Has everybody forgotten that the arts are recession proof? Yes, of course, revenues shrink, contributions dry up, and expenses continue to rise. (…)

But the arts—the play of the imagination, the need for this parallel universe with its dream logic and its moral reverberations—are not affected by shifts in the housing market or the Dow.

The value of a painting has never been established at auction. The power of a novel has never been determined by the advance the author happened to receive or by the number of copies that eventually sold. The greatness of a theatrical production has nothing to do with how many people attend. Dancers who can barely make their rent go on stage and give opulent performances. Poets, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper, erect imperishable kingdoms. And there are millionaires who chose to live with the barebones beauty of a Mondrian or a Morandi.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

{ Marilyn Minter, Stepping up, 2005 }

{ Hélio Oiticica, Sêco 14, 1957 | gouache on board | Galerie Lelong, 528 W. 26th Street, NYC | until February 6, 2010 }

Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot — and some is not. It’s all about your hormones. (…)

“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance,” said Lovatt. “And women understand it — without noticing it.” (…) In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite.

{ Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Arseni Khamzin }

What do we know about the relationship between mental illness and jazz?

A review of biographical material of 40 famous jazz musicians of the period from 1945 to 1960 excluding those who were still alive, was studied and rated for psychiatric diagnoses according to the DSM IV classification.

Results:

• 10% (4) had family psychiatric disorder
• 17,5% (7) had unhappy or unstable early lifes
• 52,5% (21) were addicted to heroin some time during their lives.
• 27,5 (11) were dependent on alcohol and 15% (6) abused alcohol
• 8% (3) were dependent on cocaine
• 8% (3) had psychotic disorder
• 28,5% (11) had mood disorders
• 5% (2) had anxiety disorders
• 17,5% (7) had sentsation seeking tendencies such as disinhibition and thrill and adventure seeking. This has been linked to borderline personality disorder
• 2 killed themselfs later in life

{ Dr. Shock | Continue reading }

Abstract painting is nearing its centenary. Although what exactly abstraction is, who first achieved it, and when and where, are questions open to interpretation, the best art-historical thinking dates its inception to around 1912, when Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian and Arthur Dove quite separately made their breakthroughs across two continents. (…)

It would be easy to make the argument that abstraction has long since settled into its comfortable dotage–that it has become an art choking on good taste and mannered reticence. On this view, abstraction was deposed by movements of the 1960s such as Pop Art, with its rehabilitation of vernacular imagery and its immersion in demotic culture; Conceptual Art, with its emphasis on language and critical context; and even Minimalism, which (despite its inheritance from the Constructivist strain within abstraction) laid such great stress on what its foremost detractor decried as mere “objecthood” that a boundary was fatally breached between art and everyday things.

{ Barry Schwabsky/The Nation | Continue reading }

artwork { Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960 }

The art boom of 2004-07 saw such staggering growth, particularly in contemporary art, that it is hardly surprising that art is increasingly being commoditised, bundled into funds and flagged up as an alternative asset class.

But while most people can recognise a Warhol or a Picasso at 10 paces, they have far less knowledge of the complex issues inherent in trading something that is almost always heterogeneous, in an opaque and unregulated market. (…)

The editor of this book, Clare McAndrew (…) makes the fundamental point that “one of the most important economic features of the market is that it is essentially supply-driven … increased demand … cannot necessarily increase supply … and instead elevates prices”. (…)

Moreover, how do you assess the price of a painting when four Picasso portraits of Dora Maar, all from the 1940s and of comparable size, can sell for between $4.5m and $85m within a three-year period?

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” (…)

Quirkily enough, the artist’s life followed a circular form: He was born in December 1866, and he died the same month in 1944. This being December, I’d like to honor Kandinsky through his favorite geometry, by celebrating the circle and giving a cheer for the sphere. Life as we know it must be lived in the round, and the natural world abounds in circular objects at every scale we can scan. Let a heavenly body get big enough for gravity to weigh in, and you will have yourself a ball. Stars are giant, usually symmetrical balls of radiant gas, while the definition of both a planet like Jupiter and a plutoid like Pluto is a celestial object orbiting a star that is itself massive enough to be largely round.

On a more down-to-earth level, eyeballs live up to their name by being as round as marbles, and, like Jonathan Swift’s ditty about fleas upon fleas, those soulful orbs are inscribed with circular irises that in turn are pierced by circular pupils. Or think of the curved human breast and its bull’s-eye areola and nipple.

{ Natalie Angier/NY Times | Continue reading }

How does popularity affect how we judge music?

We tend to say we like what other people like. No-one wants to stand out and risk ridicule by saying they don’t enjoy universally loved bands, like The Beatles… unless they’re trying to fit into a subculture where everyone hates The Beatles.

But do people just pretend to like what others like, or can perceived popularity actually change musical preferences? Do The Beatles actually sound better because we know everyone loves them? An amusing Neuroimage study from Berns et al aimed to answer this question with the help of 27 American teens, an fMRI scanner, and MySpace. (…)

The twist was that each song was played twice: the first time with no information about its popularity, and then again, either with or without a 5 star popularity score shown on the screen. Cleverly, this was based on the number of MySpace downloads. This meant that the subjects had a chance to change their rating based on what they’d just learned about the song’s popularity. (…)

Berns et al interpreted this as meaning that, in this experiment, popularity did not affect whether the volunteers really enjoyed the songs or not.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

{ A Billboard analysis of 2009 SoundScan data shows a digital slowdown has arrived. In terms percentage and unit change, digital sales growth slowed immensely last year after three years of steady gains. As the graph below shows, annual changes in digital album and track sales have fallen sharply in the last two years. In other words, there are fewer additional tracks and digital albums purchased each year. | Billboard | Continue reading }

New York übergallerist Jeffrey Deitch is reportedly being ushered in tomorrow as the newest director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. This? Gamechanger.

Electing someone like Deitch, whose clout in the commercial art world is manifest, as head of a major non-profit cultural institution like MOCA, is a bold move by the board. (…)

Deitch is a jack-of-all-trades on the East Coast contemporary art scene, The Godfather of youthful creatives (Kehinde Wiley, Dash Snow, Tauba Auerbach, Ryan McGinness) with a background in corporate business sense (a Harvard MBA, founder of Citibank’s art advisory practice, independent consultant for various well-heeled collectors). He solidified his rep on the downtown arts scene in 1996 with the foundation of Deitch Projects, after running in circles with art world glitterati (Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente) for twenty years. He is, as New York art critic Jerry Saltz noted, the “consummate insider with credibility and real-world skills,” a player who knows how to make money from art.

Why’s this such a big deal? MOCA—which only survived complete financial meltdown in 2008 thanks to a $30 million infusion from financier Eli Broad—is making a high-profile gamble by appointing Deitch. No other major museum in the United States has tapped a gallery owner as its resident dictator, a position that traditionally relies on an academic tradition of patronage, politics, and presentation. Can someone so skilled in the market sector of the art world switch horses midstream and solicit donations? Can he be accountable to the needs of the board, museum staff, donors, and public at large? Can he helm an exhibition canon that makes art both accessible for the masses and transcendent to the cognoscenti?!

{ Gawker | Continue reading }

The co-chairs of the board of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art say they were aware from the start that hiring Jeffrey Deitch as MOCA director would raise questions about possible conflicts of interest.

After all, Deitch has made a 30-year career of buying and selling art, turning the inspirations and labors of artists and the desires and calculations of collectors into a lucrative business.

As MOCA’s director, he’ll have the ultimate say over which artists get exhibited — potentially boosting their prestige and asking price. And when MOCA borrows privately owned pieces for its shows, there’s the possibility that being in the public eye in the company of other notable art will make those works more marketable and valuable.

While Deitch has agreed to end his commercial art activities by June 1, when he starts his new job, there’s nothing to stop people from speculating about his decisions.

After helping to introduce Deitch at a news conference at the museum Tuesday, co-chairs Maria Bell and David Johnson said that Deitch is a man of integrity. He would also be violating his employment contract, they said, if he were to use his position to improperly benefit himself or his friends and former business associates.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Julie Atlas Muz, Jeffrey Deitch, and Bambi the Mermaid }

{ John Richardson photographed by Mark Heithoff }

Sometimes songs get ’stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm’ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.

What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.

What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ - often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.

This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965 }

{ McCarthy, From The Damned, 1986 | Last FM | Listen }

An abundance of brain scans, experimental studies and case histories has, in the end, failed to answer certain vital questions: What is music? Where can we find it in the brain? Why does it do what it does to us?

The brain is, in essence, a musical instrument—taking bits of material from a world of chaos, then shaping and modulating them into one graceful, lyrical stream. Yet, despite some scientific success in mapping its discrete compartments, it is an organ that resists efforts to render its workings in black and white. Cognition involves processes that are simply too wide-ranging and complex to be assigned to a single anatomical location.

Scientists have had to grapple with this, as well as with what is known as “plasticity.” At a recent conference on “Emotion, Music & the Brain” (…) Concetta Tomaino explained the phenomenon: “Simply put, the brain changes as it experiences and learns.” In effect, those attempting to pin down its internal circuitry are chasing a moving target.

Yet, the plasticity that reshapes the brain as we grow is also a blessing. “The challenge is in knowing how it can change when there is damage,” says Dr. Tomaino, “and then working with the neural networks that are still available.”

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

artwork { James Roper }

{ Botticelli, La Derelitta, c. 1495 } La Derelitta, ascribed first to Masaccio, then to Botticelli, then to that amiable fiction L’Amico di Sandro, and recently regarded as part of a series of cassone panels executed by the young Filippino Lippi after designs by Botticelli, is a source of discomfort not only to the connoisseur, but also to the student of iconography. The subject is as enigmatic as the authorship. A young woman, shut out of a palace, sits ‘derelict’ on the steps before the gate and weeps. This is the sort of pathetic scene which appealed to nineteenth-century novelists by arousing reflections as to what had happened before and what would happen after. In the mind of a fifteenth-century painter such a response would be, to say the least, an anachronism. At that time the themes of pictures were not meant to prompt flights of the imagination. They formed part of a precise set of ideas. An attempt to reconstruct the correct connotations of the picture called La Derelitta may help to dispel the false sentiment which the false title, most certainly of fairly recent invention, suggests. A decisive step towards finding the clue to the picture was made by Horne and Gamba when they discovered that it belonged to a set of six panels representing the story of Esther, which originally formed the decoration of two marriage chests. { The Subject of Botticelli’s Derelitta by Edgar Wind, 1940 }

{ Collier and Higgs, I Married An Artist, 2008 } The work is a ’straight’ photograph of a book both artists purchased in Toronto. The book is the autobiography of a woman (Billy Button) who was married to a prominent mid-20th Century Canadian artist. The image has not been digitally altered in any way. { Re-title }

vaguely related { The frescoes Ambrogio Lorenzetti executed for the city council of Siena in 1338–1339 mark what may be a unique achievement in the history of art: making Heaven, (or at least Heaven on earth), look infinitely more interesting than Hell. | NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

{ Jean Dubuffet, Paris Montparnasse, 1961 | Oil on canvas | Related: Dubuffet’s influence over Claes Oldenburg, 1959-1962 | PDF | And: Dubuffet and Basquiat, PaceWildenstein, 2006 }

{ Def Jam Recordings (LL Cool J., Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Run–D.M.C…) reaches its 25th anniversary. | 1. Krush Groove, the cult 1985 film that tells the story of the birth of Def Jam Recordings. 2. The third member of Run-D.M.C., Jam Master Jay, was tragically killed inside a Queens recording studio 2002. The perpetrator has never been identified. | Photos: NY Daily News | more | Related: The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number. }

Art’s link with money is not new, though it does continue to generate surprises. On Friday night, Christie’s in London plans to auction another of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets: literally a small, sliding-glass medicine cabinet containing a few dozen bottles or tubes of standard pharmaceuticals: nasal spray, penicillin tablets, vitamins and so forth. This work is not as grand as a Hirst shark, floating eerily in a giant vat of formaldehyde, one of which sold for more than $12 million a few years ago. Still, the estimate of up to $239,000 for the medicine cabinet is impressive — rather more impressive than the work itself.

No disputing tastes, of course, if yours lean toward the aesthetic contemplation of an orderly medicine cabinet. Buy it, and you acquire a work of art by the world’s richest and — by that criterion — most successful living artist. Still, neither this piece nor Mr. Hirst’s dissected calves and embalmed horses are quite “by” the artist in a conventional sense. Mr. Hirst’s name rightfully goes on them because they were his conceptions. However, he did not reproduce any of the medicine bottles or boxes in his cabinet (in the way that Warhol actually recreated Brillo boxes), nor did he catch a shark or do the taxidermy.

In this respect, the pricey medicine cabinet belongs to a tradition of conceptual art: works we admire not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept. (…)

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

Does this mean that conceptual art is here to stay? That is not at all certain, and it is not just auction results that are relevant to the issue. To see why works of conceptual art have an inherent investment risk, we must look back at the whole history of art. (…)

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

{ Denis Dutton/NY Times | Continue reading }

The best explanation of the art market may be that it is inexplicable, which is one reason its alchemy continues to fascinate and capture headlines. In no other market do we lavish wealth on such useless and arbitrary things. Advanced systems of trade that are usually the facilitators of market intelligence—international public auctions and historical price indexes—only offer a false sense of comprehension while further distorting art’s valuation.

Yet if such things could be measured in degrees, the art market of today seems more unexplainable than ever. The prices paid for certain types of post-war and contemporary art continues to outpace prices for older work as well as recent art of greater nuance. Tens of millions of dollars may still chase after art of dubious formal qualities—factory-made work by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, smears by Francis Bacon and silkscreens by Warhol.

Big money’s relationship to “cheap” contemporary art is a recent phenomenon. It began in the 1960s, as Pop Art commercialized the avant-garde—not just selling the avant-garde, but also involving commercialism in defining the avant-garde. Whereas many Abstract Expressionists died before striking it rich, several of the avant-garde artists who came of age in the 1960s experienced a more profitable fate. (…)

In 2006, Tobias Meyer infamously remarked that “the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” The quote received wide circulation because of its patent absurdity. A market is only as smart as the people who control it, and the art market has proved to be a dull creature when it comes to appreciating a broad range of artistic qualities. But to give Meyer credit, the market can be very smart about the art that speaks to it.

The art market has a unique talent for promoting art about the market. Since exhibition history enhances value, the collectors of what we might call “market art” have a vested interest in seeing their work take up space in traditional public collections. They often have the financial leverage to make it happen. In this way, the hedge-fund collector Steven A. Cohen could place Damien Hirst’s shark tank on temporary loan at the Metropolitan Museum. The oversized trinkets of Jeff Koons start appearing at the same time in the museum’s rooftop gallery.

{ The New Criterion | Continue reading }