{ Pierre Huyghe, Third Memory, 1999 | Third Memory takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972; three years later the crime became the subject of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell the story. Using a two-channel video projection, a television interview, and posters, Huyghe builds from a “first memory” of the original crime to a “second memory” with the film’s recreation of that crime, to arrive at a “third memory,” a rich blurring of the documented and the imagined. | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | University of Virginia | Art Museum }

When you say “I’m not going to participate in your art because I think it’s obscene” on the one hand you’re slapping someone in the face — what you think of as beautiful, I think should not be seen but, to be honest, on the other hand you’re often validating them. If people in the main-stream hadn’t freaked out about Robert Maplethorpe you’d probably have no idea who he was, unless you were prone to reading the fine print on the backs of Patti Smith albums. So complaints about art help define it. In part you know if you should like it because of who hates it. And it’s also free advertising.

{ Kyle Cassidy | Continue reading | Thanks Richard! }

{ 1. Unsourced image | 2. Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2000 }

{ Michelle Jane Lee }

Astrophysicists think they know how to destroy a black hole. The puzzle is what such destruction would leave behind.

The idea of a body so massive that its escape velocity exceeds the speed of light dates back to the English geologist John Michell who first considered it in 1783. In his scenario, a beam of light would travel away from the massive body until it reached a certain height and then returned to the surface.

Modern thinking about black holes is somewhat different, not least because special relativity tells us that the speed of light is a universal constant. The critical concept that physicists focus on today is the event horizon: a theoretical boundary in space through which light and other objects can pass in one direction but not in the other. Since light cannot escape, the event horizon is what makes a black hole black.

The event horizon is somewhat of a disappointment to many astrophysicists because the interesting physics, the stuff beyond the known laws of the universe, all occurs inside it and is therefore hidden from us.

What physicists would like, therefore, is way to get rid of the event horizon and expose the inner workings to proper scrutiny. Doing this would destroy the black hole but reveal something far more bizarre and exotic.

Today, Ted Jacobson at the University of Maryland and Thomas Sotiriou and the University of Cambridge explain how this might be done in an entertaining and remarkably accessible account of the challenge.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Forms, 1955 | ink, graphite and collage on paper }

…being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”

This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.

Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.

If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome. Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to reproduce them accurately. (…)

Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.

{ Alice Rawsthorne/NY Times | Continue reading }

images { Erwin Redl, Matrix II, 2000 | light-emitting diode installation }

Over the past year or so, Stanley Fish has occasionally devoted his New York Times blog to the notion that, as he put it recently, higher education is “distinguished by the absence” of a relationship between its activities and any “measurable effects in the world.” (…) “The humanities, Fish claimed, do not have an extrinsic utility—an instrumental value—and therefore cannot increase economic productivity, fashion an informed citizenry, sharpen moral perceptions, or reduce prejudice and discrimination. (…)

The real issue, as Fish concedes, is not whether art, music, history, or literature has instrumental value, but whether academic research into those subjects has such value. Few would claim that art and literature have no intrinsic worth, and very few would claim that they possess no measurable utility. Students at Harvard Medical School, for instance, like students at a growing number of medical schools across the country, now take art courses. Studying works of art, researchers believe, makes students more observant, more open to complexity, and more-flexible thinkers—in short, better doctors. (…)

In fact, humanities research already has instrumental value. That value, however, is rarely immediate or predictable. Consider the following examples: (…)

“Stream of consciousness” was a phrase first used by William James, in 1890, to describe the flow of perception in the human mind. It was later adopted by literary critics like Melvin J. Friedman, author of the 1955 book Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, who used the term to explain the unedited forms of interior monologue common in modernist novels of the 1920s. However, by his own acknowledgment, Knuth’s innovations were most clearly influenced by the work of the Belgian computer scientist Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe, who was in turn inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, on the structure of complex organisms. And that book took its title and its point of departure from a key piece of 20th-century humanities research, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), which challenged Cartesian dualism.

There is, then, a visible legacy of utility that begins with research into Descartes and leads to important innovations in computer science. (…)

Examples of research with unclear instrumental value abound, in all disciplines. Scientists at the University of British Columbia have found that working in front of a blue wall (and not a red one) improves creative thinking.

{ Stephen J. Mexal/The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

Alberto Giacometti’s six-foot-tall bronze Walking Man I sold at Sotheby’s London in February 2010 for the equivalent of $104.3 million, and was briefly (until overtaken this month by a Picasso) the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. It remains, by far, the most expensive work available in multiple examples. The sculpture, cast by the artist himself in 1961, was reportedly bought by Lily Safra, widow of banker Edmund Safra. (…)

But by most people’s standards it is a very large sum of money; and in relation to the production cost of the sculpture it is an absurdly large sum of money. To make a copy of Walking Man I today (I am told by Morris Singer Foundry, which does much casting for artists in the UK) would cost in the region of $25,000, including the price of the bronze. If we allow for Giacometti’s time to make the piece, it does not substantially alter the enormity of the disparity between production cost and market price. Given that the sculpture exists in an edition of six, it would seem that, back in the early 1960s, Giacometti single-handedly created more than a half a billion dollars of goods, at today’s prices, in at most a few weeks. (…)

Writing about the Giacometti sale, the Australian journalist Andrew Frost posed the question that no doubt many people ask themselves even if they do not utter it out loud: “Since the material value of art is negligible, we’re paying for something — but what?”

Pablo Picasso, legend has it, had an answer to this: you are paying for “a lifetime of experience.” But this explanation fails when we consider the market in work by Picasso himself. The most expensive works by Picasso that have been sold at auction are the 1932 Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, purchased recently for $106.5 million; and a 1905 Rose Period painting, Garcon a la Pipe, which was auctioned for $104.2 million in 2004. Allowing for inflation, the Garcon cost more in real terms than the Nude. Picasso, born in 1881, was roughly 24 years old when he painted it, and he eventually lived to 91: the art he produced in his old age, with a “lifetime of experience” behind him, is worth less, not more.

A sense of the disconnect between the production cost and market price of artworks has already become a part of modern consciousness. (…)

Recently a number of books have been published by economists who aim to reveal the mechanism that leads to the formation of staggering prices for art, especially modern art. As part of their analyses, these economists have attempted to define exactly what the quality or qualities are that collectors pay for. Among these books are Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, David W. Galenson’s Artistic Capital, and Olav Velthuis’s Talking Prices. Of course, theories of art can be more sophisticated than those proposed in the above books, but as a rule they don’t directly address the question “What are we paying for?” By applying the principle of Follow The Money, maybe we can arrive at an insight into art itself.

Thompson’s theory is that the price of the preserved shark to which his title alludes (a work by Damien Hirst) and of other expensive works of contemporary art is a reflection of “brand equity” produced by marketing and publicity. He compares explicitly the purchase of a “branded” artwork, i.e. one blessed by the gallery-auction-museum-press apparatus, to the purchase of a Louis Vuitton handbag, and suggests that branding is relied upon by buyers as a substitute for their own judgment, about which they feel insecure.

{ Matthew Bown | Continue reading }

photo { Isabelle Pateer }

{ Scott Musgrove at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, until June 12, 2010 }

{ Agnes Martin, The Tree, 1964 | oil and pencil on canvas | Of the genesis of her paintings, Martin said, “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do.” }

{ Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960 | oil on canvas }

{ Agnes Martin Interview, 1997 | via Doug/Ed }

vaguely related { Paintings worth up to $613 million stolen in Paris. British art crime investigator Dick Ellis, director of Art Management Group, said: “If these estimates of the value are true then this could be the biggest theft in history. | more }

{ Ghada Amer, Color Misbehavior | Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, NYC, until June 19, 2010 }

{ Mark Rothko, No.14, 1960 | Unrelated: A way of reconstructing randomly scattered images allows pictures to be transmitted through opaque objects. | How to take photographs through opaque objects | full story }

{ Australian art critic Robert Hughes chats with an art collector }

This is evident in the element of chance and randomness inserted into design by painters like Arp and Pollock, but, beyond that, it is evident in the larger urge, shared by poets and writers, to make a career of violations, risks, wagers. Gauguin is the original of the type, of whom Picasso is the most famous realization, of the artist as gambler–the solitary risk-taker, indifferent to anyone’s welfare but his own and therefore capable of acts of independence and originality unknown to timid, orderly, nice people, acts that thrill and inspire new acts a century later. It is the goal of that kind of modern artist to run the red light and hit the old ladies–the old ladies of custom and convention. Where art since the Renaissance had attempted to limit luck in a system of inherited purpose and patterns, modern art demands that you press the pedal as hard as you can, and pray.

{ Excerpted by Daniel from The New Yorker }

photo { Jean Renoir by Richard Avedon, 1972 }

{ Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 | Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Hora, 1999 }

related:

{ The Pope of Greenwich Village | video | jump to the 2:00 mark }

Imagine a market for highly sought-after items in which the makers and sellers work hard to ensure that the items go only to certain buyers, even if other buyers might be willing to pay more. The favored buyers are then expected not to resell the items for many years, even if the values skyrocket. Ideally, in fact, the buyers are expected to give these items away eventually, for the public good. And if the buyers don’t abide by these expectations, they risk being cut off, cast out with the other unwashed wealthy who can afford to buy but have no access.

At least according to Craig Robins, a prominent Miami art collector and real estate developer who filed a federal lawsuit on March 29 in Manhattan, this is a portrait of the workings of the primary market for contemporary art, which, despite the recession, remains immense and highly competitive.

At its heart, the $8 million suit is a fairly ordinary contract dispute about confidentiality agreements and sales promises. But the details of the disagreement have provided a rare view into a normally very private world of high-end art selling in which membership rules, responsibilities, rewards and reprisals can be so complex and changeable that even art world veterans say they sometimes struggle to decode them.

{ NYTimes | Continue reading }

Days after the sabotage, one of his best-known older pieces, a suspended, taxidermised horse titled The Ballad of Trotsky, was auctioned in New York for $2.1m (£1.15m). Cattelan claims he won’t get a penny of that money - he sold the horse in 1996 for $5,000. Still, what is it like knowing your work is worth so much? “It’s like going to sleep 14 years old and waking up 30,” he says. “Things that maybe seemed a joke before are now taken more seriously.”

{ The Guardian, 2004 | Continue reading }

related { The Strange caase of Maurizio Cattelan | The Economics }

photo { unsourced | via Willie }

A collection of paintings that have caused art aficionados to turn a deep shade of purple and have provoked upset and anger throughout the art world are to go on show.

The forged works include a fake Botticelli, which was bought for a higher price than a genuine work by the artist sold at the same time. A gallery director almost had to resign because of another one, a fake Holbein.

In an unprecedented spirit of public transparency (and perverse pride), the National Gallery in central London is dusting down its holdings of forged paintings, accidentally bought as genuine works, supposedly by Botticelli, Holbein and Durer, among others, and showing them off to the public.

Some experts within the gallery actually prefer the fakes to the real thing, they revealed yesterday. Rachel Billinge, a research associate in the gallery’s conservation department, said she sometimes looked upon the forgeries with more admiration than the works by their genuine counterparts. “Sometimes you can appreciate their techniques, and the effort they put in, more than the original that was churned out by a bored apprentice at a workshop,” she said.

The last known fake bought by the gallery was in the late 1950s, when it acquired a painting believed to be a genuine Rembrandt, An Old Man in an Armchair. Signed and dated falsely, many curators have marvelled at its extraordinary technique and artistic achievement.

{ The Independent | Continue reading }

{ Full on tattoo at Joshua Liner Gallery, Apr. 24, 2010 | Shawn Barber, Tattooed Portraits: Chronicle, Joshua Liner Gallery, Until May 22, 2010 }

Critics tend to declare that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, entitled “Fountain”, is the most important artwork of the 20th century. Yet its standing as a collectable object has always lagged behind its value as an idea. The work questioned notions of authenticity when Duchamp first purchased the mass-produced plumbing fixture and signed it “R. Mutt” in 1917. Now, over 40 years after the artist’s death, the problem of legitimacy remains relevant as unauthorised urinals have been discovered circulating in Italy. The art world loves paradoxical conceptual gestures, but it seems that someone might be taking the piss.

“Fountain” was the first ready-made that Duchamp engineered for scandal. The artist was a member of the board of the Society of Independent Artists, whose exhibition had no jury and was set to be the largest in America. He knew that most people would perceive the work as a prank, particularly if submitted by an unknown Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. When the board duly voted against it, Duchamp and his chief patron, Walter Arensberg, resigned in protest—a story that was swiftly leaked to the New York papers.

The ready-made had its public debut a few weeks later in an art magazine called the Blind Man. A photo of the urinal by Alfred Stieglitz was published alongside the founding manifesto of conceptual art, which included the words: “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.” The urinal then went the way of many of Duchamp’s early ready-mades; it was smashed or trashed. So insignificant was the porcelain pissoir at the time that no one can remember exactly what happened to it.

“Fountain” was not a coveted art object until well after the second world war, when Duchamp became a cult figure among Pop artists. In response to the art world’s desire to see his legendary lavatory, Duchamp authorised curators to purchase urinals in his name in 1950, 1953 and 1963. (The first is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the second is lost and the third sits in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) Then in 1964, in association with Arturo Schwarz, a Milan art dealer, historian and collector, the artist made the momentous decision to issue 12 replicas (an edition of eight with four proofs) of his most important ready-mades, including the urinal. Mr Schwarz, now 86, went on to write the artist’s catalogue raisonné—a scholarly book meant to document the complete works of Duchamp.

{ The Economics | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore, New York City, New York,
September-October, 1972 }