Tag: money laundering

SEVERE CORRECTION

SEVERE CORRECTION

CAREER SUICIDE

… 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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“IN DEEP WITH THE QATARIS”

“IN DEEP WITH THE QATARIS”

CAREER SUICIDE

Marie-Antoinette_par_Elisabeth_Vigée-Lebrun_-_1783Supposedly to tie in with the opening of the Frieze and Gap Art Fair in New York– but really apropos of nothing except “ooh, rich people”– somebody called Jason used their own drool (he also contributes to human-shaped joke Tyler Brulé’s Monocle. QED.) to write out a super-duper tip-top list of “the most powerful people in the art world” for The Guardian.

It’s the usual soul-crushing litany of scumbags, twats, con artists, plutocrats and fuckwits but the real enjoyment is to be found in the torrent of vituperation and scorn in the comments. Read them all because there’s some good stuff about the chasm between this tiny, elite art world and what most real artists do or want to do, and what the public wants from artists. Here’s a few of the best comments, complete with the typos from their authors (rightly) being so angry they couldn’t quite…

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ANITA’S ART LAUNDRY

ANITA’S ART LAUNDRY

CAREER SUICIDE

zabPhilanthropyI’ve mentioned the intellectually and morally impaired art “philanthropist” AnitaZabludowicz here on this blog many times, she of the simpleton masterpiece that is Anita’s Art Diary (Example entry, during a trip to India: “All the ladies were out in force in the streets buying up every Pashmina in sight.” This is actually one of the less banal, fatuous and irrelevant observations.) I’m tempted to say she’s like a character from Absolutely Fabulous, except she would probably regard that show as a gritty documentary. She’s almost impossible to satirise since she does such a good job of unknowingly satirising herself. I’ve also alluded to the way that the ill-gotten wealth of oligarchs, warlords and criminals is regularly laundered– either in a manner of speaking or in the truly criminal and actionable sense of the word– through the upper echelons of the art world. Somehow I missed it when it…

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