Monkdogz Artblog

Even the art world is impacted by the sports world on occasion.  An interesting wager has been set up based on the results of the Super Bowl XLIV which will be played this coming Sunday, February 7^th to determine the American football champions of 2010. 

Tyler Green who writes the Modern Art Notes blog at ArtsJournal has instigated a bet between The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  If the New Orleans Saints win on February 7^th, the Indianapolis museum will send “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” by J.M. Turner to the New Orleans Museum, which gets to show it for three months.  If the Indianapolis Colts win instead, then the New Orleans museum will send the “Ideal View of Tivoli” by Claude Lorrain to Indianapolis for a three months exhibition.  

What a great way to bring these two worlds together.

I’ve always boycotted Walmart and it’s subsiduaries as I’ve disagreed with their business model which I think ultimately depresses an economy. My views were further entrenched when I’d hear stories of Alice Walton, snatching artwork away from the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Washington by paying over the odds for the work, when the museums were trying hard to keep it in the public eye. She’s also currently embroiled with the Fisk University’s financial turmoil offering to take shared ownership of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs pending an appeal with the Georgia O’Keeffe museum according to the FT.

However I’ve had to sit back and think twice about the Crystal Bridges Museum that Alice Walton and the Walton Family Foundation have spent $50million on. The 100 acre site in Bentonville, Arkansas will be home to a beautiful museum of American art, housing much of Alice Walton’s art collection in the midst of a wonderful nature park.

The unique glass and wood buildings have been designed by Moshe Safdie which will lie by a natural spring called Crystal Spring gives the museum its name. The museum is hoping to become a venue for outdoor concerts and public events as well as for private meetings and events such as weddings and conferences. It also states on its web site that “encouraging community uses and activities (is) of its highest priorities.”

The plans look fabulous and it will be a wonderful development for the region. Current plans expect the museum to open next year. I will look forward to visiting it and hope that it succeeds in its mission.

Banksy the elusive British graffiti artist has expanded into films.  His first foray into this genre is a film which made it’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival.  “Exit through the Gift Shop” is a story of how an eccentric LA-based French vintage clothes shop keeper turned documentary maker attempts to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on him.  

Banksy has described the film as “the story of how one man set out to film the un-filmable. And failed.  “Trying to make a movie [that] truly conveys the raw thrill and expressive power of art is very difficult. So we haven’t bothered. Instead, this is simply an everyday tale of life, longing and mindless vandalism. Everything is true, especially the bit where we all lie.”

John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Festival said “Exit through the Gift Shop is one of those films that comes along once in a great while, a warped hybrid of reality and self-induced fiction while at the same time a totally entertaining experience,” “The story is so bizarre I began to question if it could even be real… but in the end I didn’t care. I feel bad I won’t be able to shake the film-maker’s hand and tell him how much I love this film. I think I will shake everyone’s hand that day and hope I hit on Banksy somewhere. I love his work in all forms.” (Courtesy of the Telegraph.) 

Chelsea is really quiet in January. Many of the shows have been up since the end of last year. Group shows proliferate and often they are just a jumble of the gallery stable artists. So it was good to come across “Stripped, Tied and Raw” at the Marianne Boesky Gallery on 24th Street.

It’s a group show of artists who have worked by stripping, ripping, twisting, draping, stretching, stitching and painting canvas; thereby expanding the definition of a painting. The artists are Jorge Eielson, Donald Moffett, David Noonan, Steven Parrino and Salvatore Scarpitta.

The gallery press release state that these “five artists have broken free from the dimensional confines of the stretcher while remaining true to painting, material and form assuming equal weight as content.”

It’s an unusual concept and a great theme for a group show. The styles are very different and yet work well together. It’s a well curated show and continues until February 13th.

A woman has joined a select club of people who’ve accidentally put a tear in a painting.

Wandering around with her art class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Friday, she stumbled onto the Picasso painting “The Actor” considered to be worth $130million and a rare example of his rose period when he painted itinerant acrobats in costume according to AP and MSNBC. The damage, a six inch irregular vertical tear in the bottom right hand corner is expected to be unobtrusive when completed.

The other person to famously tear a Picasso is Steve Wynn who put his elbow into “Le Reve” when he was showing it to some friends just after he negotiated to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for reported $139million. Wynn put a small thumb-sized hole in the canvas and the deal with Cohen fell through. It’s rumored that he said at the time “Thank goodness I did it and not someone else!” I hear that it hangs in Steve Wynn’s office today.

Unfortunately, I am also in this club, not a Picasso, but a large painting “Wild Irish Rose” a rose colored work that Robert d. Hogge gave me when I first really got to know him. I was hanging the work up in the house, when my hand slipped and it fell onto a sharp corner of a cabinet. It made a right angled tear of about 3 inches in the middle of the lower half of the painting.

I felt absolutely awful. Really sick to the stomach. Mortified. Devastated.

I feel dreadful even now when I think about it. I don’t know how I plucked up the courage to tell Bob about it but I did, knowing that he would see it before long. He was very good about it and brushed it off; reassuring me and saying he could repair it easily.

Bob did repair it well and he kindly says that he can’t see where it was now, some 7 years on. I can sense it, because it’s burned into my mind but it is hard to see. It hangs in my bedroom today where I see it every day. It’s one of my favorite paintings. It reminds me to be grateful, humble, know that life goes on and that friendship survives.

I wondered into Galerie Lelong on 26th street, this week and found myself entranced by an exhibition of very simple but elegant drawings. It was a graceful lesson in modern minimalism.

The shapes were very structured and balanced, strictly defined yet exhibiting a lightness. The colors were muted but showed a real understanding of the impact of colors on their own and juxtaposed with others creating extra dimensional impact.

Having seen several other geometrically based shows in Chelsea, I mentioned that it was a surprisingly daring exhibition of minimalism in this day and age. It was clean and refreshing, yet had high impact with its deep spatial awareness. I wondered who would be doing work like this now.

I also wondered why the drawings were so poorly lit. Were they saving electricity?

I went to ask. The very nice person at the desk told me very sweetly and without being condescending at all, “it’s to protect the work from fading”. And then I looked up and saw on the wall “Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954-58.” Finally it all made sense, but I did feel a little foolish.

This wasn’t some young emerging artist going back to the roots of minimalism and getting it right. This was over twenty rare works by the Brazilian artist who lived 1937-1980 and was a pioneer of Modernism. These works are excellent examples of his formal geometric abstractions that he executed early in his career. What made him stand out was his ability to create the spatial 3rd dimension with his juxtaposed colors and lines. He then later went on to develop these ideas into sculptures, installations, interventions, performances and spectator participation.

The exhibition continues until February 6th at Galerie Lelong who manage the artist’s estate in New York.

Walking around Chelsea these days, video art is noticeably on the increase. It’s developing as a medium and so the quality is very variable. The 3rd dimension of soundtrack in conjunction with the concept or idea and the visual presentation can be an opportunity for real added value to the bottom line of the finished artwork.

Amongst video artists, there are a group who have not really crossed the line into fine art, but maybe they should. They are the Mashup artists who create a collage of music videos by first dissecting vocal, instrumental and visual tracks, and then reassembling them to create something spectacularly new with hints of the familiar.

Jordan Roseman, aka DJ Earworm known is well known for his annual music mashups of the top 25 most popular hit songs of the year according to Billboard Magazine. This year it is titled “United State of Pop 2009”. In a very small emerging art field, he is one of the master practitioners. Done poorly “it’s like you’re trying to watch TV, and someone is sitting there switching the channel every 30 seconds” says music host Tim Baker of Clash Radio. According to Technology Review published by MIT, “Roseman is a double major in music and computer science from the University of Illinois.” This allows him to “analyze the harmonies in his raw materials, (and so) he can see key clashes looming a mile away. He doesn’t have to rely as heavily as his peers do on trial and error to find samples that fit together musically.”

Unlike some other practitioners who just cut up and re order tracks, “Roseman gradually layers (the isolated tracks) over each other, adding texture and building momentum as a song progresses. His technical skill is apparent in isolating the vocal, instrumental and visual tracks. He has even written a book “Audio Mashup Contruction Kit” in which he explains the technique.

His “United State of Pop 2008” was so well received it received enough radio play to make its way onto Billboard’s Pop 100 Airplay chart, peaking at #58 and even broke into the Pop 100 chart. On Youtube it has achieved over 2.5 million views and his 2009 version has hit over 8.1million views. His work is so good that several record labels and artists have requested mashups created solely from one artist’s music. 

I also like his disclaimer on his website in this age of copyright and fair use concerns:

“Disclaimer: The media files posted here were created for my own experimentation and entertainment, not profit. I am not the author or owner of the copyrights of the component tracks. If you like the mashups, support the artists and go and buy the originals…they are easy to find. Representatives of either the artist or publishing company can contact me, and I will take these tracks offline.If representatives of either the artist or publishing company have concerns, please contact me.”

If a broken glass or a scrunched up piece of paper on the floor can be called art, and it was in a respectable commercial gallery in Chelsea, New York, let me assure you, DJ Earworm’s mashups are an excellent example of fine art videography.

(Thanks to the Didgenator for the thread.)

Bob always encourages artists to get out of their comfort zone and try new concepts, media and techniques; not to change their art and who they are but to develop and refine their own particular style and skill.

Banners of Persuasion is an arts commissioning organization set up in 2008 by the owners of The Rug Company, Christopher and Suzanne Sharp. They contacted an international selection of artists, commissioning each of them to design a tapestry, a medium and skill foreign to them. They gave them free rein in terms of size, style and subject matter. The result is the exhibition “Demons, Yarns & Tales” which started in London, moved to Miami Basel and is now in New York.

All the designs were handmade in the same manner as the famous Renaissance tapestries, using the traditional Flemish weaving techniques used in Aubusson, a French village that has been manufacturing tapestries and carpets since the 15th century. There are so few experts in this technique today, that they had to travel to a rural community north of Shanghai, China to find a team of women who still possessed the necessary skills. The designs are translated into pixels on graph paper where each square is assigned a color. It becomes a little like a very detailed pixilated painting by numbers. Yet the skills of these women are so great, that according to an essay by Sarah Kent included in the exhibition catalogue, they were able to “produce clean, sharp outlines that, to the naked eye, appear absolutely fluent – not a zig-zag in sight!” One of the few difference between this project and those from centuries passed is that they used synthetic hues to allow for a greater variety of colors and avoid fading.

The result is amazing.

I walked into the James Cohan Gallery on 26th street in Chelsea today, looked to my left and thought…digital pop art, a collage of magazine images printed on gloss paper and I nearly dismissed it all. Then something about it pulled me forward; a feeling of substance and spirit ( some may suggest that I’m becoming whimsical or even ask me what I’m smoking – but I have to tell you something made me look closer!) The individual stitch was suddenly visible. The months of work, effort and skill was plain to see. The three dimensional effect was palpable. The design by the anonymous artists’ collective avaf (assume vivid astro focus) which was founded by a New York based Brazilian artist, combined with the skill of the Chinese team created a totally different work of art that is greater than the sum of the two, with the added bonus, that it’s hard wearing, easy to hang and can just be rolled up and transported or stored. What a gallery director’s dream!

All of the 13 pieces are impressive. I could have stood in front of each of them for hours. Another great piece is Kara Walker’s “A Warm Summer Evening in 1863” which is based on an image published in Harpers Magazine during the American Civil War of a scene of racially motivated violence and has an additional black silhouette of a lynched female figure in front of the scene. It is the largest of the works and took a year on the looms to create.

The works are all for sale in editions of 5 ranging from $30,000 to $200,000 each.
The exhibition runs until February 13th.

As a footnote, I have to applaud the team who man the reception desk at the James Cohan Gallery: today it was Alison. They are always exceedingly polite, friendly, knowledgeable and willing to research and help further, regardless of who or what you are. Bravi!

It’s a case of 30 doors close but 1 door opens.

This month sees the creditor’s meeting being held for Artistic Investment Advisors which went bankrupt in December 2009 and will be liquidating a £10.2million ($16.6million) Art Trading Fund. The fund was launched 2 ½ years ago in 2007 predicting 30% annual returns and boasting Charles Saatchi as an advisor. Its aim was to buy new art directly from artists with whom it would form an exclusive arrangement. According to the Financial Times, it was the first fund of its type to attempt to hedge its investments against a fall in the market, using derivatives.

AIA are not alone. FINalternatives a news source on the alternative investment industry quoted Fine Art Wealth Management who suggests that the number of art hedge funds have dropped 60% from more than 50 at its peak to about 20 now.
However that will be 21 in May of this year when Anthea Art Investments a Swiss firm plans to launch the Anthea 1 Contemporary Art Investment Fund to be authorized by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority. Fine Art Wealth Management reports:
“the fund will focus entirely on artworks from 1945 to the present day and is targeting at least Euros 30-40 million ($42.5 – $56.7million) at launch. The fund will invest around 70% of its portfolio in works by such established artists as Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frank Stella with up to 20-25% of the portfolio to be used to acquire iconic pieces that have particular historical or cultural value or are especially fine examples of an established artist’s work. Around 10% of the portfolio will focus on successful artists from emerging economies, and roughly 2% will be invested in works by emerging artists. The remaining 18% or so will be used to make price arbitrage investments by picking up artworks below market value via distressed situations and art auctions.”

There’s always more ready to step into the shoes left vacant by those who leave.

The oil painting by Gustav Klimt titled “Kirche in Cassone (Landschaft Mit Zypressen)” is being auctioned by Sotheby’s in the Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale in London on February 3rd. The beautiful landscape is of a small town on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy.  The story of the painting’s provenance is rather intriguing.

According to Sotheby’s catalogue, the painting was originally acquired from the artist by patrons of the arts, Victor and Paula Zuckerlandl, a Jewish Austro-Hungarian iron magnate and his wife. The couple died childless in 1927 and the work passed on to his sister Amalie Redlich. In 1938 she made arrangements for the paintings with others to be stored by a shipping company, paying the company’s foreman a hefty bride of 2,000 Reichsmarks to ensure the safe-keeping of the crates. Amalie was deported with her daughter Mathilde to Lodz, Poland in 1941 and never heard of again. In 1947, Redlich’s son-in-law returned and found the crates empty at the shipper’s premises.

The painting then passed through a Viennese gallery and two private collectors before being brought in good faith and with legal title by the current owner. According to the Telegraph, the family of the present owner and Amalie Redlich’s grandson, Mathilde’s son, 81 year old Georges Jorisch who now lives in Montreal, have agreed to place the painting for auctioned and have negotiated to split the proceeds.

The painting has been estimated to fetch £12-£18million (US$19.6 – US$27.7million).

(This story was kindly flagged for me by artist Karina Sala of Argentina)