Open Eyed Dreams

Joseph Beuys’ I Like America & America Likes Me..

2011-06-26T00:08:00.000-07:00

In I Like America & America Likes Me, one of Joseph Beuys‘ numerous performance pieces — or “Actions” as he called them — he lived and coexisted with a coyote for three straight days, in a room at the Rene Block Gallery in New York.

Garbed in his signature attire comprised of a felt hat, a fishing vest, a long sleeved white shirt and a pair of jeans, Beuys set his eyes on every movement the coyote made during the entire three days — movements which were either caused or manipulated by Beuys — movements which were neither inherently nor even remotely natural from the coyote’s standpoint.

When Beuys swathed his entire body in a large, over-sized felt blanket, with nothing but his wooden cane protruding from a slit just large enough for his eyes to peer though, the coyote, eagerly steadfast and resolute, pried the felt blanket from Beuys until the blanket was completely off.

After a fresh, healthy stack of fifty Wall Street Journals was delivered to the space which Beuys and the coyote shared and inhabited, the coyote urinated on the stack — and the subsequent stacks delivered on the second and third day.

During the entire three days, the only times in which the coyote was considerably “idle” were in those few moments where Beuys distanced himself from the coyote, sat in one of the four corners of the room, and smoked his pipe.

By the end of the “Action”, Beuys was convinced that his attempts to transform the coyote were no match to the coyote’s resistance.

TURNING SCOUSE HEADS.

2010-03-23T01:02:00.000-07:00

Just seen this on telly, I think it is awesome, it is called ‘Turning The Place Over’ and it is ironic that it is situated in Liverpool where most places get turned over at some point

It is a sculpture by local artist Richard Wilson that utilises engineering usually used in the nuclear industry to rotate a section of a derelict building in a dramatic fashion, turning it inside out. It has been done to herald the 2008 Liverpool City of Culture.
I like a bit of big art, but I am also too northern not to mention the cost, and this was set up at £450,000. The installation will only be up for a few months until the building is demolished, and I just think someone has made a shed load out of this, because I know as a piece of engineering, that didn’t cost nearly half a million quid. Maybe Richard Wilson did really well out of it.
Wasn’t Richard Wilson that old git who kept moaning on telly and said “I don’t believe it?

Through the looking-glass

2009-08-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

A passageway through a nondescript block of flats leads Jonathan Glancey to the artist Anish Kapoor's new home: a quiet oasis filled with sculpture, light and green spaces

Looking for the artist Anish Kapoor's new house in Chelsea, London, I decide he might be having a Turner moment. I was expecting a beautifully crafted modern house, with walls of glass, stone and shimmering stainless steel, designed by the architect Tony Fretton. What I didn't know was that all of this would be secreted behind a bland slab of speculative neo-Georgian design.

The painter JMW Turner set up home in Chelsea more than 150 years ago, when it was a poor and unfashionable suburb - but one where wonderful light was cast every day over the Thames. The Indian-born Kapoor belongs to a very different generation of British artist, one that thrives on celebrity. In moving to Chelsea, he has chosen to make his family home in what is now one of the most expensive and least bohemian parts of London.

Kapoor and his wife Susanna's Notting Hill home was designed by an architect friend, Pip Horne, in the late 1980s, so the idea of building a new house was not in itself a challenge. What was new was the idea of a modern house hidden from the street - "as you might find in Paris or Barcelona," Kapoor explains. A passage below the neo-Geo flats leads you into a world of unexpected courtyards, gardens and trees. There are enormous rooms, sudden stairs, cleverly constructed views and a richness of low-key materials. The narrow entrance gives way to a star-shaped courtyard, open to the sky. The kitchen and dining room are at one end of this courtyard; the other is faced, down a few wide steps, by a long living room. This is as much a private art gallery as a space in which to relax or entertain.

"The idea of the courtyards was a given, really," says Kapoor. "This is a long, narrow site and we wanted to get as much daylight into the rooms as possible. The idea developed so that the house became a way of walking in and out of fresh air and gardens, on the way from one side to the other."

Kapoor has collaborated with a number of architects over the years; a series of striking curved and mirror-finished entrances for subway stations in Naples, which he developed with Future Systems, will open later this year. His most radical work on an architectural, and indeed monumental, scale has been in partnership with the structural engineer Cecil Balmond. Their Marsyas sculpture, installed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002, was an extraordinary stretch of voluptuous red fabric. Next year, another Balmond-Kapoor project will transform the Middlesbrough landscape: Tenemos, a kind of voluminous windsock stretched between apparently delicate posts, is the first of a series of five vast public artworks, with sites in Stockton, Redcar, Hartlepool and Darlington next in line. "All these projects," Kapoor says, "are about interrogating form, and making large-scale objects that manage to be as ethereal as they are substantial."

Where Kapoor's sculptures are often richly coloured and sensuously formed, his new home works around a limited palette. At first glance, it is as cool as a cucumber. "I am naturally playful," Kapoor agrees, "while Tony [Fretton], though he has a dry sense of humour, can be almost comically dour." The principal rooms have been designed for books and artworks. These, and family life (the Kapoors have two children), will provide all the colour needed. Fretton has worked with Hopton Wood limestone and Mandale Fossil stone, two materials much loved by British sculptors and architects since the 1930s. Hopton Wood limestone, quarried near Matlock, Derbyshire, is creamy, warm and studded with fossils; Mandale Fossil limestone, from a quarry close by, comes in shades of grey and is immensely hard-wearing.

Kapoor and Fretton have known each other for years, since the artist's work was first shown in the Fretton-designed Lisson Gallery, in London. "We've enjoyed a healthily detached relationship," says Kapoor. "As a client, you need some sense of distance from your architect. I thought of keeping out of the way while he built the house - he's a craftsman by nature and very involved in construction - but I couldn't help myself, and ended up coming down nearly every morning on my way to my studio in Camberwell."

Kapoor doesn't intend to work from home. "The house is a quiet object," he says. "This is a family home, not a place for me to make a mess - I have a studio for that. For me, architecture is about the essentials of light, space, proportion and materials. I don't want to live in a sculpture designed by an architect. I go crazy when I hear people say that the best new sculpture is by architects - meaning overexpressive buildings. I love making sculptures, and collaborating with architects, but I want to live in a house that's a happy home, not an artwork."

Kapoor says that if he could have chosen any architect in recent history to build him a house, he would have chosen Louis Kahn. "No disrespect to Tony. Kahn is long dead, and anyway, I'm not sure I would be able to live up to one of his designs. He made everyday buildings somehow mythic, and my family and I need a healthy dose of reality to make everyday life comfortable. Tony and I also share a huge admiration for the work of [American conceptual artist] Dan Graham, and this house is partly a homage to him. We'll be installing a Graham pavilion in the garden courtyard here, so house and artwork will play off one another."

Fretton has designed homes and studios for artists throughout his career. From the Lisson Gallery in Marylebone, through the Camden Arts Centre (in 2004), via modest and beautiful spaces including the Holton Lee Studios on the Dorset coast, Fretton's subtle designs have been handmaidens to modern British art. Each is quietly powerful; none gets in the way. Kapoor describes his own home as "a reflection of a quiet modern vernacular". "It has traditional rooms, even if some are pretty big. And, look, we've even got skirting boards! They're made of strips of stainless steel rather than traditional timber, but which modern architect would put skirting boards in a new house? They hate them."

In a sense, Fretton and Kapoor are following in a tradition of creating just such houses in Chelsea - artists' homes that play a subtle game of balancing new and age-old designs, plans and building materials. In the late 19th century, artists such as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Singer Sargent came to live and work in Chelsea. A generation of radical artists and architects (Richard Norman Shaw, CR Ashbee) teamed up to shape the look of the area. The 1921 census reveals that nine out of every 1,000 people living in Chelsea was an artist. Today, the borough has become so expensive that the Chelsea College of Art and Design has left, moving to Westminster.

Will the artists return here? If they make Hirst-loads of money, perhaps. In the meantime, Kapoor's secret hideaway, a brushstroke or two away from Turner's old house, is a fitting retreat for a contemporary artist quietly in love with the best - but not the noisiest - modern architecture.

- Jonathan Glancey
- The Guardian, Tuesday 23 September 2008

Bye bye to bling: out goes the glitter, in comes the classic

2009-06-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

The 40th edition of Art Basel sees a return to more understated works

By Georgina Adam, Viv Lawes, Bruce Millar, Cristina Ruiz and Lindsay Pollock | FromArt Basel daily edition,

The era of diamonds and gold as artistic materials is passing, judging by the art on offer at the latest edition of Art Basel which opens to VIP visitors today.

While the ground floor of the fair has always been strong in classic modern works of art, there is a noticeable increase in historically established names such as Donald Judd, Alexander Calder and Arte Povera artists including Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Meanwhile, artists who exploited the boom years with factory-like production systems, such as Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, are much less in evidence this year.

“The bling is really off. A lot of the bling artists are in a free fall,” says Arne Glimcher of PaceWildenstein (2.0/E1) which is showing a 1929 wire sculpture of the US tennis star Helen Wills Moody by Alexander Calder ($3.8m) and an untitled six part sculpture by Richard Tuttle made of humble materials such as wood, paper and wool thread ($400,000).

Buyers are particularly interested in works that demonstrate intense labour on the part of the artist, says Marianne Boesky (2.1/V3). “They like things that look handmade, not as if they’ve been farmed out to a fabricator,” she says.

An example, by one of Boesky’s artists, is Torre de Málaga, 2007, in Art Unlimited—a ramshackle tower house by Yoshitomo Nara. Made of recycled materials, it contains a cramped space modelled after the artist’s own studio ($600,000). A 10-ft sculpture, Le Verso Versa du Vice Recto, 2000-07, by artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, which resembles a woolly mammoth, is displayed in the same section. It is made of paper recycled from computer printouts (€220,000) and is on offer with Galleria Continua of San Gimignano and Beijing (2.1/X1).

The return to simple everyday materials recalls the artists of the Arte Povera movement who are represented this year by more than 25 galleries. “This is a movement where there has never been much speculation,” says Gianfranco Benedetti of Galleria Christian Stein from Milan (2.0/F1) in explanation of the strength of their prices at a time of falling values.

The gallery is offering classic works by Jannis Kounellis dating from 1969 and 1970, as well as contemporary pieces, and works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Uncini and others. Galleria Tega (2.0/W3), another Milan-based specialist in Italian art, is offering three Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale: Attese paintings from the early 1960s for prices up to e1.55m and a rare Piero Manzoni “Achrome” work from 1959 for €1.9m.

Tried and tested

As ever, galleries throughout the fair are relying on the giants of modern art such as US minimalist Donald Judd—but many this year are presenting them in heavily curated booths.

They include the González gallery from Madrid (2.0/R2) which has devoted its entire stand to “Progressions”, a single exhibition of six Judd sculptures made from anodised aluminium, galvanised iron and stainless steel, dating from 1967 to 1976.

The artist also takes pride of place at L&M Arts (2.0/E2), which is offering a 1987 Untitled sculpture consisting of ten copper and Plexiglass units for “under $4m”. According to gallery director Dominique Lévy, it is the only single copper stack in the world. “Judd completely reinvented the language of sculpture,” says Lévy, who stresses that the gallery is presenting a “more heavily curated” stand than in previous years.

The prevalence of curated displays this year is catering to the connoisseurs who are returning to the art market now that the speculators have disappeared, says Mathias Rastorfer of Gmurzynska gallery (2.0/V1), which is juxtaposing works by Calder with thematically-linked pieces by Alexander Rodchenko.

Calder “pulls together modernism and contemporary art”, says Nathalie Seroussi (2.0/U5) who is showing an Untitled iron mobile painted in red, white and black from 1961 (€1.25m).

A recurring favourite at Art Basel is Andy Warhol who is represented this year by 31 galleries. They include Bischofberger from Zurich (2.0/J1) whose entire stand is devoted to a single, 11-metre canvas by the artist, Big Retrospective Painting, 1979. Priced at $74m, it could be the most expensive work on offer at the fair and a considerable gamble for the gallery.

Works by Picasso, traditionally one of the most expensive artists at the fair, include a 1965 group portrait, La Famille du Jardinier, at Richard Gray (2.0/S1), priced at $6.5m. The work has been in a private collection and has never been publicly shown.

Most dealers surveyed say they expect far fewer American visitors this year. The speculators and their entourages are also gone, they say. “The under-educated guy with a cell phone who fancies himself as an art advisor has completely disappeared,” says Andrew Fabricant of Richard Gray. “This is a return to dealing like it was before. There’s no more impulse buying and the amateurs are gone,” he says.

“There’s much more to art than expensive materials,” says London dealer Maureen Paley (2.1/P3) who is showing work by Wolfgang Tillmans and Seb Patane among others. “All that glitters is not gold—sayings like this have real meaning.”

£30,000 for a £70 grocery receipt? It doesn't add up but it's art, darling...

2009-06-30T04:34:00.001-07:00

In the real world, paying £30,000 for a till receipt for goods worth £70.32 simply wouldn't add up.

But even in the world of modern art, the decision by one of Britain's most prestigious galleries to buy the supermarket receipt - a 'conceptual' piece by little known artist Ceal Floyer - has attracted ridicule.

The artwork, entitled Monochrome Till Receipt (White), is part of a new exhibition at London's Tate Britain, which receives government and lottery funding.

Pakistani-born Miss Floyer, 41, who graduated from Goldsmith's art college in London in 1994, describes the work as a modern still life where objects are imagined rather than shown.

The receipt lists 36 items, all of which are white, including boil-in-the-bag rice, (£1.77) and Andrex toilet roll (£1.25).

Despite the estimated £30,000 price-tag, the piece comes with a list of instructions from the artist, stating that a new receipt must be used every time it is shown.

Because she is now based in Germany, the latest shopping trip was left to exhibition curator Andrew Wilson, who was simply told to base it on the original list, now archived by the Tate.

He explained: 'Till receipts are light-sensitive and fall apart so they have to be replaced.

'Also it is fixed to the wall, so each time it is taken down, it is ruined.'

He called the piece 'an imaginative leap of faith from the daily drudge of going to the supermarket to the idea of the domestic still life painting, but also with the supposed purity of Modernist monochrome abstract painting'.

However, some critics have not been so kind.

David Lee, editor of art newsletter The Jackdaw, said: 'Anyone who is interested in a supermarket receipt is probably either certifiably insane or just doesn't get out enough.

'The Tate have bought an incredibly limited piece of work here which has no stamina as a work of art.'

-SIMON CABLE

Small pleasures

2009-03-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve fallen in love with this little thing.

I cannot even begin to tell you how darn cute this sculpture/ installation looks. Or how funny it must have looked when I got down on my haunches to take this picture. If someone had taken a picture of me, then we could have had a line that Colonel Hathi from Jungle Book would have been proud of. The bucket, by the way, was brought in by the artist. Apparently, the gallery had offered to get a bucket but Baliga sternly forbade them and brought his own bucket down from wherever it is that he lives. I’m so glad he did. Not that I would have minded a shiny, red bucket but it’s rather cool how the grooved circle pattern on the bucket reflects the rows of kids being photographed. The class dangling from the wall is made of carved wood and the teacher, seated in the centre of the bottom row, is intentionally smaller than her students who tower over her. I love the different woody colours that he’s got going in the bit with the class and the shadows that piece casts is fantastic. The airborne and hovering class also reminded me of the old mythological serials in which gods would appear in an obviously painted sky and have clouds under their feet to communicate their levitating powers (a sure sign of divinity). Except of course when you look closely at Baliga’s sculpture, it’s quite obviously school kids. They’re all pretty cute but no one can hold a candle to Mr. Photographer. If you go round the front, he’s holding a camera. Utterly and completely adorable. I was so tempted to just pocket him and tiptoe out (the gallery was empty as usual) but I restrained my criminal urges. This is particularly admirable because while surfing around aimlessly, I did find at least two things that would have matched his size perfectly and sort of fitted the mood of Baliga’s tongue-in-cheek show

by Anonandon

Tastes of Paradise

2009-03-08T01:41:00.000-08:00

The Smoking Lamp is an object that amplifies the personal choice of smoking or not smoking in a public environment. The lamp is deliberately paradoxical, at once inviting the public to smoke whilst at the same time signalling their transgression. Designed as a funnel that terminates with a ring of light, the lamp changes from a bright white to a warm pink if it detects nicotine smoke beneath it. The light emitted corresponds with the new situation, illuminating the particles being exhaled by the smoker, and placing the smoker within a theatrical scene. The light situation calls to mind the dramatic interrogation rooms from celluloid history, spotlighting the smoker, exposing them and their activity. The red hand and face gestures of the smokers become the focus of attention while the non smoking public, cast as the spectator, watches the extraordinary phenomenon that was first described by 17th century Europeans - before the word was verbalised - as “drinking smoke”.

Official prohibition of smoking in public spaces has a history as long as tobacco usage itself. The most recent case in Europe was under the Nazi regime in Germany campaigned against smoking with slogans such as ‘Die Deutsche Frau raucht nicht’ (The German woman does not smoke), cigarettes were rationed and banned from all public places as part of a wider programme to attain a more ‘organic’,‘natural’ and ‘biological’ way of life. Restricting individual freedom was justified for the greater good of society: to ensure the future of the German genotype (1). As a consequence of such prohibitive measures, smoking has been repeatedly used a symbolic protest against political oppression and to express liberation: In revolutionary Prussia, every smoker seen on the street was suspected of being a “dangerous democrat”(2) whilst in nineteenth century France, smoking acquired new symbolic significance for the female emancipation movement, when rebels like George Sand and Lola Montez shocked the social mores of their time by smoking deliberately in public. Gender bias in smoking lingers on today in the adoption of cigars, the ultimate symbol of power and masculinity. The cigar was famously used as a substitute phallus in the Clinton–Lewinsky affair and Marcel Duchamp anticipates such a situation in his 1967 poster design for "Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Duchamp" (3) where a photomontage shows a male hand holding a cigar below a rising cloud of smoke in the form of female genitalia. Duchamp’s image was the departure point for the invitation to INTOXICATION (4) at the Galerie Vanessa Quang in 2006. But this time the gender relations were inversed; a woman's hand holds a cigarette that is superimposed with an industrial smoke emission. Today, as intolerance of smoking in public increases, the smoking lamp is designed for tobacco’s new ambiguous status: at a moment when smoking is not quite yet a sign of social rebellion but the space for a few puffs are (or are about to be) greatly reduced. If the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch observed that “smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity”, then the Smoking Lamp serves as a device to augment smoking activity to the point of absurdity. Neither for, nor against, the lamp simply magnifies the language and culture of smoking, amplifying the personal choice that each individual makes.

The smoking Lamp is part of a larger artistic research into the question is how to generate real-time consciousness of air pollution. The effects of contemporary pollution are slow and imperceptible: a single cigarette will not kill, but a continuous use might - we consume now and we pay later. Like all the projects from Pollstream series (see hehe.org/pollstream), it reduces the time delay between our actions and their effects, cause and effect are scaled into the real-time decision making process, posing the question: to pollute or not to pollute? Smoking Lamp brings alive the ugly stuff that goes into our lungs - the cigarette smoke itself. And as vapour particles are translated into red light and noisy oscillations one becomes aware of those little clouds we inhale and exhale. As a design, a product, an installation, a work of art, it does neither offer humiliation nor affirmation for the smoker - it turns the beast into the beauty and amplifies our choice - here and now.

Obama signs Recovery and Reinvestment Act with reinstated support for the arts

2009-03-05T06:15:00.000-08:00

Bailout benefits NEA and Smithsonian

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Smithsonian Institution have secured a small allotment of federal funding as part of the $787bn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President Obama on 17 February, following fears that arts groups would be completely excluded from the stimulus package. A committee comprising members of both houses of Congress reached an agreement on the final spending bill, which was notably smaller than the versions passed by either the House or the Senate, with a number of cuts made to education and health programmes to secure the sliver of Republican support needed (three votes) to pass the bill. The NEA will receive $50m to distribute to non-profit arts organisations while the Smithsonian gets $25m to repair its facilities.

Although the original bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives, contained $50m for the National Endowment of the Arts, the version that went through the Senate had completely removed such funding. It also included an amendment by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn that would prevent museums, theatres and art centres from receiving any stimulus money by grouping them with other projects considered “wasteful and non-stimulative” such as casinos and highway beautification. Senator Coburn’s amendment was passed by the Senate and is still in the final bill, but the mention of museums, theatres and art centres was removed and now only excludes “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool”.  When the House voted on the final bill, Democratic Congressman David Obey, who sponsored the bill, explained why he thought it was important to retain NEA funding in the stimulus package: “There are five million people who work in the arts industry. And right now they have 12.5% unemployment—or are you suggesting that somehow if you work in that field, it isn’t real when you lose your job, your mortgage or your health insurance? We’re trying to treat people who work in the arts the same way as anybody else.”   Following the House’s passing of the final bill, the NEA released a statement describing its plans for the stimulus money. According to this, the agency “will make awards that result in job retention… For example, by awarding grants to arts education programmes, the NEA can help grantees employ teaching artists and administrators. Through grants to art festivals, the NEA can help the festival employ staff to manage the event and artists to perform or exhibit there. By funding new productions, the NEA can help an arts organisation provide work for carpenters, electricians, caterers, ushers, custodians, lighting designers, seamstresses, parking attendants and others as well as artists.”   Meanwhile, the Smithsonian’s funding was cut down from $150m in the House’s original version of the bill to $25m in the final package. A spokeswoman for the Institution said: “We’re delighted that the museum has received this funding. The Smithsonian certainly has infrastructural needs that we have every year and this will help in addressing those. We have a list of projects that need funding and we’re going to figure out which ones need the most urgent attention. We’re also going to look at which will help to create new jobs as that is the point of the whole stimulus package.”  Some of the most vocal critics of the arts receiving stimulus funds came from senior Republicans such as Arizona Senator John McCain, who singled out funds allotted to the NEA and the Smithsonian Institution as among the “hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending that will not do anything to stimulate the economy”. He went on to ask “how giving tens of millions of dollars to the National Endowment of the Arts or the Smithsonian Museum will reverse the devastating effects of the economic crisis?”   In response to the threat to arts funding, advocacy groups such as Americans for the Arts and the American Association of Museums lobbied senators to oppose the bill, citing the economic benefits of supporting cultural organisations. 

Jeff Koons’s $25 million sculpture for Lacma

2009-03-05T06:01:00.001-08:00

Jeff Koons is working on the largest and most ambitious project of his career: a towering sculpture consisting of a life-size motorised replica of a locomotive dangling from a crane. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) is funding the awesome work that will rise above the entrance plaza like a memorial to the Industrial Age technology that fuelled America’s westward expansion. The project, in development for two years, is about to move into the fabrication stage. The price tag? “We’re talking about a $25m work,” said the artist, speaking to The Art Newspaper at The National Arts Club in New York, which recently awarded him the organisation’s Gold Medal of Honour. “That’s a number we used going into the project,” confirms Lacma director Michael Govan in a telephone interview, adding that he will not begin raising the money until fabrication costs are calculated. The projected cost would make Train the most expensive artwork ever commissioned by a museum, surpassing Richard Serra’s $20m sculptural array, The matter of time, 2005, in the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Lacma has already spent about $1.75m of $2m pledged by trustee Wallis Annenberg for preliminary studies. “It’s chugging along,” Mr Govan quips of the complex and demanding process of realisation, which must adhere to Koons’s exacting production standards.   The artist envisions hanging a full-scale 70-foot-long steel-and-aluminium replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive from a 160-foot-tall Liebherr LR 1750 lattice-boom crane. The train’s wheels will spin, its funnel belch smoke and the whistle blow at appointed times. “A real train was not meant to hang vertically and would have all sorts of environmental problems,” explains Mr Govan, adding that preliminary design and engineering studies were completed by Los Angeles-based fabricator Carlson & Co. “The next stage is 3D scanning of the parts to get the data necessary to recreate the train,” he says. Scanning began late last month at the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society—the Albuquerque museum that owns the original train serving as the model. “No manufacture can analyse it until we have all the data,” he says, adding that the scanning will be finished in May. “We have to get a crane,” he continues. “They were tough to come by in the old economy—you used to have to get on a waiting list—but it’s getting easier,” he notes. “It’s really architecture, like building a campanile or bell tower,” he says, “and that’s almost exactly how it functions in the urban environment. It’s the architecture around which the museum campus will function, and the campus is a town square for LA.” When will the landmark be completed? A date will not be set until manufacturer begins, but Mr Govan says he and the artist anticipate it will take about four years.   Lacma has another daunting commission on the more immediate horizon: a sculpture by land artist Michael Heizer that incorporates a granite boulder weighing hundreds of tonnes. The 22-foot-high pyramidal rock will rest on reinforced concrete rails above a ramp that cuts into the ground to allow visitors to walk ominously beneath. Levitated/slot mass will be installed at the north edge of the campus near the parking garage entrance at 6th Street, says Mr Govan, adding that the cost of the work will be determined in coming months, and prospective sponsors have expressed interest. He would like to unveil it in a year, but a truck must be specially designed to transport the colossus from a quarry in Riverside, California, about 70 miles away. “Its arrival in LA will be quite a ceremony,” says Mr Govan. He wants Lacma’s new large-scale sculptures to “define the architectonics of the campus. They hover between sculpture and architecture and become the focal points”, he says, “so the defining experience outside is not of giant buildings but of artworks.”

THE JOKER

2009-02-12T04:20:00.000-08:00

Richard Prince at the Guggenheim.

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted. But his is a shallow, brittle, ultimately desolating conceit—seizing on things that are a-twitch with a little vitality, and chloroforming them. Prince’s nearest approach to identifiable emotion is the exiguous zeal of obsessive collecting. (He’s a bibliophile, with letches for authors, including Nabokov and Kerouac.)

Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He has said that his parents were spies for the Office of Strategic Services, and that his father served in Vietnam. Caution is in order, however, regarding Prince’s autobiographical accounts. In 1985, an art magazine, ZG, published an interview with him, conducted in 1967 by J. G. Ballard, the English writer of dire fantasy, when Prince was eighteen years old and under detention in London for want of a valid passport. The interview, in which Prince describes his father as a diabolical manipulator of minds, was a lively hoax. Also in the eighties, Prince collaborated with the late Colin de Land, an eccentric dealer, to make the work and shepherd the career of one John Dogg, a fashionable and, it later turned out, nonexistent sculptor. Prince’s devotion to the put-on is among his bona fides in a generation—that of punk, deconstruction, and David Letterman—addicted to vertiginous irony: in-jokes with nothing in them. An appropriate bonus of the catalogue is a series of interviews about Prince, by the hipster’s hipster Glenn O’Brien, with leading technicians of waggery: ad and magazine people, cartoon editors (including Robert Mankoff, of The New Yorker), a car designer, the Hells Angel Sonny Barger, John Waters, and Phyllis Diller.

Prince attended college in Maine and arrived in New York in 1973, where for ten years he worked various low-end jobs (notably, assembling magazine tear sheets) in the Time & Life Building. He started to show in 1975—small, gnomic paintings, prints, and photo-and-text works. His emergence on the scene is commonly, and lazily, associated with “Pictures,” an epochal 1977 show at the non-profit downtown gallery Artists Space. He happened not to be in it. (Neither was Cindy Sherman, the first artist who comes to mind in the same connection.) Curated by the critical theorist Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” announced a movement of menacingly cold-eyed appropriation, as in the work of Sherrie Levine, who became known for her no-comment photographs of classic modern photographs. Prince had taken to photographing magazine ads, enjoying the strangeness of, in his words, a “reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” He refused an invitation to appear in “Pictures,” he has said, because he was put off by what he deemed to be Crimp’s dogmatism. (Crimp has denied inviting Prince.) An admirably bristly independence is apparent in his move, eleven years ago, from Manhattan to rural Rensselaerville, New York. There he filled a tacky house with some of his works and collections of this and that to such striking effect that, in 2005, the Guggenheim bought it as an in-situ work of art, titled “Second House.” (In June of this year, lightning set it afire; what to do with the intact but charred remnant is undecided.) Flirting with self-forgetful realism in the nineties, Prince took elegiac photographs of woebegone back-road sights, such as a basketball hoop in an overgrown meadow. That mood passed.

Prince has dubbed his retrospective “Spiritual America,” keying it to his 1983 photograph of an infamous Garry Gross photograph, published by Playboy Books, in 1976, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and her face given womanly makeup. Prince applied the title—which comes from Alfred Stieglitz, who coined it for his 1923 photograph of a gelded workhorse’s rear end—to the work, to a show consisting of nothing else, and to the one-off gallery, in a Lower East Side storefront, that first hosted it. His unbounded enthusiasm for the awful image offers queasy-making testimony to his character as an artist. He sees in the photograph, he has said, “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.” And he enjoyed the spectacle of Shields’s failed later effort, in a lawsuit, to quash Gross’s picture, which her mother had authorized for four hundred and fifty dollars. It gave him a “patriotic” feeling, he has declared—“that is to say if I was to have heard that this type of activity over a photograph was happening in another country I would have considered moving there.” (Note the piled-up subjunctives: Princean grammar.) The Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector—who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity—hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, “a portrait of desperation” exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that’s the word) Prince’s omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at auction) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn’t diagnose decadence. He swims in it.

by Peter Schjeldahl

Artist: Richard Prince

2009-02-12T03:51:00.000-08:00

In the early eighties, Richard Prince started to re-photograph magazine ads featuring the Marlboro Man; since then, he’s given biker chicks, Borscht Belt jokes, celebrity autographs, and pulp-fiction nurses the legitimizing stamp of “appropriation art.” Karen Rosenberg spoke to the 55-year-old artist and obsessive book collector.

You started working with ads when you worked at Time-Life?

 I was in the tear-sheets department. At the end of the day, all I was left with was the advertising images, and it became my subject. Pens, watches, models—it wasn’t your typical subject matter for art. Then, in 1980, I started taking pictures of the cowboys. You don’t see them out in public anymore—you can’t ride down a highway and see them on a billboard. But at Time-Life, I was working with seven or eight magazines, and Marlboro had ads in almost all of them. Every week, I’d see one and be like, “Oh, that’s mine. Thank you.” It’s sort of like beach combing.

Is there a current-day equivalent to the Marlboro Man?

 I would have to say probably certain designers—Ralph Lauren, who shows up week after week in the same section of the Times Magazine. Abercrombie & Fitch—their catalogues have an art look. I could actually see Man Ray or George Platt Lynes or Robert Mapplethorpe photographing them. I kind of like Marc Jacobs’s campaign; it almost doesn’t look like advertising. Actually, I’ve started to look at a new cigarette ad, for Camel. It’s an illustration of a woman, and the mouth is the focus. I think back to what de Kooning would have thought of it; he used to cut out the “T” smiles from the Camels and paste them on his women.

What got you from there to painting?

 I found the subject matter, which was the jokes. Before that, I wanted to paint but I didn’t know what to paint. The subject comes first, the medium second. In this show, there are some new paintings done on canceled checks. I collect other people’s canceled checks—celebrity checks. I remember buying a canceled Jack Kerouac check once.

What do you think of younger artists under your influence, people like Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton?

 It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called “pirating.” Now they call it “sampling.” There’s a guy on the street who paints copies of my “Nurse” paintings, along with Elizabeth Peytons and Eric Fischls. I think it’s funny. I actually bought one; I thought it was pretty close.

What’s the difference between Richard Prince the artist and Richard Prince the collector?

 I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work. There’s an Elizabeth Peyton piece in the show, one of her canceled checks with a Sid Vicious drawing. And a Sonic Youth check with a signed drumhead.

How about your own collectors—do you agree with their taste in your work? 

I’m surprised at the reaction to the “Nurse” paintings. I’ve never felt that I had to put out work that I actually liked—just because it’s out there doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind it. A lot of it’s experimental, spontaneous. It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

The joke paintings are especially popular—one sold last year for more than $700,000. When they first came out, you couldn’t give them away. They’ve become pretty serious to people, which is funny. During an auction last year, behind the podium, they had a monochromatic joke painting next to a Rothko next to a Barnett Newman. They’re just paint, stretchers, and canvas; it’s the subject that’s radical.

By - Karen Rosenberg

“Modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”

2009-01-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt, the 2008 winner of Russia’s Kandinsky Prize, on the struggle for the future of Russian art.

On 8 December, Beliayev-Guintovt was known only to the small community of people who closely follow the Russian contemporary art scene. But overnight he became one of the most talked-about Russian artists in the past two decades. “Before the prize, my website had only a few hundred hits a day,” he says. “Now it has several thousand a day.”

The Art Newspaper is the first publication invited to visit his modest three-room apartment/art studio, in a working-class neighbourhood in his native city, Moscow. The walls of one room are decorated with a 19th-century print featuring Napoleon at Waterloo in 1814, and a Soviet banner emblazoned with the words “Workers of the World Unite”. There is a bust of Lenin on the shelf. The furniture is late 19th century, except for an ornate chair that Beliayev-Guintovt says is probably 18th-century Persian. “I call it my Eurasian throne,” he says.

The television is playing a 1937 Soviet propaganda film showing Stalin inspecting a parade of robust athletes on Red Square. “This was basically a parade of Eurasian athletes; just look at the faces,” he says. The screen shows the youthful features of Slavs, Central Asians and people from the Caucasus region. “My next project will be based on this parade,” he adds. “I want to do a Eurasian parade of the future, depicted in about 15 large paintings. I want to give a futuristic view to the Soviet-Stalinist aesthetic.”

Beliayev-Guintovt doesn't hide his fondness for the Stalinist-era aesthetic, and he is uncomfortable when it comes to passing judgment on the Soviet dictator. “I had family members on both sides during the Stalin era. Some worked for the NKVD (secret police), while others ended up in the Gulag.”

“My style unites space and time, and Eurasian ideals are very prominent,” he says. “Art in Russia has always had a very strong social component. I am at the epicentre of a conservative revolutionary movement that includes many nationalities, from Islamic mystics to Russian Orthodox old believers.”

Beliayev-Guintovt says that contemporary art in Russia, as it ascribes to current international art trends, is run by a “totalitarian sect” and that “modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”.

“The controversy over my art is a classic battle between icon painters and iconoclasts,” he says. “They want to destroy the sacredness of images, and I want to exalt it. This is a very serious struggle over the future of Russian art, and with me getting the Kandinsky Prize, they’ve lost a major battle.”

During Perestroika in the late 1980s, Beliayev-Guintovt, born in 1965, dabbled in a variety of western youth counter-cultures. “I was a hippie, a punk, a new waver,” he says. He began his artistic career in 1985, but his big break came in 1994 when gallerist and artist Alexander Yakut took him under his wing.

His painting technique involves covering the canvas with gold leaf and creating an image with a stencil. He then dabs his palms in paint and presses them onto the canvas, his hands working as his brush. “I don't sign my work because my handprint can’t be faked,” he says. “My images might look traditional, but the texture and technique is certainly contemporary. My method combines the traditions of icon painting with the technology of Soviet avant-garde poster-making.”

Today, promoting his Eurasian ideas is Beliayev-Guintovt’s paramount concern. In essence, these ideas call for Russia to turn away from the west and towards the east, and strive for a rebirth of the Russian empire in its tsarist-era borders. Regarding art, he supports “the righteousness of classicism” and “the power of beauty”. Yet he admits his art manifestos are also intended to poke fun at and provoke his detractors on the artistic Left. This of course leaves one wondering whether all his talk about ideology is serious or just an artistic ruse.

John Varoli | 28.1.09 |

The Two Faces of Takashi Murakami

2008-10-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

He's high art. He's low culture. He's a one-man mass-market machine.

Takashi Murakami is often billed as the next Andy Warhol. Like the American pop art icon, he fuses high and low, pulling imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting, highly original work. He is vigorously, ingeniously self-promotional. In the past few years, Murakami has swept across the US and Europe, receiving fawning media attention and exhibiting at big-name museums. Just shy of 42, the charismatic artist even lives and works in what he calls a factory. How much more Warhol can you get?

But there's a key difference. Warhol took from the low and gave to the high. With ironic detachment, his work - paintings few could afford, films few could understand - appealed to an audience in on the joke. Murakami, on the other hand, takes from the low and gives to the high, the low, and everything in between. He makes paintings, sculptures, videos, T-shirts, key chains, mousepads, plush dolls, cell phone caddies, and, last but not least, $5,000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. Murakami's work hits all price points: This fall he plans on selling plastic figurines packaged with bubble gum - a Murakami for $3. Warhol died before a T-shirt company licensed his soup cans and made a bundle. Murakami, who reads Bill Gates for management tips, knows better than to make that mistake.

It may be old hat to draw ideas and imagery from the mass market, but it's something else to hawk your wares in the candy aisle. In this as in other things, Japan may be leading us into the future. Murakami, who grew up in Tokyo, sees his heritage as key to his art: "The Japanese don't really have a difference or hierarchy between high and low." His "art merchandise" is dominated by a cast of creepily cute characters inspired by manga comics and anime cartoons - the twin pillars of Japanese pop culture. Cartoon characters have figured in high art since Roy Lichtenstein first transferred a Sunday comic to canvas in the early '60s. But the art establishment - steeped in old-world prejudices against mass merchandising - took Lichtenstein and Warhol's art as a critique. Murakami's work celebrates commerce, and commerce returns the favor: His Vuitton handbags have become one of the French fashion house's best-selling lines. Speaking through an interpreter, Murakami explains that his art process is "more about creating goods and selling them than about exhibitions." Not that he's shunning the big shows. In September, a 23-foot sculpture of one of his trademark characters - Mr. Pointy, a cross between a blissed-out Buddha and a space alien - went up in New York City's Rockefeller Center.

Murakami began his art career as a traditionalist. During his twenties at Tokyo National University, he worked on a doctorate in Nihonga, an amalgam of Western and Eastern painting styles dating to the late 19th century. But after witnessing the rise of anime and manga in Japanese culture during the '80s, he grew disillusioned with Nihonga, finding it irrelevant to daily Japanese life. He wanted to create something that would leave a lasting impression. "I set out to investigate the secret of market survivability - the universality of characters such as Mickey Mouse, Sonic the Hedgehog, Doraemon, Miffy, Hello Kitty, and their knock-offs, produced in Hong Kong," Murakami wrote for a 2001 retrospective of his work. The result, in 1993, was Mr. DOB, Murakami's most ubiquitous and enduring character.

Now, as president of Kaikai Kiki, Murakami presides over an art-making corporation that operates from a campus of buildings known as the Hiropon Factory, outside Tokyo, as well as a studio in Brooklyn. While Warhol's Factory featured such colorful characters as Candy Darling, Lou Reed, and Edie Sedgwick, Hiropon is peopled by accountants, publicists, managers, and a computerized administrative system. "Staff members type up reports of what they work on each day. We then send everyone an email that compiles all the reports," explains Yuko Sakata, Kaikai Kiki's New York exhibition coordinator. Murakami, she says, got the idea for daily logs after reading Gates' Speed of Thought.

Murakami owes much of his success to the highly efficient Hiropon Factory. Hardly a reclusive artist toiling in his garret studio, he employs 25 assistants to perform specialized tasks, and he uses technology in pragmatic, labor-saving ways. Because his work features a number of recurring motifs - eyeballs, mushrooms, flowers - the factory maintains an immense electronic archive of renderings that he can cut and paste into the files he's working on. Murakami may be the first artist to make paintings from his own portfolio of digital clip art.

Each creation begins as a sketch in one of numerous pocket-sized notebooks. Full-size drawings are then scanned into the computer. From there, Murakami "paints" his works in Adobe Illustrator, tweaking the composition and cycling through thousands of colors until at last he hands the finished versions off to his assistants. His staff then prints out the work on paper, silk-screens the outline onto canvas, and commences painting. Without this embrace of technology, Murakami says, "I could have never produced this many works this efficiently, and the work wouldn't be as intense."

The fusion of art and computing led Murakami to a pictorial style that rejects the illusion of depth and perspective. Dubbed superflat, the approach isn't entirely new - Warhol's paintings often read flat - but Murakami has something else in mind. Superflat captures the aesthetics of our technological age: PDAs, digital billboards, flat-screen TVs. An exhibition curated by Murakami, titled simply Superflat, made its way to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2001. "I'm amazed at how that show continues to reverberate," says Michael Darling, an assistant curator at LA MoCA who helped bring the show to the States. "Superflat also refers to the leveling of distinctions between high and low. Murakami likes to flaunt that he can make a million-dollar sculpture and then take the same subject and crank out a bunch of tchotchkes."

The danger is that Murakami's unapologetic hucksterism may obscure just how good his art is. His images are disturbing and beautiful, and, above all, full of ideas. This alone won't secure his place in art history. What should is the way he marries talent to a keen understanding and manipulation of market forces. And unlike Warhol, when college kids plaster Mr. DOB on their dorm walls, he gets paid.

Jeff Howe (jeffhowe@wiredmag.com) is a contributing editor at Wired.

Banksy wall 'art' to be painted over

2008-10-25T01:03:00.000-07:00

LONDON'S Westminster Council says a work by underground artist Banksy is graffiti and will be painted over.
The 7m tall work, painted in giant white letters on a concrete wall in April, was intended as a criticism of Britain's Big Brother culture and specifically the prevalence of CCTV cameras. "One Nation Under CCTV'', it screams, from a wall on which a CCTV camera is also mounted. A child figure perched in a letter appears to be painting the message on the wall, which overlooks a post office yard in Oxford Circus. The work, Banksy's biggest in London, was painted under the cover of darkness after the artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence, despite being watched by the CCTV camera.
But Westminster Council says the work will be painted over, The Times reported today. The council says it will remove any graffiti, regardless of the reputation of its creator. Banksy has no more right to paint graffiti than a child, the council says. "If we condone this then we might as well say that any kid with a spray can is producing art,'' Robert Davis, the chairman of Westminster's planning committee, told The Times. "To go and deface other peoples property is graffiti. Just because he's famous doesn't give him that right.'' Banksy started out as a street artist, but his work is now coveted by celebrities and has earned him a lot of money.

In February, his Andy Warhol-inspired screen print of supermodel Kate Moss sold for £96,000 ($210,550) at a street art auction in London. And a wall he had painted sold for £208,100 ($453,700). Banksy's work has been bought by actress Angelina Jolie and singer Christina Aguilera.

www.adelaidenow.com

Quest for Identity

2008-10-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

The theme of this project is provoked by the strange history of a community known as the Parsi. This community was displaced from its roots in Iran in the 7th century AD and settled on the hospitable shores of India. The Parsi community traveled down to India to save themselves from religious persecution. It grew from a handful of migrants to approximately 1,11,500 as per the 1941 Indian census. In order to preserve the “purity” of lineage, certain conventions came to be set by orthodox members of the community. For instance, anyone not born a Parsi could not convert to become a Parsi and a Parsi could not marry outside the community. This is perhaps a key reason for the continuous decline of the community to a paltry 69,601 in 2001.

The objective of my project is to capture some of the insecurities that plague this exceptionally small community, one which is attempting to retain its identity in the melting pot of the 21st century. I have reflected this by taking up the issue of marriage within the community, an age-old system that is still followed to retain the purity of the community, thereby not allowing the community to grow. Ironically this is not stated in the Avestain scriptures. My work also questions the rules and the value system of the community which alienates women from outside of the community who marry into the Parsi community thus commenting on dominance of the male character in the community. This project is a personal expression of how I feel about the issue of identity of the Parsi community as well as the women who live within it.

Varun Cursetji- www.artconcerns.com

Interview with Mr. Cheng from Xin Dong Cheng Gallery

2008-10-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

  AfN: Dear Mr. Cheng, you just did a book presentation: a Chinese translation of the French book "Art Business" by Judith Benhamou-Huet. Why have you chosen that book to translate into Chinese? And how was the presentation?  

Cheng: China is completely new in the art system. We were building the system with old artistic elements, so all this information is very very useful to help China to do its first steps towards the restauration of artists, galleries, artists, museums, auction houses...   Judith Benhamou is a French journalist, a person who has a lot of experience because she travels a lot in the world, a specialist of the art markets... I found information in her book that can be useful for China. That is why I did it [the translation] - because I think it is good, and because I see a financial chance in everything, and because I think it is very useful for the Chinese public.

  AfN: So the wider Chinese audience is still not very familiar with the Western system of how the art world is organised. Why is that?

  Cheng: After a special period in the past, when the country went through war, after certain political moments, after the cultural revolution, completely all systems of art collapsed.   With the new era of globalisation, Chinese will know a lot of new things; I am not sure if that is good, if the Western systems are good for China, but anyway, they can learn something from that. They can compare. There are so many experiences which are useful for China.

  AfN: And do you publish these books on your own. Do you have a publishing house?  

Cheng: That is why I created a publishing house. I am not really a publisher... We are the new Chinese generation, and we are actually living the new era; life changed so quickly, and China becomes more and more open to the world. Every day there is so much information... I have never experienced that before. I did not learn that at school. So for us, it is new. We are acting, and we are learning something, and then you know how to do it.

  AfN: We would like to know a little bit about you. When did you open your first gallery, and what is your background?  

Cheng: First, I studied in China. I passed the national examinations. It was very hard. Less than 1% of people could pass the examination and go to university. But it was still much better than during the cultural revolution when all the universities were closed. But the competition was very hard; everything was managed by the government, they chose the best students to study science because at the beginning of the 20th century, they were thinking: "Only science and technology can help China - China has lost so many wars, they need the technology." So I studied science here. I did not want to, but back then, I was 15 years old, and the government chose the students to learn something - no discussion, everything was organised and paid by the government. But the first year after, I said to myself: "This is not what I want to do." Young Chinese people did not have the choice so they learned and finished. And then, with the opening-up in the 80s, we learned a lot of things outside of the school system - from the society, from TV, the publishing books. At that time, I was the leader of a student movement, so I organised a lot of dialogues, art forums, discussions. After Mao Zedong, and the new economic reform, with the new leader, everything was completely different so we learned again - we were learning about the real China, to know it better, the Chinese culture, geography... everything - even Confucianism! It is an old philosophy but we did not learn this in school. So it was a completely different China!... The young people looked at China like at a new country, like a baby. So I wanted to change, too, but there was no chance. The only thing I could do was to learn something from somewhere else.

   AfN: And then you went to Paris?

  Cheng: Not so quickly. In '83, the central government suddenly changed the politics against the reformists. I had organised a lot of conferences and dialogues, so I was criticised by the school. It was forbidden for me to organise anything. The only thing I could do was to study science. At that time, we could only pass examination after examination; I made a master, doctorate, I came back. I wanted to change, to learn something else but I finished my four years of studies in science, chemistry - I had no choice. I was sent to the countryside to work in a pharmaceutical factory for two years. I wanted to show that I can do better, so I studied again. I passed again examination after examination. I chose another city like Xian which was a bit further of where I come from. I wanted to go back to the origins of China's cultural heritage so I went to Xian to study philosophy. But at that time, chemistry was the only thing that I could do. Then, I was again chosen as the leader of a students movement, and at the beginning of '86, the situation changed again, there was again a change of leadership.   

Studying at that time was very hard; just a few books were translated. What we knew about Europe, were names like Victor Hugo, Emile Zola... nothing about the contemporary world. So when China opened up a little bit, I have seen several images in the publication books, but all in all, there was very little information, no internet, mainly propaganda. What we tried to do is to find all the information possible. From all people in China we were the first generation that went to foreign countries to study. As I passed every examination, I was allowed to go to France to study, at the beginning of '89.

  AfN: So you were sent to France?

  Cheng: Yes. I passed the examination for it. And at that time, I met a French girl, love story..., so we took the train together: Beijing-Moscow, Moscow-Warsaw... it went slowly...  

When I arrived at the Gare du Nord, I immediately fell in love with the city Paris. So I studied there, and, of course, it was very important to learn the language first; everything was new for me. All I knew about Paris were names like Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, several new books written by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and very few books and images of Paris, some postcards of Paris like Notre Dame de Paris... nothing else. So it was a new world, a new life for me. It was a new beginning.

  AfN: Did you open your first gallery in Paris or in Beijing? 

 Cheng: First, I did not study chemistry anymore, I did not like it but I learned something about it. I began to study suburban culture, and at that time, I got lucky and I met the director of the Galerie de France in Paris whose work is so important, who works with everybody, with great international artists. So I met her, and I started to work there, and I learned things very quickly. Then, there was this very rich period when I met all the most important international galleries, went to big museum exhibitions, travelled to see biennales, the biennale de Venice, the biennale São Paolo, the biennale de Vienna; I was discovering the system. After all that, I told myself "what I want to do is art". With my experience, it would be good to do something in China and work as a promoter, producer or something like this. The concept of gallery was completely new for me; it did not exist in China. Even now, it is still new in China. I learned everything about the system in the 90s, and I learned it in an international context where art, relationships, business, public, politics - everything is coming together!  And then in 1992, the fresh government was preparing a "Pierre Soulages"-exhibition in China. Soulages, at that time, worked with the Galerie de France. They needed somebody like me with a connection to China. I had the experience, so in 1992, I went back to China to prepare it. It was completely new, something like this. I learned a lot. After, I asked myself: "How can I use best the different experiences? How can I bring the different cultures together?" So that is how I found my personal identity.   In 1996, I was the first person to introduce Chinese contemporary art to Paris, to France - first, at the Galerie de France, and then in public spaces like museums, Musée de Picardie in Amiens etc. I was lucky to meet very important international artists so I tried to bring them to China. In the 90s, I had no money, no gallery, I only had my experiences. So I thought that the easiest way to make a connection between Paris and Beijing was to create two bases in these two cities and to facilitate the contact. Since then, I was a creator, le commissaire d'exposition, and I introduced a lot French artists like Buren, Martial Raysse, etc to China, and not only in the big cities but also in the capitals of the provinces. It was a big event, and I had to organise it. I tried to push all the forces, strengths together to promote, to show in public because it was the first time for China; especially in the provinces it was really something new. [...] Life changed since 1999; and I told myself "I should organise a space in China". I opened my space in 2000.   At the beginning, it was in my house. There were not enough collectors, there were very few. I created artist studios; I invited artists to work in my studios. In three months, I created everything, and then, after three months, Beijing made a studio exhibition.

   AfN: Your first art fair was the FIAC in 2003. But then, you went back to Paris because you have a branch there, too. When did you open that branch?  

Cheng: Of course, I wanted to open my own gallery to sell art. I had nothing to rely on, no financial system in China. There was no capital, because everybody was communist, everybody was equal. The first fair I took part in was here in 1997, at the Shanghai art fair. I am the only one taking part since the beginning. shcontemporary is new, before there was only the Shanghai art fair. So I went there to help my friends; it was important for Shanghai at the beginning. I was the only one showing contemporary and international art, both together. But nothing was sold (except for some masterpieces; I made quite a big event). People at that time, in 2000, used artworks for communication. There was no background of art, no art education at schools - it was something completely new. How can art be discussed? The only thing you can do is to show the distance of communication and to make them understand art. You must create the movement. So now, we can talk about art because we have passed the most difficult period. Of course now, there is the shcontemporary. This is progress. It was not that easy. It was more than 10 years of work.   Now I have three galleries in Beijing, and each year, I organise a big event for the Chinese contemporary art in the world, in another country. Before it was in Europe, last year for the second biennale of Moscow where I invited more than 30 artists. It was a useful experience. This year, we were in Greece, in the National Contemporary Art Centre. More than 40 artists were there. Next year, we will be in South America. I have my gallery, my publishing house... Why is it such hard work? Because if you don't do it, the government will not do it. We are late. I hope that China, one day, can offer some good museums... 

 AfN: But slowly the government is accepting it. It uses this fame of Chinese art for the fame of the country. Isn't there a change in the relationship between artists or the art community and the government?  

Cheng: They make some progress compared to the beginning of the 80s, 90s. It is a completely new phase in contemporary art, at least for some of it. The media is not open to everything and everybody. We still have the propaganda ministry. Some pieces cannot be shown for political reasons, for violence reasons, sex - but that's life. 

 AfN: I also have the feeling that sometimes the censorship is rather privately motivated. There is not a real structure or reason why this artwork can be shown, and the other one cannot be shown. It is mainly because a certain censor might say "I don't like this", and then it is not shown...   

Cheng: For practical reasons. The ultimate aim is the stability of society.   AfN: Today is the last day of the shcontemporary art fair in 2008. You also did the 2007 edition. Compared to last year, what is your impression of the future for the shcontemporary? Or for Shanghai as a major art venue in general?  Cheng: If we think about the future and think about Shanghai and China, the shcontemporary is very important because it is organised by a new, more international team. The team has more international relationships, a lot of experience; they are more professional. Of course, for Shanghai, this is very important. The only problem is that China is not ready to observe all those international artworks because they don't know, they don't understand them. There are exceptions; the new generation has seen more, they travelled. But the public in general, a lot of people don't come here because it is too early. There is no [art] education at school.   

AfN: It is different for them. When I compare the Shanghai art fair with this, I can see a big difference. There is a completely different viewing; it seems that a lot of Chinese people are rather traditional. But this year, I was in New York at a fair called Bridge Art Fair where they show a lot of Chinese galleries. I was surprised to see that the Americans and New Yorkers were really shocked. They could not really interact with Chinese contemporary art - too much colour, too much power... 

 Cheng: They can understand Chinese modern "classic" better than Chinese contemporary art. It is perhaps not very contemporary but for them, it is evolutionary.   

AfN: There is a gap in viewing culture.   

Cheng: Of course. It is the same for everybody. The Chinese are closer to their own culture because they have the background, they have some education about their own culture assimilation.   

AfN: But what about Beijing? I always had the feeling that they never managed to make such a big event like it is done here in Shanghai.  

 Cheng: I think they already make a big, big, big effort. The only problem is that the new Chinese generation, they do not have enough experience. They need more relationships. They don't know enough people to introduce a more international crowd, and they cannot do that without sufficient knowledge of the market. Of course, they try their best. It is still the beginning.  

 AfN: So Hong Kong is the place to be? 

 Cheng: Hong Kong is big. It is a very good place to do [a big event]. But still, Hong Kong itself has a very poor local culture. It is only business. Of course, art fairs are business.   

AfN: Yes, but I mean, Hong Kong as a city, I never associated it with art. There are art galleries, also major art galleries, but the city is a pure business town.   

Cheng: Why not? You cannot ask everybody to be an artist, you cannot ask every buyer to keep pieces for future generations. There are no responsibilities. Why? You buy for your own pleasure like when you shop for clothes. And next year, [the fashion] changes again.

  AfN: In preparation of this interview I have read an article in "Le Monde" where it says: "Les temps ont changé. Il aurait été surprenant que l'art chinois échappe à la commercialisation à outrance, voire à la tendance à l'"industrialisation" qui pousse certains artistes à faire tourner jusqu'à la surchauffe leur machine à créer." The catchword for me was "industrialization", especially when I compare for example the shcontemporary art fair with the Shanghai art fair. When you switch between the events you have the feeling that everything is possible: Art production for the Chinese collectors eye, art production for the western collectors eye - anything desired is for sale. Do you think that we westerners have a too romantic view on the art world?  

Cheng: For me, personal creations of artists come from the studio. Of course, it could be commissioned or industrialised ... You cannot escape this development. What do you do with art creations? You want to show them and let the society know about the creations. It is not a problem. Andy Warhol tried to break the system. He wanted to make mass reproductions in order to change art concepts by the volume of art. But who gives the volume of art? First of all, the artists - they make the creations. And then we, the public, understand artworks more, understand artists more... The social volume grows. It is normal. The market has cracked. Since the beginning of the human being, society exists with the same social laws: You need a market. And with art, it is the same. But it is not exclusively like this. You cannot choose artists only like products.   

AfN: Since Impressionism, we add certain unique figures to art. We think of the artist as a loner with a beard, painting or creating crazy things alone in his studio...

  Cheng: Ok, you can. But one day, art creations leave the studio and enter the society.  

AfN: And then the mechanisms of society get hold of them...  

Cheng: People talk about prices. They say that the Mona Lisa has no price, that there is art without price. This is nothing sure. At the beginning of François I, the French king, he bought the piece with a price. There was always a price.  

 AfN: The same "Le Monde" article - there's also a quotation from somebody who wanted to remain anonymous. It says: "L'art contemporain chinois reste prisonnier d'une esthétique facile et sans contenu réel ! C'est du tape à l'oeil !" On the contrary, I know that lots of famous contemporary artists in China have experienced the cultural revolution and/or the happenings on Tiananmen Square in 1989. These events must have left emotional traces for the artists. How would you explain that we westerners sometimes miss this subjective and emotional expression that the Chinese of course must have as well? 

 Cheng: We have different measures. Western people have western visions. But why do you ask Chinese to share the same visions? The Chinese contemporary artworks will get better; the communist period is still present. And this period is a period of the struggle of powers. I want to show this period because we cannot escape it. Why should I ignore this? I share these emotions; of course, I cannot ask my children to share the same things with me. The other people, they only know stories from television etc, and they don't know what they are talking about. My responsibilty is to describe this period as deeply as possible, to show this emotion and to understand the vision of art. You cannot ask anybody to be responsible for other civilisations.  

AfN: Another thing concerning the keyword "industrialization" is the relationship "artist to gallery" and "artist to auction house". Chinese artist became very famous within a short period of time, through the results of their auctions. Now the British artist, Damien Hirst sells directly from his studio to the auction house. Do you think that this is also an indicator of the "industrialization" of the whole sector? 

 Cheng: In the art world, there are not so many artists who can do the same like Damien Hirst. First of all, he knows the communication and the system very well; he is already supported by a very strong art system. He is selling more than 200 pieces. Maybe he wants to break the system? Perhaps it is a joke? I don't know. It is difficult for the people who supported him since the beginning, the galleries... I think he is free to do what he wants to do. But I don't know how he will do it in the future. Of course, art can sell without art fairs, especially when the artist is famous.   

AfN: Mr. Cheng, where are you heading to next? Are you going to Miami?  

Cheng: Before the end of this year, I will be in my galleries where we will have three or two exhibitions. I will alos help to organise some exhibitions in museums. I will be in Greece, preparing the National Contemporary Art Centre. [...] We will also be in Miami at the fair. And we are preparing for next year, the fairs, the exhibitions, my galleries... Life continues.   

AfN: Thank you very much for the interview.  

Cheng: Thank you very much.

This is an artfacts.net interview with Mr. Cheng from Xin Dong Cheng Gallery in Beijing and Paris.

CO2LED

2008-10-04T01:10:00.000-07:00

Temporary Public Art Encourages Environmental Stewardship
Public art addresses environmental concerns and leads the way to the annual Planet Arlington World Music Festival in Rosslyn

A trio of environmentally-friendly artists, Jack Sanders, Robert Gay, and Butch Anthony will create a temporary public artwork in Rosslyn from Wednesday, June 6th through Friday, June 15, 2007. The project, titled CO2LED, will be erected at the traffic island at Ft. Myer Drive,North Lynn Street, and North Fairfax Drive, just north of the Meade Street Bridge over Arlington Boulevard (Route 50) at the southern entrance to Rosslyn, near the Iwo Jima memorial. On display through Labor Day, CO2LED celebrates environmental stewardship andbeckons the way to the second annual Planet Arlington World Music Festival (Saturday, September 1, 4-10 PM at the Netherlands Carillon). A satellite display of CO2LED will occur at the southern tip of Crystal City, on the traffic island where Route 1 meets Crystal Drive.

CO2LED promotes the use of alternative energy sources as well as recycling and responds to Arlington’s environmental initiative, FreshAIRE(Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions). 552 solar-powered LEDs (light-emitting diodes) secured to rods of varying heights, each topped with a reused plastic drink bottle, illuminate the traffic island between North Lynn Street and Ft. Myer Drive. The poles’ slight flexibility,combined with the LEDs’ nebulous glow underneath the ridged surfaces of the plastic drink bottles, create a soft, undulating cloud oflight. A native American prairie grass, little bluestem, is planted beneath the poles and stands in contrast to the grid upon which the poles are installed. At the exhibition’s conclusion, the plants will be transplanted to sites throughout the County and all project materials will berecycled.

"This temporary' project promotes 'sustainability,' hails the availability of alternative energy sources and technologies and demonstrates theease of recycling," says Jack Sanders. "We will reuse all the materials used in the project--everything."

The use of energy-efficient, solar-powered LEDs, rather than conventional incandescent bulbs, has the power to significantly reduce therelease of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. Conventional lighting, fueled by power plants which generate energy throughburning fossil fuels, requires far more energy than LEDs, resulting in increased carbon dioxide emissions. Being solar-powered, CO2LEDproduces long-lasting illumination, free of toxic by-products. The team collaborated with local solar-power supplier Jody Solell of SolarElectrics (www.SolarElectricsVA.com) to determine the most appropriate solar panels to employ for this project and to demonstrate thelocal availability of such technology.

CO2LED was developed in conjunction with Planet Arlington, http://www.arlingtonarts.org/PlanetArlington.htm a year-round culturalprogramming initiative designed to explore issues of immigration, globalization and the environment through the lens of the arts andhumanities. CO2LED beckons the way to the Planet Arlington World Music Festival, which is the signature event for Planet Arlington. Thisexhibition was sponsored by Arlington County, Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources.Jack Sanders, Robert Gay, and Butch Anthony met while working at the renowned Auburn University Rural Studio www.cadc.auburn.edu/soa/rural-studio/. This program guides students in the design and construction of affordable and sustainablehomes for the economically disadvantaged living in Hale County, Alabama. In addition to working collaboratively, each artist alsooperates his own design business: Jack Sanders operates Design Build Adventure www.beaconlives.com and Robert Gay runs THOUGHTBARN (www.thoughtbarn.com), both out of Austin, Texas. Together they collaborated on a large-scale, temporary public artproject for First Night Austin http://www.beaconlives.com/firstnight.pdf in 2006. The team is also developing a permanent public artproject in association with the future Lance Armstrong Bikeway Project in Austin, TX http://www.nextproject.info/ Butch Anthony of Butch, Anthony of Seale, Alabama operates Museum of Wonder www.museumofwonder.com and completed a temporary public art project forArlington in 2006, enveloping a Rosslyn bicycle kiosk (the Bike the Sites Oasis http://www.bikeoasis.com/, located at the northwest corner of19th and North Moore Streets, half a block north of the Rosslyn Metro) in a web of recycled bicycle parts and street signage.

The fine line between curating and promoting

2008-10-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

The excellent Richard Prince exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery which closed earlier this month raises important issues that all public galleries may sometimes face. In 1983 Iwona Blazwick and I presented a show by Richard Prince at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Prince emerged as part of a generation of politically-aware American artists, including Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. The exhibition included three works now on display at the Serpentine but then the financial value of those pieces was very low. Since the 80s all those artists have entered the market, albeit in different ways. However, one thing they had in common was an interest in what the market could do for them—certainly in terms of wider distribution—as much as what they could do for the market. In this respect they were quite distinct from some politically-orientated senior artists, who were highly equivocal about the art market.

This shift in approach was typified by the artist Leon Golub in an interview for “State of the Art”, a 1987 television series on the UK’s Channel Four. We had put on a show called “Mercenaries and Interrogations” at the ICA in 1982. The works are big, vivid, figurative images of people being tortured and intimidated. They are very political and, we thought, not at all commercial. And then, to the surprise of many, Charles Saatchi bought several. I asked Leon how he felt about that, and he said: “You can say Saatchi ... takes possession of my mind, of my art. But then I enter his home or his environment. I put my mercenaries there.” Thus, over the past 25 years, two issues come into play: there are many more collectors willing to buy a greater diversity of work—including pieces that previously were seen as political, with lower commercial value—and a generational shift among artists, who became more conscious of how they wanted to be positioned vis à vis the market.   Today, no curator can afford to be ignorant of the market. If you are, you will soon learn a hard lesson when you try to mount an exhibition by a “hot” artist. Either you will find it very difficult to secure loans, or you may come under pressure from collectors or dealers to include particular works.   All institutions have some impact on the credibility of an artist, and that in turn may affect prices. It is unlikely that the Serpentine will at this point have any inflationary influence on the market for an artist as successful as Richard Prince. But the potential impact is something that all of us working in museums have to be aware of. In the 1970s and 1980s the German economist Willi Bongard produced a guide for collectors called Kunstkompass, comparing the top-selling 100 artists each year against a points system he had devised. He would award points for museum shows, favourable reviews, catalogues, and so on—something like 20 for a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and 16 for a show at the Tate at Millbank—and then he would produce a points-to-price ratio, working out who was good value. The winner was almost always Joseph Beuys, who scored highly from the museum shows, yet his prices were comparatively low. Bongard’s larger message, however, was that every institution adds some points, but the degree of market influence is often about timing.  Exhibitions in public institutions come about for different reasons, but you always have to be clear that what you are doing is for the public benefit. After that the largest potential minefield for publicly-funded museums and galleries is maintaining the integrity of the programme when you are obliged to find additional funding. You may try and find an appropriate commercial sponsor for an exhibition, but never want to be in a position that if you don’t get a sponsor you have to drop the show.  Inevitably there is a relationship between the museum and an artist’s dealer because it is almost impossible to mount a contemporary exhibition without their involvement. If they don’t want you to do it, they will make sure that, in effect, you can’t. Theoretically you might borrow all the work from others, but practically it is very difficult. The relationship needs clarity and integrity on both sides. The dealer provides access to information, images and collectors and they may agree to purchase catalogues, which will reduce the net cost. There are also occasions when a dealer might, in a quite direct way, express a particular view about a work and stress its importance. Depending on how well you know them, you have to gauge whether that is simply a knowledgeable and objective opinion, or is highly subjective because they want to keep in with a certain collector, or assure the collector of the wider validation of the work. It is one of the reasons that it is sometimes better to keep a curator working directly on the exhibition, and leave the relationship with the dealer to the museum director.  Whatever the relationship with a dealer, it should never be based on cash. It would be very difficult to maintain the perceived independence of your curator in choosing the right works if your institution was taking funding from the source helping make the works available. It works the other way as well. In the 1970s, when I was deputy to Nicholas Serota at Modern Art Oxford we discussed the possibility of taking a percentage from sales of works on show—if any were made. For those of us working in small-scale, financially fragile, institutions (as it was then) it seemed logical to earn something if a work sold during the run of the show, particularly if an artist was being exposed to early critical interest. The late Bryan Robinson created brilliant programmes at the Whitechapel in the 1950s and 1960s apparently on no money at all, and it was quite well known that he worked with dealers and artists to try to raise money from sales. But we soon realised the disadvantages. Dealers could easily avoid revealing their sales and, of course, it undermined the independence necessary in the public sphere.   It is also common, and desirable, to take works directly from the artist’s studio, because you are often worried when planning a show over three or four years that by the time you open, everything will have been seen. Of course by “seen” you really mean seen in the art world and it could be argued that, as the paramount responsibility of the public gallery is to the public at large, it might not matter. But it may still affect the level of critical interest and publicity you can generate around your exhibition. This links to the issue of artists co-curating exhibitions, as is often the case and is an integral part of the Serpentine show. There are artists, such as Richard Prince, who see the exhibition as an extension of their work. An exhibition like this is really an artist’s project, which is perfectly valid.  Conversely there are concerns regarding collectors, especially as many of them are museum supporters. Everyone tends to be cautious if one collector has dominated the ownership of an artist’s work, in which case mounting an exhibition might be an aggrandisement of their interests rather than serving the public. Most museums in the UK take the view that they will not exhibit a collector’s collection on its own unless there is an explicit commitment to donate some or all of that collection. Of course you could say, “but the public may still want to see the collection, the public doesn’t care about the price, the public cares about access to works that would otherwise be on private walls”. Nevertheless I think that none of us working in public museums wants to feel that an individual has an opportunity to exploit the public sector.  So what is the difference between a multimillionaire collector and a multimillionaire artist with their own personal collection? The answer is: probably a lot less than there used to be. But however discerning the collectors’ tastes or however famous the collection, they are not the originators of the works. That is why it is one rule for the collector and another for the artist. When the curating is undertaken by the artist, creator status trumps other concerns, as the artist’s creative intelligence is of pre-eminent interest.

Sandy Nairne |director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a member of the Museums Association’s Ethics Committee. He was speaking to Jane Morris.

The art factory and the death of the connoisseur..

2008-10-02T05:06:00.000-07:00

It has been left to a court in Germany to decide whether or not a work apparently by Jörg Immendorff—but probably signed by the artist—is or is not a fake. But to define “fake art”, we have to first define “art”. Of course the word was invented well before Duchamp opened Pandora’s Box. Before, that is, he decreed that the term included found objects, that art need involve only the artist’s choice, not his hand—that the idea is the art. Now that can be true if the idea is profound enough, or the object beautiful enough. But again it might just not be art even if the artist says it is.

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In Duchamp’s day the “art world” was tiny and the initiates were ready for a breakthrough—for new ideas and new media, for “dada”—and the big money wasn’t there. Once we accept that the artist’s hand is no longer necessary, only his idea, it’s a short leap to market the concept that beauty is not only no longer essential, it can even be turned into a dirty, “elitist” word.

That is what in certain quarters has happened to the discipline of connoisseurship. That is what happened in the art history departments of the great universities, like Harvard, after the mid-1970s. Connoisseurship is the identification of the artist by his handwriting. But if his hand isn’t there, the handwriting isn’t, and connoisseurship becomes a dead old discipline. Who needs connoisseurs? Why train them? Why not train museum director-administrators-fundraisers-construction supervisors? Who needs museum directors who actually love objects? Why not fund academic chairs in the new language—“artspeak”—to explain it all? But alas, we’re stuck with the single word “art” to define it all.

The artist can simply hatch an idea. Then comes the collaboration of an army of profiteers in “collectors’” clothes; of hungry auctioneers; of empire-building dealers; of trendy museum curators; a press bedazzled by mega-millions flooding in from every corner of the globe—art then has truly been transformed into an “asset class”. But what is fake and what is real?

Apparently any image can be “copyrighted” if an artist gets there with it first. From Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-day dots and Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, it’s a short leap to Jeff Koons’ or Damien Hirst’s or Takashi Murakami’s factories turning the stuff out.

Shock value is enough for a copyright, whether it’s a putrefying shark or a platinum, diamond-studded neo-Augsburg memento mori or a three-dimensional cartoon or a huge, shiny toy dog. With money proliferating and more and more of it pouring into the “art” market, rarity generates lower, not higher prices. Beckmanns and Tanguys cost less than Warhols or Basquiats or Richard Princes.

So what constitutes a fake? With old masters, connoisseurs devote themselves to distinguishing the master’s hand from the assistants’, and this can be done, even with objects from the pre-humanist period, when the patronage was religious and strictly formulaic.

In January 2000, a painting attributed to the rare painter, Arcimboldo, was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, for $1.5m. It has never been accepted as by Arcimboldo himself, and it has never been resold. In December 2005, two panels attributed to Bernardo Daddi, estimated at £50,000-£70,000, were sold at Sotheby’s, London for £400,000. One of the pair has now been identified as by Orcagna, an even greater and rarer master.

In December 2006, a painting catalogued as by a Rubens follower was sold in Sweden for $2.4m, then subsequently established as an autograph Rubens and resold privately for four times that amount. In October 2007, a painting estimated at $3,000 was sold in a provincial British sale as a Rembrandt copy for $5m, then fully accepted by the Rembrandt authority and valued at four times the cost. In July 2008, a painting catalogued as by Van Dyck was sold at Christie’s, London, for £3m, but the jury is still out as to whether Van Dyck painted it; there were many who thought not. All of this falls under the canopy of connoisseurship, the “dead” discipline.

Of course there are contemporary artists whose hands are much more present in their work. It would be easy to tell a fake Jasper Johns or Anselm Kiefer even if the artists weren’t around to nail the fakers. Nor have I ever seen a fake Max Beckmann.

But since out of Duchamp’s box have sprung legions of art-makers, some with active factories, guidelines are clearly needed to tell the fake from the genuine. If the artist is alive, his word must prevail. Unless he has gone gaga or been coerced and the decision-making delegated. Or his widow or designee been corrupted. There was even an instance, related to me first-hand, when out of pity for the impoverished Dominguez, de Chirico actually signed a Dominguez fake “de Chirico”.

Once an artist is dead, the going gets tougher, such as in the Immendorff situation. Then it’s necessary that the number of genuine examples have been dictated by the artist himself. That’s why, in the case of traditional sculpture, graphics and photography, I personally am prejudiced in favour of life-time examples where the artist would have approved of the patina and impressions. Those are what I consider authentic. But with “art” proliferating and the stakes so high, there may also be big rewards in store for the litigators.

Richard Feigen - The art newspaper
The writer is president of Richard L. Feigen & Co

Has Money Ruined Art?

2008-10-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

I love art and the art world, but lately, I can see why the Gavin Brown gallery has a new Website called NewYorkIsDead.biz. The site’s creators say that “nothing’s moribund; energy still abounds. But its timbre is strange.” Just how strange can be seen, as never before, when the bullshit machine runs at full steam; students charge $25,000 for paintings; the M.F.A. (as Daniel Pink notes) is the new M.B.A.; and “the system,” as David Hammons observed, “is making people offers they can’t refuse when it should be making them offers they can’t understand.”

A large chunk of the art world seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid, too. Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts. They’re P.T. Barnums, showmen and -women who have become part of the show. Art magazines, once left on coffee tables, are fat enough to be coffee tables. Ten years ago this month, Artforum had 124 pages. This month, it has more than that many pages of ads, and 412 pages overall. Damien Hirst, who once brazenly declared that collectors would “buy what you fucking give them,” recently, and wearily, told The Guardian, “You just make things and you sell them, you make things and sell them.” Addressing the strangeness, the underrated painter Jason Fox recently observed, “In these conservative times, it’s easy for art to become hollowed out from any progressive or radical energy and exist only as a bourgeois decoration.”

Just how easy can be seen all around. A couple of seasons ago, after Christie’s Christopher Burge brought down the hammer on Warhol’s Orange Marilyn, 1962 at auction for $14.5 million, the bigwig collector-dealer Bob Mnuchin dimwittedly shouted from the auction-room floor, “How about a hand for Christopher?” Everyone applauded, understanding that art had become a currency to manage. Perhaps it was ever thus; it’s just more thus than ever.

Last year, amid the same tent-city casino atmosphere, Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head of Christie’s postwar-and-contemporary-art department, crowed that auction houses were “the big-box retailers putting the mom-and-pops out of business … After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?” A few months earlier, her cheeky competitor, Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s, effused, “The best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart.” That’s exactly wrong. The market is not computer but camera, so dumb that it believes almost anything put in front of it. It’s self-replicating: If the market sees one artist’s work selling well, it buys more by that artist, driving up prices. Thus, the rush to buy third-rate product from second-rate artists, like the kitschy paintings of Martin Eder, whose prices have hit $500,000.

The words “New York is dead” rocketed though my head last month at Greeting Card, a spectacle staged by artist Aaron Young at the gloriously emptied-out Seventh Regiment Armory. The event, organized by the otherwise admirable not-for-profit Art Production Fund, and sponsored by sundry art dealers and collectors, Target, Sotheby’s, and Tom Ford, was attended by over 500 invited guests, including—for a touch of pseudo-danger, I suppose—members of the Hells Angels. A-listers, curators, thin and well-dressed women, up-and-coming artists, and certain critics were given seats. Everyone else had to stand.

With the social pecking order in place, and gas masks and earplugs distributed to the nervous, at exactly 7:45 p.m. (this professionalized art world runs on time) the lights of the Armory dimmed, ventilation fans switched on, and twelve motorcyclists began fishtailing atop 288 black-painted plywood panels, rubbing away the surface to reveal snaking lines of fluorescent pink. Wheels spun, smoke rose, and by 7:55 this ersatz Carl Andre sculpture had been turned into an ersatz Brice Marden painting. Some said they thought the $220,000 testosterone-fest was not decadent but “divine.”

Young, who’s made good work but here fell prey to his own hype, told the New York Times that he wanted the performance to be “very hard-edged.” But Greeting Card, though impressively militaristic—it elevated painting to some combination of gladiatorial spectator sport, motocross, and a rock concert—was less hard-edged than Hallmark. As artist Jackie Saccoccio remarked, “Like a lot of things these days, it was more about the funders than the thing funded.”

Speeding Up the Assembly Line Taste has become a cheap high. Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it’s never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses, and there are more Joneses than ever. When we learn that a Richard Prince photograph fetched over $1 million or that a Marlene Dumas canvas sold for $3 million, does it affect the way we think about these artists’ work? High prices become part of its temporary content, often disrupting and distorting art’s nonlinear, alchemical strangeness. Money is something that can be measured; art is not. It’s all subjective. You can’t prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell—although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I’d say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn’t really looked at either painter’s work. Taste is a blood sport.

By Jerry Saltz -New york art

MILAN KUNDERA - The painters Brutal Gesture

2008-09-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

When Michel Archimbaud was planning this collection of Francis Bacon’s portraits and self-portraits, he asked me to write the book’s introduction. He assured me that the invitation was Bacon’s own wish. He reminded me of a short piece of mine, published long ago in the periodical L’Arc, a piece he said the painter had considered one of the few in which he could recognize himself. I will not deny my emotion at this message arriving, after years, from an artist I had never met and loved so much.

That piece in L’Arc (which later inspired a section of my Book of Laughter and Forgetting), discussing the triptych of the portraits of Henrietta Moraes, was written in about 1977, in the very first period after my emigration, obsessed as I was then by recollections of the country which I had just left and which still remained in my memory as the land of interrogations and surveillance. Here it is:

It was 1972. I met with a girl in a Prague suburb, in a borrowed apartment. Two days earlier; she had been interrogated by the police about me for an entire day. Now she wanted to meet with me secretly (she feared that she was constantly being followed) to tell me what questions they had asked her and how she had answered them. If they were to interrogate me, my answers should be the same as hers.
She was a very young girl who had as yet little experience of the world. The interrogation had disturbed her, and, after three days, the fear was still upsetting her bowels. She was very pale and during our conversation she kept leaving the room to go to the toilet-so that our whole encounter was accompanied by the noise of the water refilling the tank.I had known her for a long time. She was intelligent, spirited, she had fine emotional control, and was always so impeccably dressed that her outfit, just like her behavior, allowed not a hint of nakedness. And now, suddenly, fear like a great knife had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook.
The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up, and I suddenly had the urge to rape her. I know what I’m saying: rape her, not make love to her. I didn’t want tenderness from her. I wanted to bring my hand down brutally on her face and in one swift instant take her completely, with all her unbearably arousing contradictions: with her impeccable outfit along with her rebellious guts, her good sense along with her fear, her pride along with her misery. I sensed that all those contradictions harbored her essence: that treasure, that nugget of gold, that diamond hidden in the depths. I wanted to posses her, in one swift moment, with her shit along with her ineffable soul.
But I saw those two eyes staring at me, filled with torment (two tormented eyes in a sensible face) and the more tormented those eyes, the more my desire turned absurd, stupid, scandalous, incomprehensible and impossible to carry out.

Uncalled-for and unconscionable, that desire was nonetheless real. I cannot disavow it- and when I look atFrancis Bacon’s portrait- triptych, it’s as if I recall it. The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to size hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do harbor something-but whatever it may be, we each of us have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in the hop of finding, in it and behind it, a thing that is hidden there.

The best commentaries on Bacon’s work are by Bacon himself in two series of interviews: with David Sylvester between 1962 and published in the later year, and with Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926-1932 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw’ an area there… which in a way has been unexplored, of organic from that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’. With this very precise remark, he defines the realm whose exploration is actually his alone.
Aside from that short period Bacon mentions, one could say that Picasso’s light gesturetransforms human body motifs into two-dimensional and autonomous pictorial reality. With Bacon we are in another world: there, playful Picassian(or Matissian) euphoria is replaced by an amazement (if not a shock) at what we are, what we are materially, physically. Impelled by that amazement, the painter’s hand (to use the words of my old piece) comes down with a ‘brutal gesture’ on a body, on a face, ‘in the hope of finding, in it and behind it, a thing that is hidden there’.

But what is hidden there? It’s self? Every portrait ever painted seeks to uncover the subject’s self. But Bacon lived in a time when the self inevitably eludes detection. Indeed, our most common personal experience teaches us (especially if the life behind us is very long) that faces are lamentably alike (the insane demographic avalanche further enhancing that sense), that they are easy to confuse, that they only differ one from the next by some very tiny, barely perceptible detail, which mathematically often represents only a few millimeters’ difference in the various proportions. Add to that our historical experience, which teaches us that men mimic one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulability, and that man is therefore less an individual than an element of a mass.
This is the moment of uncertainty when the rapist hand of the painter comes down with a ‘brutal gesture’ on his subject’s faces in order to find, somewhere in the depths, their buried self. What is new in that Baconian quest is, first (to use his expression), the ‘organic’ nature of those forms in ‘a complete distortion’. Which means that the forms in his paintings are meant to resemble living beings, to recall their bodily existence, their flesh, and thus always to retain their three-dimensional nature. The second innovation is the principle of variations. Edmund Husserl explained the importance of variations for searching out the essence of a phenomenon. I will say it in my simpler way; variations differ one from the other, but yet retain some thing common to them all; the thing they have in common is ‘that treasure, that nugget of gold, that hidden diamond’, namely, the sought-for essence of a theme or, in Bacon’s case, the self of a face.
Looking at Bacon’s portraits, am amazed that, despite their ‘distortion’, they all look like their subject. But how can an image look like a subject of which it is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet it does look like the subject ; photos of the persons portrayed bear that out; and even if I did not know those photos, it is clear that in all the triptychs, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that one recognizes in them some one and same person. However ‘distorted’, these portraits are faithful. That is what I find miraculous.

I could put it differently: Bacon’s portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where lines the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?
5
For a long time, Bacon and Beckett made up a couple in my imaginary gallery of modern art. The I read the Archimbaud interview: ‘I’ve always been amazed by this pairing og Beckett and me’, Bacon said. Then, farther on, ‘…I’ve always felt that Shakespeare expressed much better and more precisely and more powerfully what Beckett’s and Joyce were trying to say…’. And again ‘I wonder is Beckett’s ideas about his art haven’t wound up killing off his creation. There is something at once too systematic and too intelligent in him, that may be what’s always bothered me’. And finally : ‘In painting, we always live in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough, but in Beckett I have often had the sense that as a result of seeking to eliminate, nothing was left anymore , and nothingness finally sounded hollow…’.

When one artist talks about another one, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what’s valuable in his judgment. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about himself?

That he is refusing to be categorized. That he wants to protect his work against clichés.

Next: that he is resisting the dogma tics of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, the later represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Whereas Bacon looks through the history of art inn its entirety; the 20th century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.

And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, fearing to stifle his creative unconscious; fearing also to allow his art to be turned into a kind of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because, in our half of the century, art is clogged with a noisy, opaque logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media- free contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener).

Wherever he can, Bacon there fore blurs his tracks to throw off interpreters who try to reduce his works to an over-facile programme: he bridles using the work ‘horror’ with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting(chance turning up in the course of the work-an accidental spot of paint that abruptly changes the very subject of the picture); he insists on the word ‘play’ when everyone is making much of the seriousness of his paintings. People want to talk his despair? Very well, but, he specifies immediately, in this case it is a joyous despair.
6
From the reflection on Beckett quoted, I pullout his remarks: ‘In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…’ . Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, fill up, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. That describes, for example, in the sonata form(of even the greatest-Mozart, Beethoven) all the (often very conventional) transitions from one theme to another. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with ‘pillar’, do away with what ever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential(the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say).

So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are hyper-simple, flat- color; but: in the foreground, the bodies are treated with the richness of colors and forms that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearean) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat –color background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if ‘put on a diet’, as if diminished, and for bacon the issue always and above all its beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems now a days to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

And it is by he is irritated by the word ‘horror’ that is persistently applied to his painting. Tolstoy said to Leonid Andreyev and of his tales of terror: ‘He is trying to frighten me, but I’m not scared’. Now a days the too many paintings trying to frighten us, and they annoy us instead. Terror is not an aesthetic sensation, and the horror found in Tolstoy’s novels is never there to frighten us; the harrowing scene in which they operate on the mortally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky without anesthesia is not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no picture by Bacon lacks it. Butchers’ shops are horrible, but speaking of them, Bacon says, ‘One has got to remember as a painter that there is this great beauty of the color of meat’.

Why it is that, despite al Bacon’s reservations, I continue to see him as akin to Beckett?

Both of them are located at just about the same place in the respective histories of their art. That is, in the very last period of dramatic art, in the very last period of the history of painting. For Bacon is one of the last painters whose language is still oil and brush. And Beckett still wrote for the theatre that was based on the author’s text. After him, the theatre still exists, true, perhaps it is even evolving; but it is no longer the play writes’ texts that inspire, renew, and guarantee that evolution.

In the history of modern art, Bacon and Beckett are not the ones opening the way; they close it again. When Archimbaud asks Bacon which contemporary are important to him, he says: ‘After Picasso I do not know. There is Pop-art show at the Royal academy right now…when you see all those paintings together, you do not see anything. To me there is nothing in it, it’s empty, completely empty’. And Warhol?’…to me , he’s not important’. And abstract art? Oh know, he does not like it.

‘After Picasso, I do not know’. He talks like an orphan. And he is one. He is one even in the very concrete sense of the life he lived: the people who opened the way where surrendered by colleagues, by commentators, by worshipers, by sympathizers, by fellow travelers, by an entire gang. But bacon is alone. As Beckett is. In one of the Sylvester interviews: ‘I think it would be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working together…I think it would be terribly nice to have some one to talk to. Today there is absolutely none to talk to’.

Because their modernism, the modernism that closes the way again, no longer matches the ‘modernity’ around them, modernity of fashions propelled by the marketing of art. (Sylvester: ‘If abstract painting is no more than patter-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative works?’. Bacon: ‘Fashion’. Being modern at the moment when the greater modernism is closing the way is an entirely different thing from being modern in Picasso’s time. Bacon is isolated (‘There is absolutely none to talk to’); isolated from both the past and future.
8
Like Bacon, Beckett had no illusions about the future either of the world or of art. And that moment in the last days of illusions, both men show the same immensely interesting and significant reaction: wars, revolutions and their set backs, massacres, imposture w call democracy-all these subjects are absent from their works. In this Rhinoceros, Ionesco is still interested in the great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea. Inconceivable subjects for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilization (as Beckett and bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society , with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological materiality of man. That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which used to concentrate within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a simple physiological scandal. ‘I’ve always being very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extra ordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and this smell of death…’.

To link Jesus nailed to the Cross with slaughter houses and animals’ fear might seem sacrilegious. But bacon is a non-behavior, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, ‘Man now realize that he is an accident, that he is a completely fertile being, that he has to play out the game without reason’. Seen from the angle, Jesus is that accident who, without reason, played out the game. The Cross: the game played to the end.

No, not sacrilege; rather a clear-sighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze that tries to penetrate into the essential. And what essential thing is revealed when all the social dreams have evaporated and man sees’ Religious possibilities. Completely cancelled out for him’? The body. The mere Ecce homo, visible, moving, and concrete. For ‘of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butchers shop I always think its surprising that I was not there instead of the animal’.

It is neither pessimism no despair, it is only obvious fact, but a fact that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blids us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And then one day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at the body’s mercy, like the young women in Prague who, following the shock of an interrogation, went off to the toilet every three minutes. She was reduced to her fear, to the fury of her bowels, and to the noise of the water she heard re filling the toilet tank as I hear it. When I look at Bacon’s Figure at a wash basin of 1976 or the Triptych May-June 1973. for that young Prague women it was no longer the police that she had to face up to but her own belly, and if someone was presiding invisibly over that little horror scene, it was no police man, or apparatchik, or executioner, it was a God-or an anti-God, the wicked God of the Gnostics, a Demiurge, a Creator, the one who had trapped us for ever by that ‘accident’ of the body he cobbled together in his workshop and of which, for a while, we are forced to become the soul.

Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can be sen, for instance , in the picture called Studies of the Human Body, in which he unmasks the body as a simple 'accident', an accident that could easily have been fashioned some other way, for instance-I don't kow- with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees. These are the only pictures of his that fill me with horror. But is 'horror' the right word? No. For the sensation that these pictures arouse , there is no right word. What they arouse is not the horror we know, the one in response to the insanities of history, to torture, persecution, war, massacres, suffering. No. This is a different horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly unveiled by the painter, of the human body,
9
what is left to us when we have comedown to that?
The face;
the face that harbours 'that treasure, that nugget of gold, that hidden diamond' which is the infinitely fragile self shivering in a body;
the face I gaze upon to seek in it a reason for living the 'completely futile accident' that is life.

Translated from the French by Linda Asher..

Richard Marshall Interviews Matthew Collings

2008-09-28T01:26:00.000-07:00

3AM:Tell us about yourself.

MC: I’m 46 years old. I’ve been doing art criticism for… I don’t know how long really -- over 20 years. I never intended to be a critic. I’m a would-be artist who has written books about art and done TV programmes about art, both of which are assumed to have a populist dimension. I’ve had this role of apologist for contemporary art, for Tracey Emin, etc, for about five years.

But the weird thing about it is that I either have never thought about it at all – making art popular -- or else I’ve positively hated the popularisation of contemporary art. When I’m being extreme, I’m capable of thinking that frankly the whole art scene is made up of a bunch of idiots. And I have no desire to get millions of ordinary people to queue up to look at that stuff. Why should they? It’s got nothing much to do with them. To suddenly expect it to be popular is asking the impossible. There really is very little in it for a mass audience and I think this mass audience it’s suddenly now got, knows that really. And they’re not really interested; they’re just along for the ride, for the nonsense. The mandarin people in charge of the Turner Prize, and the media people at Channel 4, and middle-class people who run the art columns on the broadsheets, all assume ordinary people must have this stuff explained to them -- but the motivations for doing that are completely bullshit. It’s for commercial reasons, to get the ratings up.

You could have said 50 years ago that the equivalent people in charge of modern and contemporary art packaged it for the masses because they thought it was good for them, or it would save society, or it was against fascism, or something. But now they don’t even pretend it’s out of decent motivations. It’s just for commercial reasons. In any case, I don’t care about any of that. But as I said, I only think those types of things when I’m being extreme.

The fact is, I am interested in what the grain is -- the grain of contemporary art. But I don’t think that to be involved with that, you have to be involved in a zombie way. I think you can be involved in an intelligent way, and that might mean being sceptical. It might mean thinking against the grain. But that’s only because you’re thinking about the bigger picture. I mean, if I think of Sickert – his paintings are characterized by a little bit of light in a general gloom, and the light makes the whole thing. Now I would defend that, and say it’s important and moving. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what art can be, it’s just what’s going on in British art in the Edwardian period. I don’t have to go around mindlessly worshipping that little patch of light.

The equivalent in our time is young British art, (the yBas), full of nihilism, satire, surrealism and decadence. That stuff can be pretty good, and I am sometimes interested in it. But again I would feel like I was suffocating if I thought that was all art could be. And because this art is so popular it’s like there’s no air. We’ve got to hear all this mind-destroying stuff all the time about the very narrow issues and concerns of this art, and of the art of the recent past, like Warhol and Bruce Nauman, and so on, that’s supposed to have begun it all. So when I’m gooning on the TV in front of the Turner Prize, and ironically indicating a bit of disapproval, while seeming to be blindly following the agenda; and then in interviews like this actually being quite explicitly aggressive toward the contemporary scene; it’s just to let in some air.

I don’t really mean that I hate those artists or even those moronic zombie curators, with their ghastly pc homily ideas. I went to art school to be an artist. For one reason or another I fell into this journalistic world. But I thought I was just explaining stories about what I knew to be the codes of the art world. I didn’t necessarily agree with the codes, I just felt I could describe them, because I knew them well. I never had the remotest interest in making this contemporary art scene that we now have, which as everybody knows is mostly just crap, accessible to an audience who has no real interest in it anyway.

On the other hand I’m glad to do a bit of thinking aloud about the aspects of the scene which I find to be good, like Sarah Lucas, or the Chapmans, or whoever. And the more sociological aspects -- I find it good to have a few thoughts about that side of things, too, and put the thoughts out into the public world. I try it out in an article, then maybe again in another one, slightly changed, or a book, or a programme. It’s all the same stream, things developing and changing in my mind.

But I now find myself to be this person who meets strangers in the street who say ‘I really liked your programme’ -- about art I actually might not have much interest in – and they say: ‘And it really opened my eyes to it!’ It’s rather moving to be praised like that, or acknowledged, or whatever, but it’s confusing. I don’t revere the art world, or at least certainly not the contemporary art world. But I learned to think in an art context. Art school was my higher education. So all that is an explanation of what I do.

3AM: Your strong views are very clear in your last book Art Crazy Nation but perhaps weren’t as clearly signaled in your earlier stuff, say Blimey!

MC: I can’t totally remember that book actually. But I’ve never felt any different. I always knew what my relationship to art was, if not to audiences of my own work. It’s never changed. Blimey is a kind of amusing, semi-diaristic description in an Evelyn Waugh English surrealism kind of tone, mixed with a Jennings Goes to School tone. But it’s never an apology for the yBas. I think people assume it’s that without having read it. It’s a satirical description. For one thing, it’s a critical book; there’s a definite pecking order, of artists who I take seriously and ones I take less seriously.

Also people read it and get it wrong, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it really is not what I think it is. But when I say in it about some figure or other, that ‘he is a very good artist’, that’s about playing a kind of game. I assume that if I say something in the book at one point, which is a kind of key to the book, then people will remember it later. But apparently they often miss the connection. Actually one of those key things is specifically about missing connections: I think I say something like: ‘People come up to me and say “The Late Show” is getting much better, because they were on it -- they don’t see the connection!’

It’s not that I’m so complicated or so twisted. I write these books intuitively and they end up more or less how I wrote them in the first place; except the language gets more refined in the re-writing, and the ordering of the thoughts might change. But the fact is, how it comes out in the first place is jaded. Irony is a part of intelligent conversation, it’s not a stylistic choice, like someone daft choosing to make installations; it’s a sign that you’re probably saying something thoughtful. On the whole when I’m ironic, it’s because I really do have a certain distance.

Of course I believe in art, in the sense of some kind of tradition and history which includes modernism and to some extent contemporary art; but I believe it’s a slightly stupid age for art right now. It’s probably the worst age there’s ever been. Since art began it couldn’t have been much worse than this. But I don’t wish I lived fifty years ago, or in 1907 or 1870, or something. We are what we are, formed by our own time, of course. But ever since I started this critical enquiry, whatever it is, the theme has always been the same.

Why is art like this? Whose fault is it? Is it the audience’s? Is it the artists’? Is it art’s? Is it inevitable? There are no easy answers to those questions. So I’m always monitoring my thoughts about art; and often they’re based on input from these sometimes surprisingly illiterate people, who often don’t have much self-knowledge, these yBas. I fall asleep after one minute with them.

They’ve never read a book, they drink all the time, and they’re unbearable. They have a drink and they go mad and act like caricatures. You wouldn’t believe it. Then another minute I’m more humble because, on the other hand, I think, ‘Yes, that is art -- they are the top artists’. So I don’t think that Blimey is much different to this new one. I think the real different one is It Hurts! in that it wasn’t very good. I don’t know why. I think I wrote it too quickly. Or I wrote it off the back of a TV series. The momentum was there for half a book and then it went away again. And now when I read that one through, or bits of it, it’s the one that gives me the most pain.

3AM: The one that brought you to the public eye was probably This Is Modern Art, based on the TV programmes you did.

MC: The first time I was relatively widely known was as a result of that series. Within the art world I was already known because of the ‘Late Show’, and because of Artscribe, which I edited for a few years. If you run an art magazine you’re a bit feared, or at least people often want to suck up to you. But you see I had a bit of a crisis earlier, when you asked me to tell you about myself, because I was sincerely trying to work out what I do, and what the use of it is. And I had a complete existential attack. What could I call myself? And anything I thought of, I found a bit worrying.

But anyway with This Is Modern Art I was recognized a bit, and that was when it became apparent to me that a lot of people saw me as a populariser of a difficult subject, which I really thought myself as being. It’s just that I was naïve: I thought with that series, when it was offered to me, well, they’re going to pay me -- not very much actually -- and I know about this stuff, so I’ll just explain it as clearly as possible. I’ll divide it into these categories – Jokes, Beauty, Shock, Nothingness, etc -- because those seemed to be the themes the general public acknowledged. And I thought that, weirdly, the general public was right: they are the main themes.

You could say if you were boring that the general themes are the body and race and gender and so on, but the real theme now is shock: everything falls out from that. Black humour and surreal not-really-disturbing jokes are part of shock. So I thought you could do a reasonable history of modern art and especially very contemporary art using these themes. And they were interesting ideas. Well, not fantastically interesting, actually, but I had enough interest in them to make them work as programmes.

But then when you start making a TV programme you’re working with loads of people so everything gets slightly distorted, and in the end it’s not quite what you thought you’d started out with. Maybe some of it is better, because of the talent of the executive producers and the camera guy and the series-producer. But it probably wasn’t in the end all totally accurate to how I actually feel about things. But then there it is on TV and suddenly you’re Mr Art.

What on earth are you going to do with all this? I can’t imagine. I’m just rambling!

3AM: Keep it coming!

MC: I don’t take seriously the current moment of contemporary art, as I say -- but a lot of the artists who are currently in the spotlight I do think are the genuinely good ones. I think the Chapman Brothers are fantastic, very good and intelligent and thoughtful and clever and funny – the things they’re supposed to be, according to, say, the dim lights of ‘Dazed’n’Confused’ they actually are.

And I think the same about Sarah Lucas and to a slightly less extent Tracy Emin, and maybe a bit higher up but sometimes much further down, because he’s a bit amazingly variable, Damien Hirst. But still it’s a low moment, because there’s nothing in society anymore that asks for art to exist, except the market or the celebrity game, which are both trivial things. Or if they are important they’re important in ways that are irrelevant to art.

Obviously it’s economic values that rule now. Celebrity is a trivia side-product of them, in that it’s a popular sign of success. Success has become our main cultural value. We know clearly what it is. Of course art can have aspects of anything but what makes it worth having is what’s soulful, serious and important. The last things you want it to be are sexy and celebrity-driven, or daft and amusing. And those are the only things people want art to be at the moment.

So in Art Crazy Nation, I’m trying to think about that problem and be realistic about it, and sometimes state it more starkly and openly than I did with Blimey, which was a book which had a more sustained ironic tone, or at least the irony was jollier.

3AM: So where would you like to be?

MC: I wouldn’t like to be in the past because that would be mad. You have to be true to your own experiences. Experience shows me that art has a certain comedic character at the moment, and it’s not a noble thing to be in. It’s a daft thing, more or less. But I’m in it just the same.

3AM: Several of your complaints about the trivial nature of the art world echo complaints made about the current state of literature. Steven Well’s Attack! Book project and the works of Stewart Home, for example, are examples of writers who are addressing this. Are you wanting to effect change or are you just a witness to this ironical art?

MC: That’s a very good question. Let’s see – I think I can only answer it by thinking about what good art writing is, for me. People are often shocked at how hopeless I am as a left-winger. Am I going to go on like this, groping blindly, subjectively in this darkness, making a few sort of amusing jokes along the way, or am I supposed to actually do something? The work I’ve been doing for the past five years or so has been mainly writing, and the writing has taken a kind of pleasure-seeking form, kind of indulgent. I might have a jaded attitude towards art but I truly like the writing, the craft of it, and I take it totally seriously.

But it has been, until this point, a weird kind of game of how to objectify this pleasurable thing, in terms of paragraphs and structure, and how to achieve a book-like structure. That’s what all that experimenting is with little sub-headings in bold type: I mean, I think of that stuff as quite lyrical and poetic. That’s why I found Julian Stallabrass’s parody of it, or his designer’s attempt to parody it, in Stallabrass’s book High Art Lite, baffling. In that book, the headings actually tell you what will happen in the paragraph, to help the reader. Which is definitely not what mine usually do.

In any case, with my writing work, there hasn’t necessarily been any developing of a socially useful meta-theory. Surely I should be able to give an account of what we should be doing now, as a society, you might think. Which is what Clement Greenberg was so good at, in the thirties and forties. He thought art was in a certain way and he, as a committed Marxist, would have something to say about it, to further the situation along a bit. I suppose also that’s something Peter Fuller felt about he was doing; though in his last years, of course, not as a Marxist but as an evangelist for that weird kind of conservative thing he believed in.

But I come from a very different background to both of them. Peter was evangelical, and I’m not. Clem was high-minded and educated, and could speak several languages, and was a sophisticated philosopher, and I’m not any of those things. I can only write about art in a way that seems believable to myself by making it up as I go along as a kind of amusing thing, like a kind of art form which is primarily self-expressive. You’d think by now I’d have a few staggering theories that I could give you the privilege of hearing but I haven’t.

When Greenberg was writing in the 30s, and up to when he did the essays that made him really important, he saw the problems of culture, and of culture’s position in society, from a Marxist point of view, as I say. But after that he became a decadent, cocktail-drinking swinger, and remained so for the next forty years. And I think I moved straight to that position. In the last decades of his life, he would point at some paintings of blobs and say ‘Oh, that one’s good, that one’s good, that one’s good, that one’s bad, throw it out.’ But he earned the right to be blasé because of being so rigorous before.

I mention him because I admire him and reread him a lot, even though I’m not like him. And I’m thinking about this problem of whether I’m supposed to actually do something about anything. I admire and re-read Donald Judd’s critical essays. Judd wasn’t a Marxist but just a formalist and a pleasure-seeker. He’d value art if he felt he could say it was ‘interesting’, which was basically code for pleasure. But in the late 50s and early 60s Judd was this very precise and terse and often a bit cruel reviewer of art exhibitions, as well as an artist. And when he occasionally wrote at length about, say, some stripes, it was incredible, really enlightening. He’d say something simple was really complex, and you’d get what he meant. I really admire that.

Greenberg is elegant and Judd is curt, but I like the clarity of both of them. It’s a clarity that comes of being born into a well-off situation, having a bit of high education, and possessing a broad, large understanding of things. I believe all that does make their thoughts about art more resonant and important than anything you might read now in the Sunday papers. Those papers, how I hate them. How people learn about art now is in from the papers. That’s the general tone: saying any old wank about Louise Bourgeois. No one cares if it’s true or not. And there is no equivalent, today, of the Donald Judd or Clement Greenberg type of art writing. I’m not an equivalent, either. But I like their difference to the Sunday papers writing, and I want to be different to that, too.

3AM: What about David Sylvester?

MC: I don’t think he was ever like Greenberg or Judd. I liked him as a good writer, in a way. But I think of him more as a performer, a great physical beauty and a charismatic guy. If he were in the room here with us, right now, we’d all be really impressed and thrilled, if a bit intimidated. Patrick Heron, the painter, was a very good art writer, very impressive. What made him slightly less good, sometimes – certainly not always since he really was a bit of a genius at writing -- than Clement Greenberg, who he violently hated, was that Patrick was very narrow. He was interested in the problems of yellow, or of wriggly brushstrokes. Greenberg might narrow down to that for half a sentence now and then, in an essay. And eventually he started making his pronouncements as if that was the only kind of thing that mattered.

But he started out with original and excellently expressed thoughts about Kafka, TS Eliot, Jewishness, fascism, society, and so on. It was amazing that he could convincingly, in a really impactful way, put the pursuit of nice colours and brush strokes into that kind of context. But unlike Greenberg, Heron never moved from an obsessive, detailed, microscopic consideration of the surfaces of paintings, and compositional harmonies and tensions, and so on. In terms of his actual art criticism, as opposed to his occasional polemix (which were always very dazzling and good as well, incidentally), that was pretty much the only thing he wrote about. Anyway, I don't see any equivalents of those figures now. And I don't say I'm one myself, by any means. But those are the ones I like. And to return to your question, do I want to change anything? Am I just going to record things or do something about it? I think there’s been a big mistake.

And that is that populism and art are not meant to go together; art is now surrounded by a sort of fake populism. So I think that’s the problem. That’s the ‘it’ I think I’m doing something about. The way I do it is clown for a bit, then find an opening and then be clear, because at that point something makes sense to me. But I haven’t yet made it to the stage where I can just take out the nonsense and go straight to the clear bits.

3AM: Is that because of the material you’re having to talk about rather than your own lack of ability? I mean, one of the things that is strong about your books is that they do make it clear what the codes are and what we’re to do with the art we’re presented with. Even though you’re annoyed that you’ve been seen as a populariser of contemporary art there is this very clear expository dimension to your work. Like, you’d look at the Dan Flavin and say, look, this is a way of taking this stuff.

MC: Well, with that Dan Flavin thing and with a couple of other artists in This is Modern Art, I’m just letting you know what I’ve learned about them and what is there to think about. And that might include a bit of mystery where, ok, they are really only neon tubes, and it doesn’t take a lot of manual skill, but there are a number of possibilities: you can look at it like this or like that. These are the codes, take it or leave it, it sounds absurd, I know, but there you are.

So in that sense you could say I’m doing a job there of demystification. Even though I’m allowing mystery I’m also, as well as I’m able, within the medium of TV, taking a bit of the wrong mystery away. I know about the subject and I know that to a certain extent at least, it is explainable. But it’s not always possible to be that clear and actually I don’t always seek to be clear in that way. I feel I must do something else sometimes. I’m not quite sure why. I suppose it’s because it feels stifling not to, as I said earlier.

3AM: Do you ever think about doing something different — writing a novel or something?

MC: It always occurs to me to write a real book. But I’ve got an agent and publishers. And every time I say I want to write a book they never say, here’s the money now, get on with it. They always ask me to write the first ten pages or so, and I can never be bothered. So the offer has never been concrete enough for me to do it.

3AM: So if we get back to what you’ve described as your own confusion, having to sort out what is happening and your own role in it, what might we look forward to in the art world? Is this just a bad blip?

MC: No. It’s going to get worse. It’s possible to feel jaded about it now but it’s only just begun. I look at the scene that’s going on at Millbank at the moment, where the new Saatchi museum is shortly going to open, with a big new Hirst-fest, and Tate Modern is already there. And the Chelsea Arts School’s moving down there -- which means there’ll be a whole load of subsidiary things opening down there.

And they’ll all be geared to a Saatchi mentality and a Tate Modern mentality, and those mentalities are awfully empty, except with a little bit of pious, PC fake religious values sprinkled in, in the case of Tate Modern. And that’s going to get huge. It’ll start in a year’s time, when the Saatchi thing opens and in two or three years it’ll be the new mindset for aspiring people. So what we’ve so far seen will be as nothing – what we’ve seen is a very rough sketch of what’s to come. It’s going to be streamlined, fake, goo, pseudo-art that’ll lie on the land for years and years. That’s my vision of it. I think the only hope for anything creative or genuinely expressive, is that there has to be some sort of cultural underground. Because if something is only in the spotlight or striving to be in it, then inevitably it’ll be hollow.

Art is special, where you strive to get something of quality, something amazing, weird, difficult. At least, it seems weird and difficult until you’ve done a bit of work on it. Then you get more at home with it. It’s still difficult but the difference is that it’s worth it, that initial sense of difficulty is what it’s all about. Whereas with anything that’s a popular medium, like rock music, say, it’s designed to be instantly accessible, to not have difficulty. You can find difficulty in it, like finding some difficult bits of obscure rock, but the rock form isn’t fundamentally about that.

So there’s got to be some way for artists to get out of that plastic goo mind-set, and make their own cultural world. Which will be quite a difficult thing to do, because nothing can survive that isn’t popular, now. But also by definition, to be genuinely cultural and not just a private obsession, it’s got to be capable of at least a relatively broad appreciation. I can’t think of an historical situation where all this has happened – it’s a new problem. Art has had a wide public aspect before, of course, but the wide public world had some gravity and dignity. It’s as almost as if we’ve now got to admit that what art was, it can no longer be. In ten years time we’ll probably admit that it no longer exists, that we really have broken away from any need for it.

We really are too depraved and idiotic as a society now for art. Actually that was my joke theme for that last Turner Prize programme, straightforwardly declaring difficulty out and Madonna and celebrities in. But in the future that will be reality not a joke. Maybe we’ll all get more interested in the past. Rather than just nostalgia, we’ll develop a serious fascination with real museums, and we’ll treat Tate Modern as a branch of entertainment, which it essentially is.

3AM: It’s a very high art view of art you’ve got. High Romantic, anti-bourgeois, Baudelaire and all that. Someone like Stewart Home might say that it’s a function of the ruling class and the society, capitalism, but on the other hand what might be bad for art might be good for society. You know, it might be a function of democracy.

MC: The end of what you said is right because these are all the results of democracy. But Stewart, hmmm…I think he’s genuinely interested in what it might be to be avant-garde. I was saying earlier that there isn’t an historical period that you can go to for advice.

In terms of avant-gardism – well, avant-gardism doesn’t work now, because the avant-garde we have is an official one and therefore a pseudo one. You can’t be against the system if you are the system. You can’t be ahead of the system if you only exist because of the system, to serve it, that is – the system is ‘avant’ of you.

So, for example, we can’t have an Apollinairian idea of Cubism, something marvelous and connected to poetry, science, progress, ethics, everything: a fantastic thing in the air that some avant-gardists have absorbed by osmosis, and these artists are somehow ahead of the system. There’s nothing in the air now except irony. And that’s something that everyone is in tune with, not just artists. They had that notion of progress, which included democracy. We have progress but not an ideal of it. If anything we have a fear of it as much as an ideal. And also our versions of progress and democracy are that we have a system where many of us can afford car radios now, and we more or less accept they’ll be nicked all the time.

My last series had a lot of chat in it about Romanticism, but in a nutshell it simply said that culturally we are not Romantics but we pay lip service to Romanticism. We still say we admire individualism, intensity, deep feelings, and people who are special and above the herd. But we are ambivalent about this because essentially we know we aren’t Romantics. When art is good now it's because it expresses that ambivalence vividly. And when it’s rather grotesque and distorting and hideous, it’s when it thinks it can be Rembrandt, kind of Rembrandt for executives.

That’s what the problem with Lucian Freud is. The artist having a lot of pseudo deep feelings, when we know perfectly well he doesn’t, because none of us do. So I like art to be good and have some aesthetic loveliness about it, and there isn’t much of that about, and I can see why. But I don’t deplore that there isn’t much around, and curse everyone. Well, I do, but I don’t then say the answer is that we’ve got to do a fake Rembrandt. I mean, that Queen painting must be the ugliest painting I’ve seen in my life. How could anyone take that seriously?

3AM: Adrian Searle liked it.

MC: I think he felt pressured. I think he feels I’ve got the job of being the fool, so he must define himself by being the serious one.

3AM: How difficult is it to work against that goony stereotype?

MC: I kind of accept it. I’m only able to write in a certain way. I can only go in a chip-choppy way, paragraph by paragraph, a bit here and a bit there.

3AM: But you have a definite style now.

MC: To me all the books are very different — with one, I wrote it very quickly, I never looked up, and I almost can’t bear to look at it now because it’s so giddy. Although, actually, there are some excellent bits in it which often get quoted, and I find myself almost admiring whoever wrote that…I mean myself. And then another one is It Hurts, which isn’t quite right in a different way. Blimey was the first one and I do think it’s good, although very shoddy in its typos and wrong captions and so on, just like all the others. With the last book the cover keeps falling off.

You can imagine what that feels like, for an author. On the whole, when they work, I think it’s because of humorous understatement. I worry sometimes about the idea that I’m a complete goofball – I think it said something like that in the review in ‘Art Monthly’ of ‘Art Crazy Nation’. But if it’s so there’s nothing I can do about it. If someone said here’s a hundred thousand pounds, and they put me on a desert island, and they said here are the hula-hula girls, plus all the cocktails you want: and now write how you really, deep-down want to write.

Well, I still wouldn’t be able to come out with the literary ideal that I admire, which is a bit of Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh, Clement Greenberg, Donald Judd, Edward Wilson’s journals, bits of David Hockney’s first autobiography, bit of Rimbaud, and so on. Plus the lyrics on all Bob Dylan’s records. And the Doors, and the four classic Stones albums.

Actually I think I have occasionally matched the fantastic inspired genius of putting that line ‘…I’ll be in my room, with a needle and a spoon…’ in the context of a country song. But the rest is all completely beyond me. I just couldn’t do it. It’s not in me. I think the serious points are sometimes expressed OK. But there’s probably an awful lot of blubber.

3AM: Michael Bracewell, talking to me about your books and your programmes, thinks they’re very serious.

MC: I take that as a compliment. I know I can’t be convincingly earnest, though. If someone can then that’s good, but I find in general it’s not a happening thing at the moment. Patrick Heron is a good example of someone who can get round that. You could never call him exactly earnest, because he has this shrill kind of enthusiasm, which you used to be able to hear in his talking voice, but is there also in his writing. But he could be serious while appearing to be light, which is what I’m getting at, what I’d like to be myself. He was writing in the forties and early fifties, and if you’re interested in this narrow subject of aesthetic, abstract painting, well, he is the master: he is lucid, elegant and beautiful about the mechanics of a painting. But I don’t have the vocabulary and perception and focus to do that.

My TV programmes have been serious in intent. They all have different contexts in which they were made -- different material conditions – but there are general things that unite them all, similar restrictions. TV by its nature is a team thing. So those aspects of a tone of voice, individual integrity, and so on, they’re the first things that come under attack, basically because no one knows your real wavelength, or wants to get bogged down with thinking about it. They want a presenter because it’s a ‘voice’, which is a TV-plus, in terms of the documentary genre, but everyone wants to control the voice and change it a bit. They’re a bit horrified by the real voice.

And when you’re writing a book, although there’s editorial comment and guidance, to some extent, it’s nothing like the distorting pressures of TV work. So a lot of my tone of voice, and so on, and the compressions of meanings, when I do those TV commentaries, and the pieces-to-camera, are approximations of myself. I’m trying to compress it, to get it to fit. But the question is, is the ‘serious’ intent, either with the books or the programmes, to say that art is good and everyone should get involved in it -- because that’s not at all my intention.

I think art is a difficult thing that people should only get involved in who want to, and if they do they will immediately see it’s something worth doing some work on. I don’t have to say ‘Do some work you lazy gits!’ I can say ‘This is what I think’, and they can respond if they want. That was my experience of learning. I don’t see why I should now do something I personally would certainly not have liked anyone doing to me, which is coming over all earnest. Where I sometimes experience difficulty, is with art that takes difficulty and profundity in its stride.

In the last two series I’ve done Goya and Delacroix, and Friedrich, and in those cases I don’t really have much to offer that isn’t already out there in history books or art books, or in the clichéd imaginations of middle-class people. So then I have to be quite careful, and I do slightly rely on people in TV, my colleagues, to notice when I’m becoming falsely earnest, or waffling. With contemporary art they often want me to waffle more, whereas my inclination is to be blunt because I think I do see what is good about what it is that, say, the Chapmans do, and I can do justice to it in a few words.

3AM: You are an artist yourself.

MC: Yes. I went to art school in the mid-seventies and I’ve never stopped leading the life of a painter, except that I can’t do it all the time now, sometimes for months I can’t do it. I’ve been writing and doing TV. I like that of course but I regret that I can’t do everything.

Patrick Heron had to give up writing in order to paint. He was a gifted abstract painter and a good art writer, and he had to give up writing because doing it meant he wasn’t taken seriously as a painter. But maybe also he gave up writing in order to make himself more serious as a painter -- it’s not just a question of the world taking you more seriously. It’s difficult to do serious painting and write as well. At least, that’s my excuse, my reason why I haven’t advanced as a painter.

3AM: So do you see yourself more as a writer than as a painter?

MC: I’m paid for writing and that’s my position in society. But I want to do more painting. I’m going to find out in the next twenty-five years if it’s possible to do both. I hope it is. I suspect it isn’t and I’ll accept it if that’s the case. I’ll keep on painting but no one will give me a good review or buy my paintings. It might be for the right reasons that they don’t. Because in my writing I can see how to make that craft thing work and I can see where it’s going, and what the thoughts are. I don’t have that equivalent sense with painting.

I’m still in relative darkness, because I haven’t put in the hours. There’s not been the continuity, the struggle, and the feedback from people, which I’ve had with writing. I certainly wouldn’t say that my relative failure as a painter has anything to do with what I was saying earlier about this being a bad moment for art – I can’t blame that! It’s my own dilly-dallying.

Richard Marshall is a talented writer and acts as an editor for 3am.

Fight for art’s sake

2008-09-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

The sea changes happening in the art scenario have never been much spoken about. How far apart are ideals from the actual causes?

Buyers might end up having works that have absolutely no value.

There exists an inherent conflict when one tries to reconcile the academic and the business aspects of art, particularly in the case of contemporary Indian Art.

One very obvious development in today’s art scene is the aspect of marketing, something that I have brought up earlier. It is a very crucial aspect of Indian Contemporary art and there are moments that I have felt totally averse to the idea of s omething that is considered to be a powerfully effectual tool for commodities that range from toothpastes to designer clothes, seeping into the very fibres of Fine Art. This is owing to the fact that it is a field, which to me, is still strongly rooted in subjective and academic criticism in order for it to remain a vibrant platform within which an individual or collective artistic expression is conceived, developed, debated and ideologies ascertained.

Of course, it’s not as if dealers, collectors and artists themselves have not used such tools in the past to gain a public audience.

At the turn of the 19th Century, public perception associated financial success with the aesthetic quality of the works, a scenario that is being played out in urban India today.
Also there were artists at that point in history, particularly Picasso who was known for his shrewd business acumen apart from being a master genius. Unfortunately, things are happening at a rather fast pace, especially in terms of demand that certain galleries and dealers expect artists to mass produce their works. While this occurs within Contemporary Art in the West, there have been many learning curves through which the world could differentiate between great, good, mediocre and bad works. None of the contemporary artists in India is being given the time to grow and eventually establish their artistic practice because of vested interests both in the West and within our own country.
Therefore, while some Western artists have fallen because of speculation and overpricing owing to market driven hype, a point in case being Julian Schnabel, strong historical development over years and years of Western Art saw to it that the entire market didn’t crash and vanish.
Therefore, while a certain degree of promotion and publicity have to be developed to support an artist, it is being used a tad too aggressively at a very delicate and fragile stage in the country’s current art scenario.
Contemporary concept
There exists a strong historical backbone that supports Classical Indian Art unlike Contemporary Art. With the latter the attention came by way of money, the only means by which new buyers and more importantly the mass audience are being initiated into the concept of the contemporary.
While some of the influential players within the dynamic, young contemporary art scene propose to do something about it, often suggesting the path to be taken, time and again it comes across as being shallow. This is because of the example they set with their own practice.
Let me recount something that took place recently at The Asia Society in New York during The Asian Art Week — a smart and obvious marketing tool, one could say, whereby we have a week that will be a one-stop-shop for collectors, investors and the occasional art aficionado to permeate their being and satiate their need (be it financial or passion) for art that is ‘All-Asian’! The tag did not perturb me as much as the lack of straightforward dedication to the cause of Indian art the so called “experts” brought to the forefront in the discussion. The dialogue was meant to shed light on the future of Indian Contemporary Art.
The panel included, Dr. Arani Bose, businessman, director and gallery-owner of Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, Melisa Chiu, museum director of Asia Society, Artist Atul Dodiya and Dr. Hugo Weihe, head of Indian and South-East Asian Art, Christies, NY. There were some valid points that were being made by the panelists, but as expected they seemed to offer nothing more than words. There isn’t much one could expect from these individuals who are for most part more attuned to the business side of art rather than the aesthetic, except, to a certain extent, Atul Dodiya. This, like one other panel discussion on Indian Art that I’ve been to, fell short of my expectations.
Let me explain why I find myself exasperated. For most part they desperately try to project a genuine need to support the growth of Indian art and artists from an academic and art historic point of view. Dr. Arani Bose brought out some valid issues faced in terms of contextualization and how categorizing in terms of cultural background is considered to be, in his words “Ghettoization” when it comes to Asian art.
However, different rules apply to Western art, where, say a German artist is considered International as opposed to just being German. He brought out how there was a lack of support for developing institutions and infrastructural support that produced critics, theorists, academics and, of course, artists that would sustain a steady growth. Wise words until Dr. Bose suggested the solution. He strongly felt that getting some of India’s new billionaires to invest in setting up the much needed foundation for sustained development would be a good start.
However, he failed to mention that his own gallery is guilty on many occasions of putting financial gain ahead of any other aspiration. How else can one explain their handling of an artist pair the gallery represents — Tukral and Tagra? The duo had their solo show in the New York gallery, which opened in April 2007. Within a year of their show the artist’s works were up at three auctions.
Provenance for these works only included exhibition history. Provenance is the history behind a work of art that is extremely intrinsic to the process of quantifying the monetary value of a work of art.
For example, German artist Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer boasted of a provenance that included its unique history involving a battle between the Austrian government and a family heir of Ms. Bauer. The niece claimed that the work, along with five others, was seized by the Nazi’s during World War II. This aspect of the painting’s history made it an extremely valuable piece in terms of art history thereby playing a major role when it came to pricing the estimates and ultimately shaping the outcome of the final bid — a world record of $135 million dollars.
The work is now part of the Neue Galerie in New York which focuses on Austrian and German Art. Every work need not have such an illustrious past but the point to be noted here is the value of art history. Of course, one can argue that contemporary art is created in the present and a number of Western contemporaries sell for exorbitant prices. However, one needs to understand that Western art has a longer “history” on its side, and for young India, contemporary history goes back to only a mere 60 years to the late 1940’s when the Modern Art movement took shape through The Progressives.
It reiterates how young the Art scene is in the subcontinent which is not a terrible situation to be in.
However, with the pressure to make quick profits comes the danger of expediting the production of art works as if it were coming out of factories for mass consumption. How could Dr. Bose encourage putting up Thakral and Tugral’s works for auction if his intentions are to support his artist’s growth? It also makes one question if the artists themselves are conscious of what they are getting themselves into.
What with value?
Does it not occur to them that if their prices rise when they are beginning to establish themselves, only because it’s financially prudent, what happens when the fiscal aspect dies? Buyers might end up having works that have absolutely no value since they do not stand at a strong position art historically — which I reiterate is the single most powerful aspect that determines the value of a work of art. And this will affect the careers of these young artists who otherwise might have potential but were misguided in terms of how they could develop their practice.
That is not what Indian Contemporary Art needs. And galleries such as Bose Pacia to an extent might be guilty of doing so by encouraging this terrible pattern of putting up their artists for auction when they have barely exhibited for more than a couple of years.
Mind you, the likes of Dr. Bose and Dr. Weihe are well aware of the fact that majority of the players within the Indian Contemporary Art scene is in it for the money. What irks me is their assumption that all of the audience is blissfully ignorant of this fact.
Apart from uninspiring didactic statements, there were quite a few glaring contradictions in the discussion. One of them revolved around art critics in India. For some reason the only name the panelists could suggest both during the discussion and when an audience member posed a question, was Geeta Kapur. I have deep respect for Ms. Kapur, who is a pioneer of art critical writing in India but the fact that they did not mention any younger writers who are up and coming showed their lack of interest in even acknowledging their existence. It is all well to say we need to encourage the new but if the “experts” themselves can’t go beyond one name it’s beyond absurd.
Dr. Weihe who is a knowledgeable and sincere person fell short of my expectations. There was hardly anything insightful he offered. Dodiya’s experiences as an artist, and how it amused him to see the attention he got from his neighbours, who didn’t know or care for art before the entire buzz, was a good way of explaining the manner in which some sections of Indian society view art today. One attends panel discussions such as this with a hope of hearing people within the industry who have the power and influence to shape the future of Indian Art offer some concrete, genuine, truthful insights.
The problem is that everything isn’t defined in terms of “Black and White”. Unfortunately, some of these players do not care to admit that and continue to be strongly business minded in their practice, whatever the consequence may be. Nevertheless they project themselves as championing the cause of critical and historical support, when their actions speak otherwise.

-Meenakshi Thirucode -The Hindu

Soufiane Bensabra and Three Angels in Paris

2008-09-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

Soufiane Bensabra walks with a spring at his heels. A cupid lingers around his lips when he smiles, who refuses to roost anywhere else. Ask him to pose for a photograph, he looks elsewhere; you insist him to look at your camera, then his cheeks go red. His shiny eyes with dense eyelashes are always half open. He is a dreamer; he dreams big and while chatting up with him, you realize that this young man of twenty seven has the mettle in him to make his dreams real. He is handsome with killer looks. His neat cut clothes frame his six feet lanky figure gorgeously. Soufiane Bensabra loves India and Indian contemporary art. Oh yes…I forgot to tell you. He is an art dealer from Paris and the facts and figures (of both aesthetics and market) of Indian contemporary art are in his finger tips.

Soufiane Bensabra
Call him an art dealer, he would suddenly look into your eyes and say, No. “I am not an art dealer. I am a curator, a gallerist, an art market player, an art collector and of course, you can say that I am all these rolled up into one. And I want to go beyond all these and do something that none has done in the art scene so far.” You tend to ask, what is that ‘something’? Lighting another cigarette, he laughs from the driving seat of his small Mercedes. “I am figuring it out slowly,” says Soufiane while waving at those Parisian beauties passing by the sidewalks. Now you too are distracted. In Parisian summer you can do nothing but get distracted by the beautiful girls. “Why don’t they put on weight like the Indian girls?” Manish Sharma, my artist friend exclaims from the backseat, still unable to dissuade his eyes from the leggy beauties. We drive through a thin line that demarcates the zones of pure admiration and absolute lechery.

First time I met Soufiane in artist Chintan Upadhyay’s residence, almost a year back. Now he is the curator of Chintan’s ‘New Indians’ solo show at Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris. Even before Soufiane became the curator of Chintan, he had befriended many of the Indian contemporary artists including Bose Krishnamachari, Jitish Kallat, Riyas Komu, Shilpa Gupta, Anita Dube, Subodh Gupta, Bharati Kher and so on. I am curious to know why this young man is interested in Indian contemporary art. “I was introduced to Indian art by the Indian artists living in Paris, namely V.Viswanathan, Akkitham Narayanan, S.H.Raza, Sohan Kadri and so on. Soon I found India is the most happening place in the art world. I did a good ground work and landed up in Mumbai in 2007,” he recalls.

Aesthetic inclination, youthful energy and ambitious dreams, when strategically mixed with business acumen, would definitely produce a Soufiane. “Johny likes white girls,” comments Chintan from the front seat. “Yes, because I feel that I should know those ‘bodies’ that ruled us for ages,” I explain halfheartedly as my thoughts linger around Soufiane’s entry into Indian contemporary art. “I too like white girls,” says Soufiane, “because I am not white,” Soufiane’s gleeful mood changes with his words, and a strange silence fills in the car. “I am of course French, a true Parisian as I am born and brought up here.” Somehow, the silence that engulfed us a few moments back refuses to budge.

Soufiane comes from a family of migrants; son of a Moroccan mother and an Algerian father. Business brought his father to Paris where he met his mother. Soufiane was born in 1981 in Saint Ouven, a suburban town in Paris. He had a normal Parisian education. “Perhaps I learned a lot from life rather than from schools. I was crazy and was always on the move. I studied English and Economics in college and after graduation, at the age of 21 I joined Alen, a dealer in Antiques and Handicrafts.” Alen, whose surname Soufiane does not remember (everyone knows Alen, says Soufiane) was crazier than what the young apprentice could imagine. He worked with Alen for around eight months and decided to quit. “He sent me crazy,” sipping a glass of champagne Soufiane laughs. We are at all loss to decide who could have sent the other crazy. Now, things fall in place; Soufiane cannot be white but he can be a crazy Parisian. While working with Alen, Soufiane had already imbibed the rules of art market. He studied international art market closely, worked with a few galleries and participated in a few auctions, until he found the gallerist Natalie Seroussi, a rich entrepreneur of Jewish lineage. Since 2006, Soufiane is the curator-consultant for Galerie Natalie Seroussi.

We go to Buddha Bar, one of the most fashionable nightclubs in Paris. “I am enjoying the nightlife in Paris after ages. These days I don’t get time to do all these as I am traveling all over the world, searching for potential artists to showcase in France. I am happy that you are here.” Soufiane parks his car in a place that almost looks like a Tow away zone. Experience for a week has taught us that Soufiane is afraid of Police. “Look, everywhere you can see these Police guys. I hate them.” We look around and find no police personal. But Soufiane is a Parisian and he has a natural instinct to smell them out. I imagine Indian cities. There are policemen around. But like Tracy Chapman sings, “Its good to call the police/Always come late/If they come at all.” Indian mainstream films testify this late coming.

A ten feet tall statue of Lord Buddha presides the nightlife in Buddha Bar. Girls and boys groove to the DJ’s music. Beer costs a bomb. And especially when you are in a look out for ‘company’ your wallet should be stuffed. Manish catches the sight of young and dashing black young men dancing with white girls. “Here everyone seems to get a girl. Why we don’t?” Manish is morally agitated. “Look Manish I have not managed one. So cheer up,” I shout into Manish’s ear. We don’t have much time to waste. Soufiane takes us to Queens Club, another famous night joint in Paris. Soufiane smells Police around. Before I could make out what is going on, he shoves the ‘joint’ that we were smoking, into my hand. He is tricky like a goblin. He doesn’t want to get caught while smoking weed. While negotiating a sharp curve, he yells at another motorist. We notice, on a daily basis, Soufiane gets more ‘middle fingers up’ than anyone else in the streets of Paris. You need to wear a life jacket when he is at wheels. In a silent aside, Chintan asks Soufiane, “Why don’t they have Jesus Bars?”

Entrance of Queens Club gives us hope. Today we are going to be lucky. A discotheque that reminds you of the set of any Bollywood item number, welcomes us. Music. Boys with overgrown muscles and rolled up sleeves, guys with feminine looks dance. I find a few girls, dancing alone. They must need company, I think. “Don’t even dare,” reading my thoughts Soufiane says. In Queens Bar, it is a ‘gay day.’ The girls dancing alone there are waiting for their ‘girls.’ Soufiane cannot control his laugh. We all head towards his car, crestfallen. “Let’s us go to forest,” announces Chintan. Visiting forest has become a nightly routine for us by this time.

What Chintan fondly calls forest is a five kilometer stretch of main road from the Arch of Triumph to one of the posh suburbs in Paris. It reminds you of a ridge area in any city. ‘Forest’ is a regular haunt of ‘she males’; males who exactly look like women. When the night falls, the she males, both white and black ones, most of them Latin American migrants as Soufiane tells us, come there and stand along both sides of the road soliciting clients. They are sex workers. Some of them are transsexuals, some of them transvestites and a few of them punks. They wear skimpy clothes exposing their booties and stand provokingly there. They excel the normal women in appearance and beauty; with heavy duty assets. It is a commercial trade and they are given protection by the Police and the state approves of this flesh trade in the city of love. Pay forty euros, they take you inside the forest and give you a clean job. “They take hormone treatment and do silicone implants to enlarge the body parts,” informs Soufiane. Interested? “No”, we say in chorus.

Soufiane is impulsive in nature. “Let’s us do it” is his mantra, which has helped him to make connections with the artists from all over the world. “What do you think about Indian art and Indian art market?” I ask him. He looks different and serious when he answers a professional question. “Indian art has a lot of potential which has not yet been tapped. We have recognized this fact and we are supporting Indian art market. Perhaps, more than you know, we have got all the data and details of Indian art with us. We want to make it happen and we want to grow and go to places with Indian art market,” he says. I wanted to ask him, who are ‘we’? But the answer is there in his statement; the western art galleries, promoters, dealers, museums, institutions and funding agencies together make this ‘we’.

Indian contemporary artists like Anita Dube, Shilpa Gupta, Chintan Upadhya and so on work with Soufiane. Many still have reservations with this dynamic young man as he is aggressive in his dealings. “I don’t mind that,” Soufiane says, “those who have not yet started working with me would work with me sooner or later as I am not only a dealer and curator but a serious collector too. I have collected a good number of works from a good number of Indian contemporary artists.” Where does the money come from? “I do good art dealings and I make good money that I use for buying good art,” Soufiane’s answer is definite and clear.

One of the paintings from Chintan’s ‘New Indian’ series is placed at the ten by ten glass wall of Galerie Natalie Seroussi, facing the street. The painting is seen from all the street corners. Soufiane takes us in his car through the winding allies of Rue de Siene, where the gallery is located, only to reach the gallery. We wonder why. “I love to see this painting from different streets and feel how people would see it from different distances,” he chuckles. He has this craziness. And his craziness has a method in it for he promotes his artists in the international platforms, places them in good collections and auctions.

Moulin Rouge is half an hour drive from the city centre. Soufiane takes us there. Live shows, peep shows, sex shops, curio shops; everything is there. You would like to browse, yet you prefer not to shop, for anything you buy from here couldn’t be gifted to anyone without nurturing naughty thoughts. With unwilling partners back home you can’t have those things for private use either. However, what you have seen in the virtual world looks quite real in these shops. We don’t shop. But Soufiane does. He buys two packets of ‘some game’. Back in car he opens one packet. He suddenly pushes it into my hands with a ‘you see it’ face. I see it. It is a game that you can play with your partner; a kind of card game. You take a card which has a question (no porn pictures but cards with instructions written in four languages) and your partner chooses another from the stack. When she/he gets the right answer, you have to perform it on his/her body. Tedious and boring than a scrabble game. Who is going to wait to study recipe in detail when the food is served?

It is time to say good bye. Soufiane says good bye to us. Suddenly he gives one of those packets to Chintan. “It is a gift from me,” he says while roaring with laughter. Chintan looks at it. I don’t know whether he has taken it back home or not. But the gesture was interesting. And I love Soufiane for his personality. He deconstructs the image of a traditional art dealer and curator with pinstriped suits and ignorance coated with arrogance and fake friendliness. Soufiane is real; real like you and me, the laughing, weeping, police-fearing ordinary citizens.

-Johny ML-www.artconcerns.com

"Banks fall over, art triumphs."

2008-09-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

This week started with an ominous bang. It was "Black Monday" for bankers, financiers and investors at all wealth levels as a big chunk of the U.S. banking system imploded. The week has been tough on the Republican presidential candidate and war-lovin' (which means deeper debt-spendin') Senator John McCain, too. The George W. Bush clone has found himself scrambling to criticize the mismanagement that led to the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, blaming the latest, alarming developments on "unbridled corruption and greed," even as - typically - he avoided reality and steered clear of recognizing that Republican policies since the Reagan era that have deregulated American corporations and let them get away with just about everything, including not paying their fair share of taxes, have been hugely responsible for the greedfest Wall Street's money movers have long enjoyed. Until now.Hirst's "The Golden Calf," a bull preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc, sold for the equivalent of almost $18.4 million at this week's auction in London. Despite the widespread, painful fallout from "Black Monday," at least one big risk-taker has scored triumphantly in the money game, proving that it still can be done - with art, though, not with stocks or subprime mortgages or debt-to-be-repaid of dubious value acquired from countless secondary or more-distant sources.

That's the British artist Damien Hirst, who brought to a two-part Sotheby's auction sale in London on Monday and Tuesday a batch of his older works and some all-new works. (The auction bore the title "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.") In doing so, Hirst broke with a long-established protocol in the international art market, according to which artworks are normally sold at auction by collectors who had purchased them from commercial galleries or from earlier auctions. In bringing his works to auction himself, Hirst completely bypassed his usual dealers at blue-chip galleries in London and New York.

As the Sun, referring to the artist who is "best known for suspending a shark in a tank of formaldehyde" inimitably puts it in a headline, Hirst's Sotheby's success was a case of "Shark 'n' Awe." The controversy-loving British tabloid reports that Hirst "smashed records by raking in £111 MILLION [$198.7 million] from an auction of his crackpot artworks. The payday was TEN TIMES more than the previous high for a sale of pieces by a single artist, Sotheby's said." The results of the sale "stunned Hirst," who had "feared the [current, worldwide] credit crunch would scare off collectors." The 43-year-old artist observed: "I'm totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling."Earlier this month, British artist Damien Hirst posed in front of his work, "The Incredible Journey" (a zebra in a tank of formaldehyde), which was offered for sale in this week's auction.

The Sun adds: "The top-priced item in the two-day auction was 'The Golden Calf,' one of the artist's notorious works featuring pickled animals. It went for £10.3 million [$18.4 million], the highest price paid to date for a Hirst at auction. A dead tiger shark in a tank called 'The Kingdom' sold for £9.5 million [almost $17 million]....And even 'The Abyss' - a collection of [cigarette] butts - fetched £1.8million [$3.2 million]." Other Hirst works in the sale featured butterflies. Last night, the Scotsman reports, Hirst "said 'people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks' after economic gloom failed to dampen enthusiasm for his work."
One bidder in the Sotheby's sale said of Hirst's artwork: "It is iconic, inherently British....His work challenges people, and visually it is stunning." However, Reuters reports, Hirst's creations are "not to everyone's taste." The news agency quotes Charles Thomson, a co-founder of theStuckist figurative-art movement, who remarked: "The art world has gone stark, raving bonkers. It is akin to a fever, a plague people have caught. It won't last forever." The above photo, not from this week's London auction, shows Hirst's "Away from the Flock" as it was displayed earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Commenting on the Hirst auction after the first night of the sale, Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions director at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, told the Guardian: "Banks fall over, art triumphs."
Of the activity in the Sotheby's salesroom on the first evening of the two-part sale, the Guardiannoted: "Like asteroids on an inexorable collision course, the spectacular sale had converged on the most spectacular bank collapse of the century: in the buzz of chatter in Italian, German and French before the sale, the question was whether there would be any millionaires left in the swirling clouds of space dust for Hirst to pick off. There were, but they were hiding at the end of telephone lines or in the private boardrooms sheltering some of Sotheby's very favorite customers....On the big lots, the bidders in the room, almost all with mobiles clamped to their ears as they gambled somebody else's money, dropped out pathetically early at about the £1 [million] mark, leaving the battlefield to the anonymous voices on the banks of phones."As he took in the results of the second session of the Sotheby's auction, Hirst said: "I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks - seems like a better world today to me." (Sun).

Open eyed dreams...

2008-09-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

We must sleep with open eyes,

we must dream with our hands,

we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,

of the sun dreaming its worlds.

we must dream aloud, we must sing

till the song put forth roots, trunk, branches, birds, stars,

We must dream backward, towards the source...

We must row back beyond infancy, beyond the beginning

-Octavio paz