Recently in Art Category

Ed Winkleman just published a post about political art, which is worth the read. For once, I do not agree with Ed, even though that doesn't mean that I feel compelled to embrace each and every bit of art that proclaims and/or pretends to be political. When I think about photography, it's straightforward to come up with a large number of artists whose work is quite political, while it still is wonderful art. I don't know whether he would agree, but for me, Brian Ulrich's work is one of the examples I can think of (there are many others).

"So the other day, I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Slate's editors were, 'ironically, unable to get permission' to reproduce Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 for Sarah Boxer's slideshow review of 'Into The Sunset,' MoMA's exhibition of photography's role in creating the concept of the American West. [The irony, of course, is that Prince's work is actually a rephotograph of a Marlboro Man ad, which was probably photographed originally by Jim Krantz.] And so I blithely grabbed an image of Untitled (Cowboy) online, resized and retitled it, and republished it as my own work, 300 x 404, After Untitled (Cowboy) 2003 by Richard Prince, and offered to let Slate show it instead. Though I've written for Slate before, they have not, as yet, taken me up on my offer." - greg.org; also see the follow-up post.

"Art magazines and art blogs are the journalistic equivalent of studio art, while an art review in a newspaper is like public art. Anyone from any background might happen upon it. Where I write now does not exist in a generalized public sphere. A street sweeper on coffee break will not happen upon a leftover copy of this blog and be drawn into a review. A woman getting her heels buffed won't find it on the empty seat beside her and be motivated to see an exhibit of which she might otherwise not have heard. For an art critic, the death of newspapers is the death of potential connection to wider worlds. Everyone who reads this blog has a preexisting condition, otherwise known as an interest in art. On the other hand, there are notable benefits. Where I'm writing now, nobody tells me what to do and nobody derides my blog just because it's a blog." - Regina Hackett

"Ever notice how top 100 in the world' lists are heavily slanted to their country of origin? This is understandable, I suppose, but it does make me wish for one that convinced me of its objectivity." - Ed Winkleman

Boston has its fair share of unbelievably bad public art. For example, you wouldn't be surprised to find something like Robert Shure's Irish Famine Memorial in the former Eastern Bloc, but seeing it in downtown Boston is a bit of a shock. So when I went to Boston this past weekend and took a walk on Atlantic Ave - previously the site of the Big Dig - just after the sun had set I didn't expect to find something like those three structures shown in the picture above. At around seven feet tall, they were pulsating with blue light, before changing colours and then emitting dry ice (I made a little movie). Well, there's some public art I can believe in. If you're in Boston make sure to see it, because Boston being Boston, once the mechanism is broken it won't ever get fixed again.

"The tendency to relegate Art to the distaff side of our identity [...] is fully intertwined with our more mythical view of ourselves as wild west cowboys and the widely held opinion that art is for sissies." - Ed Winkleman

More talk about art: A summary of a talk art critic Jerry Saltz gave recently.

This article contains gallerist David Zwirner's thoughts about the current state of the art market; and I'm still a bit undecided how to react to it, even though some sort of laughter is probably the best reaction.

"In late August 2008, McAllen Arts Council member and Voices of Art publisher David Freeman contacted Blue Star Director and sculptor Bill FitzGibbons to congratulate the artist on his 'public art commission in McAllen.' FitzGibbons was perplexed. Unbeknownst to him, an artwork with nearly identical qualities to FitzGibbons’s local 'Light Channels' had been installed in an Expressway 83 underpass in the South Texas boomtown. [...] Strangely, nobody in McAllen seems to know when exactly McAllen’s lights were installed. Stranger still, the project has never been given a formal unveiling, the idea never credited to any person, and the work never titled." - story (via)

Reporting on Two Recessionary Shifts in Attitude, Ed Winkleman notes: "The other trend I've noticed (and had confirmed by other dealers) recently is a much more aggressive and, seemingly out of nowhere, clueless approach among unrepresented artists seeking gallery representation lately. Whereas we had been getting about 1-3 artists a month who clearly had no idea how best to approach a gallery either send us a package or email, now we're getting 1-3 a day calling us up and insisting we give them a show. And we're not the only gallery reporting this."

There's a wonderful conversation with (in alphabetical order) author, blogger, and gallerist Ed Winkleman here.

You can blame modern art for many things, but certainly not for our mass culture, right? Actually, you can. "Oh boy," I thought, when I saw that article this morning, linked to by Ed Winkleman (who seems to be putting the final touches on his book - congrats, Ed!). Usually I find it extremely silly to blame art for things. But of course, it's tough to ignore statements like "All the shallowness of modern mass culture began in avant-garde art 40 years ago".

Despite its whiff of People magazine style reporting ("In the midst of the scariest art downturn in more than a decade, Mr. Gagosian is sticking with his Hermès suits and jetting around on a private plane. Sporting a helmet of silvery hair and looking like a cross between an aging bon vivant and a secret agent, he still radiates total confidence - which, these days, not everyone is buying."), this piece about art dealer Larry Gagosian is quite interesting.

"Over the past decade – until, at least, global credit began to crunch our fun – the art world has developed into a high-turnover, high-visibility international activity that everyone wants a slice of. It’s an exponentially expanded system of artists, audiences, art markets, dealers, galleries, curators, critics, collectors, museums, institutes, foundations, biennials, triennials, quadrennials, fairs, auction houses, art schools, prizes, books, magazines, journals and consultancies. [...] In recent months, though, this expansion has been tempered by anxiety. The tighter the credit crunch grips us, the louder you can hear the gloating of those who think a drop in auction prices and a swathe of galleries going under will somehow result in the disappearance of the present art system and the resurgence of some kind of prelapsarian art paradise unfettered by the evils of capitalism and what they perceive to be cultural con-artistry." - story