(found here)
Read more »

There’s an absolutely wonderful post over at Ed Winkleman’s blog, about artists leaving a gallery to go elsewhere and galleries who “let go” of artists (if that’s the word). One of the reasons why I like Ed’s blog so much is because he is willing to see both sides of the story, and he will be happy to talk about them openly - in a world where even the gallerinas won’t talk to you, if you look like you don’t have a lot of money.
Read more »

“Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process. The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.” (story) No comment necessary. Update: I am being told it’s a hoax! How very witty! Makes me think, though - isn’t it a sad sign that we now live in a time where stuff like this (and every other headline from the satirical newspaper The Onion) could be real?
Read more »

“Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, 2008 - ongoing. Exact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed.” - Martijn Hendriks (via VVORK)
Read more »

“Giuseppe Verdi, one might think, is hard to mess up. But a theater in the eastern German city of Erfurt seems to be doing its best. In a re-interpretation of the opera ‘A Masked Ball,’ which opens on Saturday, director Johann Kresnik has hit upon a dramatic novelty: His staging has naked pensioners wearing Mickey Mouse masks, wandering around the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center.” (story) Notes the Daily Torygraph: “Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.”
Read more »

After having read the article about “gallerinas” (that I got so angry about here), I talked to a couple of female friends about how the article described the role of women: Smart is good, but looks are more important. Even though my friends live on different continents - one in the US, one in Europe, they both basically wrote the same thing, namely (paraphrased) “We’ll, we women are quite used to be being treated like that.” For me, that’s unacceptable; even though one could point out that it’s easy for me to say that since I’m a man, and I don’t have to deal with it. But then sexism - just like racism - can (in fact: should) be offensive also for people who are not subjected to it. In any case, on her blog, Cara Phillips (the American friend I had talked to) just published a long discussion of this general topic - a very recommended read! Update (6 April): Check out this follow-up post!
Read more »

Ed Winkleman (himself a gallerist) pointed me to this article about gallery staff and the amount of friendliness they usually have on display (exceptions, of course, merely confirm the rule). Needless to say, I do understand some of the issues raised there: If you come into an art gallery just to take a literal or “just” a verbal piss and then get ignored or treated “rudely”, should that surprise you?
Read more »

Martin Eder’s paintings have titles such as “Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels” or “The Ass Sniffers”, and if you are wondering what they show there is little surprise in store for you (hey, the guy is German!), except maybe the fact that the sniffer in the latter one is a fuzzy kitten (no, seriously, a cat, there are tons in his work). Here’s a nice article about the work, even though I would probably have given it a different title (not that the published one is no good), but that would probably have been unprintable. In any case, Martin Eder has also done some photography, which you can see either here or here (and from what you have just learned about his paintings, you might realize immediately it’s not safe for work) - well worth the visit!
Read more »

“When art abandons color, as it did in the nineteen seventies, it can only recede into the domain of abjection - into the protocols of language, history, and representation. The consequence of this […] is that all discussion of art under such régimes begins at a position of linguistic regress that renders invisible the complex dialogue between what we want to see and what we want to see represented.” (Dave Hickey, “Pontormo’s Rainbow”, found in Air Guitar; emphases in the original text)
Read more »

Kinetic art - sculpture that moves in smart ways - I can’t get enough of. I just found the work of Theo Jansen, whose TED presentation (incl. lots of movies of his fantastic sculptures) you can see here. Update (21 April): There’s a nice interview with him here.
Read more »

“An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition. […] Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. […] Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness”, as reported by the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium (with many more details and - as is the case in any serious scientific study - caveats concerning observed correlations etc.).
Read more »

Any art critic who says things like “I despise art education. Art doesn’t lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It’s a set of propositions about how things should look.” or “There are no serious art magazines.” or “Training sissies for teaching jobs.” (when asked what the MFA’s raison d’être) or “With the artists, I don’t teach, I coach. I can’t tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. […] My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That’s all I wanted in a professor.” has my ear, that’s for sure (interview, found over at Exposure Compensation).
Read more »

“Called Honey Space by its creator, the gallery has sprung up in one of the last unused (and as yet undeveloped or demolished) old warehouses in the booming, polished Chelsea art district. No rent is paid by the gallery. There is no sign. The door on 11th Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets looks a little like a breach in the wall. The gallery will generally keep Chelsea hours, open Tuesdays through Saturdays. But most of the time there will be no one attending it.” (story)
Read more »

It is so thoughtful that someone bought me a Francis Bacon triptych for my upcoming big birthday, even though the price tag (51.68 million dollars) might strike some as a bit excessive.
Read more »

“Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream” - story
Read more »

It’s too bad that the images on Simone Eberli & Andrea Mantel’s website are so tiny, since the work is very nice. You can find some slightly larger examples here.
Read more »

I saw this before, but Art Threat just had an update: “Had you been watching Czech Television on June 17, 2007, you might have seen what appeared to be a nuclear explosion on your television screen. A mountain resort in the Krkonose region of the Czech Republic appeared to go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke. The video was a hoax, cleverly perpetrated by Ztohoven, a local art group. […] The performance, entitled “Media Reality” sparked controversy throughout the country. The Czech National Gallery awarded the group with the newly created NG 333 prize for their work. […] According to Dusan Ondracek, state prosecutor, six of the members of Ztohoven group have been charged with scaremongering and spreading false information. The members, if convicted, could face up to three years in prison.” This appears ironic/absurd, given the statement of the group: “We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group, our aim is not to intimidate the society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on daily basis both in the real world and in the world created by the media… We hope our action will become an appeal for the future and remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth.” But then, the circumstances of their event makes it a bit understandable, since they “hacked into television broadcasting”: “On June 17, viewers of a Czech television channel watching a Web cam program monitoring weather in various Czech mountain resorts could see a nuclear explosion taking place in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains in the northern Czech Republic.” (source)
Read more »

There is an interesting post about art and politics over at Ed Winkleman’s blog - my only concern being that if people/artists are presented with the option of either being “left” or “right” then they clearly will lose out - because the world consists of more than just black and white (even if politicians want to make us believe that’s not true), and art lives exactly where there are many, many shades of gray (good art, that is).
Read more »

Another great provocation from beyond the Atlantic: “The great majority of popular culture in the UK is worthless, moronic, meretricious, self-serving, anti-democratic, sclerotic garbage: it’s the enemy of thought and change: it should be ignored, marginalised, trashed. There I’ve said it.” (source)
Read more »

“Young artists may dream of being Richard Prince, but the 58-year-old former Time Inc. staffer spent years in obscurity before his ‘joke’ paintings, re-photographed Marlboro Man ads, and muscle-car sculptures began to fetch record-breaking prices.” - story Update (6 Dec): And then there is this article about the photographer who took the original cigarette ad photos.
Read more »

I always love a good discussion about art (in part because it’s ultimately so pointless), so here’s a provocation to have fun with: “The truth is very few people really like art. This is the dirty secret that makes a living for artists such as Caroline Shotton. […] The hilarious gimmick of this Central St Martin’s-educated painter is to put cows in the classics.” (story) Moo or boo?
Read more »

Found at things magazine: Karl-Hans Janke spent the final 40 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from paranoia, schizophrenia, and possibly autism. His doctor noted the main symptom of his illness was “manic inventing”. You have to see the catalogue of a show about his work to believe it - note that most of the German texts appear in English translation a few pages later (unfortunately, the quotes by Wernher von Braun - which make you question his sanity - aren’t translated).
Read more »

My new job entails a commute of about an hour, a little more than half of which is spent on a bus. Well, my choice of residence - Northampton instead of Amherst (where I work) - is responsible for this; and I don’t mind the commute at all, since I like to read. I am currently reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which I couldn’t recommend more - provided you have an interest in either the (cultural) history of the 20th Century and/or “classical” music. If you want to get an idea of the style and contents of the book, check out Alex Ross’ article about Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, which also appears in the book.
Read more »

There’s something profoundly wrong with blockbuster art/archeology shows, and you just have to go to one of them to know why. In fact, if you have a reasonable amount of common sense you don’t even have to go, but then you have to live with people telling you that you can’t judge the show since you haven’t seen it - a curious argument in itself, but that’s an entirely different matter.
Read more »

“Many major art magazines merely skim the surface of what the internet can offer by using their websites as lacklustre advertisements for the latest issue or as a facility for archived articles. But artforum.com has become a cool little sister to its seminal hard-copy publication, and a worthy force within the international art world with its own voice, heft and value. […] All of the online art magazines offer news, gossip and reviews, but ArtForum is a rare example of a print publication successfully branching out and expanding its offerings online. Don’t you agree that artforum.com ought to be a role model for other art magazines, who can learn from it that there is life beyond the newsstands?” (story)
Read more »

“A lot of what I learned in [art]school had to be unlearned once I got out into the real world. Most importantly I don’t think I learned enough about myself and my needs as an artist.” - Ofer Wolberger on Art Education
Read more »

“Jake and Dinos Chapman […] will spend much of the fair [Frieze art fair at Regent’s Park in London] sitting at the stand of their gallery, White Cube. Hand them any kind of English paper money - […] anything so long as it has the Queen’s head on it - and they will draw on it for you. They’ll give you back the note, now worth many times more than your original outlay, and with the monarch’s visage defaced.” (story)
Read more »

When I first read this article by Damien Hirst I thought he must be having quite the laugh (“As an artist, I feel that, in the unlikely event of a tank getting broken beyond repair, then it can be replaced with a brand new tank made to the old specifications; and similarly, if an animal specimen gets damaged beyond repair or lost for whatever reason, it can also be replaced with a new specimen of the same dimensions.”). But then I realized that there really is more to the issue than I thought at first (but DH might still be having a laugh). Interesting.
Read more »

“From Mary, Queen of Scots’ beheading in 1587 to John Joe Amador’s lethal injection in 2007: the styles in execution may have changed, but the death mask, it seems, lives on.” (story)
Read more »

“Imagine how little news about visual art would appear in the papers if the following generic stories were banned: 1. The most expensive work of art ever […] 2. Anything about graffiti […] 3. Lost masterpiece rediscovered […] 4. Contemporary artists as plagiarists […] 5. Art historian/archaeologist makes earth-shattering discovery […] 6. Restoration stories” (story)
Read more »

“a new stained-glass window in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral […] evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine. Contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter designed the 65-foot-tall work to replace the original, destroyed by bombs in World War II. As a starting point, he used his own 1974 painting 4096 Colors.” - story; the window was fully revealed today, more images and a short German text here.
Read more »

Alison Jackson’s work is a commentary on a culture obsessed with “celebrities”.
Read more »

“An orangutan is holding his first solo exhibition of his paintings in a zoo in Germany. Like many artists, he knows the therapeutic value of art: He took up painting after his partner died. […] Now Buschi, whose chosen medium is fingerpaints on paper, is holding his first solo show at the age of 34. His paintings are being shown in the ape house of Osnabrück Zoo and can be bought by visitors.” - story
Read more »

Somehow I find this piece of art (an about 4cm big mammoth carved from ivory, recently found in a cave in Germany and estimated be around 30,000 years old - there’s a [German] article about it here, with more images) quite a bit more exciting than this piece of art (which, given the recent buzz about it, surely needs no introduction).
Read more »

What would an art festival be without a scandal? Or, these days, “scandal”? Take Germany’s Documenta. In the spirit of the cleaning lady who removed one of Joseph Beuys’ fat corners (I never looked up whether that really happens, but it’s something that just should have happened, for the entertainment value) the street cleaners in Kassel (that’s the place where they have that art festival) removed Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld’s art work - strips of tape on top of traffic markings, which were supposed to make those markings look like crosses. It seems there is only this German article about it. It quotes the artist as being “personally really hurt” and a spokesperson of the city as saying “At least Mrs Rosenfeld managed to get a reaction that gave her art work the desired attention.” (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing!)
Read more »

A couple of days ago, Ed Winkleman posted about a scientist who produces beautiful images, but who refuses to consider herself an artist. As always at his blog, the discussion that followed is quite interesting. Needless to say, part of my interest stems from the fact that in my day job I am a scientist myself, and I keep running into people who just can’t comprehend how a scientist would know something about photography. So when people ask me what I “do”, I’m always a bit of a loss what to say, since I don’t want to define myself through any single activity.
Read more »

Brian just posted about Duane Hanson’s sculptures (find more images and information here and here); maybe for those who want their photography more tactile.
Read more »

“German expressionist artist Jörg Immendorff - known both for his artistic charisma and his colorful lifestyle, died on Monday after a long illness, his wife said. He was 61. One of Germany’s foremost modern artists, the 61-year-old had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease which attacks and destroys nerve cells in the brain.” (story) Find some more information (including Immendorf’s official portrait of former Chancellor Schröder - c.f. this entry from a little while ago) here, and discussion of his “Cafe Deutschland” series here.
Read more »

A while ago, a photographer who had made quite splash with his first book was about to publish his second one. As I followed some of the discussions about what to expect from that second book I couldn’t help but notice the similarities with the kinds of discussions usually to be held when a rock band or some pop star releases a second album after a very successful first one. I thought that maybe that wasn’t a very good way to deal with photography.
Read more »

“An original work by artists […] Gilbert and George would normally set you back many thousands of pounds. But from 11.30pm [6:30pm EST] tonight a piece [‘Planned’] is being made available to anyone who wants it - for free. […] Planed will be available to download at bbc.co.uk/imagine and Guardian.co.uk/art.”
Read more »

The other day, I came across a fine, yet somewhat ubiquitous example, of how our culture “thrives” to a large extent by turning art into kitsch (this the tricke-down effect in art). Someone had Albrecht Dürer’s “Hands of the Apostle” as a kitschy vanity license plate (kind of as if you turned something like this into a license plate). And then, just yesterday, Alec Soth showed another fine example, where the original art work, which had caused a scandal back when it was produced (for more than just one reason btw), was turned into kitsch - with the original model being part of the show.
Read more »

The British not only have a Queen, but they also have artists portray her in what might or might not be regular intervals. What I find interesting about this is that instead of opting for a safe artist, namely someone who’d paint the umpteenth run-of-the-mill painting, quite often you get someone who’ll do something different, which makes things quite interesting (just as an aside, I think in Germany the Chancellor gets to pick who will paint his/her portrait - there’s only one - and that typically is also quite revealing and interesting). A few years back, one of my favourite painters, Lucian Freud, was commissioned to paint the Queen, and the result was utterly excellent. This year, they asked Annie Leibovitz. If you view this from a photography point of view, this is about as undaring and safe a choice as it could possibly be - but it’s a photographer they asked and not a painter. Read a glowing review here. I guess the keywords in that review are what the writer sees as the task of the portrait, namely that of “beautifying age and celebrating majesty.” Well, you know,… that they got - and really nothing else. Update (3 May): “News” channel CNN reports: Two critics “not amused” by the portrait. For extra amusement note at what CNN decided to use as story “highlights”. Update (7 May(: The official site about these ortraits can be found here.
Read more »

In a new post, Brian Ulrich discusses what makes people take self portraits, especially under unusual circumstances. Check it out!
Read more »

Through Shane Lavalette’s blog I found Laurel Nakadate (also see Shane’s original post, which contains quite a few links), a video artist.
Read more »

“After 54 performances, many remain unsure what to make of Beecroft’s work. Some see the fashion element as superficial, some see the naked Helmut Newton-esque images of these women as little more than ‘hooters for intellectuals’ (as one review famously dubbed her work). Some say she’s demeaning women, parading them like hunks of meat, in the process creating a male wet dream, while others say she’s reclaiming sexualised images of women from the pages of Penthouse and recontextualising them as symbols of feminist empowerment.” (source)
Read more »

“A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ.” - story Update: As reported by Ed Winkleman, the show was canceled. So how is Christianity more tolerant and open-minded again? And then: don’t feel sorry for the artist.
Read more »

“348 of the 2,914 artists in the Tate’s collection are women. That’s a mere 12%, or 7% if you count it by the proportion of actual artworks by women. But it’s hardly a failing unique to the Tate. The National Gallery owns work by just eight women artists, while there are over 400 men represented, which leaves women a measly 2% of the whole. The problem is that, due to a variety of economic and social factors, for most of history […] women have produced far less art than men. ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ the art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked in 1971, explaining carefully to both the feminists and the traditionalists that this wasn’t because female artists had been overlooked, nor because they weren’t any good. There just weren’t enough of them to have gained the visibility, the supposed ‘greatness’, with which so many men had been lauded.” - story
Read more »

Painter Johannes Kahrs works where Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon (and thus photography) meet. Find a long article (in German) about his work here.
Read more »

“Lionsgate and the Firm are partnering on a feature adaptation of Thomas Kinkade’s painting The Christmas Cottage, aiming for a holiday season release.” (source) Now get this: “Kinkade’s company asserts it’s sold $1.7 billion of artwork at retail over the past 15 years along with $2.4 billion in licensed product sales - such as greeting cards and calendars - over the past decade, resulting in Kinkade art being found in one out of every 10 U.S. households.” Yes, that’s right, that’s “billion”.
Read more »

“Banksy is in fact the equivalent, in our troubled times, of previous beloved popular artists from LS Lowry to Rolf Harris. His art has a quirky sense of humour along with its condemnation of capital, and a goodheartedness that makes it far warmer than the harsh conceptualism of Turner Prize art. His book Wall and Piece […] is a hit because it does make you laugh, or snigger, as well as reassuring you that you’re no Tony Blair. Put this on your coffee table and your lounge will have an edge.” - story
Read more »