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 }

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 }

{ 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 }

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 }

The genome, as we all know, largely determines what we look like, our traits, and, significantly, our susceptibility to disease and other disorders. Ahituv is one of tens of thousands of well-funded researchers around the world trying to determine which segments of the genome contribute to which disorders. It is one of the biggest scientific endeavors in history, premised on the notion that the results can be used to prevent or fix many things, or possibly everything, that ails the human body — from allergies to cancer to aging itself. Dozens of biotech companies have sprung up in the past decade to commercialize this work, and one might assume that a stream of miracle pills will soon be on its way to our pharmacies.

You bet — just as soon as we work through a couple of hitches in this grand genomic enterprise. Scientists have indeed been superb at finding connections between disorders and various strips of DNA. But it turns out that in the vast majority of cases, these connections happen to be hideously convoluted, with any one disorder related to many genes and any one gene affecting many things in the body. Even when researchers are able to highlight a clear relationship between a single gene and a single disorder, they generally have little or no idea how those chunks of DNA are causing problems. (…)

It turns out that many dozens or even hundreds of genes each contribute to any given human attribute, and any one gene might contribute to several. Genes, in other words, turn out to work not as simple disease switches, but in impossibly complex networks.

{ The Gene Bubble: Why We Still Aren’t Disease-Free | Fast Company | Continue reading }

color lines { Ellsworth Kelly | Reifenhäuser }

But what do we mean by “art”?

Art is… what? A pursuit of excellence, a pursuit of meaning, a way of trying to make sense of the world. The arts, we’d say, are part of our life, our language, our way of seeing. The arts tell us truths about ourselves and each other and our society that reach parts of us that politics and journalism don’t. Art is passionate, ambiguous, complex, mysterious, and thrilling. It helps us to fit the disparate pieces of the world together; it helps us to try to make form out of chaos.

From all this I don’t imagine you’d dissent. And perhaps we could all agree on a hierarchy, a pantheon that would include, say, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Mahler, Matisse, Dickens, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, Auden, Hughes, Renoir, Fellini, Orson Welles, Charlie Parker – and so on, all dead, all tested by time, all enduringly popular.

{ Richard Eyre/The Independent | Continue reading }

artwork { Roni Horn, Clown Mirror, 2001 | And more }

{ Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 | 104 anodixed aluminum panels | MoMA }

In 1956, when he was 34 years old, Ellsworth Kelly was invited to create a sculpture for the lobby of Philadelphia’s Transportation Building which housed the old Greyhound Bus Terminal. The piece he made, Sculpture for a Large Wall, was the largest work of his career to that point.

{ ArtSeenSoho | Continue reading }

The Ellsworth Kelly “Sculpture for a Large Wall” was sold by Ronald Rubin for about $100,000. Then Matthew Marks turned around and sold it to the Lauder’s for about $1,000,000. The piece was later donated to MoMA by Carole and Ronald Lauder.

It was Kelly’s first sculpture, first commission and one of the first uses of anodized aluminum in fine art in America. The fact that no one complained when this unique masterpiece left Philadelphia while they raised $200,000 to retain Isiah Zagar’s kitschery makes Sid Sachs (director of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts) a very sad man. And the quality of the work and its importance is attested by the fact that MOMA used it every chance it could in ads and bus stop kiosks.

{ Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof | Continue reading }

When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School (…) wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The major fall art auctions may not have sold everything on offer, but collectors showed a renewed willingness to bid up top examples of artists’ work. (…) New York’s two chief auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s International, brought in about $596 million combined from their semi annual sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in the past two weeks. The total surpassed the houses’ $409 million spring sales in May, a gain that could signal a measure of returning confidence in high-end art values. (…)

For auction houses, these sales also marked the return of the guarantee, a financial mechanism in which an auction house promises to buy a work if it doesn’t sell at auction. Guarantees offer potential sellers a risk-free reason to part with their best pieces, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s stopped offering deal-sweeteners after suffering an estimated $63 million combined loss from unsold guaranteed artworks last November.

Now, auction houses are gingerly stepping back into such deals, but they’re mostly shifting the risk to third parties, typically dealers or collectors who agree to pay the seller a prearranged price for the work if it doesn’t ultimately fetch a higher price at auction.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Gober, Untitled, 1993–94 | Beeswax, wood, glassine, and felt-tip pen }

{ Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1969 | Oil and crayon on canvas | Quote }

{ Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889) and Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889) }

{ Vincent Van Gogh, The Church at Auvers (1890), View of Arles with Irises (1888) and At Eternity’s Gate (1890) }

My dear Theo,

Yesterday Gauguin and I went to Montpellier to see the museum there. (…)

Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c.

The discussion is excessively electric. We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it’s run down. (…)

Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he felt: ‘that he could feel his old self coming back’, which gave me great pleasure.

As for me, coming here last winter, tired and almost fainting mentally, I too suffered a little inside before I was able to begin to remake myself. (…)

As regards setting up a life with painters as pals, you see such odd things and I’ll end with what you always say, time will tell.

{ Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 17 or 18 December 1888 | Continue reading | More: 902 letters from and to Van Gogh }

On 23 December 1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In panic, Van Gogh left their hotel and fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and gave to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to “keep this object carefully.”

Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

There is something to be said about fakes in tribal art, often seeming somehow to lack soul, and not quite having some kind of ring of truth. For example, they’re often somehow seemingly made to shock us, or to please us. The very finest works of tribal art, New Guinea art, or African art in my opinion, somehow have a lack of any interest in our perception at all, they’re sort of in another world. You can sort of see that in retrospect but can you always be certain with every piece you come across? No, I don’t think so.

{ The philosophy of authenticity, fakes and forgers | ABC | Continue reading }

artwork { Kefwele mask, Songye tribe, Congo }

{ Duane Michals, Things Are Queer, 1971 }

{ Linda Evangelista by Maurizio Cattelan, W magazine, Nov. 2009 | More photos | Behind the scene video }

related:

{ Helmut Newton, Allure magazine, 1997 }

{ Maurizio Cattelan | Bidibidobidiboo, 1996 | Him, 2001 | La Nona ora, 1999 | more }

{ Goya, Plate 39 from The Disasters of War, 1810-1820 }

{ Jake and Dinos Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead, 1994 }

The Chapman brothers, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, had become obsessed with Goya’s gory ouvre - to the point, as Jake Chapman told me in a phone interview, that they later even considered changing their surname to Goya. They were especially haunted by the famous series of etchings known as “The Disasters of War”, in which Goya portrayed the atrocities he had witnessed in the Peninsular War between Spain and France (1808-1814) with a visceral horror. (…)

In 1994, they re-created plate 39 of “The Disasters of War - Great Feat! With Dead Men!” - on a larger scale, using nylon-wigged mannequins. Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), which was their contribution to the legendary ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, depicts three naked male bodies bound to a tree; blood dribbles from the crotches of these shop dummies where their genitalia would have been, if they’d ever had them. One victim’s arm dangles by its fingers from the makeshift gallows alongside the carcass of his torso, the severed head skewered on a branch.

{ Christopher Turner, editor at Cabinet magazine | Tate | Continue reading }

{ Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sex, 2003 }

With their bronze sculptures under the title “Sex” (2003), the Chapman brothers make a jump in time. They show the decomposed corpses from “Great Deeds Against the Dead” (1994). The bodies are swarming with flies, maggots, worms, and all sorts of creatures which have picked their bones clean. At first glance, everything seems naturalistic. It isn’t until one examines the work more closely and talks to the artists that one realizes the flies and worms were originally cheap plastic reproductions from toy stores and novelty shops. These were cast in bronze and hand-painted by the artists.

{ Absolute Arts | Continue reading | Art Net }

{ Jake and Dinos Chapman, Death, 2003 }

{ Moma rejection letter to Andy Warhol, 1956 | via Douglas Wilson | Enlarge }

Fridays

• Museum of Modern Art - Free 4 to 8 p.m. (normally $20)

• Whitney Museum of American Art - Pay-what-you-wish 6 to 9 p.m. (normally $18)

(…)

Saturdays

• Guggenheim - Pay-what-you-wish 5:45 to 7:45 p.m. (normally $18)

{ Museum free hours in NYC for fall/winter 2009/10 | Newyorkology | Continue reading }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Horizontal Line, 1951 }

{ New scientific techniques have uncovered evidence that this picture is a previously unrecognised work by Leonardo da Vinci. | Antique Trade Gazette | Continue reading }

I try to do what Jeff Koons did when he put 1, 2 or 3 New Shelton Wet/Dry vacuums in a Plexiglas box, and added a title. I put news in Plexiglas boxes, and add titles.

It’s rather an experiment than journalism.

It’s about editing news, about the concept “editing/commenting is creating” developed a century ago when philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault to name a few) made Philosophy by commenting past Philosophy.

Almost everything is quoted and nothing is signed: French writer Marguerite Yourcenar once said that it doesn’t matter who is writing. What matters is that it is written.

Also: Personality is like a collection of traits that we all share, and that we sometimes borrow from each other, but the totality (of qualities and traits) is peculiar to a specific person. That’s how one differs from another, by creating a different mix of existing traits, by tuning these traits to various degrees.

The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. We spend our life building this mask, and make it attractive, unique, different, coherent… It’s about editing traits and influences. It’s about creating something new from existing material.

artwork { Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker, 1981-87 | Vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas and fluorescent lights | Photo: Thanks Daniel! }

related { Whether your earwax is wet or dry is determined by a mutation in a single gene, scientists have discovered. }