Monkdogz Artblog

Two English friends have bought a wall from a construction site in south London.  It sounds like the start of a joke and may yet turn into one.

The wall has a stenciled image of a punk rocker reading an instruction booklet for an Ikea furniture flat-pack.  It looks very much like a Banksy graffiti and the pair thought that they might be able to sell it for around $780,000.  It took the two men nine days and nights to dig the wall out of the ground and then had to hire a crane to lift it out in a specially made metal cradle spending a total of just under $47,000. 

Now the joke is that Banksy, despite having an image of the wall on his website some time ago, has refused to authenticate this as his work.

The problem is that there have been a lot of Banksy “fakes” of late and selling unauthenticated pieces may be difficult and face a lot of opposition. However there are also organizations that are offering their own authentications.  

Read more on the Telegraph

Joyce di Bona sent us a link to a very intriguing article in the Washington Post of an experiment that they did back in the Spring of 2007.  The experiment was about context, perception and priorities…..as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste:  in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

They asked one of the world most prominent violin players to busk in the L’enfant Plaza station in Washington D.C. for around 45 minutes in the height of the morning rush hour and see what would happen.  Many of those using the station were going to work in a government job.  The station is at the hub of federal Washington.  Wearing jeans, a long sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap, the musician placed his violin case open with a little seed money in it already and started to play.

Using a 300 year old Stradivarius violin worth $3.5million, Joshua Bell, played six classical pieces, including Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Chaconne” one of the most difficult and powerful violin pieces ever written and Franz Shubert’s very familiar and beautiful composition “Ave Maria”.  Bell usually plays to sold out audiences, commanding on average $100 per seat, and always receives rave reviews.

The article is very long, but worth the read.  However I will give you the synopsis.  In the 43 minutes that he played, 1,097 people passed by.  Seven people stopped and listened to the performance for at least a minute.  27 people gave money, a total of $52.17 which included $20 from the only person to recognize Bell, having just been to his concern two weeks prior and $5 from a man who had at one point toyed with the idea of becoming a professional violist himself.

Watch the video that accompanies the article and you’ll see most people rushing by, not even seeing the violinist, many on cell phones or listening to music through their ear phones.  Bell said “it was a strange feeling, that people were actually ah……ignoring me!”  

So the question that Gene Weingarten of the Post asked is:

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears……was he really any good?

He starts to answer this with a historically reference:

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

Weingarten goes with Kant and he is backed up by Mark Leithauser, senior curator at the National Gallery, who suggests that if he took a Ellsworth Kelly painting worth $5million and popped it out of the frame and hung it on a restaurant wall with a $150 price tag on it, no one would notice it.  He thinks an art curator might look up and say “Hey that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly.  Please pass the salt.”

So he thinks that context matters.  

It probably answer’s in some part why art continues to be seen in optimal settings like galleries and museums.  Why there really is a role for the art critics and art theorists. 

Weingarten culls from others as well, quoting British author John Lane who writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world, not because people don’t have the capacity to understand beauty anymore, but because it has become irrelevant to them.  

Interestingly, Kant argued that your ability to appreciate beauty is related to your ability to make moral judgments.  Having just seen the lack of moral judgments that has resulted in the current economic situation…..this may also provide additional reasons to the dramatic fall in art sales!  

I wasn’t going to get on the band wagon…but I’ve realized that he was too significant a person to not acknowledge.  I would be doing his legacy a disservice.

Michael Jackson was an artist who created work of the most magnificent variety.  Like many artists he too was tortured.  However as time moves on, maybe his music is what will be remembered and treasured and the rest will just become a footnote.

While I was reading the flood of articles and interviews about him, I came across the catalogue of 1390 lots of his belongings that were to be sold back in April of this year, over four days of auctions handled by Julien’s house of Beverley Hills.  The auction was cancelled and his belongings were returned to him.  

Included were a lot of sculptures and prints plus a few paintings amongst the furniture, china, and cutlery.  Most of the art are reproductions which is interesting for a man who at one time could have bought whatever he wanted.  So it must mean that, that is what he wanted.  For a man who craved the limelight and wanted to be loved, it’s interesting that he wasn’t interested in the perception of what collecting “original art” would have conferred upon him.  He actually bought things, because he liked them.  He collected artwork because he appreciated the message that they conveyed to him.  He bought work for the language of art as Mr. Roland Augustine so poetically beseeched collectors to do.  He didn’t buy art as an asset class or because other people bought the same artist’s work.   

I hope he enjoyed his works of art while he lived. 

May he now rest in peace surrounded by the love he always sought.  

Wright, the Chicago auction house owned by Richard Wright held an auction called “Important Design” today.  A large proportion of the sale included contemporary furniture and design items.

Included also were 8 drawings which Jacqueline Kennedy completed as she waited to be interviewed for Look Magazine in 1961. Each work done in a cartoon illustration style depicts an event or occurrence during the political career of her husband, President John F. Kennedy.   Each drawing is signed and dated with the year.  The drawings were gifted to the president of Cowles Communications and Look Magazine following the interview, the works have remained in his family collection until now.  

The drawings were estimated to sell at $3000-$5000.  Only one drawing sold during the auction at a price of $3125 which included the 20% buyer’s premium.    

Jacqueline Kennedy memorabilia can command significant premiums due to her iconic status and it is rather surprising how little sold.  In fact a small pink pocketbook that Jackie owned has sold in auction for $175 more. 

It shows how important and how difficult pricing work is, especially when work by the artist is being sold for the first time whether in an auction or for direct sale.  Consideration needs to be given to economic climate, demand for the genre, volume and pricing of similar work, prior history of sales, and a study of relevant factors such as the age of the artist, public renown, associated marketing and promotional activities, before determining a price.  And even then, look what happens!

Following the media attention of Susan Boyle especially in Britain where they are very good at building up and then knocking down anybody who dares to pop their head up, mole style, into the glare of their journalistic headlights, it makes you wonder what role they play in the success of person. 

Despite the fact that Susan Boyle lost to “Diversity” the exciting dance group of 3 sets of brothers, she will no doubt be able to cash in on her fame, albeit in a dimmer spotlight, but it will probably not be a bad outcome, considering the pressure that she’s been under and perhaps succumbed to.

Andy Warhol in 1968 said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”   It’s a now famous quote which may have backfired on him, with critics suggesting that he was just a famemonger and not a great artist.  Did fame contribute to his success?  Does his work command the millions of dollars because he was famous as a celebrity in his own right?  Would his work have stood the test of time without being attached to the media attention?  We will never know.

Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are today’s celebrity artists. 

Jeff Koons went as far as hiring a media consultant and taking out adverts in international magazines, cultivating a successful persona.  His marriage to porn star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) added to his notoriety added to his socializing with the rich and famous.  Legal cases surrounding their son after the divorce and copyright battles has meant that Koons remains in the news. 

Damien Hirst has courted fame and notoriety with his controversial art and public antics which have been well documented by the popular press. 

So does this celebrity status help or not?  Libby Purves a British journalist, radio broadcaster and author has been part of the UK celebrity culture for well over 3 decades.  Purves suggests that “moderate doses of applause and recognition are necessary to artists. They need both the sense of public communication, and the money.”  However she cautions the extreme; “overdoses of fame can be lethal: they often douse the creative spark and drive the artist into noisy self-parody and consequent self-hate.

It is worth noting that -all three artists above have had to use a “factory” of assistants, not unlike the renaissance studios in order to fulfill demand for their works. 

Interestingly and rather disparagingly Purves also says that “In a way, the new phenomenon of empty celebrity un-backed by original talent is less destructive: any amount of fame can’t do much harm to the oeuvre of Piers Morgan or Paris Hilton.

So what is success?  Is it financial wealth, is it critical acclaim, is it public applause, is it media attention, is it collector desire?  Perhaps only the passage of time will give us the real answer.  

My 7^th grade son has become a paintball fanatic and he is actively looking to pursue this sport, even into college.  Yes it is a sport; an extreme sport at that and is in fact the United State’s fastest growing extreme sports worth $1billion with over 10 million players already.  Amongst the many players, my son’s hero is the rising paintball star Alex Fraige.  He is 35 and has been playing since the 8^th grade and is in one of the top US teams called Dynasty.  It is a sport which as yet does not have significant sponsorship, but Alex Fraige who is also an artist, has found another way to live off paintball. Fraige creates logos and designs for many teams and companies that sell paintball equipment.  At one point he thought about going-on to study graphic design at Rhode Island or LA, but decided to become a professional paintball player instead.  Today he provides designs for the industry which is looking for creations from celebrity players which are edgy and also have huge audience appeal.  Fraige is able to provide on all points.  He also admits to painting and sketching to relieve tension – a true sign of a real artist.

In a recent interview, Fraige invited Xtreme Paintball into his house which resembles a guys’ dorm rather than a home; he lives with several other paintball players.  In his room which consists of a bed, a TV and computer, I was interested to see that he had several framed photos and prints on his wall that he collects.  The most intriguing was Van Gogh’s, “Starry Night”.  

I wonder what Van Gogh would think about being an inspiration for an extreme sport.  Actually, the fact that these guys shoot little balls filled with paint and end up covered in the paint from head to toe, is rather apropos for an artist, don’t you think?