Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 13, 2012 6:34 pm

Project Willow wrote:It's long overdue now that I posted this online, so I took the opportunity. Here is my friend speaking to art with a capital A, just two weeks before she passed. You might notice the tumor on her cheek, and she did this on 1500 ml of morphine, plus half a dozen other palliative drugs and after coming home from radiation treatment. She was an amazing human being.



I'm sorry for the loss of your friend, Su Job, and grateful that you have introduced her to us through this video.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Apr 13, 2012 10:41 pm

"When a woman makes an altar cloth, so far as she is able, she makes every flower as lovely as the graceful flowers of the field, as far as she is able, every star as sparkling as the glistening stars of the night. She withholds nothing, but uses the most precious things she possesses. She sells off every other claim upon her life that she may purchase the most uninterrupted and favorable time of the day and night for her one and only, for her beloved work. But when the cloth is finished and put to its sacred use: then she is deeply distressed if someone should make the mistake of looking at her art, instead of at the meaning of the cloth; or make the mistake of looking at a defect, instead of at the meaning of the cloth. For she could not work the sacred meaning into the cloth itself, nor could she sew it on the cloth as though it were one more ornament..." -- Soren Kierkegaard.

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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Apr 13, 2012 11:05 pm

"... I wonder if a woman who embroiders a cloth for sacred use does not make every stitch as carefully as possible and perhaps begin over again many times. Yet I wonder if it would not distress her if some viewed it the wrong way and looked at the pearl-stitch embroidery instead of at the altar cloth? She found her priceless joy in doing everything as carefully as possible and simply because this work has no meaning and ought to have none; the needlewoman is unable to stitch the meaning into the cloth--the meaning lies within the beholder." SK again, on his own work, from a draft version of the above. Frege spoke of his own work in the same manner.

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Artistes these days tend to get in the way of Art. Art is now part of the economy. It has acquired a use (or material value). i say this and am not entirely sure whether it's true but there seems to have been a time when art was useless and valued as such. a song. the make of an object.

modernism began with a turn toward the primitive and folk art. Sappho, Homer, Chaucer, the troubadours. Braque, Picasso, and their interest for African objects/masks; Van Gogh's love for Japanese manga. meaningless things with no apparent use. a singular object.

a familiar scene brought to the viewer's attention as if for the first time. to make what was seen so often but never noticed because it was so familiar. Warhol's banana. Duchamp's "ready mades". Stilleben. and for me, Cezanne. Cezanne. Cezanne.

art is useless and remains so. the artist disappears from view if it is art that is the point. otherwise it's journalism or something presented by Attenborough (to hear an Artiste panting with excitement in front of his/her "work" even when they're across the Atlantic is just a nuisance).

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art (the work) must take care of (speak for) itself.

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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Sat Apr 14, 2012 7:23 am

Project Willow wrote:Ahab, there is so much I want to say but can't, because I am not at leisure to devote the time to a well thought out and possibly sourced essay at the moment. Confession: it takes me so damn long to translate my idiosyncratically formed, visually-based thoughts to the English language. Grrr.


Don't worry about it, I wasn't posting the article as a challenge or anything. I was just a bit disgusted by the tone of it overall - no one quoted in it seems to consider art as anything other than a physical commodity with a monetary value attached, like spices or furs or pharmaceuticals, including Spalding as far as I could tell. Using terms like "sub-prime" and "market crash" and so on. He seemed to be giving advice to investors - no doubt wealthy investors, since Hirsts' creations aint cheap - rather than putting forward any serious criticism of Hirst's artwork. His book is bound to go into more detail - at least I hope it does.

It seemed a good example of what Mac said: "Could it be because they are essentially courtiers, i.e., servants of power, and welcomed by the powerful? It might be worth looking into."

Spalding strikes me as the consummate courtier-type, warning his monied masters that the bubble in Dutch Tulips is about to burst, rather than someone who cares about art, or artists. Of course, he's not an artist himself, but I'd expect better even from a critic.

Project Willow wrote:Spalding is claiming there is some intrinsic value to art that's stripped away along with the artist's hand in more manufactured, conceptual pieces. I don't know if I agree with what he says here, but I will say that over valuing concept, like over valuing or negating any one component of creative expression can produce poor results. I've felt it as a visceral reaction when I encountered ready-made types of sculpture that represent a single idea, as a painful emptiness. However, I don't think that means all contemporary conceptual work is intrinsically less valuable as a tool of communication.


I really wish that's what was happening in the article, but it seems nowhere near as interesting as that. All it's about is money and nothing else. I felt a visceral reaction of painful emptiness when reading it! I agree with you about conceptual art, btw, I have absolutely no intrinsic or moral objection to it as a form, and am not dismissive of it... puzzled by it's sudden and unchallenged dominance, maybe, but not too surprised by it in the age of throwaway plastic forks and mile-high buildings made of sheet glass. And TV, of course. Art had to react to the new reality somehow, and it's done a pretty decent job of it. A lot of it maybe isn't very good (or it's not very good for me) but conceptual art is hardly unique in that.

Project Willow wrote:Conceptual artists are using a set of symbols common to the language our times, just as painters of the renaissance did with mythological iconography, but they're using them in a way that works to exclude rather than address the masses. This serves the same ultimate purpose, to reinforce elite power. It doesn't matter if any one or group of works appears to mock or undermine the system, these flourishes are co-opted, and the result is the same. Successful visual artists function somewhat like court jesters, as they always have.


Agree completely! Witness Banksy, etc. Of course, the work can still be good, or great, or immortal, even if it is co-opted or compromised - or even if it is deliberately and knowingly reprehensible in it's intentions (though that kind of stuff is very rare).

Project Willow wrote:A central role artists can play, that of social critic, is of course rarely valued in its own time. So I might agree with Spalding on at least one of his points, that if we were to try to construct a system of valuation of artistic output, what future generations might think of the work is important, at they very least, in that sense.


I just thought he was saying it wouldn't be worth money in future? Like that sixties piece that was just a 2X3 slab of blue perspex leaning against a wall. Who'd buy that now?

If he was actually saying Hirst's work would have nothing meaningful to say to future generations then that's a different thing altogether and I could start to respect Spalding a bit more... although Hirst himself would probably say that the lack of a message is part of the point or whatever.

Project Willow wrote:Did you know that Goya's original Saturn had an erection and that when the piece was moved, it was painted out? This really upsets me. I imagine the piece would be just that much stronger if the phallus had remained.

Image


No, I didn't, but I'm glad you told me! Once you know about it the lack of genitalia really doesn't look right at all in such a brutal and full-on portrayal. What's the theory on who might have censored it? Did it happen when it was being transferred to canvas?

It's surprising that Goya painted it on the wall of his own dining room considering the subject matter, and if Saturn originally had an erection too then I can imagine his dinner guests being a bit... surprised by it. There seems to be some doubt over whether the cannibal is Saturn at all - since the victim is not a child (EDIT: or doesn't appear to be a child, I should say. Or not to me. Maybe in scale the person appears childlike in relation to Saturn - though of course he's a God, and Gods are huge - but the musculature looks adult). There is also some doubt over whether the victim is even male, which would really change the whole meaning of the piece.
Last edited by AhabsOtherLeg on Sat Apr 14, 2012 11:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby crikkett » Sat Apr 14, 2012 10:18 am

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:It's surprising that Goya painted it on the wall of his own dining room, considering the subject matter, and if Saturn originally had an erection too then I can imagine his guests being a bit... surprised. There seems to be some doubt over whether the cannibal is Saturn at all - since the victim is not a child - and also some doubt over whether the victim is even male, which would really change the whole meaning of the piece.


On the wall of his own dining room. Set and setting. That's fantastic.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby Project Willow » Sat Apr 14, 2012 2:20 pm

AhabsOtherLeg wrote:I really wish that's what was happening in the article, but it seems nowhere near as interesting as that.


That's funny, I saw that bit of Stuckism argument and took the money rhetoric to be negative sniping, not earnest advice. I know nothing about Spalding, and should work on my reading comprehension. Thanks for schooling me.

Project Willow wrote:What's the theory on who might have censored it? Did it happen when it was being transferred to canvas?


All I know is it happened during the transfer.

The figure looks androgynous to me, I interpreted it as a metaphorical (god's) child. Who knows. Would be an interesting case to investigate.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Sat Apr 14, 2012 10:06 pm

and there's this:

Damien Hirst and the great art market heist

Hirst is the world's richest artist and the Tate's big retrospective will mark the zenith of his power. But when his stock falls, how will an art world in thrall to big money respond?

Hari Kunzru
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 March 2012 22.55 GMT

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A question of value: Hirst's Symphony In White Major....Absolution II. Photograph: Damien Hirst And Science Ltd DACS 2011

The Map and the Territory, the latest novel by the mordant French satirist Michel Houellebecq, opens with a description of a painting titled Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. Koons is portrayed throwing his arms wide. Hirst is slumped on a white leather sofa, drinking a beer. For Houllebecq's fictional artist, "Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an 'I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash' kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death; finally, there was in his face, something ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him look like a rank-and-file Arsenal supporter."

Hirst is not only the world's richest artist, but a transformative figure who can be assured of his place in history. Sadly – for him and for us – this is not because of the quality of his work but because he has almost single-handedly remade the global art market in his image: that is to say, the image of the artist as celebrity clown, the licensed working-class fool who not only shits on us from on top of his pile of cash, but persuades us to buy that shit and beg for more. This cockney chancer routine, perfected in the 60s by the likes of David Bailey and Keith Moon, has deep roots in British pop culture. We have a lot of affection for guys like these, who seem to be getting away with it, sticking it to the man.

In the early 90s, Hirst seemed like a breath of fresh air, a rave-era blast against the terrible, starchy politeness that characterised the British art scene. In a world of high theory and rigorously monochrome wardrobes, it was funny to say that you paid assistants to make your art "because I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it". Then, when stories of your millions were all over the press, and it came out that those assistants were extremely poorly paid, it seemed less funny. Now, in Hirst's current incarnation as house artist to the 1%, running some kind of Foxconn-style production line on his compound in Baja California, the cheeky chappie act has lost its last residue of charm.

This year may come to be seen as the high-water mark of Hirst's cultural power. On 4 April, a retrospective of his work opens at Tate Modern in London. In January, an exhibition of his "pharmaceutical paintings", canvases of varying sizes covered in uniform coloured dots, opened in all the Gagosian Gallery's 11 locations around the world. These are major shows, intended to underscore the status of an artist who, at least in the UK, seems to need no help in reaching an audience. The most interesting thing about them is the hints they drop about the new rules of the art world, and about the artist's future reputation, which is not as secure as it might appear.

As Hirst has become wealthier, his work, which (as Houellebecq points out) incessantly circles the twin poles of death and money, has lost the cocoon of edgy cool that sheltered it through the 90s, to emerge, like one of his murdered butterflies, in its full form: as a pure commodity, fluttering free of the things that tie most art down – aesthetics, geography, the specifics of material and manufacture. He has certain signature elements (dots, pills, dead things, shiny shelves, chunks of scientific text) that can be deployed, with minor variations, at every price point from major installation to souvenir mug. His thematic interests in pop culture, shock and replication make it easy to keep a straight face while he sells his dodgier diffusion lines in markets that haven't been saturated by the earlier "better" work – see, for example, the shameless recent series of National Geographic-style butterfly photos, punted out in Hong Kong, safely away from the derision that might have accompanied them in London or New York.

This isn't just art that exists in the market, or is "about" the market. This is art that is the market – a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue. Hirst has gone way beyond Warhol's explorations of repetition and banality. Sooner or later, his advisers will surely find a way for him to dispense with the actual objects altogether and he will package concepts in tranches, like mortgage securities, some good stuff with some trash, to be traded on the bourse in Miami-Basel.

For the moment, Hirst still has to make things and we still have to look at them. The byproduct of his activities is the most starkly authoritarian corpus of art of recent times. All those hard, glittering surfaces, those rotting animals. The body, for Hirst, is trash, which exists to be anatomised, displayed, described in cribbed Latin names. The only way to cheat death is to slough off your rotting flesh and take on the qualities of capital. It's the 21st-century version of ars longa, vita brevis. Don't just make money, be money: weightless, ubiquitous, infinitely circulating, immortal.

The aspiration to break the bounds of the particular has always shown through in such Hirst titles as I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life, Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (his 1997 book) and Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, the 2008 Sotheby's auction where he sold $198m worth of art direct to the public, bypassing the galleries who represent him.

This drive to disembodied ubiquity is a message to the proles, to awe us, crush us, sap our will to resist. We, after all, are stuck in our stubbornly physical bodies, which we need to feed and clothe and shelter under conditions of ever-greater austerity and social discipline. We are faced with an enemy that seems impossible to kill. In For the Love of God, the grinning, diamond-encrusted skull that formed the centrepiece of Hirst's last London show before the 2008 crash, we behold the face of our masters. And in its failure to sell for its $100m asking price, we can detect signs of the invisible hand moving against the skull's Barnumesque creator. The world's most expensive contemporary artwork was eventually bought by a consortium that included the artist himself and his London gallery, White Cube. It was, in an important sense, a work that would not have been complete without a buyer, and its failure to sell would have been damaging to Hirst's prices, which in art, as in any other asset class, are highly dependent on investor confidence.

Investor confidence is the key to understanding the unprecedented Gagosian show of Hirst's spot paintings. Hirst's atelier has been turning these out at every scale since 1986, and by the artist's own estimate there are around 1,400 in existence, of which Gagosian was showing 300 under the faux-definitive title The Complete Spot Paintings. They are made by Hirst's assistants to a simple aesthetic rule – the colour sequences of the dots must be "random". The paintings are given the names of drugs: Amphotericin B, Cocaine Hydrochloride, Morphine Sulphate, Butulinium Toxin A, and so on. Many of them are technically difficult to execute, such as the piece completed for the Gagosian show that comprises 25,781 one millimetre spots that the poor bloody assistants had to paint without repeating any single colour. Examples have sold at recent auctions for between $800,000 and $3m. This is to say that they are valued like unique, individual works of art, yet are made in quantities – and using methods – that seem to deny this fiction. Thus one could make the case that they are significantly overvalued. Cue alarm in a lot of penthouse living rooms.

If I were Larry Gagosian (usually cited in power lists as the contemporary art world's most important player) and I wanted to help my top client shore up the value of a body of work that was losing its lustre as its fashionable 90s aesthetic began to look tired, and the penny started to drop among collectors that at every other dinner party they went to they saw something on the wall that looked awfully similar to the something on their own wall, what would I do?

Long-term value in the art world depends in a certain raw way on scarcity, but is largely produced through a delicate process by which aesthetic value (determined by curators and critics) intersects with market value, determined ultimately by auction prices. One point at which these two types of value intersect is in provenance. The story behind an object – its past owners, where it has been shown, its place in the story of the artist's career, and so on – confers both types of value. A landmark show, geographically dispersed in an unprecedented way, is bound to be remembered as a significant moment in Hirst's career as a global art star. When that show is accompanied by a critical apparatus, chiefly a catalogue raisonnée (a meticulously documented list of works shown, accompanied by scholarly essays), those works become part of a canon and a magical walled garden of significance is erected around them.

As Francis Outred, Christie's European head of contemporary art, told the Economist, this catalogue "could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume". The pharmaceutical paintings are frankly too financially valuable to too many people for their actual status (banal, mass-produced, decorative) to intrude on the consensus fiction that they are scarce and important. The owners of the 1,100 paintings not in the Gagosian show should be nervous, though. They just lost their AAA rating.

Like any major artist, Hirst is not the only person to have a stake in his success. Gallerists, museums and auction houses have investments, reputations and income streams to protect. The people with the greatest interest in maintaining Hirst's prices are the collectors who have already invested in his work. These collectors include some of the world's most sophisticated speculators: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the tiger shark in a tank that became the icon of 90s Britart, is, for example, now owned by the hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital Advisers, who has $14bn under management.

This is how it works. A few major collectors make the market. Where they lead, the horde of hedgies follows. Many of the new breed of art investors (not Cohen, who is known to be a man of great taste and exquisite legal representation) have jettisoned even the pretence of connoisseurship. Some of these guys care about the bragging rights that come with a blue-chip work hanging in the loft. Others are all about the numbers, and employ the same tools and decision-making processes to play the art market that they use at work. A few have also discovered that many of the regulatory mechanisms that apply in other markets – preventing insider trading, price-fixing by cartels and sundry other abuses – simply don't exist in the art world. It is possible to game the system in many ways, and the careers of certain artists look not unlike a classical Ponzi scheme, where money from new investors is used to pay returns to those further upstream.

Will every collector who bought multimillion-dollar vitrines from Beautiful Inside My Head Forever see their works increase in value? Or will that value just accrue to the early-90s works on which Hirst's reputation rests, works held by the market-makers? How about those spot silkscreens, priced attractively at a few thousand pounds but produced in editions of a thousand or more? Do they have a future as anything more than wallpaper? It's certain that pieces such as the shark, which have a place in the story of 90s British art, will retain their value – even if it's not exactly the same shark, the original having rotted and been replaced in 2006. But with such a glut of Hirst out there, there's no doubt that some people are going to lose their shirts.

In this context, art museums find themselves in the eye of a storm. Nothing confers more value on an artwork than its selection for inclusion in a museum show. It is the definitive critical vote of confidence. This, of course, depends on the fiction that such decisions are made on pure, aesthetically disinterested grounds. As sophisticated investors enter the market and work out how the game is played, that particular story is wearing thin. This is not to say that the Tate shouldn't be showing Hirst. Its director, Nicholas Serota, attended Freeze, the 1988 student show that first brought the artist to public attention, and the Tate has consistently supported the "YBA" generation of which he is a part, helping to shape the explosion of interest in British contemporary art, not just among speculators but an art-loving public who pay entrance fees and buy nothing more expensive than a postcard.

However, Serota, like other museum directors, is expected to find money to run his institution from a variety of sources, including corporations and private individuals, and this makes museums vulnerable to pressure from those who wish to use them to confer value on their holdings. For many years, the Tate had a sponsorship relationship with UBS. One of the benefits received by the Swiss bank were regular Tate shows of works from its collection. Other major corporate collectors routinely negotiate similar deals. Deutsche Bank has relationships with institutions such as the Whitney and Guggenheim, unself-consciously declaring, in a press release accompanying a recent Georg Baselitz show in Italy, that the artist's work "constitutes an important part of the Deutsche Bank collection. Deutsche Bank acquired significant works by the artist as early as 1981 … In 1999, Deutsche Bank honoured him with the show Nostalgia in Istanbul at the Deutsche Guggenheim …"

The corruption of art museums by investors is perhaps most apparent in the case of New York's New Museum. In 2009 it devoted its entire three-floor space to an exhibition of the collection of Dakis Joannou, a Greek Cypriot industrialist who sits on the museum's board. Other recent New Museum shows, devoted to Urs Fischer and Elizabeth Peyton, also relied heavily on Joannou's collection, and his wider web of patronage. The impression has been given of a museum that is no longer able to make independent determinations of value. This has become an open scandal in New York, satirised in a much-reproduced drawing by William Powhida titled How the New Museum Committed Suicide With Banality, or "how to use a non-profit museum to elevate your social status and raise market values". Likewise, Hirst's major collectors will see an effective windfall from the inclusion of their works in a Tate retrospective, and other Hirst stakeholders will benefit too. That may not be why the show is happening, but it is not without significance.

Despite the financial crisis, contemporary art continues to soar in value. The unprecedented concentration of capital in the hands of the global elite means that the art market, being essentially a very high-end service industry aimed at generating a pleasurable experience of differential consumption, is weathering the storm very nicely. The Mei Moses index, a measure that largely relies on sales of paintings in London and New York, outperformed the S&P500 by nine points in 2011. New York magazine recently printed graphs (drawn on data from Artnet) that show Hirst's work outperforming contemporary art in general.

Other figures suggest the picture for Hirst is less rosy. In 2008, the year of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, just over $270m-worth of his art was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. His 2009 sales were 93% lower. Capital needs to be put to work, and a double-digit rate of return looks excellent in any economy. For the moment, Hirst's work is still an attractive investment, but market sentiment may move against him. The artist himself is undaunted. He recently announced that he has enlisted two assistants to paint 2m tiny spots on a canvas. He estimates that it will take them nine years to complete.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... art-market


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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Sat Apr 14, 2012 10:29 pm

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The Brooklyn Rail commissioned the right artist to do their cover feature on the questionable curating practices of New Museum. William Powhida, an artist known for donning fictional personas in order to critique the art world, this time played an artist he imagined would be in collector and New Museum trustee Dakis Joannou’s collection to put together the sprawling narrative. Of course, it’s unlikely anyone but Reena Spaulings activist Merlin Carpenter would feel comfortable publicly criticizing the show were they in it, but the criticism is clear nonetheless. The New Museum should not be showing the collection of a trustee member, nor is their mandate to showcase emerging art being filled. Art world figures such as James Wagner, Gavin Brown, Lisa Phillips, Marcia Tucker, and many others (including myself) are featured prominently in the cartoon.

I spoke to Powhida about the ongoing debate Friday afternoon, noting the spaces they relagate to emerging artists: The icky glass-walled space behind the cafeteria, the alcove in the stairway, and their education department. If the New Museum really wanted to dedicate some space to emerging artists, they’d give Rhizome some physical space every once and a while, switch up the programming so emerging artists receive floors to themselves (I’m sorry, but blockbuster group shows like Younger Than Jesus can’t be the only venue for the new), and promote their talks a little more. I don’t mind seeing Elizabeth Peyton at the Museum, but I’d at least like to see an attempt to balance out the programming a little for the artists who really need the exposure.

Related: Countless posts by James Wagner.

http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/11/03/ho ... -banality/


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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Sat Apr 14, 2012 10:44 pm

THE MONA LISA CURSE











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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Mon Apr 23, 2012 3:22 pm

art? not art?

Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style
Photographs, digital images, video and sound (2010 and ongoing)

Improvising with materials close at hand, Seat Assignment consists of photographs, video, and digital images all made while in flight using only a camera phone. The project began spontaneously on a flight in March 2010 and is ongoing. At present, over 2500 photographs and video, made on more than 70 different flights to date, constitute the raw material of the project.

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror using my cellphone. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits. There is no special illumination in use other than the lavatory's own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone. At the Dunedin Public Art gallery, the photos were framed in faux-historical frames and hung on a deep red wall reminiscent of the painting galleries in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



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http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photog ... lemish.php

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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby Project Willow » Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:55 am

:lovehearts: Vanlose.

Some earlier reactions to the Hughs doc here: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=31439&p=433574&hilit=hughes+art#p433574

Forgive me if it takes quite awhile before I post in response to your offerings as I'm a week or so out from my big event launch and am all consumed by the labors.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby kenoma » Tue Apr 24, 2012 7:51 pm

Wow, but that Hughes documentary was obnoxiously racist. It's not at all about his horror faced with the commodification of art, it's about his petty resentments about the deracination of European heritage, and the defiling of Holy Europeanness by non-Europeans. So that the sacred mystery of the Mona Lisa was all of a sudden shattered in 1962 when she visited the US and was gawked at by a million working stiffs. As if this -
Image
-hadn't happened in 1883, or this -
Image
in 1919.
And then later in the film it's claimed that whatever quantum of Profound Inexpressible Significance that managed to survive the Mona Lisa's trip to NY will be utterly obliterated by a visit to Abu Dhabi (the Louvre in Abu Dhabi??! Why don't we just fuck dogs and be done with it?)

All this being a foretaste of the peculiarly nasty bullying of Alberto Mugrabi:



This apparent takedown of a moneyed philistine is really about asserting the authority of a club to which Mugrabi could never belong (Did you know Warhol? I did).

Mugrabi is damned because he is incoherent when talking about art. But Hughes is incoherent when he tries to rhapsodize the Mona Lisa. Nor can he say anything coherent about Rauschenberg, whom he tries to cast as an outsider genius, though Rauschenberg was a mediocre talent and died very rich, with a 35 acre estate in the Florida Keys.
Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally. - Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power, February 21, 2008
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Apr 26, 2012 3:27 am

Project Willow wrote::lovehearts: Vanlose.

Some earlier reactions to the Hughs doc here: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=31439&p=433574&hilit=hughes+art#p433574

Forgive me if it takes quite awhile before I post in response to your offerings as I'm a week or so out from my big event launch and am all consumed by the labors.


a Willow's got to do what a Willow's got to do!

i love those Katchadourian portraits. they kind of express what i was trying to get at in my posts above but with greater precision and clarity. they're eminently "throw away". meaningless, useless, ephemeral. and so very beautiful. the light. like fallen leaves really. or cherry blossoms. a grand hopeless yet loving gesture. they're not satire. what they achieve, to me, is to remind me of the "value" of art by "cutting it down to size" (clearing away the blather), bringing "language" back from the metaphysical to the everyday (thank you Wittgenstein). they strip their references of the grandiose, heavy, historical, institutional, and economic weight that has been piled on them. The Mona Lisa ought to hang in an Italian kitchen ("Oh, that! That's an old portrait of aunt Clara. We loved her. It's nothing.") that's where it belongs. where it was meant to hang. art is the everyday awakened. it should be taken lightly, like holding a butterfly, with utter seriousness, and let go of with a smile. that's the best i can manage.

it's best to say nothing and just look.

*

Malevich designed a wonderful tea set.
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Fri Apr 27, 2012 5:20 pm

Project Willow wrote:Thanks for schooling me.


Ha! I have never schooled you on anything at any point, and certainly not on the subject of art! :bigsmile

I remember you posted about Su Job in the thread after my Dad died, it made me feel better, that they had gone around the same time (for some reason I thought Harold Pinter had died then too, but he's still alive I think... shit, no, I was right the first time). Anyway, Su Job is awesome and so are you.

Project Willow wrote:The figure looks androgynous to me, I interpreted it as a metaphorical (god's) child. Who knows. Would be an interesting case to investigate.


You're probably right. The buttocks look feminine (to me) and the upper torso more masculine, but it's really hard to say what gender (or age) the child is supposed to be. Would be a great thing to look into. It's a painting I'd love to see in real life. Did you know I've seen Carravagio's Beheading of St. John the Baptist with my own two bleary eyes, btw, over in Malta, in St. John's Co-Cathedral? Well, I have, and that makes me better than you - unless you've seen it too, of course, which would make us roughly equal. It's bloody massive. And bloody great. And bloody.

On a slightly related note, if you look at some of the depictions of Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel she basically has the exact same body as Adam but with unnaturally proportioned breasts welded to the front. And she also has longer hair obviously, but other than that and the penis not being visible she has a physique every bit as "manly" as his. At least one art critic has theorised that Michealangelo had never seen a naked woman in the flesh so he just drew a man with boobs. I highly doubt that's true, but it's still a good wee bit of art gossip to throw out now and then. In other parts of the frescoe she appears much more feminine (or stereotypically feminine, I should say... I should also shut up).

Good luck with the exhibtion!

I had sensible things to say in this post at one point, but it'll have to be another time. :beer:
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
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Re: Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

Postby Project Willow » Fri Apr 27, 2012 7:01 pm

:hug1: Ahab

I thought it was well established that Michelangelo drew from male models.

I wish I had seen the Caravaggio, but I have seen his works that are in the Uffizi, as well as Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith. Take that!

:cheers:
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