New edition of Sluice magazine out now, May 2017.
Tag: art world elite
SAVE £40 ON FRIEZE TICKETS
… every single year, guaranteed… BY NOT GOING.
I’m severely late on this one, because Frieze Art Fair [sic] was last October and at the time I was far too fucking busy touring Japan and having an amazing, inspiring time in the midst of the most staggering beauty to even think about paying £40 to be milked by a loathsome trade fair for oligarchs, blood money gold diggers and other moneyed Eurotrash, even if I’d been in London at the time. However, this is an excellent– and dare I say even Career Suicidesque– response rant by Morgan Quaintance to Frieze’s jaw-droppingly unironic and egregious discussion panel entitled Off Centre: Can Artists Still Afford to Live in London? During a ticketed fair where a person earning minimum wage would have to work for nearly six hours to afford the admission price, and putting your coat or bag in the…
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PIGGIES
When I and a few enlightened colleagues started talking about the art world and money in about 2009, hardly anybody was interested and we were very often asked why we bothered. Within a few years, nearly every agency and artist-facing organisation was talking about artists, art and money if they had any sense. The mainstream art magazines like Frieze still don’t talk about it very much except in a celebratory way, as if there’s nothing at all problematic about the whole high-end art scene, because their reason for being and their main income is from courting the (rich) hand that feeds or fists at its own whim.
Likewise, I have asserted for many years that the real story at the top end of the art world is not how bad, irrelevant and vapid most of the art and most of its suppliers are– don’t get me wrong, they are all…
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OCCASIONALLY THE VOICES ARE RIGHT
A wee update on this story about a woman who attacked a fellow visitor to Art Basel Miami Beach last December, while onlookers interpreted the whole thing as some kind of performance art. The attacker, Siyuan Zhao, has unsurprisingly been found to be suffering from a serious mental illness. Eventually coming back to a somewhat even keel through therapy and medication after randomly stabbing a stranger, trying to kill a therapy bird (whatever that is) and hearing voices that said “she needed to protect the event from the Middle Eastern terror group ISIS”, Zhao has agreed to “deport herself” back to China where her family will take care of her.
“She was very psychotic,” Dr. Ilan Melnick testified. He also said: “She felt ISIS was going to be at Art Basel to destroy the art.”
Dr. Melnick possibly slightly stating the obvious there, especially in conjunction with his second…
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ZOMBIE PROFESSIONALISM
An interesting article by Daniel S. Palmer about what ArtNews calls the “hyper-professionalization” of some artists. I’d go further and call it something like “jobification”; the reduction of a vocation to a mechanical and wholly uncreative grind. As Palmer points out, it’s not even the best way for an artist to make money or for anyone to make money from an artist’s work, because it’s so shortsighted:
“The entire system seems designed, predominantly, to disappoint. What has arisen from these failures is a marked distinction between product- and project-based artists. Product-based artists have been led to think of an artwork as a product serving a demand, rather than a single step in a longer, sustained development, as is the case with project-based artists. Consider the most visible trend in recent years of Zombie Formalism, a kind of reductive, easily produced abstract painting, sold quickly to collectors queued up on…
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REPULSIVE
“Young collectors cocktails”
At PULSE (sic… they always style it like that) Miami Beach 2016 this December, there will be a “private preview brunch”, followed later that day by “young collectors cocktails.” I know, I had an urge to vomit too. The poor grammar here suggests that the cocktails will be made from young collectors; while I do think it’s a good idea for the 1% to be pestled and pulverised I’m going to assume they mean cocktails for young collectors.
These young collectors will probably only be slightly richer than the exhibitors, because it costs a (non-refundable) $275 to apply, plus a $2000 deposit against your final charge of either $4960 for a small booth with three lights– woo!– or a medium booth with a crazy FOUR lights for $6,200. You do get your $2000 back if they don’t accept you, you lucky thing, though $2000…
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ABSTRACT PROPAGANDA
I was recently reminded by this post at Open Culture that Abstract Expressionist painting and exponents of it such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock got a big (though covert) push from the CIA, who secretly organised a number of influential exhibitions including MoMA’s New American Painting. It was all an attempt to depict America internationally as a country with a sophisticated culture borne of a fully functioning democracy.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha… oh… ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wait, wait… ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Sorry about that. Most Americans hated Abstract Expressionism, and they still do. Not to mention the fact that US foreign and domestic policies in the 1960s moved on to brainwashing, drugging, sabotaging and sometimes just straight up murdering (or having murdered) anyone who stood in the way of their global agenda. But it’s interesting to think…
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MULTIPLE SLASHES ARE SOUGHT AFTER
“I can’t believe they’re talking about this shit with a straight face” of the week goes to a recent article on Artsy (aforementioned) on ‘The Secrets of Art Pricing‘. If they’re meant to be secret, should you really be telling us? Never mind.
Submarkets for individual artists, and markets within different periods for those artists, require their own brand of unique pricing lore. Case in point is the oeuvre of Lucio Fontana, who began puncturing the surface of paper or canvas in the late 1940s, developing the idea over the next two decades. “At different times, different colors are more or less popular,” wrote Melanie Gerlis, Art Market Editor at The Art Newspaper, in her 2014 book Art as an Investment?, referring to Fontana. According to Fontana specialist Luigi Mazzoleni, founding director of Mazzoleni London, “regarding the slashes,” the most popular colors on the…
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“GLORIFIED SHOPPING MALLS”
Some magnificent verbal kamikaze quotes from Australian gallerist Evan Hughes, on the occasion of closing down the business founded by his father and then run by himself.
Top Sydney gallerist launches blistering attack on the art world
PRODUCT FOR DICKHEADS
“… It was almost as if we were given permission to declare that the art world had been taken over by dickheads. Too much of the commercial art trade has become about the selling of product and the accumulation of capital, much to the confusion and disillusionment of young artists. ”
REALISTIC PORTRAITURE
A commission for Malcolm Turnbull, Australian prime minister: “In the 1990s, when Malcolm was still a merchant banker, the Turnbull family commissioned one of my father’s artists, Lewis Miller, to paint a portrait of Malcolm. Unhappy with the work, Turnbull confronted my father at a function and exclaimed: “That artist of yours is no good; he’s made…
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SEVERE CORRECTION
… of the art market. What were you thinking of, you dirty wee puppy? I’ll deal with you later. No, according to a University of Luxembourg study, the international art market is in a “mania phase” and the bubble is going to pop any time soon, leading to a “severe correction”. Countdown starting right now to an art exhibition called either Severe Correction or Mania Phase.
The contemporary art market has been a very bad, bad, dirty, disobedient and thoughtless pig.
The “zombie formalist” artists (i.e. makers of art as an asset class, devoid of narrative, representation, politics, ideology, etc.) and their handlers are partly to blame, but as the gentleman who created the term rightly says, and as I have also said in a various ways over the past few years about a hundred bloody times: “Since the entire market is entirely irrational, it can’t be rationally…
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REAL ART WORLD MORE SATIRICAL THAN SATIRE AGAIN
This is what you get when rolling around on the floor, self-harming and generally making a tit of yourself become normalised as art practices: a woman (really, but non-fatally) stabbed by another woman in the neck and arms with a craft knife during an altercation at Art Basel Miami Beach and taken out on a stretcher while police cordoned off the crime scene was described by onlookers as “a performance art presentation.” Two of these patrons were “sipping champagne” and gawking at the bloody floor from behind police tape even as they expressed their horror that it was a real stabbing. Still think covering yourself in body fluids, paint, food (etc.) is cutting edge or exploring new territory? The public are now so blasé about this “transgressive” type of art that they assume crimes, violent incidents and bloody accidents are art interventions, so the answer is a resounding NO.
Obviously…
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PSY-CHOTIC BREAK
… is one of the possible reasons why all the people appear to have lost control over basic motor skills as well as their damn minds in the aforementioned Anish Kapoor and Friends [sic] video, making the most of the inexplicable craze for Gangnam Style a few years ago. Like your grandad realising several years after the fact what twerking is or what whippits are, so he keeps saying “twerking” or “whippits” all the time and nudging you because he’d like you to admit he’s totally with it and hasn’t lost his touch. Anyway, dance along like a toddler to some horrifying GIFs from Anish Kapoor and his imaginary friends.
Firstly some box-fresh gallerinas, straight from the Gallery Maid factory’s affordable basic range. Jackie O bug shades? Yes. Short dress over black tights? Yes. Straight, shoulder length hair? Yes. Moves like granny? No, granny’s actually a…
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9 MORE FUN FACTS ABOUT MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THAT WILL SURPRISE YOU
BONUS fun fact: Marina’s head is actually very loosely balanced on her neck and it could fall off at any time!
Here are nine more facts about Madge Ab that will surprise you and fun you, inspired by this listicle of great importance which is definitely not filler hackwork at Artnet News, in which we learn that the “grandmother of performance art”* did performance art at a museum, her mother didn’t like seeing pictures of her daughter’s breasts, and she affects not to like being famous despite gleefully hanging out with the Beyoncé family and Lady Gaga. None of these are particularly surprising or fun facts and nor are the other six “fun”, “surprising” facts surprising or fun, but what can you do? Clickbait headlines gonna bait clicks.
* Not the nice grandmother, the other grandmother that the mother and grandchildren of performance art would really like to get…
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NEO-THOREAU
Discussions of economics and making a living from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854):
SELLING AND AVOIDING THE NECESSITY OF SELLING
“Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it…
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TOP TEN THINGS TO SEE AT THE VENICE BIENNALE 2015
BY GUEST CRITIC PP BORBORYGMUS, CONTEMPORARY ART CORRESPONDENT AT LARGE FOR TEMPORARY CON ART MAGAZINE
1. THE FRIEZE PARTY
It’s fabulous because hardly anybody can get in, so no riff-raff will be there to see you trash the place and talk shit about the person you’ll then turn right around to, air kiss and and be all smiles with. You’ll see lots of peons outside, though, trying to blag their way in as you sail through like an oligarch’s yacht (see No. 2) deliberately ramming a Mediterranean immigrant raft. That’ll show them who’s important and who isn’t. Matthew Slotover is a darling and almost never strangles people then stuffs them into weighted suitcases to dump into the lagoon from the back of a water taxi in the middle of the night a bit like that chap in American Psycho. Don’t forget to appreciate his tasteful business card and you…
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“MAIN REASONS WHY THE ART WORLD NAUSEATES ME”
Thanks to my colleague Dany Louise for pointing out this great article by Sola Agustsson at Alternet: Why the Contemporary Art World Is Insufferable, Corrupted by the Super-Rich. Spoilers:
- Art collectors treat art as an investment.
- Art is a spectacle.
- Conceptual art is a joke.
- Art factories steal souls.
- Art school is kind of a scam.
- Women artists and artists of colo(u)r are sidelined.
- Money for art in public schools is dwindling (the USA kind, i.e publicly funded, not private schools)
Agustsson is absolutely bang on with every one of these points and I know a lot of the Career Suicide Squad will agree too; read the article.
WHEN CRITICS ATTACK
MOMA COMPLETELY BJÖRKS UP
I’ve often compared the art world to the mafia, with their mutual general secrecy, their deliberate cultivation of mystique, and their maintenance of respectable fronts for money laundering and worse. Then there’s the code of silence– certainly we don’t criticise our self-appointed superiors for fear of blackballing, but we should avoid offending our peers too, just in case they’re of use to us later. Whether somebody is of use, of course, being the psychopathic standard by which the most successful artists, curators and gallerists judge each other and everyone else. Most reviews of contemporary art are so bland and uncritical (in every sense of the word) that they could charitably be called reports rather than reviews, if we quite reasonably define a review as a critical assessment. Very often supposed art critics or arts writers seem to be following a prim “if you can’t say anything…
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ROMANTICISM, BEAUTY, MONEY
THREE QUOTES FROM BRUNO MUNARI, ‘DESIGN AS ART’, 1966 (ON SUBJECTS THAT STILL HAVEN’T BEEN SORTED OUT BY THE ART WORLD FIFTY YEARS LATER)
“It must be understood that as long as art stands aside from the problems of life it will only interest a very few people… The artist must cast off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men*, well up in present day techniques, materials and working methods.”
* Obviously this applies to women as well, and I don’t endorse automatic 1960s sexism.
“When a lot of money comes along before culture arrives, we get the phenomenon of the gold telephone.”
“A thing is not beautiful because it is beautiful, as the frog said to the she-frog, it is beautiful because one likes it.”
INTERVIEW AT ART MAP LONDON
Find out– among other things– the benefits of saying FUCK YOU to art world shitheels, how uncool starving in an attic is, and why you are probably not a princess or an astronaut.
http://artmaplondon.com/artmap/artist-artist-interview-alistair-gentry/
BAD WRITING WORKSHOP
WITH ART-AGENDA
Courtesy of one Nickolas Calabrese and the Art-agenda [sic] mailing list from the reliable nonsense mongers at e-flux. There appears to be little or no information available online about Mr. Calabrese, although in May 2012 he was described as an “artist and philosopher”. Please, no. By this week he was just an “artist and writer in New York.” Maybe the philosophy didn’t work out. Somebody’s intern, possibly? His oeuvre so far amounts to three reviews, but each of them is loaded with clumsy metaphors, malapropisms and other examples of what not to do in professional writing. Art-agenda apparently has editors. I feel like invoicing them for doing their job. I’m just reproducing the greatest (s)hits here; you can read the reviews in full elsewhere if you’ve nothing better to do.
ART BASEL MIAMI BEE-ACH
“The site of the apocalypse is not spatial, but temporal…
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