Erin Cosgrove: "What Manner of Person Art Thou?"

Erin Cosgrove seems to be as much a writer as an artist. But at least from the concepts described on her website, it seems as if she writes as though engaging the medium of the romance novel as an artist would -- from the outside and inside at once.

More interesting to me is a piece that seems to consist of writing, animation, and a large scroll: "What Manner of Person Art Thou?"

In the animation and in the scroll I see the invoking of the past as though it's contemporary, as though for whatever progress we thought we'd made we find ourselves in the nineteenth century anyway. The social situation she employs reminds me distinctly of the Shakers, that celibate religious community known to us now mainly through pieces of furniture, chairs that, to paraphrase Thomas Merton, "look as though an angel might sit on them."

Of particular note to me is the way Erin uses a combination of Leet Speak and LolCat Speak on the scroll, which otherwise is an obvious reference to the Bayeaux tapestry.

It looks to me as if she situates her art, and we the viewers, in a very apt position: regarding this vestigial aspect of the art making activity, as well as the linguistic byproducts of the technological expansion that should have solved society's ills by now, but has simply made us even more divided, less able to discern the truth, less able to actively unite or understand one another in spite of pervasive, instantaneous communication.

Check out her website.

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The Jig is Up: David Nahmad, 'possibly the biggest dealer in the world,' says "Contemporary art is almost a fraud"

I wonder what finally pushed him over the edge.

Maybe it was a collector who's made teaser buys in the past, who called up and asked for the thirtieth time for a split cow in formaldehyde. Or maybe it was a museum purchase of a Picasso that was cancelled at the last minute in favor of a pair of fiberglass statues of anime characters spewing bodily fluids.

Check this from The Independent:

Mr Nahmad, who is reputed to have a £2bn collection of some 5,000 paintings, including 300 Picassos, told The Independent on Sunday: “There are a lot of embarrassed people who bought art that is now not worth what they paid for it. For the past three or four years it’s been a very, very thin market, with just two or three buyers pushing up prices by bidding against each other.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people knew the game. So those people who did not know are realising it now. It’s almost a fraud. I would never advise my clients to buy contemporary art.”

To accept Nahmad's wholesale trashing of an entire art category, you'd have to ignore the inauspicious beginnings of the artists whose work he deals. There were times in all their lives when selling at any price seemed like a dream.

Mr Nahmad and his family have made billions of dollars trading art. They specialise in the works of great modern artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. He added that he doesn’t think any artist since Francis Bacon had pushed art forward. The last notable artists were Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, he said.

That's pretty funny. Slashed canvases and paintings made by having nude blue-painted women crawl on canvas -- that shoves art forward. But Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Judd, Serra, Bueys, etc etc etc -- they're all just hacks.

Because, you know, none of them would have had the absolute genius to slash a canvas or make a woman paint one with her naked body.

Nahmad continues...

“There is the real art market, with real artists, and then there is the stupid art market which uses publicity to make some artists become very expensive. That doesn’t mean they are good. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull at $100m was a stupid thing; $100m is an offence. Hirst started with $10,000 – that’s OK. But $100m? That’s ridiculous.”

I think we can probably agree that Hirst and the other members of Saatchi's visual arts equivalent of "Air Supply" are a different story altogether, true creatures of promotion and hype. But of course that wouldn't be the case with Modern art, right?

For example, Pollock's No. 5, 1948 -- it's absolutely worth its 2006 gavel price of $140 million. No manipulation or hype involved in that. True?

DeKooning's Woman III -- $137.5 million. That's not fraudulent. No way!

Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe for $102.2 mill. The list goes on and on.

Unconscionably high art prices were invented by people of Mr. Nahmad's ilk, in the very market he's trying to protect from the supposedly fraudulent contemporary art dealers. The Moderns were all little-known or unknown contemporary artists during some period of time. For that matter a number of them were considered frauds at some time during their careers.

Sure, the Moderns are more likely to sustain their prices, assuming the market doesn't suddenly flood due to desperate unloading by collectors in financial distress. Part of their market solidity derives from the fact that they've been cultural fixtures longer than is even possible with contemporary art. But another strong force in sustaining those prices is decades of hype.

Occasionally a truly contemporary artist will be featured in a big museum show, for example. But more often it's a Modern or Pop artist. Think shows in big-name museums influence art prices? I do.

Contemporary art is a much greater risk. That may be one reason that the contemporary art dealers I've spoken with have said that, at least so far as little-known artists are concerned, they recommend that collectors buy art that they really enjoy and want to own, leaving its potential investment value as a secondary consideration, if that.

Considering that valuations of the kind of art Nahmad hawks are as much the product of hype, circumstance and manipulation as the segment of contemporary art that apparently now terrifies him enough to trash the entire category, his fraud pronouncement comes off as just a bit disingenuous.

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Brooklyn Museum Presents SPEAK OUT! Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take? March 21, 2009, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Brooklyn Museum Presents SPEAK OUT!
Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take?
March 21, 2009, from 2 to 4 p.m.

In celebration of the second anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum will present
SPEAK OUT! Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take? on Saturday, March 21, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium.

The event features a keynote address by C. Nicole Mason, Women of Color Policy Network, NYU Wagner School, titled "Now is the Time: Activating Women Leaders for Collective Change;" an audience speak-out moderated by GRITtv host Laura Flanders with respondents Ana L. Oliveira, New York Women's Foundation, and Ai-jen Poo, Domestic Workers United; a performance by award-winning musical artist Toni Blackman; and closing remarks by Liz J. Abzug of The Bella Abzug Leadership Institute.

SPEAK OUT! was created by UNFINISHED BUSINESS, a think-tank founded by a core group of diverse women to identify ways of mobilizing external networks to raise public awareness about intergenerational communication, issues of race/class/gender, and the effects of current events on women and children. Participating founding members include Liz J. Abzug; Sharna Goldseker, 21/64: Strategic Philanthropy Through the Generations; Sara Gould, Ms. Foundation for Women; Mia Herndon, Third Wave Foundation; Carol Jenkins, The Women's Media Center; C. Nicole Mason; Monique Mehta, Independent Consultant; Benita R. Miller, The Brooklyn Young Mother's Collective; Elizabeth A. Sackler, Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation; and Amy Sananman, Groundswell Community Mural Project.

A reception and participatory mural project with Groundswell will follow in the galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art from 4 to 5:30 p.m., sponsored by The Women's Media Center; Ms. Foundation for Women; Groundswell Community Mural Project; Women of Color Policy Network, NYU Wagner School; and 21/64: Strategic Philanthropy Through the Generations.

200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn NY 11238-6052

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"That Old Master? It’s at the Pawnshop" -- Pawning off that Rembrandt, Warhol, Leibovitz or Schnabel to Art Capital Group

Tough times call for tough measures. You can't keep that priceless Vermeer on the walls when the walls are being repossessed. Better to take that bad boy down to Art Capital Group. Just ask one of their satisfied customers:

Last fall, Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, borrowed $5 million from a company called Art Capital Group. In December, she borrowed $10.5 million more from the same firm. As collateral, among other items, she used town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.

This according to the NYTimes.com article "That Old Master? It’s at the Pawnshop."

It's got to be a drag dragging your wealth drippings down to Art Capital Group's Ian Peck and Baird Ryan, crying all the while as they count out a pile of big bad Benjies that you know are gone from the get-go. And there's no way I'm not going to feel badly for someone as well-liked as Leibovitz. I really hope it all goes well for her.

Just the same, it's hard not to think, "If only my problems in life amounted to dealing with the gruelling decision of whether to pawn the Tiepolo or the Veronese."

Incidentally, if you know any former investment bankers who suddenly have six empty spaces on the wall, give 'em a call, because -- surprise! -- they're in the article, too!

A former investment banker in New York, who spoke anonymously because he did not want friends to know his financial situation, is sending six modern paintings to ArtLoan, hoping to borrow $50,000 against them to finance a business venture. His former company’s stock, which he was given as part of his annual bonuses, has gone from the high $70s a share to $22, he said.

Well, it's just another sign of the times. Might not be long before the market floods with pawned paintings, and then, baby, Art Capital Group just might be making DEALS! DEALS! DEALS!

Three words: cry and buy, people.

Cry and buy.

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Holland Cotter: "The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! "

I've held off weighing in on Holland Cotter's "Boom is Over" article because it's a fairly predictable assessment of what's happening in art now and also because there are plenty of other voices weighing in and doing a damned fine job of it. But after reading around it looks to me like some things still bear noting.

For me the money quotes in Cotter's article are, in no particular order:

...“Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

The ideas don’t vary much. For a while we heard a lot about the radicalism of Beauty; lately about the subversive politics of aestheticized Ambiguity. Whatever, it is all market fodder. The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an Elizabeth Peyton painting of Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious. And the big political statement? That the art establishment voted Democratic.

"Some would say?" Methinks Mr. Cotter would be among them.

Regarding "the subversive politics of aestheticized ambiguity," I guess I never saw ambiguity as subversive. It seems more passive-aggressive to me. I usually think of ambiguity as a strategic alternative to the tiny cultural footprint that sometimes results from very specific messaging, particularly if the message is simple.

Interesting that in times of stress the fundamentalist strain returns. The stress I'm referring to now is not our current economic milieu, but the broader cultural situation that literally has no message for artists, unlike pretty much every period up until the mid-1980's. No surprise that a return to the familiar, to the academic, is part of what's been going on for a while.

Art schools can change too. The present goal of studio programs (and of ever more specialized art history programs) seems to be to narrow talent to a sharp point that can push its way aggressively into the competitive arena. But with markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education?

Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology?

My issue with turning studio training into an interdisciplinary experience is that there's more than enough in this world to distract us and yank us out of the studio. What artists need isn't less studio, but more.

The flipside of this is that there's no shortage of artists, since probably the late 1960's, who make art that feeds off of these themes. I'd say that when artists feel the need for them, they find them on their own.

Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very different than it does today.

I like this idea a lot -- but some version of what Cotter describes should already be happening in the lives of any intelligent, engaged artist. This is simply getting out into the world and being a force for good. It's not hard, and it can be a lot of fun. Making it part of a graduate program is too much hand-holding, in my view.

Here's a thought that I think covers all the bases: why don't artists live and work more collectively? Rather than return to academic practice or seek distraction from the studio, we could return to an older, more communal living concept that's mutually supportive, so that we can afford to extend our practices forward -- whatever forward turns out to be.

Sure, this presents many issues. But this business of artists becoming teachers to subsidize their practice has worn thin, in my view. Some artists are superb teachers, but many just aren't, and some shouldn't set foot in a classroom after graduation. And, at least as I see it, the day job possibilities devolve from there, from the university down to soul-sucking hairnet gigs.

Maybe it's time for artists to give serious concerted attention to developing lifestyles that support the best kinds of art making, regardless of what's happening in the economy.

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Rhizome at the New Museum -- Interview with Goldin+Senneby, Interview with Mellotron Documentary Filmmaker Dianna Dilworth

Just got an email from my good friend Ally Paz over at Rhizome. Wish I had more time to go into how cool this mag is and what's up with these articles -- this is definitely worth your scrutiny:

Hi Bill,

Love the blog. (!!!!) I found some great posts at Rhizome recently that you might want to check out.

Ones an interview with Goldin+Sennby about their serial novel:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2314

and the other one is an interview with mellotron documentary filmmaker Dianna Dilworth.
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2344

Keep up the great work!
-Ally

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FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!!!

From this morning's Boston Globe:

Shepard Fairey, the controversial street artist riding a roller coaster of publicity with his red, white, and blue posters of President Obama, was arrested last night on his way to deejay an event kicking off his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Fairey, 38, who is known for his countercultural style, was arrested on two outstanding warrants and was being held, according to a police official with knowledge of the arrest who requested anonymity. Police could not describe the nature of the warrants, but said they originated in Massachusetts.

Fairey has been arrested at least 14 times, he has told the Globe.

FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!
FREE SHEPARD FAIREY!

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Arne Glimcher writes about the state of things in "Brave New Art World" at The Daily Beast

Awesome article, and don'tcha love it when serious art world movers and shakers pony up with their insights?

The few I've spoken with have proven to be so generous with information that I can only credit our sometimes being in the dark as artists to the fact that we're not asking enough questions of the right people.

One of several money quotes in Arne Glimcher's article, from the lips of Chuck Close to your ears:

Chuck Close told me, “We thought we had a lifetime ahead, hellbent on purging our work of anything that had ever been done. Today, because of student loans, the cost of studios etc., some artists make ‘slacker art’ that projects the look of a mature vision without being mature. Innovation and personal vision became devalued.”

Ain't it the truth? Read something worthwhile, dammit!

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Hex Education Journal -- The newest, hottest arts publication out of Brooklyn

My friend Chloe Gray emailed me last week about a banging new online mag Jason Diamond launched out of my old stomping grounds in Brooklyn.

"Hex Education Journal was founded in 2008 to provide a platform for stories and opinions on, about, and for creative thinkers. Dispatched from Brooklyn, New York, for the independent minded across the globe."

That's like the understatement of the decade. This thing's an arts nexus, hitting all that's good and happening about writing, art, music, film, the works. This is where you're gonna get the real deal, not like the established papers and zines where it's all bought and paid for. Hex Ed Journal brings you the up-to-the-split-second hemmorage-edge action so you can get traction without distraction.

This week alone, crazy stories that will blow your mind:

Leather Love Seat by Justin Maurer, Advice for The Newly Cloned Wooly Mammoth by Zack Lipez, The Bonnie Brae by Minju Pak and more.

In the Arts section Chloe Gray writes about political art's bad rap, a survey of work by Nayland Blake, the gallery picks for February are coming up -- it's just scads of quality content.

Check it out, check it often -- Hex Education Journal.

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