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K8 Hardy Ripped Fashion a New One at Her Riotous Whitney Biennial Runway Show

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K8 Hardy Ripped Fashion a New One at Her Riotous Whitney Biennial Runway Show
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A video artist, photographer, and rogue stylist known for her underground zine “Fashion Fashion,” Whitney Biennial participant K8 Hardy recreated all the smoke and mirrors of a professional runway presentation this Sunday in an immersive performance-cum-fashion show at the Whitney. Hovering ambiguously between avant-garde design and “anti-fashion,” Hardy’s “Untitled Runway Show” effectively placed self-reflexive quotation marks around the concept of the fashion show and its fraught relationship to both art and commerce.

In an interview with Elle, Hardy explained that she wanted to “do a fashion show so that we can look at [fashion] in a different context outside of commercialism.” She added that she wanted to “make a statement with the looks of a more democratic expression outside of luxury.”

On the fourth floor, guests were assaulted on arrival by a pulsating mash-up of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” and a frenzied nail art tutorial, courtesy of celebrity DJ Venus X. In place of relentless fashion show attendees Kayne West and Alexa Chung, art critic power couple Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz sat in the front row. Saltz was wearing earplugs, possibly to muffle the show's soundtrack of throbbing reggeaton beats spliced with irony-drenched one-liners like, “Money or lack of is the number one cause of divorce or suicide,” and, “If you do a cost benefit analysis of the laser hair removal, it’s worth every penny.”

In a rather literal display of détournement, a bevy of waifish models strutted backwards onto the runway, which was built by another Biennial artist, Oscar Tuazon. Each model boasted a multi-tiered cocoon wig. Designed by Bumble and Bumble stylist and famed wig purveyor Duffy, these towering topiary-like hair sculptures looked like the brainchild of a drunk Bjork and Madame de Pompadour. The fashions on parade ranged from defiantly schlubby to eerily beautiful to just plain bizarre. Hardy didn’t manufacture any clothes from the show. Instead, she sutured and pasted bits and pieces of thrift store rags to create piecemeal, Frankenstein-like ensembles: A raglan sleeve blouse cut from a Nascar T-shirt and a dental hygienist’s scrubs was paired with women’s career pants and dowdy nude pumps. The External Bra — not the lacey, diaphanous variety,  but the “hoist-em-up” memory foam species — was a pervasive trope. The show’s piece de resistance was a confection-like mini-dress made entirely from stacked multicolored brassieres.

Granted, remixing used articles of clothing is hardly a radical proposition. Everyone on the sliding scale of hipster credibility and economic means — from Mary Kate and Ashley to Lena Dunham and her coterie of perpetual interns — pillages flea markets for their grandmother’s housedresses and their grandfather’s navel grazing trousers. That said, Hardy’s creations are far beyond the confines of Williamsburg-sanctioned quirk. They’re closest in sprit to the rag-and-bone aesthetic of pioneering underground filmmaker Jack Smith.

“Untitled Runway Show” succeeds in divorcing fashion from luxury. Commodity fetishism is thrown out with the bathwater alongside quaint notions like “taste” and “quality.” By dint of juxtaposing rebellious, haggard looks with radio ads for hair removal treatments, the artist’s feminist implications are clear. Hardy’s aesthetics are by no means programmatic. A delightfully random eclecticism reigned over the project. Some of the pieces — namely a pink taffeta prom dress and a mutton-sleeved princess gown — could even be called “girly.” Intentionally or not, Hardy touched on some currently trendy silhouettes, including the geisha-style platforms, crop tops, and the aforementioned high-waisted pants. Who knows? Maybe butt-less bathing suits with chain-link garters are the next big thing. 


Slideshow: Spring Sales at Christie's Hong Kong and Other International Sales

Derek Liddington's Revolution

"When You Interrupt Us, You Have to Deal With Us": Murray Moss Invites You to Intrude at His Midtown Lab

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"When You Interrupt Us, You Have to Deal With Us": Murray Moss Invites You to Intrude at His Midtown Lab
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NEW YORK — Three months after closing SoHo’s venerated design destination Moss, founders Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell have settled into their latest business, the Moss Bureau consulting agency, in its new home in the Garment District. To see its inaugural exhibition, Cathy McClure’s “Midway,” all you need to do is take the elevator to the 10th floor, where it opens directly into the new office. The exhibit itself is quite sinister; robotic elephants spin on a zoetropic metal carousel revolving in the dark. A sign in the elevator warns of flashing strobes, but the most off-putting thing happens just before you step out: you realize you’re walking into someone’s actual office, where employees sit at their desks and work on their computers. The discomfort immediately settles in, as if you’ve intruded in a place you don’t belong.

The thing is, you actually are intruding, which is exactly how Murray Moss intended it; it’s all part of his ideal business model, carried out more theatrically here than was ever possible in the showroom he left behind in March. “When you interrupt us, you have to deal with us,” Moss told ARTINFO. “What I tried to do with Moss before, by having all the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs and things behind glass, was prevent you from accessing it without a human, without one of our people. I never meant for people not to touch. I meant for people to need to ask. You sell things when you are actually engaged with the person.”

Sales aside, the set-up of their new agency is more like a comical lab experiment in privacy. There may be a Richard Woods door hanging in the middle of the room, but there’s little separating you from the workers who could be, hypothetically, on the phone with customs at JFK trying to track down the Hermès-wearing taxidermy that was somehow lost in transit. “There’s this sense that you’re backstage, that you’re inside the mechanism of the company,” Moss added. “It’s as theatrical as Hollister and Abercrombie. I like the surreal quality to it.”

To see images of Cathy McClure’s “Midway,” their inaugural exhibition, and to take a tour of the office, click the slide show

What If Your Prized Painting Turns Out to Be Nazi Loot? The Niche Market for Art Title Insurance

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What If Your Prized Painting Turns Out to Be Nazi Loot? The Niche Market for Art Title Insurance
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Can insurance be sexy? Maybe in the art world.

In 2007, FBI agents showed up at the office of film director (and celebrity art collector) Steven Spielberg to reclaim a Norman Rockwell painting, "Russian Schoolroom," that was hanging on the wall. While Spielberg had purchased the work legally, it turns out that it had been stolen from a St. Louis art gallery in 1973 and he did not have clear title to it.

The unregulated nature of the art market makes it easy to run up against legal troubles, especially with works valued in the six- and seven-figures. As with the Spielberg case, scandals in the art market often arise from questions of ownership: Think of the endless chain of Nazi restitution claims. This is where art title insurance — a niche but growing market — enters the picture.

For a long time, collectors had little in the way of assurance that they were protected from claims against an artwork's ownership, other than careful due diligence before a purchase. But a small company called ARIS changed that in 2006 when it took a concept from the world of real estate and added a twist, applying it to works of art. As art prices continue to rise through the roof, title insurance has become an increasingly popular way of assuring that art ownership can be protected, whether from decades-old Nazi theft claims (attention-grabbing, but relatively rare) or a lien on a painting once shared with an ex-spouse because they haven't paid their taxes (less sexy, but more common).

For a premium of between one and five percent (or higher, especially for works that are at risk for a Nazi-related restitution claim) of the value of the work, ARIS will cover legal costs if a title dispute occurs and reimburse the client for the value of the work if they lose ownership. Policies are not cheap, in absolute terms, but represent only a fraction of other fees associated with art purchases, such as property insurance, shipping, and the hefty 12-25 percent buyer's premiums charged by auction houses.

While this type of insurance is on the rise with collectors across the board, it has especially caught on with those who operate in the art lending sphere, according to Stephen Brodie, a partner at law firm Herrick Feinstein, which does a lot of work in the realm of art lending. Where finance goes, insurance follows. Brodie is a fan of title insurance, having spent most of his career in real estate law, where insuring title is commonplace even though ownership is a matter of public record. "There can be a lot of questions about the change of title for a work of art. Often they are very old, and there is no public record of who owns a particular piece the way there is with real estate, for example," he said.

He also notes that insuring the title doesn't protect against everything, but "puts a floor under the degrees of a problem." That soothes lenders, who many times are giving money against collections valued in the tens of millions of dollars, and don't want to risk their money if there is any question in terms of ownership or authenticity.  

But unlike real estate, where there can be no question of where the land came from, art title insurance can only protect a collector against claims of ownership, it cannot protect against claims of authenticity. "With art, if something turns out to be school of Rembrandt instead of Rembrandt, it has a very different value," noted Brodie — no type of insurance can protect against such catastrophe.

Shelley Fischer, a former senior vice president of lending at Sotheby's Financial Services, is somewhat skeptical, though not dismissive, of title insurance — mostly because of its novelty. "I just don't know," she said of its utility in practice, noting that it has never been challenged in court. She is correct in that there haven't been any highly public cases involving a claim against (insured) art title to test the response of both the legal system and the insurance company. But, she added, "For newbies in the art market place, maybe it offers them a measure of comfort." 

ARIS said in an email to ARTINFO that it has had recent claims, one including a major U.S. museum that it settled to the satisfaction of both the insurance company and the institution. The company also professes to protect collectors against claims before a purchase is even made if it uncovers something suspicious in doing research before issuing a policy — a service that could be just as valuable as the insurance itself, especially as new buyers enter the art market in hopes of diversifying their portfolio, rather than approaching collecting from the point of view of the passionate long-term hobbyist.

So, what's the verdict? At the end of the day, title insurance is an expensive form of risk management for wealthy collectors (and investors) who don't want to spend exorbitant amounts of time performing due diligence on highly valued works of art. And as sad as it is, that's an increasing portion of the art market these days.

Garage Sale at 11 West 53rd Street! MoMA Curator Sabine Breitwieser on Crowdsourcing Junk for Martha Rosler

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Garage Sale at 11 West 53rd Street! MoMA Curator Sabine Breitwieser on Crowdsourcing Junk for Martha Rosler
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NEW YORK — Want to add some excitement to your annual spring cleaning? Don’t forget that you can donate old clothes, books, and trinkets to the Museum of Modern Art — at least for a few weeks. The New York institution is accepting second-hand items from the public that will be sorted, displayed, and sold this fall in the museum’s atrium by artist Martha Rosler. The endeavor is certainly useful for museumgoers with a tendency for hoarding — but exactly what does “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” have to say as an artwork?

“It is, in a way, a huge, collective readymade,” MoMA curator Sabine Breitwieser told ARTINFO in an interview. “A museum is a repository of our culture through artifacts, but our lives are also defined by everyday objects. Duchamp already showed us that the everyday can become an art object when shown at a museum.” “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale,” Breitweiser explains, takes Duchamp’s idea and pushes it further — items chosen by the viewer, not the artist, become the artwork.

The exhibition, running from November 17 to 30, will be Rosler’s largest garage sale to date. She staged her first sale at the University of California, San Diego, in 1973, and has since recreated it several times. (Over the years, Rosler has kept particularly special discoveries, like a cache of intimate family slides, for herself.) To participate, art lovers are invited to drop off unwanted belongings at MoMA and MoMA PS1, respectively, on June 2 and 3, as well as a on few to-be-determined dates in July. (The museum also accepted donations from the public over the last two weekends, and has collected objects from museum staff and trustees.)

Rosler herself stressed the importance of public participation in the artwork. “I wanted to bring the garage sale model to an art space, where the question of worth and value, use and exchange, are both glaringly placed front and center and completely represented and denied,” she states in an interview on MoMA’s Web site. “I wanted the work to engage the visitors not as observers but as participants, ones enacting the impulse to possess and to get a bargain.” As in previous installments, MoMA will photograph visitors with the objects they purchased; earlier photographs of happy shoppers taken at other garage sales will be projected on a wall in the museum.

As many devoted MoMA-goers have noticed, “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” is the latest in a series of participatory installations in the atrium. “The museum is embracing performance now,” says Breitwieser. After formal, staged performances like Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” and a recent concert series by the electro-pop band Kraftwerk, the curator says she sought to find a performance that “deals with the everyday.” In addition to reflecting the ordinary, Rosler’s garage sale will take on a life of its own, transforming as objects are bought and sold. “For two weeks, as things come and go,” Breitwieser said “every day we will have a different exhibition.” 

To donate objects to Rosler's garage sale, check MoMA's Web site for collection dates and locations. Recent donations will be posted online via the museum's Facebook and Twitter

Slideshow: Damien Hirst's New Paintings at White Cube Bermondsey

Kanye Unveils "Immersive" Video Art at Cannes, Critic Compares Hirst to Ghaddafi, and More Must-Read Art News

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Kanye Unveils "Immersive" Video Art at Cannes, Critic Compares Hirst to Ghaddafi, and More Must-Read Art News
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– Kanye's "Cruel" Arab-Themed Art Installation: Rapper and self-proclaimed voice of his generation Kanye West will be in Cannes this week to premiere his latest opus, a short film-cum-video art installation titled "Cruel Summer," which was made in association with the Doha Film Institute. Little is known about the mysterious Bananarama-referencing short — which will be on public view for two days and is described as an "immersive, seven screen experience" — except that West co-stars in it alongside four Arab actors. [Variety]

– Critic Deems Damien Hirst a Dictator: In his latest assault on the YBA punching bag, art critic Jonathan Jones doesn't review Damien Hirst's new exhibition of paintings at White Cube so much as tear it to shreds. "The last time I saw paintings as deluded as Damien Hirst's latest works, the artist's name was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi," he writes, referring to the late dictator's son. "This is the kind of kitsch that is foisted on helpless peoples by Neros and Hitlers and such tyrants so beyond normal restraint or criticism they believe they are artists." [Guardian]

Kentridge Rallies Behind Nude Zuma Painter: South African artist Brett Murray had a tough Tuesday. His painting "The Spear," which portrays the president Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed, was defaced by two men wielding paint buckets as it hung in Johannesburg's Goodman Gallery, and the ruling African National Congress party took him to court to have the painting taken down. An expression of support in an affidavit from the country's most famous living artist, William Kentridge, likely provided little consolation. [NYTGuardianITA]

– Records Galore at NYC Latin American Sales: Fifteen artist records were set at Christie's recent Latin American art sales, including one for Chilean artist Roberto Matta, whose painting "La revolte des contraires" sold for £3.2 million ($5 million). Tonight, the attention turns to Sotheby's, where Diego Rivera's 1930 oil painting, estimated at $4-6 million, is also expected to break an artist record. [ReutersAP]

– Free Museums for U.S. Military: Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, 1,600 museums across the United States will waive admission for active members of the military and their families. The program, Blue Stars Museums, which is sponsored by participating museums, the NEABlue Star Families, and the Department of Defense, incorporates institutions from the Metropolitan Museum (which apparently waives the guilt trip-based "suggested admission" policy for our nation's soldiers) to LACMA. (See a full list of participating museums here.) [WaPo]

– Warhol Silkscreen Pilfered in Detroit: The FBI has descended on the Michigan city to investigate the recent theft of 18 artworks, as well as an original silk screen used to produce Andy Warhol's "Flowers" paintings, from an unidentified business in the Corktown neighborhood. The collection has been valued at between $200,000 and $1 million. [Detroit Free Press]

– West Virginia University Gets a Museum: The Morgantown, WV university is preparing to break ground on an art museum that will house its 3,000-plus collection of painting and sculpture, currently in storage. The 5,300-square-foot institution, which is expected to open in the summer of 2013, means students will no longer have to travel to "Pittsburgh, D.C., or Cleveland to see major museum collections," said Joyce Ice, the museum's director. [Daily Athenaeum]

– Jackson Pollock Painting Seized in Customs: The Jackson Pollock painting "Mural on Indian Red Ground" (1950) — strangely valued at a staggering $250 million, according to one report — was seized by Iranian customs agents on its way back from Japan, where it was on loan for an exhibition. Officials say the painting, which is a centerpiece of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Arts, is being held in exchange for unpaid debt on the part of the culture ministry. [AFP]

– Performance Art Returns to Politics: It seems political pundits simply cannot help themselves from using the rhetoric of performance art in political debate. The latest comes from Mitt Romney aide Stuart Stevens, who described the Obama campaign's recent attack ad featuring laid-off Bain workers as "performance art gibberish." [Politico

– RIP Large-Scale Sculptor George Wyllie: The Scottish artist, known for creating huge versions of quaint and familiar objects like a towering wooden bicycle, a boat-sized paper boat, and a life-sized locomotive made of straw, has died at age 90. He was also a published poet and produced playwright; the Collins Gallery at Strathclyde University closed a major retrospective of Wyllie's work last month. [Guardian]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

See video of K8 Hardy's fashion show at the Whitney, from Sunday (or read ARTINFO's review, here):

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

What If Your Prized Painting Turns Out to Be Nazi Loot? The Niche Market for Art Title Insurance

K8 Hardy Ripped Fashion a New One at Her Riotous Whitney Biennial Runway Show

Reagan's Blood, Bieber's Hair, Ally McBeal's PJs: 10 Freakish Items From PFCAuctions's Current Online Sale

"When You Interrupt Us, You Have to Deal With Us": Murray Moss Invites You to Intrude at His Midtown Lab

Warhol Foundation Denounces Aussie Hotelier for Commissioning Master Forger in Publicity Stunt Fiasco

Allen Jones' Soft Porn Sculptures Spice Up Sotheby's Gunter Sachs Evening Sale, but Warhol Dominates


Slideshow: Alison Jackson, Jubilee

"I Don't Like the Term Installation": Daniel Buren on His Grand Palais-Filling Monumenta Show

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"I Don't Like the Term Installation": Daniel Buren on His Grand Palais-Filling Monumenta Show
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PARIS — Daniel Buren's exhibition "Excentrique(s), travail in situ" for Monumenta, has been very well received by the public — and ARTINFO — and newly elected French president François Hollande even dropped by to see the exhibition the day it opened. Since then, Buren has made a slight change to the exhibition, allowing visitors to go onto the balcony to see his work from above. ARTINFO France recently sat down with Buren to talk about how this exhibition is different from all his others, his gripes with gallerists, and his unconventional ideas about the autonomy of art.

What effect has Monumenta had on you this year?

By definition — and it should be like this for quite a long time — each invited artist will feel the weight of the others. I have four that I have to deal with. If it lasts 100 years, it will surely become very heavy over time!

Is your work for Monumenta a departure for you?

It's a very curious mix because in almost all the details, however important they may be — if you take the filters, the arrangement, the idea of cabins, the use of the glassy surface — I've tried out just about all of it before. But together, in this space, it creates an exhibition that isn't like any other that I've previously done. More often, from one exhibition to another, there is a more direct line, visually speaking. But here it's more extravagant because these are all things that I know because I have already used them.

To take a significant example, when I did the Palais Royal [a site-specific artwork consisting of striped columns of different heights], I had never used cement, or marble, or asphalt — these were completely new ingredients. And the piece was new and at the same time visually close to what I had been doing. But here, I don't see where in my work there would be something that looks like this... but it's certainly by me!

Why didn't you choose a curator for Monumenta?

For solo shows I don't see what good a curator can do, unless it's to serve coffee. But for group shows, of course, the curator is indispensable, though you can debate his or her exact role.

What is your standing on the international stage as a French artist?

Even if you make the effort, it's very hard to see your own situation. But I think that it's important to know it. I realized that some images of me had become very negative. I realized that I had created an image and an impression of my work that I find completely false. But you can't control everything.

How would you define your situation as an artist today compared to early on in your career?

Most of what I've been able to do since 1968-1969 came from invitations. So my option is either to accept or refuse. Today, there are even so many invitations that I have very little time left for other things. When I started, I could do other things, but it's physically impossible today.

I'm a Parisian, and I've done lots of things in Paris. In the 1960s, I started doing things more or less officially in exhibitions, and generally those turned into a no man's land — few people were interested. In the beginning the invitations all came from abroad. Very quickly I was able to survive thanks to that. Nothing was happening for me in France and this lasted for 15 years.

However, I did have a gallery, Yvon Lambert, where I could show work every two years. It was only in 1983 that I had my first museum show at ARC [the contemporary art department of the Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne]. I had already had over 30 shows abroad! I was in all the international events, where there were only rarely a few French artists. At that time, I was active internationally, but I had never been promoted or presented by France. When I was invited to represent France in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, I had already been invited by the Italians to all the Biennales since 1970. I could have been invited to Venice 12 years before!

Today you are represented by Galerie Kamel Mennour. What has your relationship to galleries been like?

I've always liked to maintain a lot of freedom. I've worked with a gallery for 25 years, but at the same time a gallery can't decide for me where I show my work. With Yvon Lambert, from 1969 to 1972 we worked well together. But he started to work with [the group of French artists] Supports/Surfaces, and I disagreed with them so much that I didn't belong there anymore. Afterwards, I don't know why, he kicked them all out. So I came back. Then, once again, I didn't like the path being taken there so much, but it was a less violent reaction than before.

I didn't have a gallery for a while. Then I worked with Marian Goodman, but she didn't even do the minimum amount of work necessary, especially for a show in New York that was endlessly postponed, so I left. That's how I met Kamel Mennour. Things have been good since I've been there. Unlike most galleries that are very focused on business, Kamel Mennour is able to show artists who don't only make pieces that are relatively easy to sell. Galleries like that are hard to come by these days.

Is there an intuitive component to your work?

The intuitive part is almost the dominant one. It is sometimes reduced or controlled by the side that is more... I don't like the word theoretical, but... by the conscious side of the idea that I can have about how a piece should look. Very often — maybe even all the time — the thing that makes me start working on a project is an intuition instead of a very concrete or geometric concept. Monumenta is a very good example of that.

Do you consider art autonomous?

It's very clear: What I do is not autonomous, these are not autonomous objects. If an object is considered autonomous, that would mean, if we take it further, that every artwork produced throughout art history is autonomous. I've thought about this a lot. Obviously I think that even something that is a manipulable object, despite its appearance, is not autonomous. From my beginnings, this opened the door onto a radical critique of the discourse that claims that art is autonomous. Because as soon as you look a bit closer, you notice that it's not autonomous in relation to society, or in relation to the wall, etc. But for a long time now I haven't wanted to get into this debate anymore. In any case, I assert the fact that my art is not autonomous.

Is that why you don't like the term "installation"?

That's part of it, yes. I don't like the term installation because it means that you are installing yourself, settling in. And insofar as not all, but a large part of my work is ephemeral, it never installs itself. It's installed precisely, for a certain time, and after that it disappears.

Is what you have called a "visual tool" something for revealing and reflecting?

The idea of the visual tool is what I found to define most precisely the alternating white and tinted stripes. It's very specific to the usage of something that in the beginning was used absolutely repetitively, and almost violently, and which is still used, like a sign that allows something to be read, something between this sign and another sign. And if this tool changes all the time, it ceases to function as a reference point, and it doesn't work anymore.

So it's color as pure thought?

I am convinced that it is the main element of a thing that is shown. You cannot define it with words. It speaks and it speaks in an absolutely specific way in which words are powerless. The principal thing that is not transferable into any other medium, neither literature nor music, for example, is what color means in a visual object.

What do you think of the young generation of artists?

I've had a lot of experience as a teacher, especially in workshops. At the École des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques [School for Advanced Study in Visual Arts], Pontus Hulten and I gave two- or three-week workshops with students. We paid them for the session and it was very stimulating. Most of the artists who are talked about today were with us: Xavier Veilhan, Philippe Parreno, Gonzales Foerster, and many foreign artists.

What are your next projects?

I'm working with a team of architects, designers, sound engineers, and historians to build a streetcar line in the city of Tours. As you know, in a medium-sized city, setting up a streetcar changes the entire city. It's really very interesting and I have a lot of responsibilities — responsibilities on a city-wide scale.

What do you think about contemporary architecture?

Sometimes I am more interested in architecture than in certain ideas in art. There are great architects such as [Peter] Zumthor, [Renzo] Piano, and Jean Nouvel, whom I've known for a long time. In 1972, I often spoke with Frank Gehry in Los Angeles before he became the star he is today. But there is some architecture that I don't like at all. I have to say that architects have a considerable responsibility and they aren't all geniuses. An artist can have a personal responsibility, but in reality, artists don't have the same responsibility as architects.

To see images of "Excentrique(s), travail in situ," Daniel Buren's "Monumenta" project for Paris's Grand Palais, click on the slide show.

A version of this article appeared on ARTINFO France.

All Noisy on the Western Front: Tom Cruise and Natalie Portman's Itchy Trigger Fingers

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All Noisy on the Western Front: Tom Cruise and Natalie Portman's Itchy Trigger Fingers
English

It’s been a good week for the Western. A few moments from Quentin Tarantino’s "Django Unchained" were screened in Cannes. It was also reported in Variety that Tom Cruise is up for a “Magnificent Seven” remake and in The Hollywood Reporter that Lynne Ramsey will direct Natalie Portman in another oater, “Jane Got a Gun,” which the actress will produce. Read the full post on Spotlight.

 

Remembering African-American Artist Frederick J. Brown, Peripatetic Painter of Bluesy Expressionism

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Remembering African-American Artist Frederick J. Brown, Peripatetic Painter of Bluesy Expressionism
English

Though long absent from the New York art scene, Frederick James Brown, the Georgia-born, Chicago-bred expressionist painter who died on May 5 at age 67 from cancer in Scottsdale, Arizona, carved out a significant niche in the early days of SoHo.

The painter’s giant loft on Wooster Street possessed a grand piano, and the jazz- and blues-loving artist kept up a 24/7 salon for artists and musicians in those bygone days when rent was dirt cheap and condo-owning investment bankers a rarity.

Bearing a university art degree, Brown was largely self-taught, with his work incorporating a heady brew of both high art and more folk-art-tinged culture. He developed a brash kind of German expressionist portraiture, saturated with vivid colors and quick brushstrokes. He was also strongly influenced by New York School of Abstract Expressionism, especially the work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His subjects ranged across an encyclopedic spectrum of music and art titans, from Thelonious Monk and Bessie Smith to Clifton Chenier and de Kooning.

In an interview in 1988 with Lowery Sims, then the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s associate curator of 20th century art, Brown described his allegiance to that movement, saying, “To me, Abstract Expressionism was a very beautiful, lyrical language, like spoken Italian. Also, I had always been fascinated with that type of surface, because my mother was a baker, and I used to like to watch her frost cakes and things.”

Though he had an early solo show in New York at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery in 1975, a period when he was still painting in an abstract manner, Brown’s career took off and peaked in the 1980s, when Neo-Expressionism and figurative painting were in full bloom. He had several successful solo exhibitions that decade at Marlborough Gallery, and in 1988 somehow managed to become the only Western artist (apart from Robert Rauschenberg) to have an exhibition in China, debuting there with a 100-painting retrospective in Tiananmen Square, at the National Museum of the Chinese Revolution.

Brown, tall, stocky, and hard to miss in his high-top Afro hairstyle and casual Western dress, greeted me with a dazzling smile when I had the good fortune of bumping into him on the edge of Tiananmen Square that June — a casual encounter of two downtown souls saluting one another as if it were just another day in SoHo.  

Ironically, the seminal event of an African-American artist landing, Marco Polo-style, in an exotic country, came exactly one year before the bloody crackdown orchestrated by Chinese authorities violently wiped out youth-driven populist calls for democracy. Not surprisingly, Brown, always a seeker of fresh ideas and melodies, had sensed change in the new China, spending considerable time there, including a brief but fruitful stint teaching at the prestigious Central College of Fine Arts and Crafts. That job set the stage for his unique and historic retrospective.

But his desire and ambition to make such a mark on foreign soil was extremely costly. The self-funded retrospective drove him perilously deep in debt and alienated him from his New York dealer. The real estate boom in SoHo had already driven Brown out of his loft space, and so he resettled with his family in Arizona, where he spent the remainder of his career mostly confined to showing at regional museums.

In June 2005, Brown was interviewed in Omaha by Leo Adam Biga on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to him at the Joslyn Art Museum. Once again, he talked about the remarkable atmosphere available for artists in New York back in the day:

you had these people all around you who were at the top of their game and of the avant garde scene and of the aesthetic thing…. Plus, right in front of me, I saw the work ethic. You could go to their studio or they could come to yours, and you could partake in whatever you wanted to partake in and discuss aesthetics at the highest level. You had all this kind of wisdom, information, feedback and back-and-forth.

Brown is represented in a number of American museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has five works including “Genesis-Dedicated to Noah Goldowsky” (1978), and a large and religious-themed “Ascension” (1982). The latter was one of the works included in the brash but much-maligned Met exhibition, “The 1980s — A New Generation” curated by William Lieberman in 1988, the museum's belated attempt to catch up with the decade's art.

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City has perhaps the largest concentration of Brown works, ranging from the mural-sized “They Had the Right to Sing the Blues” (1995), a soulful ode to female singing legends, to “The History of Art,” a wildly ambitious compilation of art styles filtered through Brown’s carousing imagination and comprised of 110 shaped and interlocking paintings from 1994-2000.

The artist's last major exhibition took place in 2002-2003. Titled “Fred Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues and Other Icons,” it opened at the Kemper and traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

“He was a world class artist,” said Lowery Sims, curator at New York's Museum of Arts and Design, “but he did it in the context of outside the mainstream. He was always on his own trajectory. He should be recognized because he was a real force in the art world.”

“I always used to kid him,” recalled David Robinson, a long-time director at Marlborough Gallery in New York, “about the scale of his work: ‘oh, it’s only 15 by 40 feet, Fred, are you sure you don’t want to paint something a little bit bigger?’

“He loved scale,” said Robinson, “and he could paint big.”

 

Brown is survived by his wife, the artist and modern dancer Megan Brown, his daughter Sebastienne, his son Bentley, and a brother, Anthony Brown.

by Judd Tully, Art+Auction,Contemporary Arts,Contemporary Arts

Slideshow: MoMA Party in the Garden

Barbara Walters, Ellsworth Kelly, and Other Stars Turned Out for MoMA's Party in the Garden, Headlined by Santigold

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Barbara Walters, Ellsworth Kelly, and Other Stars Turned Out for MoMA's Party in the Garden, Headlined by Santigold
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NEW YORK — The Museum of Modern Art rolled out the red carpet along 54th Street last night to welcome the generous patrons who showed up for its annual Party in the Garden.

Guests gathered under giant suspended spherical ornaments in the dressed-up Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which was decorated with glittery white carpet and illuminated with an array of lights. This year’s event honored MoMA trustees Michael Lynne, Anna Marie Shapiro, and Edgar Wachenheim III for “their philanthropic endeavors and contributions to the cultural community.”

Luminaries like artists Cindy Sherman, George Condo, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, journalist Barbara Walters, and actress Kim Cattrall attended the plush dinner in the museum before heading out into the MoMA courtyard for the lively after-party. “It’s a great collection,” said Close to ARTINFO about the museum. “Great art, a resource for our city. We’re all lucky to have it.”

Absent was Kanye West, who provided ample material for endless fodder with his soul-baring train-wreck of a set last year. Instead, the museum hired Beyoncé’s little sister Solange Knowles, who showed off her legs in a leaf print Flaminia Saccucci ensemble, and downtown songstress Santigold, who wore a psychedelic floral-print dress, for the entertainment this year. Although Close couldn’t pick a favorite from Santigold’s 11-song set, which ended with the jumpy dance anthem “Big Mouth,” the crowd certainly showed their approval with their enthusiastic dance moves.

Click on the slide show to see pictures from MoMA's 2012 Party in the Garden.

Slideshow: The Work of Frederick James Brown


Rapper-Producer El-P Proves That There Are Second Acts in Hip Hop

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Rapper-Producer El-P Proves That There Are Second Acts in Hip Hop
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Yesterday 37-year-old rapper and producer El-P released his third solo album, "Cancer4Cure." So far, the reviews have been quite good. "Cancer4Cure" is a contender for rap album of the year -- alongside another new El-P project, "R.A.P. Music," a full-length collaboration with rapper Killer Mike.  And his recent accomplishments haven't just been on wax:  Last week El-P performed before what was surely the largest audience of his career, on the "Late Show with David Letterman." For a guy marking his return to hip hop's cutting edge, he sure has a big audience. Read the full article on the new Spotlight culture blog.

 

Slideshow: The Work of Fernando Botero

Slideshow: See Top Lots from The Gunter Sachs Collection at Sotheby's

Slideshow: The Work of Alyson Shotz

"I've Never Seen Anything Like It": Experts Weigh in on the International Appeal of Fernando Botero

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"I've Never Seen Anything Like It": Experts Weigh in on the International Appeal of Fernando Botero
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When Fernando Botero had his first solo exhibition, in 1951 at the small Leo Matiz Gallery, in Bogotá, his work was so heterogeneous that visitors initially assumed they were looking at a group show. The young Colombian artist’s watercolors, drawings, and oils depicting local bars and brothels and prominent Colombian figures borrowed as much from painters like Paul Gauguin as they did from Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo. There was no indication that this unknown 19-year-old, who turned 80 last month, would become Latin America’s wealthiest and most recognizable artist.

Today the name Botero is inseparable from the corpulent, dark-eyed figures that have become his signature. “You can recognize a Botero anywhere in the world,” says Gary Nader, owner of an eponymous gallery in Miami. Over the past decade, the artist’s distinctive style has attracted new buyers in emerging markets, facilitating a steady rise in prices. Virgilio Garza, head of Latin American art at Christie’s, says, “We have found buyers for [his] monumental sculpture all over the globe.” Last November Christie’s sold "Dancers," 2007 — a 10-foot-tall, 3,500-pound bronze sculpture of two fleshy figures facing each other, eyes locked and poised to dance — for $1,762,500 (est. $1.5–2 million) to a European collector, making it the most expensive Botero sculpture to sell at auction. His market will be tested again when Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips de Pury & Company all feature Botero works in their Latin American sales this month.

The son of a traveling salesman, Botero was drawn to art from a very young age. When he was a boy in Medellín, his uncle enrolled him in bullfighting school, but he was far more interested in drawing the bulls than baiting them. He quit the academy after two years and as a teen made a living creating illustrations for the newspaper El Colombiano and working as a set designer. He would revisit the bullring later in his career: A series of 25 bullfight paintings sold out when they premiered at Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1985, at prices between $30,000 and $60,000. Today those works sell for $350,000 to $600,000, and one of them, depicting a family of bullfighters, sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $1,706,500 (est. $1–1.5 million). But his early years in Colombia would prove influential in more ways than one. While Botero is usually associated with genial figures, the politics of his home country informed lesser-known series that focus on drugs, corruption, and violence.

In 1952 the 20-year-old artist struck out for Madrid, where he studied painting at the Academia de San Fernando and sold sketches of masterpieces by Goya and Velázquez as a copyist at the Museo del Prado. Traveling around Europe for the next three years, Botero learned fresco techniques in Florence and spent days studying the work of French painters at the Louvre. “If you look at Botero, you can tell he is a student of masters,” says Axel Stein, vice president of business development and a specialist in Latin American art at Sotheby’s New York. “He may give it a new shape and color, but he is a classic painter.”

Indeed, many of his paintings toy with iconic images — like "Déjeuner sur l’herbe," 1969, sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2007 for $1,329,000 — in which Botero swaps Manet’s nude woman and suit clad man for a nude man and clothed woman, both considerably better fed than the originals. And yet, “the art-historical paintings are sometimes not as successful as his family portraits or musicians,” says Henry Allsopp, Phillips de Pury’s senior specialist in Latin American art. The latter have broader appeal and consistently fetch $800,000 to $1.2 million at auction; the record price, $2,032,000, was reached by "The Musicians," 1979, at Christie’s in May 2006 and again the next night at Sotheby’s with "Cuatro músicos," 1984, although Nader says he has conducted private sales of the family paintings for as much as $2.5 million.

Botero moved to New York, the nexus of Abstract Expressionism, in 1960, and his work from this time shows him experimenting with a looser stroke before hitting on his signature rotund forms in the late 1960s. He has said the idea came to him one afternoon while he was drawing a mandolin “like I learned from the Italians.” Sketching a small hole in the middle made the instrument seem huge, monumental: “I saw that something happened there,” he said in an interview at the Berkeley Art Museum, in California, in 2007.

Botero’s first solo show in New York was in 1972 at Marlborough. Some critics dismissed his work as less than serious because it did not attempt to engage with the avant-garde. However, museums acknowledged his significance early on: The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired "Mona Lisa, Age 12," 1959, an eerie rendition of the legendary portrait, in 1961. (His work is now in 46 museum collections, and he continues to exhibit at galleries around the world, including Tasende, in Los Angeles; Galerie Gmurzynska, in Switzerland; Galería el Museo, in Bogotá; Felipe Grimberg Fine Art, in Miami; and Galerie Thomas in Munich.) Furthermore, Botero’s advocates note, it is not as if the artist is unconcerned with criticality and art history. “His cynical humor really dates back to Goya and Renaissance artists,” says Lucinda Barnes, chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, and his plump, tactile figures belie a wry worldview, according to Marlborough president Pierre Levai. “They give a feeling of warmth,” he says of Botero’s family paintings, “but there is the sense that this family, which could be idyllic, is not.”

With a series of commercial successes under his belt, Botero moved to Paris in 1973 and began to expand his repertoire, branching out into three dimensions. Made in marble, bronze, or resin, his sculpture incorporated motifs from his paintings like dancing couples, reclining nudes, and men on horse-back (the latter are the most prized). Today, tabletop sculptures in editions of six typically fetch $200,000 to $400,000, while pieces up to five feet tall sell for $350,000 to $700,000. This month Sotheby’s is offering an eight-foot-tall bronze, "Standing Woman," 2003, which is estimated to earn between $700,000 and $900,000 at its Latin American sale on May 23.

As Botero’s global profile rose, he began to undertake more noncommercial projects. In 2005 he made a series of paintings inspired by the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Shown at Marlborough in 2006, the contorted figures recalled his earlier work targeting the avarice and violence of Colombian political leaders and were praised by critic Roberta Smith for “restor[ing] the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony.” Botero donated the entire series to the Berkeley Art Museum.

Last May Botero was the subject of a single-artist sale at Sotheby’s. “It was a bit risky,” says Stein, but after being offered a number of especially high-quality pieces from two private collections, he concluded that “the time was right.” Seventy-six percent of the 21 lots sold, underscoring Botero’s continuing appeal, particularly in emerging markets: The top three lots went to Asian buyers, and Stein says the sale brought out the most diverse group of bidders he had ever seen for Botero, with interested parties from Indonesia to Singapore to Hong Kong to Russia.

The sale also highlighted an area where Botero’s market continues to stall: works on paper. The cover lot, "El Presidente," 1975, a satirical pastel portrait of a fictional leader in the style of a court painting, sold for $266,500, below the low estimate of $300,000, while two graphite portraits failed to find a buyer. Strong drawings and watercolors are widely available for $35,000 to $70,000, while larger works on paper go for $150,000. Collectors from South America and tropical regions tend to avoid them, Stein explains, because the paper doesn’t respond well to humidity.

Despite the substantial number of available works, experts say Botero’s market still has room to grow. “The paintings will go quickly over $3 million in the next couple of years, and I think we will see sculptures selling for more than $2.5 million or $3 million,” says Stein. “He is an artist who is collected worldwide,” adds Nader. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

FROM THE FILES

— The May 2011 sale devoted to Botero at Sotheby’s New York made $7,456,125.

— Botero was expelled from his Catholic high school in 1949 for an essay he published in the local newspaper entitled “Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” which discussed the Cubist painter’s nudes.

— Experts note that Boteros from the 1950s to the late 1960s — mostly still lifes and portraits of women — are currently undervalued. With price points between $40,000 and $200,000, they are “one-third of what they should be,” says Axel Stein, of Sotheby’s.

— To celebrate Botero’s 80th birthday, the Museo de antioquia in Medellín has mounted a show of his latest series, “Via crucis,” inspired by his faith and Renaissance works, on view through August 8.

To see works by Fernando Botero, click the slide show.

This article appears in the May issue of Art+Auction.

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