums across 40 countries, allow online visitors unprecedented access to artworks and provide new levels of brushwork detail.
Last year Yale University became the first art institution to announce it would provide licence- and royalty-free access to digital images of public-domain materials in all Yale collections. Far from having a price calculator, it makes no charge for downloading the 20MB, 300dpi TIFF file of any of Yale's public-domain works.
I spoke to Kenneth Hamma, consulting information architect at the Yale Center for British Art, who described the two-step process in adopting this open-access policy. The directors of the museums and libraries first convinced themselves this was the right thing to do partly because the licensing revenues were small, but more importantly because they didn't feel it was their responsibility to determine how these images could be used. After this idea was presented to the officers of the university, they took five minutes to make a decision. It was a no-brainer.
A Rembrandt at Christie's
June 12 2012
Video: Christie's
Now this is how you do it - compare this knowledgeable, focused and understated video by Christie's co-chairman Richard Knight on Rembrandt's Bust of a Man in a Gorget and a Cap (coming up in July at £8m-£12m) with the effort Sotheby's put out for their Damien Hirsts.
A Hirst sales pitch
June 12 2012
Video: Sotheby's
Unintentionally, the Sotheby's expert offering multi-million pound Hirsts hits the nail on the head:
'What fascinates Damien so much is the blind credence we human beings have...'
Update - a reader writes:
[It's] the art equivalent of your dad dancing to Coldplay.
Another reader takes me to task for preferring the Christie's Rembrandt video over Sotheby's Hirst one:
With reference to the promotional filmettes of the Rembrandt and the Hirst, you are letting your views on the artists influence your views on the films themselves. Whatever you think of the works of art behind talked about, the piece about the Hirst is actually very sober in the words it uses, while the Rembrandt video uses the words genius, iconic, virtuosity, seminal and astonishing all within the space of a few seconds. Just what we art historians were taught not to do. Knowledgable? He's reading from a script. Understated? It's all sales talk, with a bit of art history-lite thrown in. And you took that quote about blind credence totally out of context.
I am not trying to defend Damien Hirst, only to keep you on your toes!
Personally, I think the key difference here is that Rembrandt's art deserves to be described with the words 'seminal' and 'iconic', whereas Hirst's does not (yet). And I think it's a shame that art historians are (or rather were) taught not be enthusiastic about their subjects by using words like 'genius' and 'iconic'. If you like something, say it.
Another reader also pulls me up on the quote above from the Hirst video:
I think very selective quotes are usually a bad idea, speaking as a former lawyer, so was a bit surprised to see the Hirst one.
The quote from the video may have been judiciously selected, but if I may plead in defence, I did preface its selection by writing that the Sotheby's expert was expressing a view 'unintentionally'. I think one can make a case that Hirst is interested in society's 'blind credence' on a number of levels, not least in its capacity to believe in the value of his art. On which point, let me remind readers that I hold a secret admiration for Hirst himself; it's just the associated guff people in the art world attach to him that grates.
Splendid news
June 12 2012
Picture: Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery
I mean, really splendid news, on a number of levels. I recently mentioned Birmingham Museum's quest to raise £900,000 for the acquisition of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Dr John Ash (above). In these austere times, it looked like a big ask. But - praise be - the Heritage Lottery Fund has stepped forward with a whopping £675,000, leaving just £50,000 to be raised.
Is this more evidence (after the generous £5.9m support of the Ashmolean's Manet campaign) that the Heritage Lottery Fund is at last looking more kindly on acquisitions (as AHN has long hoped for)? If so, then it promises to be one of the most important developments in the UK's recent cultural history. Not only can museums begin to think seriously about acquisitions again, but we might also be able to save some of the important pictures that are being sold overseas.
Extreme souvenir hunting
June 12 2012
Whilst looking for a video for the story below on the Trevi Fountain, I came across this choice piece of cultural tourism, at the Moro Fountain in Rome.
Damage to the Trevi Fountain in Rome
June 12 2012
Rome's Trevi Fountain shows signs of age by euronews-en
More details here.
Imagining Jane Austen
June 11 2012
Picture: Mail
There was a flurry of news about the Rice portrait of 'Jane Austen' this weekend. The portrait has long been claimed as Jane Austen thanks to its apparent provenance. But more recently the identity has been questioned, most notably by the National Portrait Gallery in London, and not least on grounds of date. It is thought to have been painted too late to show Jane as a girl. Jane was bown in 1775, but the portrait, stylistically and in the fashion represented, seems to date from the early 19th Century.
The family who own the picture have been on a long quest to prove that it does indeed show Jane. Their latest evidence that it is her, which hit the headlines this weekend, is based on a series of inscriptions found on old photographs of the painting. These prove, say the owners, that the portrait was by Ozias Humphry - an attribution which is important since it would push the date back to when Jane was a girl. The story goes that these highly important inscriptions have since been removed by over-zealous restorers. See more details in The Guardian here, and the background on the dedicated Rice portrait site here.
The Daily Mail concluded their report on the new evidence:
If the portrait is confirmed as being Austen, it may be an embarrassment to the National Portrait Gallery, which granted the picture a licence for sale abroad on the basis that it could not be the writer.
The gallery chose not to comment.
The NPG need not fear embarrassment, however. I applaud the owner's attempts to prove their painting is Jane. But I'm afraid these apparent inscriptions in old photos of the painting, which I have been shown, are (to me at least) not compelling. Nor is this the first time apparently conclusive 'writing' on the painting, seen in questionably interpreted and magnified old photographs, has been claimed. For the best critique of the painting's identity, read former NPG chief curator Jacob Simon's brief note here. In particular, he deals with the question of the apparent inscriptions written on the painting:
The [Rice Portrait] website claims that the portrait is signed several times in monogram, inscribed JANE and dated 1788 but, from my lengthy experience of examining British portraits, these apppear to be purely incidental and meaningless markings. They were not noted by Thomas Harding Newman, owner of the portrait in 1880, who attributed it to Zoffany. They do not appear in photographs taken by Emery Walker in about 1910, despite claims to the contrary on the website. They were not apparent to the professional painting conservator who examined the portrait with others at Henry Rice's request before cleaning it in 1985. They were not apparent to Christie's experienced cataloguing staff in 2007 when the portrait was put up for sale in New York, despite an earlier report of initials on the portrait.
View from the artist no.11 - answer
June 11 2012
Picture: Wikipaintings
Well done everone - lots of correct answers for the location, St Petersburg. But not many of you got the artist, Alexey Bgolyubov, painted c.1850.
The Emperor's new... exhibition
June 11 2012
There's an exhibition dedicated to invisible art at the Hayward Gallery in London at the moment (really). A reader writes:
I agree.
Update - another reader writes:
This happens when people stop learning art history.
Things you shouldn't use as a coaster
June 8 2012
Picture: Christie's
Top of the list - drawings by Rembrandt. This slightly soiled example is yours for £50,000-£80,000 at Christie's next month. Of course, if it could be proved to have been Rembrandt's own coaster, then add a nought!
Update - it might indeed by Rembrandt's coaster (of sorts), for Christie's write:
The circular stain is an iron-gall ink stain, probably from the base of an ink-pot, so (while we can never know for sure) there is certainly a chance that the stain could be from the artist’s studio.
Christie's $12m vs Sotheby's $5m
June 8 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
Sotheby's New York Old Master sale last night made a total of $5.2m (with preimum), less than half Christie's total of $12.5m earlier in the week. The top lot was a curious 14th C Madonna by the Pseudo Dalmasio Degli Scannabecchi (above), which sold for $794,500. The Guido Reni fragment I mentioned previously made $122,500.
Guffwatch
June 8 2012
Picture: Ellen Jong
A reader sends in this gem, from an exhibition at the Allegra La Viola Gallery in New York of photographs by Ellen Jong. You wouldn't know it from the blurb, but the photos mainly show someone's erection.
The Invisible Line uses photography, video and poetry to document how Jong remembers falling in love over a four-year period leading up to her wedding day. The work is intimate and echoes the bold and provocative sentiment of Nan Goldin and Tracey Emin, but with the snapshot aesthetic of William Eggelston. Highly adept at interjecting private moments into a public space, Jong’s work provides a window into realized and uninhibited displays of passion.Where most people fail at being able to completely let go, Jong travels deep into the nether lands of love where her heart acts as a compass.
The photographs on view mimic pieces to a larger puzzle, offering micro-details of when and how Jong’s general existence and personal transition began to crystallize. Between the creation of each image and its pixel and grain, is a gesture of emotion that captures a dissolve and discovery of self, simultaneously. The images are uninhibited and demonstrate a form of passion seldom experienced in contemporary art, but universal to all.
Classic guff language. Take an abstract concept, cloak it in art-world legitimacy by name-checking other better-known artists, and then intersperse with useful guff-words like 'simultaneously'. In guff-land, things are always happening 'simultaneously'; it's a word that allows you to connect the totally random and unconnected.
