Tell me that this kind of art world does not corrupt the soul

For a spirit-sucking description of art and power, see the excellent piece by Laura Cumming, "What price the rise of private art?" The Observer, Sunday, Oct 12, 2008. A rich piece, well worth the read (grab a cup of coffee or glass of wine first, as it is longish). Yet, so much is still left out of this account in terms of the base of the pyramid: the tonnes of galleries who believe in their artists and discover them before the top-feeders try to pick them off (on "gallerists" versus "dealers", see the article for the distinction), great artists who may never be widely recognized as great, and collectors who buy art for the love of art and not the symbol of status, but Cumming would need to write a whole book to map the whole art world (which I hope she does) and fully account for the systemic pathologies that define the hyper-calculating 'elite' art world.

Art, Reflection and Responsibility

Today's Guardian has a very thought-provoking story about the power of art and different perceptions of its role in producing reflection on the part of viewers versus responsibility for impact on viewers on the part of the artist. Decide for yourself:

James Meickle, "Eurostar station cancels rail death artwork," Guardian.co.uk, Monday, October 13, 2008.

New small-cube shreddings by Raymond Waters - Vintage TIME magazine

Raymond Waters has just created two new smaller scale shreddings. For those who have yearned to acquire a Waters but found the prices of the larger works too much to afford at the moment, consider these as great ways to add a Waters work to your collection -- in a price range that also makes them possible gifts for contemporary art lovers in your circle.

The details of the two works are:


Red Army's Budenny (cover) Time Magazine October 13, 1941
Magazine Front Page Glued to Canvas and Mounted to Board with Shredded Magazine Contents at bottom of Plexiglas Case
30.8 by 30.8 by 11 cm
12 by 12 by 4 1/2 inches

Time Magazine No. 1 March 23, 1923
Magazine Front Page Glued to Canvas and Mounted to Board with Shredded Magazine Contents at bottom of Plexiglas Case
30.8 by 30.8 by 11 cm
12 by 12 by 4 1/2 iinches

Maleonn opens on October 16 at Ogilvy New York

(September 29, 2008)

P R E S S R E L E A S E

Maleonn opens on October 16 at Ogilvy New York;

Rising Chinese art star has first solo show in America

ABOUT OGILVY GALLERY

Ogilvy New York has always been a strong supporter of the Arts, and over the course of a year, has focused on a growing list of curated shows within the agency itself. With a consistent rotation of top artistic talent, working closely with galleries and museums, the agency ensures an interesting and at times provocative line-up of work that aims to inspire thought and infuse discussion.

Works on display on the walls of the agency's 12 floors include Thunderdog Studios, Mint & Serf, Friends with You, Cannonball Press, Bilderklub, Mark Dean Veca, Chris Scarborough with The Foley Gallery, Yee Haw Industries, Henrik Krundsen, Moshe Brakha, Kenji Aoki, The Art Student's League of New York, Yo! What Happened to Peace Collective, Kareem Black, James Rieck and Maleonn.

THE MALEONN EXHIBITION

Jun Lee, Art Curator at Ogilvy New York, presents a range of works by Maleonn (nom d'artiste for Ma Liang) from several series created between 2005 and 2008. The show opens October 16 and runs for three months.

As Peter Goddard, the visual arts critic for the Toronto Star (the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada), has written, Maleonn is the "reigning fabulist among today's new crop of photographers with an almost child-like imagination producing lyrical digital fantasies." Maleonn's photography - alternately (and often simultaneously) playful and edged with the macabre - juxtaposes with singular artistic power widespread feelings of dislocation and unease at the pace of change in today's China, on the one hand, and the welcoming of new horizons of self-expression and cultural vitality, on the other. Many of the works in the show explore the evolution of Chinese identity. His works narrate the intersection of multiple contemporary influences (from various globalizations to China's frenetic capitalism) and deep historical currents (from traditional culture to the Mao period). For his most recent show at CraigScottGallery in Toronto, Maleonn commented on his theatrical and painterly photographic world by saying that it "cannot be completely classified." He turns to aesthetic expressionism "to demonstrate the labyrinth of our spirits," preferring his work "to be the same as my spiritual world: complex and profound, kind and wicked, naïve and cruel, suspicious and trustful, painful and happy, all existing at the same time and becoming more real by virtue of their interaction."

ABOUT MALEONN

Born in 1972, Maleonn resides and works in Shanghai. After graduating from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 1995, he went on to become a director of short films including television advertisements. His artistic and unique style made him a well-known figure, and even a sort of cultural icon, in the creative community in Shanghai and to some extent to the wider populace to whom his commercials appealed. In 2004, Maleonn turned to photography-based art and mixed-media works (photography and painting). He has appeared in numerous group exhibitions worldwide as well as solo exhibitions in China, Singapore, Canada, Thailand and the United States. Work has been featured in group exhibitions in important museums such as, in 2008, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. Between the Ogilvy New York show and the end of 2008, Maleonn has a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum in November and a feature appearance in the Craig Scott Gallery exhibit at the photoMIAMI art fair in early December.

Biography has clearly played a shaping role in Maleonn's art. Maleonn's father was Shanghai's leading opera director at the time of his and his family's banishment to a re-education camp during China's Cultural Revolution, and his mother was a well-known screen actress. Both the theatrical and the filmic are clear influences in his work. But so is a resolute independence of mind and freedom of spirit that must partly stem from being separated from his interned parents while being raised by extended family. From the intersection of these influences and propelled by sheer innate artistic creativity and technical talent, Maleonn has emerged as a major artist and cultural figure in 21st Century Shanghai.

ABOUT CRAIG SCOTT GALLERY

Craig Scott Gallery has represented Maleonn since late 2005, the first gallery to represent him (soon followed by Aura Gallery in Shanghai). The gallery is located in downtown eastside Toronto. A regular schedule of exhibitions sees eight to ten solo or two-person shows per year. Works in a broad range of media and styles are exhibited. Apart from promoting top-drawer emerging and under-recognized Canadian talent, Craig Scot Gallery introduces exceptional artists from around the world to North America. In 2006, the gallery gave Maleonn his first solo exhibition outside Asia. Artists such as Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew (at age 28, already two-time recipient of Thailand's National Art Prize in Painting) and Gianni Pennisi ("the greatest collagist in the world": Joseph Beuys, 1979, to the media and critics at Beuys' retrospective show at the Guggenheim New York) have also been introduced or re-introduced to North America by the gallery.

To see images of Maleonn's work, please click here.

Email on Anne Bertoin from visitor at opening

The opening on Thursday evening for Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady's TRAP / ELUSION show was a buzzing affair. Those attending took to the works of both artists and enjoyed discussing the connections between the artists' styles and themes. Most importantly, both artists create works with double depth -- both of image and of meaning -- and pairs and groups of visitors could be seen throughout the evening in front of one painting after another discussing their responses. This really is a show worth attending. Don't let it slip by before you realize. Because we had a week-long preview period, this show concludes in three-weekends time, on October 26.

Below is an email that a visitor sent the morning after attending the opening on Anne Bertoin's work:

Anne Bertoin paintings are huge and vast. i wish i could shrink myself to make them larger. or walk around inside them. Her paintings are the bomb! Past and future abandoned at the same time.

Come experience them and the enigmatic beauty of Ron Eady.

Anne Bertoin interview on Radio-Canada Wednesday

Anne Bertoin will be interviewed tomorrow (Wednesday, October 8) on Radio-Canada's art show, Les arts et les autres, by show host Line Boily. She will discuss her new body of work that will be exhibited in the show Trap / Elusion, opening this Thursday, October 9, 6-9 PM. Seven new works by Bertoin are complemented by seven new works by Ron Eady. Do consider coming to the exhibition to see the visual dialogue. (Above, Bertoin's "Party at the Hospital", 48" x 48"; below Ron Eady's "Inquietude", 36"x36").

Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady Open this Thursday Night, Oct 9, 6-9 PM

ANNE BERTOIN AND RON EADY, TRAP / ELUSION, OCTOBER 1 – 26, 2008, OPENING RECEPTION, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2008, 6-9 PM

From October 1 to October 26, Craig Scott Gallery presents a two-person show of new work by Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady, Trap / Elusion. The show is conceived as a dialogue between two artists whose sensibilities and styles of painting (Eady in encaustic and Bertoin in vinylique) share significant commonalities but whose conceptual thematics have different centres of gravity (even as both cross over into the fields of psychology and psychiatry as attested to by academic articles on each artist from scholars in those fields). One artist has chosen the title Trap for the artist’s contributions to the exhibition while the other artist has chosen Elusion. The viewer is invited to explore the nature of the line separating the works in Trap / Elusion.

ANNE BERTOIN, TRAP/

Anne Bertoin was born in Lyon, France. From a very young age she found herself interested in drawing and took courses put on by the city. In 1982, she left Lyon for Paris after being accepted in the École Nationale de Beaux-Arts, where she specialized in painting over the four years she attended Beaux-Arts. Not long after graduating from Beaux-Arts, she came to Canada in 1988. In Montréal, she pursued a bachelor of studio arts at Concordia University in order to study sculpture and also in order to familiarize herself with a more contemporary approach to art. A special influence on Bertoin’s work was the teaching of Crémonini at Beaux-Arts. Bertoin recalled that Cremonini, “passing from abstract to figurative work, was employing chance in painting in order to call up the subconscious.” Writing about her own work in 1995, she comments, “[T]he spaces [in my paintings] are constructed on the basis of memory and by chance and not according to photographs.” Art critics in Québec have in effect noted the influence of these elements, in commenting on how Bertoin’s own paintings emerge, for the artist, from a process suspended between the conscious and subconscious and, for the viewer, as a work that pulses with uncertain origins and unresolved narratives.

Anne Bertoin showed at Craig Scott Gallery in January 2007 with her Fractured Visions works, consisting of both paintings and sculptures. Gary Michael Dault wrote on both media in two separate reviews of the show. Of Bertoin’s painting, he wrote in the Globe and Mail of her “dizzying”, “persistent, venerable, and disturbing,” and “stupendous” paintings In his weekly “Walking the Line” column for Artinfo.com, he later again commented on her painting as “majestic” and “euphorically apocalyptic.”

Recent important articles on Bertoin’s work have included:

• Pierre Gaudriault and Aurore Cartier, "Anne Bertoin ou l'auscultation du désastre," (2006) 71 L'evolution psychiatrique 782-786

• Bernard Lévy, “Les espace dévastés d’Anne Bertoin,” automne 2004, no. 196, Vie des arts, pp. 46-49

RON EADY, /ELUSION

For Ron Eady, encaustic painting is a medium that permits him to carve out subjects and images from deep within his soul, resulting in unique and powerful works. His compelling canvases fascinate viewers even as they very often also disturb. Rich in ambiguity, his work triggers within viewers constantly changing emotions and reflections.

Of his approach to his work, Eady writes, "I work the surface through a repeated process of painting, burning and scraping, allowing the work to evolve, and lead me in new directions, until it feels complete." His technical mastery of encaustic painting includes employment in some of his works of a signature cross-hatching method (what Eady calls a "line work" weave) that grows out of training and earlier work in drawing. Eady is now exhibiting internationally, including, since 2004, in Los Angeles, Japan, the Netherlands, and, as of April 2006, with Opera Gallery in New York City. In 2000, Eady became an elected member of The Ontario Society of Artists (O.S.A.).

Following his November 2006 Stages of Mind exhibition at Craig Scott Gallery, Eady had a very successful show with Galerie d’Avignon in Montreal. The Montreal Gazette devoted a full-page review essay to the show. In 2005, Stir Magazine devoted a four-page interview to Eady: “Exposing Layers: Interview by Birgit Moenke”, Stir Magazine, Edition 10 (Globe & Mail supplement for subscribers of the newspaper), October 2005.

Eady’s work, like Bertoin’s has also attracted interdisciplinary critical commentary from the world of psychiatry and psychology. The following extract is from University of Toronto Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, John M. Kennedy, “Metaphor and Art” in R. W. Gibbs (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, forthcoming):

Eady’s pictures have incomplete buildings, mounds of twigs, dark blue water, dense forest, shadowy figures glimpsed through windows, and mirrors reflecting impassive faces over taps and washbasins. They are sinister and compelling at first glance.

Eady’s pictures conjure metaphor from objects, geometries, lines and contours. Indeed, as will become clear, art’s devices cut broadly across cognition and the senses, in ways likely to be remarkably universal…...

Four venues for Craig Scott Gallery for tonight's Nuit Blanche

Click here.

Images of Julie Tremblay Installation at the Gladstone's upART fair, Oct 2-5, 2008

Tim Lee wins 2008 Sobey Art Award

I have just returned from the Sobey Art Award reception at the ROM, at which the 2008 winner was announced. The winner is Tim Lee. Have a looksee at the Sobey Art Award website overview of the five shortlisted artists: Lee, Daniel Barrow, Terence Koh, Raphaeelle de Groot, and Mario Doucette. I can't say I was overwhelmed by the shortlist, but Lee's work is certainly conceptually ambitious with an intriguing aesthetic spareness. Judge for yourself by visiting the Institute for Contemporary Culture up in the rafters of the ROM during Nuit Blanche when I understand it will be the ROM's offering for the night. There will be guides to point you to the winding path that takes you up an elevator, across a bridge linking new and old ROM structures, and on through ancient art galleries. (Good luck finding it at any other time -- especially given its out-of-the-way location, it has to be the most badly signposted exhibition space in any major art institution.)

Julie Tremblay at upART Contemporary Art Fair at the Gladstone; PREVIEW is Thursday evening

Craig Scott Gallery presents Julie Tremblay at upART Contemporary Art Fair @ The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen West at Gladstone), Thursday, Oct 2 to Sunday, Oct 5, 2008

-- upART is an installation-based art fair --

Julie Tremblay’s upART public space installation greats visitors to upART. It consists of six life-size figures from her Reflections series sculpted from cast-off industrial sheet metal; aptly described by Gary Michael Dault as "airy personages" who "take up space even as they create it", five of the works soar just below the Gladstone’s ceilings in the lobby and up the main staircase to the second floor where all other public space as well as the room installations appear.

The Tremblay works were installed today, and attracted the wonder-struck attention of Gladstone guests, restaurant visitors, and staff, virtually to a person. This is a great opportunity to view these very special works in a non-gallery space that shows their great capacity to transform an environment, whether hotel, home, or workplace.

The PREVIEW is 4-8 PM this Thursday. The $7 admission fee includes a copy of the Fair’s catalogue.

The upART Fair continues Friday (12 noon - 11 PM), Saturday (12 noon - 7 PM), and Sunday (12 noon - 5PM).

After 7PM on Saturday, until Midnight, the upART Fair is open for no admission charge as part of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. (No catalogues are available during this period.)

Midori Harima Installation in Unstaffed Honey Space on New York City's Westside Highway

This past Thursday I spent an afternoon visiting a dozen of Chelsea's 200+ galleries. As NYC art visitors will know, one way to go from gallery to gallery is to walk street by street in a zig zag the way one might wind one's way through a multi-aisle art fair. Every second street, one walks up 10th Avenue to get to the next east-west art street, and, every second street, one walks for a stretch (of sidewalk on) the Westside Highway. It is actually a highway, with cars whizzing by at considerable speed, so, when walking the stretch between 22nd and 21st Streets, I was not expecting to come across a gallery. Lo and behold, an open door beckoned me Honey Space.

I entered to see a quite fascinating installation by Midori Harima (more on which, later). There was a table with information (hard to read, mind you, in the near-dark) and no staff. I resolved to find out what this space was, when I returned to Toronto.

Above is a picture of the open door with the website's "About us" text. The text, too small to read here, tells us "[s]ituated in a former garage/warehouse that has intentionally been left raw, Honey Space presents exhibitions that are necessarily site-specific, and that are designed such that the space can operate without any staff. Metal security gates open in the morning, go down at night, and throughout the day the space is open to the public." Cool, to say the least. One Thomas Beale founded Honey Space in 2008, and, judging by the website Archive, the exhibition I saw, Negativescape by Midori Harima, may be the first one.

The website very much pushes you to go see the actual exhibition, as it currently has no information on the artist or the show other than the dates September 13 - October 11, 2008. So, let me describe it briefly.

You enter this darkened space, as one might enter a video room in a gallery, and you see a life-size or near-life-size carnival carousel about 12 feet ahead. It is a ghostly apparition, a chalky white with some grey lines and shadow. Horses without riders seem to shimmer in front of you. It feels almost like a a superscale graphite drawing (if memory serves me correctly). The whiteness is created by a projection from a projector hanging near the entrance, although it was not possible to tell whether the carousal object onto which the light was projected was itself white and grey. In any case, the light seemed to be projecting a mirror image of the carousel. I have to give this some more memory-thought (I did not take notes in the dark) but installation appeared (to me, anyway) to be partly about the sense of movement of the carousel created by the fact the cars pounding the pavement on the Westside Highway (only 2o or 30 feet from the door of the Honey Space) caused vibrations in the building structure to which the projector was attached. The image was thus vibrating in such a way that the carousel appeared to shake.

It was intriguing and also a bit haunting. I recommend a visit, although, if I were a woman, I would probably not stay long in a darkened space in an unfrequented section of industrial New York without someone else as company.

Terracotta warriors shot down as clay pigeons in Germany

Check out the following story from The Guardian on a recent scam turned scandal at a museum in Hamburg, Germany: Kate Connolly, "Fake warriors 'art crime of decade', say German critics." Apparently the Museum of Ethnology believed representations that eight clay sculptures were eight of the terracotta warriors unearthed in the 1970s in Xi'an, China, despite the source of the sculptures (and the provider of supposed certificates of authenticity), the Leipzig exhibition company called Centre of Chinese Arts and Culture (CCAC), had already toured the works as copies two years before. A royal mess, with no small degree of irony in that authorities in China -- the home of the global forged or copied art industry -- blew the whistle. I love the following quotation from the story:

China's state office for the administration of cultural artefacts in Beijing said it was likely that the exhibits were illegal copies. "It looks like this is a problem with the protection of copyright," he told the German media.

I will do a little investigation into transnational copyright law, but in general I am pretty sure that copyright does not enter the picture for works of art that are 2000 years old. In most domestic law systems and in international treaties, copyright law generally does not apply if the artist has been dead for more than 70 years. It is lawful to copy a Titian painting, for example, but one cannot attempt to sell or achieve any other economic benefit from it by farudulently presenting it as an original. Fraudulent commerce by the Leipzig company and possible the Hamburg museum, if it was in fact on notice there were not real, can be a crime and certainly a private-law breach of contract, but copyright does not seem likley to be in play here. That said, it may be that some area of copyright law allows copyright to start only from the moment of discovery of historic art or Chinese law may treat national cultural property as under copyright regardless of when the individual authors lived. I will do some checking.

Anne Bertoin's "Reichstag en Quebec" for the Trap/Elusion exhibition

Three more works have been finalized for Anne Bertoin's side of the Trap / Elusion exhibition with Ron Eady (Oct 9 opening; Oct 1 - 8 preview period). I will post them one by one over the next few days. The first posted a few days ago was "Spock" (28 x 28 inches). Posted below is "Reichstag en Quebec" (48 x 36 inches).

$500

I owe the blog and readers a series of posts as I was in NYC for several days and at a hotel where the wireless was down (or my computer wireless card was on strike).

The first such post is by way of artistic tribute to the American economy. Above is Raymond Waters' "Five Hundred Dollars", which was part of his Values exhibition earlier this year. You'll get some sense of how it fits into the overall show with my catalogue essay "Foreword: The Art of American Values." The work is $500 U.S. in various denominations, shredded and then arranged on canvas under Plexiglas (a great Canadian invention,by the way -- Plexiglas, that is). It is approximately 66 inches high x 45 inches wide.

Stay tuned for an announcement over the next few days when this work will be placed on a time-limited Dutch auction, where its value will decrease -- indeed, plummet -- day by day until somebody buys it or the seller goes bust.

Samuel Chow Exhibition Generating Much Interest

On OMNI TV 2, the Cantonese Daily News aired a new items and an interview with Samuel Chow on several occasions late last week. This follows on from a review in Now magazine, from highlighting in Toronto WHERE magazine, and a review note in a feature article in the Toronto Star.

Chow's I'm Feeling Lucky exhibition has seen a steady flow of visitors since its opening on September 3. Many visitors have confessed to being pleasantly surprised at how enthralled they have been by Chow's new-media "random path network". I say "surprised" because they have either had no experience of moving-image or video art or indeed have viewed video art before but not been impressed. Visitors come out of the projector room talking on the aesthetic side about being "refreshed" and "bathed by the lushness" of the imagery. A little girl of seven or eight just came to the gallery as her first gallery visit (her parents read about the show in the Ming Bao Chinese-language daily) said she did not really understand what it was all about but she really loved the images. I have learned to respect the visual instinct of kids who are interested in art, and I see this as one more sign of the deep appeal of Chow's work. On the ideas side, some visitors find that the work's function as a metaphor for the nature of knowledge in an Internet age slowly dawns, sinks in and then sparks reflection, while others say the work stands on its own without the conceptual underpinning. However one reflects on one's experience, the response has been very very positive -- which is not what I was necessarily expecting given the lack of video-art reference points for most art appreciators.

I mentioned Ming Bao, which is the largest Chinese-language daily in Hong Kong with a Toronto edition. Apart from the listing that brought the above-mentioned family to the gallery, the newspaper plans to do a feature on Chow in the September 27 Saturday Magazine.

Do note next weekend (27th and 28th) is the final weekend to see the work. Note that it is available in an edition of 15 as a Blu-ray disc in a special presentation box, along with a medium-format digital print of the I'm Feeling Lucky frame of the purchaser's choice, for $3650. Prints are available separately for $750 (small format in edition of 9) to $1600 (larger format in edition of 5).

The Life and Times of Istvan Kantor, on September 25

One of the most iconic of anti-authoritarian performance and installation artists that Canada (and Hungary) has ever produced, Istvan Kantor, opens with his new exhibition, The Life and Times of Istvan Kantor, on September 25 at 7pm at Fountain Gallery (652A Queen West, entrance off Palmerston). The exhibition runs until October 5. At both the opening on September 25 and on Nuit Blanche (Oct 4) also at 7pm, Kantor will engage in a performance.

Many will know Kantor for his action-art interventions in various museums around the world from Cologne to Montreal to New York to Toronto to Ottawa: Blood Campaign. His most recent action was an unsolicited gift to the AGO in 2005, following which the Art Gallery of York University gave Kantor a show of his unique and compelling "robotics" installation-performance art.

In 2004, Kantor won a Governor-General's Award for the Visual Arts, the most coveted award for an established Canadian artist apart from the Sobey (although the Sobey is limited artists under 40) and perhaps just below the honour of representing Canada at the Venice Biennale. Click here for a glorious photo of Kantor with then Governor-General Clarkson and John Ralston Saul.

Anne Bertoin's "Spock" for the Trap/Elusion exhibition

Three more works have been finalized for Anne Bertoin's side of the Trap / Elusion exhibition with Ron Eady (Oct 9 opening; Oct 1 - 8 preview period). I will post them one by one over the next few days. The first is the 70 x 70 cm "Spock," below:

The art world ever in search of itself

If you are in the mood for some post-Damien Hirst auction fun,check out Jasper Gerard, "Pietro Psaier, lost in an Andy Warhol haze", The Daily Telegraph ("An auction of Pietro Psaier's work has been postponed, amid questions over whether he really was Andy Warhol's collaborator. Jasper Gerard investigates.") Do note the delicious David Bowie anecdote in the article as well.

This article was accompanied in The Telegraph by:

Colin Gleadell, "Andy Warhol's mystery acolyte Pietro Psaier"

After reading the pieces, you will recognize the irony in the fact that the following two ads were the first two Google ads to appear on The Telegaph page listing the above two articles:

Google Web Results
Results 1 - 3 of about 4410 for psaier

Pietro Psaier on artnet
Pietro Psaier (Italian, 1939) - Find works of art, auction results & sale prices of artist Pietro Psaier at galleries and auctions worldwide.
http://www.artnet.com/artist/624796/pietro-psaier.html

Latest News: Pietro Psaier: John Nicholson Fine Art Auctioneers ...
Pietro Psaier was born in Italy in 1936. Psaier was best known for his Pop ... During the late 1950s Pietro Psaier worked with his father on concept cars ...
http://www.johnnicholsons.com/da/56037

Butterflies Over Banks: Damien Hirst, Global Art Hero

Ok, after this post, I promise to shut up about Damien Hirst.

The second day of the Sotheby’s auction of Damien Hirst's 200+ artworks ended yesterday with something like 100,000,000 British pounds in sales (e.g. approximately $200,000,000 US or Cdn – yes, $200 million) even as over $600,000,000,000 US (the extra three 0’s mean a billion, by the way) has been committed by the US government (plus floating $100,000,000,000 in new treasury bonds) to pay for the bailouts and guarantees already committed to date and those to come. The whole world noticed the weird (and possibly wonderful) juxtaposition. SFgate.com blogger Edward Gomez quotes Hirst as (reportedly) saying "I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies [i.e. his butterfly paintings] than banks - seems like a better world today to me." Yep, Hirst strikes a blow for culture and the little guy in one fell swoop. I can’t wait for the first pop art of Damien Hirst, Art Hero to appear.

You judge what it all stands for with these various online discussions of Hirst’s work being gobbled up from the (non-American) world’s nouveaux riches – which may turn out to mean, in this auction context, many Russian buyers – at the same time as the US gets its comeuppance for decades of living fat on the world’s indulgence. Only problem is that the whole world must now suffer – both from the US and from Damien Hirst (…getting fat on the world’s indulgence?).

Edward Gomez, Artist Damien Hirst's auction windfall: "Banks fall over, art triumphs.", SFgate.com

“Russian guessing”, Conde Nast portfolio.com

Maev Kennedy, "111 million pound Damien Hirst total sets record for one-artist auction", Guardian.co.uk

Peter Conrad, "I have to admit it - I was wrong about Hirst", The Independent (a pre-auction column that counterbalances my own crankiness with Hirst)

The Economist.com, “The boy done good”


Moira Weigel, “Bull market”, Forbes.com


Nina West, “Hirst hysteria”, artfact.com on Forbes.com


Peter Aspden, “Hirst buyers defy gloom to spend £100m on art”, FT.com