The Great Modern Art Conspiracy
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 6, 2008 at 5:33 pm
The Great Modern Art Conspiracy
by Paul Dorsey
http://dalihouse.blogsome.com/2006/0...art-conspiracy
"Une âme au ciel" ( "A Soul in Heaven") by William Bouguereau, 1878
Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they're giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won't spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre's chairman, who's got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it's trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up).
You'll recall that the "Establishment" used to be in favor of "academic" art and the very classical realism it involved, and against upstart weirdoes like Goya and Manet and, well, JMW Turner
http://dalihouse. blogsome.com/2006/...-jmw-turnertoo for that matter. Then the impressionists caught hold, Picasso made everyone's heads hurt and academic art was all but forgotten in the delirium of deconstruction, save for the funeral dirge sung by the likes of Barnett Newman and Henry Moore. (I would have said Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, but that really sets the ARC mob off - more on that later.)
Now, of course, Ross et al are saying the staunch old academy was right in the first place and these young hooligans - Cezanne, Braque, Warhol, you name it - should have been clubbed to death at birth so we wouldn't have to spend a century being dragged all the way into abstract hell.
Following are excerpts from Ross' tirade "The Great 20th Century Art Scam". You can read it in its entirety here
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/P...hilosophy1.asp
FOR OVER 90 YEARS, there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th century. Fueled by a cooperative press, the ruling powers have held the global art establishment in an iron grip. Equally, there was a successful effort to remove from our institutions of higher learning all the methods, techniques and knowledge of how to train skilled artists. Five centuries of critical data was nearly thrown into the trash. It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism.
We at the Art Renewal Centre have fully and fairly analysed their theories and have found them wanting in every respect, devoid of substance and built on a labyrinth of easily disproved fallacies, suppositions and hypotheses. If, dear reader, you are not already one of their propaganda successes, I encourage you to read on.
Against all odds, and in the face of the worst kind of ridicule and personal and editorial assault, only a small handful of well-trained artists managed to stay true to their beliefs. Then, like the heroes who protected a few rare manuscripts during inquisitional book-burnings of the past, these 20th-century art world heroes managed to protect and preserve the core technical knowledge of Western art. Somehow, they succeeded to train a few dozen determined disciples.
Today, many of those former students have established their own schools or ateliers, and are currently training many hundreds more. This movement is now expanding exponentially. They are regaining the traditions of the past, so that art may once again move forward on a solid footing. We are committed in every way possible to record, preserve and perpetuate this priceless knowledge ...
If you studied art history anytime between 1945 and 1980, you were told that there were great old masters that existed from the early Renaissance to the time of David, Constable and Turner in the early 1800s. Then you were taught about Corot and Courbet and the Pre-Impressionists and then finally the Impressionists themselves who led the way into Modernism. Most of the period from 1850 to 1910 was described as a terrible cesspool of official art where petty academic artists painted inane silly paintings that cared only for technique, that were devoid of emotion and who didn't recognise the genius of the Impressionists ...
The period of art history from 1850 through 1910 was thrown into near obscurity. But it was precisely this period that produced some of the greatest art and artists in the history of humanity ...
It was a period when 500 years of accumulated knowledge, stretching from the early Renaissance to the present, reached its absolute peak of development ...
It is an incredible irony that this greatest of all periods should have become the most denigrated.
Men like William Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean Francois Millet, Jehan Georges Vibert, Edward Burne Jones, Fredrick Lord Leighton, Edward Poynter, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, Leon L 'hermitte, Sir Frank Dicksee, Sir John Everett Millais, Alexander Cabanel and Jules Lefebvre. These names, many of which may be new to you, were as well known by the cogniscenti in the 1890s as Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, De Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol are known today. They were household names. People would line up sometimes for blocks to see exhibitions of their works. The rich, and the poor, the humble and the famous alike adored their work.
Men like Henry James, Frederic Chopin and Charles Dickens idolised these academic masters. Could such men that we all agree were beyond question great artistic geniuses themselves have had such bad taste so as to idolise art that today's ideologues would have us believe was so bad?
Bouguereau is one of the chief villains in tales told by modern historians. I shall especially refer to him in this discussion, for he is being increasingly revered by thousands of scholars, collectors, curators and art lovers as one of history's all-time greats, ultimately deserving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Leonardo, Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
But just as Rembrandt was relegated to near oblivion for over 100 years after his death, so too was this to be Bouguereau's fate. One of the most famous stories about Rembrandt concerns his painting "Night Watch". After his death, no one wanted it. Finally, a gymnasium agreed to hang it on their back wall if the top foot of the painting would be cut off so it would fit. Today, this artistic masterpiece is known only in a mutilated form.
[Discourse on the unprecedented high standards for the rigorous study of art in the 19th century and the innovation and exploration of new themes that took place.] These academic artists are more accurately described as "Humanists". As you read, keep your thoughts on the term Humanity or Humanism. It's probably the chief defining characteristic of the art of the 19th century. It is the most evident concept that distinguishes it from the bulk of the current establishment-celebrated art of the 20th century, which is more accurately understood as existential, destructive and nihilistic ...
What happened? Three things explain half of it: World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression ...
What unspeakable atrocities and tragedies caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, from want and war? Somebody was to blame! Someone had to be blamed. This could not have just been written by the fates. God could not have wanted mankind to suffer so. The clear, evident, and easy scapegoat for all that went wrong was quite simply "The Old Order".
"The Carpet Market" by Jean Leon Gerome, 1887
It wasn't just the leaders that were guilty. The entire last generation was to blame. This seems now a rather absurdly all-sweeping attribution of culpability. And with them everything that they believed and respected was impugned, discredited and desecrated. The artists they loved were pigeonholed as their lackeys and supporters, and their art was debased in every possible way by every possible format. People stopped even looking at the art of these great Traditional Humanists. It just had to be bad. After all, look who supported it; the old order! ...
The other critical cause was the consideration of powerful economic reasons for dealers to wholeheartedly espouse this new modernist ethic. If you were an Alma-Tadema or Bouguereau dealer, you had a list of a hundred clients wanting to buy their work. But their technique permitted them to only paint one canvas every three to eight weeks, so you stood biting your nails waiting for each canvas that you knew was sold long before it was completed. Modernists, however, could often complete a single canvas each and every day ...
Their dealers now had an enormous supply to meet whatever demand they could generate. They had high motivation to prove that these paintings were not only as valuable as the prior generation's, but that they were even better. And when the money pouring in from this consummate con game, they were able to buy themselves historians, writers and critics, who happily developed complex, convoluted arguments to justify their philosophical positions ...
One of the greatest of [the myths that have been perpetuated about this era] was the claim that Bouguereau and his colleagues were not relevant to their times; that they copied the styles of earlier times. This argument is without a shred of truth. Bouguereau was born in 1825, shortly after the American and French Revolutions. These upheavals were the most tangible results of the new ideas generated by the Enlightenment, whereas earlier centuries were controlled by ideas of the primacy of religion and monarchs ruling by "divine right" ...
Both America and France were at the cutting edge of the changing Western world. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest works of art of the 19th century came from these two societies. And with these changing ideas, art too changed, generating the many new groups and styles. There were the Realists who showed the nobility of the common man straining under the yoke of a hard life. They tried to show rural life, as it really was.
Then there were the Idealists and Romantics, who celebrated all humanity in keeping with the democratic principles and a respect for human rights and dignity. Bouguereau was undoubtedly the greatest of this group. In much of his work he uses peasants and gypsies for his subject matter. How fitting to choose society's lowest to exalt all mankind to the highest, for if we could appreciate the value of the peasants and gypsies, then certainly all mankind must be valuable ...
Rather than dumping on the Victorians, one might just as readily credit them and their era with setting in motion all of the societal changes that led to the undoing of most of these injustices ...
The next myth perpetuated about Bouguereau by his critics was that he painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich. Let's dispel that once and for all. He prided himself in never needing to take commissions. He painted what he loved and believed, often labouring 16 hours a day, seven days a week, much like Michelangelo. His fame became so great that his dealer, Goupil, was able to charge $ 10,000 for a single canvas (equivalent to more than $ 300,000 today). The bourgeois couldn't possibly buy his paintings, and they were eagerly acquired by the wealthy Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies. Let me ask who has been buying Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, or de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock? The Mellons, Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, or their equivalents!
I don't hear anyone claiming that these artists painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich. Certainly Picasso was far wealthier when he died than Bouguereau at his death. Rubens, Gainsborough, Church, Rodin, Boucher, de Kooning and Frank Stella all made or are making substantial sums on their art. The fact is that most often, it is the wealthy who buy art ...
Because Bouguereau's work had been unfairly denigrated, the resulting low prices much of the 20th century allowed private collectors to acquire or keep his work, including some of his greatest paintings. In the last 20 years, however, his prices have increased astronomically. Paintings that would have sold for $ 5,000 in 1970, were worth $ 50,000 in 1980, and would currently sell for over a million. In November 1998, the world record for Bouguereau was broken twice, with "Cupid and Psyche as Children" selling for $ 1,760,000, and "Alma Parens", an allegorical painting of mother France nurturing her children, brought $ 2,650,000 at Sotheby's. His work is still undervalued when a Picasso sold the same year for $ 48 million, an Andy Warhol for $ 17 million and a Van Gogh self portrait for $ 71 million.
Another myth concerns the accusation that most of the work of these traditional Humanists or Academic Realists is just petty sentimentality. I would agree that an adult's abnormal attachment to a high-school ring or cheerleader pompoms is petty sentiment. But what of the incomparable joy of a child taking his or her first steps? What of depicting a young person's first moments of sexual awareness as childhood passes into adulthood? What of the cruelty of the industrial life in the cities with the cold and homeless lining up for bread on a wintry night? Of course, many academic artists of the period unsuccessfully tried such subject matter and it often did look over sentimentalised. But in every period in history most of the work being done was mediocre. That doesn't prevent us from separating the wheat from the chaff ...
Next I wish to address the myth that Bouguereau, Meissonier, Cabanel and Gérôme stopped the Impressionists from showing in the salons and working at the academies and ateliers. In their youths, Monet and Renoir worked next to the great academic artist Gérôme in the atelier of Charles Gleyre. Degas was accepted and worked successfully in the atelier of Hippolyte Flandrin and Ingres. Edouard Manet worked in the atelier of Thomas Couture. And in every salon from 1873 forward there were always impressionist paintings shown. The reason that there were only a few during the earlier years was because there weren't yet many impressionist artists ...
It was also untrue that van Gogh despised Bouguereau's work. Critics like to point to one letter where van Gogh said that he would be able to sell his paintings more readily if he painted pretty things like Bouguereau. They always conveniently overlook another letter in which van Gogh expresses his deep disappointment that he'll never be able to draw as well as Bouguereau, and yet another, "I know very well that it is neither drawn nor painted as correctly as a Bouguereau, and I rather regret this, because I have an earnest desire to be correct. But though it is doomed, alas, to be neither a Cabanel nor a Bouguereau, yet I hope that it will be French. "...
There is another reason that Academic Realism or Traditional Humanism is coming back. It has to do with a widespread reevaluation of the ideological underpinnings and theoretical framework of Modernism and Post-modernism.
Our 20th century has marked a period that celebrated the bizarre, the novel and the outrageous for its own sake. The defining parameter of greatness to Modernism is "has it ever been done before", "Is it totally original where there is no derivation from any former schools of art", "does it outrage", "does it expand the definition of what can be called art? "
I propose to you today that if everything is art, then nothing is art. If I call a table a chair, have I expanded the definition of the word table? Would this make me brilliant? If I call a hat a shirt have I expanded the definition of hat? Or in reality have I perpetrated a fraud on the people who wanted to buy tables?
Modernists have not expanded the definition of art at all. What they have done is attempted to destroy art, created icons that represent this destruction, and then called these icons the thing that they have destroyed, ie, works of art. A urinal or an empty canvas, hung on the wall of a museum, are especially pure examples of this. They are not works of art but symbols of the victory of the Huns, who have sacked the bastions and forums of our culture. It would be like saying that the Roman Forum today is far greater architecture than it was when all the buildings and streets were intact ...
Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original. Nothing about what they do can ever have been done before in any way shape or form otherwise they risk being called "derivative" How utterly absurd. They've been indoctrinated with the concept that bad equals good. Every parameter upon which any standard for quality and excellence can be deduced, they have been told is improper because it's "limiting to freedom of expression". There can be no story for then you have to stay within the "tight boundaries" of the tale. There can be no illusion for than you are "chained" by the need to recreate a sense of three dimensions.
There can be no drawing, as that can be "limiting" to objects of people or things taken from the real world. They want to remove the "shackles" of modeling, perspective or subject matter of any sort. There certainly can be no attempt at harmonising of the above parameters with composition, colour and tonality, for that would "restrict" one to making everything work together.
On the contrary they have been propagandised by modernism into believing that only those works that break boundaries, ignore standards and show no interest in skill or technique can be truly "original" or "inspired" ...
The sheer glaring reality is that nothing could be more imprisoning, binding, restricting, chaining and shackling than the impossible limitations of modernism and post-modernism, that remove from the would be artist every tool (including training) that could give them the ability to create great works of art. The simple truth is that each and every one of us is capable of thinking of something that has never been done before. Does that make it worth doing and the work of genius? ...
Modern and post-modern art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity, while stripping mankind of his dignity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming majority of it's would be audience who can find nothing with which to relate.
It has been called exciting and "avant garde", but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers. Whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black. Whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the statue of liberty. The effect is always the same: Meaningless primitivism.
Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question ad nauseum: what is art? What is art? They believe that only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas, all of the great art in history is art about life ...
Do we really want the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to be representatives of the best of what mankind can produce? They are a hoax. And the public has been for too long subjected to the farce of modernism that has captured and laid siege to civilisation's museums and institutions.
As if by way of "full disclosure", Fred Ross freely admits that, along with his wife Sherry, he owns "one of the foremost collections of 19th-century European paintings".
PAUL DORSEY
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Post#2
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 7, 2008 at 12:01 pm
WHO PUT THE 'CON' IN CONTEMPORARY ART?
Jeff Koons' 'Hanging Heart', which sold to the artist's gallerist Larry Gagosian last November for a record price of $ 23.6 million, making Koons the most successful living artist at auction.
Who put the 'Con' in Contemporary Art?
Last November in New York, Sotheby's held its most lucrative ever contemporary art auction, with $ 315.9 of sales. But six days before this sale its share price dived overnight by over a third - the result of a dismal modern art auction in London. Art dealers are already celebrating what one called 'the shortest recession in history,' but they are fiddling while Rome burns. The speculative bubble known as the contemporary art boom is about to crash.
The tell-tale sign is not which artists are still making record prices but which buyers. Last November, there was a surge in one of the art market's most dubious activities - of dealers buying works of art by artists they represent at auction. According to auction house sleuths from the specialist press, Bloomberg and The Art Newspaper, the world's biggest gallerists Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian have been buying pieces at Sotheby's and Christies's by their biggest artists, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, while Banksy-dealer Steve Lazarides bought three Banksys at London's last contemporary art auctions. At the auctions in New York last November, records of $ 11.8m and $ 23.6m were set for work by Jeff Koons (a huge sculpture of a diamond ring and a heart-shaped helium balloon respectively), but both were bought by Koons' own gallerist , the world's most powerful dealer, Larry Gagosian.
You get a sense of the weirdness of this business if you consider what the financial markets equivalent would be: it's like a CEO of a large company buying up his own multi-million pound shares issue on the stock market. Yet, in the art world, it's an activity which is notoriously difficult to interpret. It could either be read as proof that the people who know best, the art dealers, think the boom in contemporary art still is far from over. Or it could be an action of last resort - a gamble by desperate men to prop up the collapsing market. The classic last phase of a bubble is when individuals who are heavily invested, try to keep the market going by spending ever more money themselves.
The latter negative reading looks nowadays like the likely truth, especially when one considers that it's not only dealers who are at it. Insider dealing is a game the whole family can play in the art world. A record price was set last October at the Phillips De Pury auction in London for an oil painting by the Chinese artist Wang Guangyi, who produces painfully obvious critiques of China's embrace of Western consumerism. "Great Criticism: Coca-Cola" sold for £ 893,600, 63 times what the original owner had purchased the work for in 1996, but who bought it? The former owner's son-in-law. If dealers and relatives won't help fuel this phoney market, the artist has one other trick up his sleeve: White Cube announced last October that they had sold Damien Hirst's diamond skull to a 'consortium of investors', yet it later emerged that Hirst was a member of the buying group. It's only a small simplification to say that Hirst sold his skull to himself! The cynicism is mind-boggling. Real investors - not art collectors - know what's really going on. That's why Sotheby's share price dropped so hard so fast.
Beyond the cynicism, lies the second of the three characteristics of the boom: absurdity. According to Bloomberg's statistics, prices for contemporary art increased fourfold from 1996 to 2006. Hiscox's researchers say the value of contemporary art increased by 55%and modern art by 44%in just the last twelve months! Most of this art isn't bad, it's just terribly overvalued. Andy Warhol, for example, never made a seventy-million-dollar painting, let alone mechanically-produced silkscreens, yet one of his car crashes, a green one, fetched that sum under the hammer last year. A Rothko also went for over $ 71 million at auction, while works by Pollock, De Kooning and Klimt each appear to have sold for over $ 130m in private transactions. The art world defends the boom, and says it is sustainable. The price of art, they will tell you, is simply a function of how rich the world is, and today it is richer than ever before. For most of us even £ 100,000 seems like an insanely large amount of money to spend on a painting, so what difference does it make if it now costs £ 10 million or £ 40 million? The answer is a lot. Comparisons provide the clue to how absurd the prices are; a Klimt, at around £ 75m, is now more expensive that a Titian portrait, at around £ 55m, a Warhol makes a Monet at £ 20m look like a snip. Contemporary art has become a poker game for the richest men and women in the world: they are daring each other to raise the stakes and call their bluff. Long ago we abandoned the idea that art should be beautiful, but it was never meant to become a synonym for obscenity.
Cynicism, absurdity and obscenity are the three key characteristics of this vastly inflated art bubble, and the underlying causes of it are not hard to find: a lack of regulation and a lack of courage. Unlike other commodity and financial markets, there are no rules against insider trading and few that relate to transparency. A narrow clique of dealers and collectors all try and find out what each other's works are going for, which produces intense waiting lists and bidding in the tens of millions for a tiny group of perhaps twenty artists. There's a deplorable gentleman's agreement among curators and museum directors not to express negative views about leading artists.
As for the media, you will search the colour magazines of the art press, like Art Review, Frieze and Art Forum, and find only a small amount of decidedly muted criticism. They are simply in the business of selling art, epitomised by the transmutation of Frieze from magazine to art fair. Today the director of exhibitions of Britain's most successful commercial gallery, White Cube, is also allowed to appear on BBC and Channel 5 as an apparently 'independent' commentator on art - Tim Marlow. The art world is dirty, corrupt and immoral, and, if there was a name for such a crime, these people would be charged with perverting the course of art history.
Of course, the art world's always been like this. The difference is that in the old days the market was so small that these manipulations were a way of protecting talented and impoverished artists from the cruelties of capitalism, but now, in a billion dollar market, they are tools to turn a narrow clique of artists and dealers into multi-millionaires.
The dealers and gallerists have their own explanation for the boom. There's lots of new money around, they say. New collectors from Russia, China and India are joining the market, while countries like Britain have been enjoying a decade of unprecedented growth. Art simply costs more because rich people have more money to pay for it, and the world economy is still strong. Anyway, they say, what people pay for art is not important. It's the art you should be thinking about. That's all that matters. Right now, they might add, the market is going through a 'correction'. Of course, it couldn't maintain the same rate of growth it has enjoyed recently. But there won't be a crash. At the auctions in New York last November, one was quoted as saying that a million dollars was the new ten thousand bucks.
This is the art world version of the patter of a used car salesman, and it's amazing that anyone believes it. Money, finally, is important. Price-tags can't be ignored - it's one way our culture measures historical importance. Today many many totally inconsequential artists are being hailed as geniuses because of the prices their work commands, and scores of really brilliant ones are being ignored because they don't appeal to the tastes of the property developers, hedge-funders and wives of millionaires who buy art.
The dealers are right that there's been lots more money around and that when people have more money than they know what to do with, they look for something to spend it on. But they are wrong to think that what they spend their millions on will retain the value they place on it as long as the whole world is still getting richer. The art bubble is like the dot com bubble: hundreds of millions have been invested in ideas whose long-term value is totally unproven.
London's seen it all before, but not in living memory. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a Victorian art boom in London. Wealthy industrialists and merchants bought the work of 'the Orientalists', terrible history painters like Alma-Tadema and Edwin Longsden Long, who produced bombastic canvases crammed with harems of women in transparent white robes. In 1882, a work by Edwin Longsden Long, "Babylonian Slave Market", achieved a record auction price at Christie's for a work by a living artist - £ 6,500 which in today's money is £ 4 million. Ten years after his death, Long's work had lost 90 per cent of its value. His biographer wrote: "One of the Victorian art world's most important figures had drifted into relative obscurity. The throngs of visitors who went to see his work at Burlington House or Bond Street had disappeared, his auction house record dismissed as an isolated sensation."
The paradox is that today there is a lot of reasonably good art about. We are living through a kind of Renaissance - all that money sloshing around, plus popular enthusiasm, plus the 'anything goes' open-mindedness of the era after modernism has lead to an outpouring of creativity, one sign of which is the return of figurative painting. Freize was full of good stuff. I stopped at the booth of Toby Webster's uber-trendy gallery, The Modern Institute, to admire a very elegant wall-sculpture by the leading Scottish artist Jim Lambie, in which he'd arranged several chopped-up halves of old chairs, painted in bright primary colours. He'd made, or had made, a handful of pieces like this. Like vast quantities of British art of the last twenty years it was a good designer joke which translated modernism and abstraction into a quaintly domestic idiom. It was an idea which was definitely worth at least £ 750. I enquired about the price tag: £ 30,000.
That's why there will be a crash not a 'correction.' That's also why the 'credit crunch' will have only a limited amount to do with it. There will be a financial wobble, sure, but that will be a catalyst for an intellectual meltdown. It won't happen in one fell swoop - there'll be no Monochrome Monday - but over the next six months, the value of the art market will move in stops and starts inexorably downwards. That will take the 'con' out of contemporary, and leave us, rather fortuitously, with the correct adjective to describe most of the art that's been shown and sold over the last decade - temporary.
Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis is a critic, broadcaster and independent filmmaker, best known for his series about contemporary artists called 'Art Safari'.
Con Man
by Jennifer Higgie
It goes without saying that critics should know their subject. Ben Lewis' odd and ignorant diatribe, 'So Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?' belies such logic. Confusing and conflating market forces with what is actually being produced on the complex and multi-layered stage that comprises the contemporary art world, he writes, 'You will search the colour magazines of the art press, such as frieze, Art Review and Art Forum and barely find a critical article, let alone a critical word. They are simply in the business of selling art, epitomised by the transmutation of frieze from magazine to art fair. ' Later on he spits' The art world is dirty, corrupt and immoral and if there was a name for such a crime, these people would be charged with perverting the course of art history. Of course, the art world has always been like this. '
Phew! Where to start? Lewis, who has never met me or any of the other editors of frieze, appears also never to have read the magazine. Over the 16 years that frieze has been in print we have always enforced the strictest separation between advertising and editorial, a rule that has remained unchanged since the inception of Frieze Art Fair. Since the magazine's beginning, we have aimed to publish only the highest standards of art criticism by established and emerging writers, critics, poets and novelists. To recap: every issue of the magazine includes around seven monographs, a questionnaire, regular columns and 25 reviews from around the world, from a variety of commercial and non-profit galleries, artist-run spaces and museums. We have published numerous themed issues, exploring subjects as varied as the relationship between art and ecology, feminism, slowness and slapstick. We pride ourselves on both the impartiality of our writers, and the quality of their writing. Reviews are often critical, but unlike Lewis, we back up our criticisms with facts and well-argued and researched opinions. Lewis' diatribe is not simply ignorant; it is deeply insulting to a generation of writers who have published their work in frieze and who have only ever approached their work with the highest integrity and rigour.
Lewis seems to think that the art world is a single glitzy, corrupt entity inhabited solely by Damien Hirst, a few lucrative galleries and the auction houses. He doesn't mention the hundreds of artists who work hard every day, often for many years, and barely manage to scrape a living. He doesn't mention the myriad non-profit art spaces, run by sincere, informed people, whose only aim is to expand and explore art's remit in contemporary society. He doesn't mention the countless talented writers who work tirelessly, and often for little reward, simply because writing and thinking about art are integral to who they are. He doesn't mention that most people who visited Frieze Art Fair aren't collectors; they're the general public, who, for the price of a cinema ticket, get to see works of art from more than 150 of the best art galleries from around the world, view a series of curated projects and sit in on an extensive talks programme that every year has included major international critics, curators and artists debating the state of contemporary art.
Lewis is simply perpetuating the kind of anti-intellectual resentment against art that is usually to be found in the tabloids. It is astonishing that the BBC has allegedly commissioned someone so willfully ignorant to make a documentary on the contemporary art market - almost as astonishing, in fact, that someone who professes to be interested in art should be so reductive and unimaginative in his approach to its contemporary manifestations.
Jennifer Higgie, co-editor Frieze
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Post#3
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 7, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Art Whore Jennifer "Higgiepotomous" Higgie:
Jennifer Higgie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Higgie is an Australian novelist, screenwriter, art critic and co-editor of the London-based contemporary arts magazine, Frieze.
Jennifer Higgie on why we write:
In her Editor's Letter at the front of the new Frieze, Jennifer Higgie makes public her internal dialogue about why she writes about art. It contains a concise explanation of my reasons for writing last month about Thomas Scheibitz's new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar: "I write for the same reason that I read novels or look at art: either to decipher something I don't understand or to be reassured .... Looking properly at something and then writing about it, especially to deadline, tends more often than not to be an act of panic tempered with an interest inspired by incomprehension. " Schiebitz's last exhibition in New York piqued my interest but didn't entirely convince me. I see so much art that my typical response to this feeling is fairly passive: I file the mental images away for later retrieval. Yet when his new show began to preoccupy my mind similarly, I forced myself to interrogate why. Without a constraint-my deadline-I probably would have deferred thinking thoroughly about his work once again. Instead, I tried to make an assessment as a means of explaining the work and my reaction to myself. To quote Higgie again, anxieties appeared: "... do these words and these objects or gestures ultimately nourish the art work or yourself or the world .... Do they avoid being prescriptive .... Do they at least try to reveal some of the multitudinous tones that litter the world unacknowledged .... Do they make anyone less lonely? " My review, a scant 218 words, may not do any of these things. But Higgie's conclusion, which I second, allows that "Even making a mess of it and repeatedly getting it wrong is preferable-at least it's an assertion of something alive: fallibility." You try not to be fallible in responding to a work of art-like the artist tries not to be fallible during the act of creation-and hope that there is something of merit in the connection sought by the act of writing.
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Post#4
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 7, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Maria Altmann and the Art Nazis
(10/14/2006)
http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/altmann.html
Christie's auction house recently announced that in November it will sell four paintings by the early-20th-century Austrian modernist Gustav Klimt, works whose combined estimated value is between $ 93 million and $ 140 million. The news has caused a sensation, and not only because of the fame of the artist and the size of the price tag.
The Klimts, three landscapes and a portrait, are part of a group of five turned over to Maria Altmann by the Austrian government earlier this year. They had been stolen by the Nazis along with other arts treasures owned by Jewish families, and the government of Austria had stubbornly refused to give them back. The seven-year campaign by Altmann, now 90, came to symbolize the international effort to seek property-rights justice for the surviving victims of Nazi crimes. But now that Maria Altman has finally recovered her family treasures, she is being criticized for what she wants to do with them.
Maria's uncle, Ferdinand, was the original owner of the Klimts. Two of them are portraits of his wife, Adele. Bloch-Bauer fled his Austria in 1938 when the Nazis took over, and the Nazis seized his property, including the paintings. The Nazi government placed the Klimts in various Austrian art museums, where they remained until Austria acknowledged that they legally belonged to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's heirs.
After she recovered the paintings last winter, Maria Altmann lent them to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then to the Neue Galerie, a New York City museum for modern German and Austrian art founded by cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. Then she sold what art experts regard as the most impressive of the Klimts, the first of the portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Ronald Lauder acquired the masterpiece for his museum at the whopping price of 135 million dollars.
Now Altmann is selling the rest, and some factions of the art world are calling her greedy, even going so far as to accuse her of embodying "negative Jewish stereotypes." New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman accused her of "cashing in," and thus transforming a "story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust" into "yet another tale of the crazy, intoxicating art market." Kimmelman argued that the family should give the works away, perhaps giving them to public institutions:
"How refreshing this story would have been had the Bloch-Bauers conceived a way to ensure that that birch landscape, say, ended up in public hands," he wrote. "In so doing they would have earned not just public sympathy for their family's struggle but also an enduring share of public gratitude. They would have underscored the righteousness of their battle for restitution and in the process made clear that art, even in these money - mad days, isn't only about money. "
Kimmelman and like-minded critics are certainly articulating a creative ethical principle, one that actually holds that it can be wrong to dispose of one's own property as one wishes. They would have a legitimate compliant if she was, for example, determined to burn the paintings out of spite; there is a legitimate ethical argument that great works of art belong to the world as well as their legal owners, creating an obligation for those owners to take care of them and ensure that they can be enjoyed by future generations.
For the same reason, the sale could be legitimately criticized if Altmann was going to put the paintings in the hands of some hysterical anti-Nazi avenger who planned on burying them or spray-painting them with acid. She has an ethical duty not to allow the art to fall into the hands of irresponsible owners, just as a dog breeder has an obligation not to sell Dalmatian puppies to Cruella DeVille. But that isn't the criticism. Kimmelman is maintaining that it is wrong for Altmann to sell her own paintings for the best possible price to parties who will willingly pay it.
Poor Gustav Klimt! First his paintings are stolen by German Nazis, and now Art Nazis want to dictate the value of his work. Achtung, guys! The paintings belong to Maria Altman! That was what the long campaign to recover the Klimts was all about, and there is nothing wrong with her selling them at the very best price she can get.
Who knows? Maybe she doesn't like Gustav Klimt paintings. Maybe, after all those years of fighting for the paintings in the name of justice, she never wants to see or hear about them again; after all, they represent a terrible period for her family, and her uncle, the original owner, was sent to Dachau after the Nazis took away everything he owned.
And maybe, just maybe, she feels that she can do a lot more good with a couple hundred million dollars than with five modernist paintings. I know that's what I'd be thinking. I'm not so sure that it isn't what Kimmelman would be thinking, too. It's so much easier to call others greedy for taking money that is offered to them when nobody's offering you anything at all.
Somehow, all that envy bounces around in your head until it turns into self-righteousness. How dare Alex Rodriguez let the Yankees pay him 25 million dollars a year to play a kids game! How greedy the CFO of Hewlett-Packard was to let the board pay her 3.5 million dollars to be acting CEO for only forty five days! Who does Jessica Simpson think she is, accepting a couple million dollars to be in a movie? She's no actress!
But the hard truth is, we all have the right to sell our skills, our time, our surgically-enhanced bodies and our Klimts for whatever the market will bear, and there is nothing wrong with that. Owning something means not having to get someone's approval to do with it what we please.
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Post#5
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 7, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Egos, Kitsch and the Real Thing
By ROBERT HUGHES Monday, Jul. 14, 1986
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...61733,00. html
The Venice Biennale is the longest-running art festival in the world. It has too many shows, too many egos clogging the Grand Canal and not enough people on the switchboard. Even when it is bad it is still good because it is held in Venice - an advantage that few other cultural shindigs can claim. The 42nd Biennale, which opened last week, is the largest ever, featuring work from an unprecedented 41 nations. It divides into two main sections: the national pavilions and a set of shows arranged around a given theme. This year the theme is relations between art and science.
The centerpiece of the 1986 Biennale is called "Art and Alchemy." It was curated (if that is the word) by Arturo Schwarz, an Italian art dealer whose purplish prose has long been one of the hazards of Marcel Duchamp scholarship. Alchemy sought to change base metals into gold and silver. More broadly, it embraced astrology and occult religion, being founded on the picture of a fourelement universe (air, water, fire and earth) proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century BC There was an early link between alchemy, technology and art, since ancient glassblowers and metalworkers were always trying to make base stuff look like gold and silver. Over the centuries, alchemy gave painters, notably Hieronymus Bosch, a rich vein of fantasy to tap, partly because its metaphors of change, duality and syncretism lay close to their own creative processes.
All this, handled right, might have provoked a passable show. But Schwarz seems to think that alchemy is a major secret text of modern art as well, though all he can find to prove it is a mass of postsurrealist kitsch. A few good things come up in the net, but the show is a tendentious mishmash.
Two better shows in the central pavilion also take up the theme of technology, science and art. "The Representation of Space" has some painstaking reconstructions of spatial illusion in Renaissance and baroque art; its best moment (which will be the envy of all red-blooded interior decorators) is a full-size wooden replica of Borromini's false-perspective colonnade, made in the 17th century for the Palazzo Spada in Rome. The second exhibition, "Wunderkammer," is a delight. Wunderkammern - literally, chambers of astonishment - were an embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making - or outright fakes, like a dead mermaid fashioned from dried fish and monkey skin. Their cabinets were stuffed with baroque pearls, narwhal tusks, mandrake roots and fossils. The cult of the Wunderkammer rose where the demonic or angelic world view of the Middle Ages shifted into the classifying rationalism of the Enlightenment. "Those are pearls that were his eyes /Nothing of him that doth fade /But doth suffer a sea-change /Into something rich and strange." Ariel's song in The Tempest imagines the sea itself as the Wunderkammer of the drowned King of Naples.
The link between such things and the surrealist delight in dream images is the theme of this show, which contrasts old curiosities with a range of modern work that runs from Joseph Cornell boxes to a weirdly beautiful reflection on nature and culture by the contemporary Italian sculptor Mario Merz, involving a motorbike with buffalo horns for handlebars, a zebra's head and a string of neon numbers.
By custom, the national pavilions are the core of the Biennale. This year the Spanish pavilion goes all-out for young artists, the best of whom are the painter Jose Maria Sicilia and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. At the other end of the age scale, the U.S. is showing Isamu Noguchi, at 81 its greatest living sculptor. Alas, the pavilion does less than justice to the range and depth of Noguchi's art. Its centerpiece, near the entrance, is a spectacular but rather banal white marble slide; otherwise there are a number of exquisite basalt slabs and rocks, fairly brimming with wabi and sabi, some models for old garden projects and a plethora of Noguchi's akari, or paper lamps. There are too many of these, but even so, the seriousness and elegance of his work look outstanding.
The prize for best pavilion was won by France, with an environment by Daniel Buren. Buren's reputation is one of the real oddities of late modernism. For the past 20 years, his work has consisted mainly of green and white bands of equal width; of late, blue and yellow bands have also appeared. It is deadly boring and emptily chic, and it comes garnished with the kind of post-1968 social rhetoric favored by Jack Lang, Mitterrand's former Minister of Culture. Thanks to him, Buren is now the official minimalist of France. Thus the French pavilion resembles nothing so much as a Platonic Gucci concession in which the leather has vanished and only the stripes remain.
West Germany sent Sigmar Polke. Since the late '60s, Polke, 45, has been the Peck's bad boy of German painting - the possessor of a snappish, antic imagination that scavenges among kitsch, pop and high art, obliquely satirizing what it derides as the culture of Germany's " economic miracle. " While neither his audacity nor the scope of his influence is in doubt, Polke's new work in Venice turns out to be a disappointment, filled with big, slack parodies of "sublime" abstraction that may or may not be meant as denunciations of corporate art. What they add up to is anyone's guess.
Poor and hasty as this effort is, Polke's reputation was bound to get an award. So he shared the Biennale's first prize with Frank Auerbach, whose work occupies the English pavilion. Auerbach's is the one genuinely memorable group of paintings Venice has to offer this year. His show trumps its rivals as firmly as the work of another Englishman, Howard Hodgkin, did at the 1984 Biennale.
At 55, Auerbach shares with his younger German contemporary, Anseln Kiefer, the distinction of being the finest painter now working in an "expressionist" mode. But he is not really an expressionist, if by expressionism one means an art that depends on a rhetoric of anguish and crisis. He is more akin to Giacometti in his stubbornness, his relentless formal probing of a small range of deceitfully familiar subjects and his desire to win back a classical order from the turmoil of visual impression by sheer tenacity of drawing. Thickly painted, scraped off, recomposed, his cryptic paintings of heads and cityscapes are extremely dense and yet open to light, air and buoyant gesture. The density is a form of realism - for the colored paste conveys the utmost physical reality without depending on the normal devices of illusion, like shading. His art looks fast but is slow: Auerbach works obsessively but finishes no more than a dozen canvases a year. Every square inch is laden with pictorial feeling. This is the real thing - and a sign that amid the secondhand babble of so much postmodernism, we are perhaps only beginning to know who the important painters of the late 20th century are.
Post#7
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 17, 2008 at 9:48 pm
The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe is required reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word
The Painted Word
Author Tom Wolfe
The Painted Word is a 1975 book of art criticism by Tom Wolfe.
Contents
1 Background
2 Themes
3 Critical reception
4 References
5 External links
Background
By the 1970s Wolfe was, according to Douglas Davis of Newsweek magazine "more of a celebrity than the celebrities he describes." [1] The success of Wolfe's previous books, in particular The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968 and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers in 1970 had given Wolfe carte blanche from his publisher to pursue any topic he desired. In the midst of working on stories about the space program for Rolling Stone-stories that would eventually grow into the 1979 book The Right Stuff-Wolfe became interested in writing a book about modern art. As a journalist, Wolfe had devoted much of his writing career to pursuing realism; in the world of art, even more than in literature, Wolfe was disturbed by the lack of any persuasive theory of realism. [2]
Prior to publication in book form, The Painted Word was excerpted in Harper's Magazine. Wolfe's longtime publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux released the book in 1975. [3]
Themes
Wolfe's thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics' theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe's book, however, was not so much the artists as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of "Cultureburg": Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that the three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with out - sized influence. [1]
Wolfe provides his own history of what he sees as the devolution to modern art. He summarized that history: "In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs ". After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: "... there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. ... Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until ... it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture ... and came out the other side as Art Theory! ... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision ... late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple ". [4]
Critical reception
"The Painted Word hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch," wrote Rosalind E. Krauss in Partisan Review. [5] By ridiculing the most respected members of the art world establishment, Wolfe had ensured that the reaction to his book would be negative. Many reviewers dismissed Wolfe as someone simply too ignorant of art to write about it. [6][7]
Other critics responded with such similar vitriol and hostility that Wolfe said their response demonstrated that the art community only talked to each other. A review in The New Republic called Wolfe a fascist and compared him to the brain-washed assassin in the film The Manchurian Candidate. Wolfe was particularly amused, however, by a series of criticisms that resorted to "X-rated insults." An artist compared him to "A six-year-old at a pornographic movie; he can follow the action of the bodies but he can't comprehend the nuances." A critic in Time Magazine used the same image, but with an 11-year-old boy. A review in The New York Times Book Review used the image again, clarifying that the boy was a eunuch. [8] The opening of the review in Partisan Review compared Wolfe to the star of the pornographic film Deep Throat. She viewed Wolfe's lack of a suggestion for what should replace modern art as similar in their ignorance to statements Linda Lovelace made about Deep Throat being a "kind of goof." [5]
In defense of critics Rosenberg, Greenberg, and Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss noted that each man wrote about art "in ways that are entirely diverse." [5] Writing in Newsweek, Douglas Davis wrote that The Painted Word fails because of how it departed from Wolfe's previous works. Wolfe's other non-fiction, Davis wrote, was deeply reported, but here "Wolfe did not get away from the typewriter and out into the thick of his subject." [1]
Outside the art community, some reviewers noted that however unpopular Wolfe's book may have been in art circles, many of his observations were essentially correct, particularly about the de-objectification of art and the rise of art theory. [9]
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Post#8
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon November 17, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Art and the CIA
by Richard Cummings
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/cummings3.html
In the play ART, someone buys an abstract painting at an enormous price, while his friends ponder how they are going to tell him that it is inherently worthless. In the debate about abstraction and whether it was entirely some sort of hoax, the new traditionalists ridicule its "flatness" and its absence of narrative, while defenders of abstraction insist that representative art is a form of nostalgia that modernism sought to eliminate. The defenders are definitely losing ground, but one wonders why they were ever regarded as credible.
The point that most art critics miss is that art is also a form of commerce, and not antithetical to it. The god of art is the art market. And so one might ask, "How did a Jackson Pollock get to be worth so much money?" Part of it had to do with the Cold War, which not only bloated the military budget, but distorted the art market as well.
Faux genius and con man Clement Greenberg was at the center of the scam. A former itinerant necktie salesman, Greenberg teamed up with struggling abstract artist and mountebank, Barnett Newman, to promote a vision of art that conveniently coincided with the objectives of the US Cold War Establishment. Indeed, Greenberg argued that the avant-garde required the support of America's elite classes, a self-serving concept that would promote his personal interests as a collector.
As the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism clashed after the Second World War, the question of "What is art?" became a significant issue in the struggle for dominance. Was art a vehicle of state propaganda to glorify a proletarian revolution or depict an evil Hitler in his bunker at the end of the heroic struggle against fascism (never mind about the Hitler-Stalin pact), or was it the product of individual creativity unrestrained by governmental control and censorship?
But since America was then in the throes of one of its tedious puritanical backlashes, the sensuality of great Western art, as represented by say, Goya's "Naked Maja," was out of the question. Deriving their central thesis from Islamic art that representation of the sensual human form was interdicted by the sublime, the new Abstract Expressionists fit neatly into what the American intelligence community desperately needed to rebut Soviet representational propaganda; an art that was highly individualistic but which did not offend the sensibilities of conservative religion. A Baptist preacher or Bishop Sheen could laugh at a Pollock, but he could not condemn it as obscene. Yet because "modern art" was widely derided, it needed a boost from an invisible sponsor, which would turn out to be the CIA.
In this milieu Clement Greenberg came forth in support of the new art. Yes, the canvas was flat, and it should be covered flatly by paint in abstraction, so beauty would be destroyed in the name of the sublime. And Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Richard Barr heralded this view when he quoted Greenberg's co-conspirator, Newman, who infamously proclaimed, "The impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty." Barr went even further - God was dead and had been replaced by Abstract Expressionism.
The more Greenberg wrote in promotion of the Abstract Expressionists, and particularly Pollock's "action painting," which involved dripping paint on the canvas, the more he collected them at minimal prices before he had made them famous. And as he increased his own power and influence, the more people wanted to buy these paintings, which served Greenberg's real personal objective; to make himself rich.
Fortunately for him, like the military industrial complex, he had a helping hand in the federal government. As Frances Stoner Saunders explains in her brilliant book, Who Paid the Piper - The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, the CIA covertly supported the Abstract Expressionist movement by funding exhibits all over the world in promotion of the idea that the culture of freedom was superior to the culture of slavery, and by covertly promoting the purchasing of works by various private collections. Indeed, the CIA named its biggest front in Europe the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It worked. Soviet art became a laughing stock, and New York became the center of the art world, not Paris, where Picasso, a long-time member of the Communist party and winner of the Stalin Peace Prize (who can forget his doves of peace?) , still reigned supreme.
The CIA had stolen the show from Picasso, taking art a step further into a near mystical expression of unfettered human liberty in the spirit of free enterprise. Nelson Rockefeller, whose family created the MoMA, actually referred to Abstract Expressionism as "free enterprise painting." But like so many Rockefeller ventures, it was state supported, so that his own collection of Abstract Expressionist works ended up being worth a considerable fortune.
But why, then, did it come to an end? The Cold War exploded into the Vietnam War and rebellion overtook the arts. The social revolution of the Sixties brought with it Pop Art, Op Art, and various forms of social protest art, forcing Abstract Expressionism to the sidelines, even if prices were still good. Confronted with James Rosenquist's "F-111," abstraction lost its force. Even more than this, the answer lies in a paraphrasing of a remark by comedian Mort Sahl about why the student movement ended. "The government withdrew its funding."
June 20, 2002
Richard Cummings [send him mail] has taught at the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the University of the West Indies, Barbados, and St. Catherine's College Cambridge. He holds the PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and "completed with distinction" the 21st Session at Cornell University, of The School of Criticism and Theory. He is the author of the comedy, "Soccer Moms From Hell" (recently produced in New York) and the forthcoming novel, The Immortalists.
Copyright © 2002 by LewRockwell.com
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Post#9
You wroteon November 17, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Richard Cummings is now a member of the group by the way!
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Post#10
Leo Plaw wroteon December 2, 2008 at 12:39 am
Here are a few rants of my own on Modern Contemporary (contemptuous) art.
Berliner Kunstsalon and Contemporary Art
http://leoplaw.com/2008/11/02/berlin...temporary-art/
Damien Hirst Like Rembrandt?
http://leoplaw.com/2008/09/09/damien...ike-rembrandt/
Contemporary, Contemptuous, or Conceited?
http://leoplaw.com/2007/12/04/contem...-or-conceited/
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Post#11
Christian De Boeck (South Africa) wroteon December 2, 2008 at 12:44 pm
As regards the discussions here and elsewhere on the art market and politics, drugs, "entheogens", etc. You can bet your bottom "avida dollars" that many of those who back, promote and "collect" (or should I rather say invest in) the industrial kitsch products of an "artist" like Damien Hirst are big time coke heads - as was Hirst himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst ...
"Saatchi years" 1991-2003
Hirst has admitted serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten year period from the early 1990s: "I started taking cocaine and drink ... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck." During this time he was renowned for his wild behaviour and extrovert acts, including for example, putting a cigarette in the end of his penis in front of journalists. [17] He was an habitué of the high profile Groucho Club in Soho, London, and was banned on occasion for his behavior. "
See also these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst. So, I guess, that kind of shoots the whole discussion on "entheogens" off the wall - at least as far as I'm concerned
However, if like "All the king's horses and all the king's men" one wants to try to put Humpty Dumpty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty together again, start over, reanimate and reopen the discussion on a more realistic note, taking the facts rather than our personal prejudices into account, then the whole matter of drugs, art, artists, the art market and politics takes on a whole new and more real, matter of fact, perspective.
"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men: Couldn't put Humpty together again. ... "
Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice.
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
08.09.2009, 18:27
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