A GOOD WAY TO TEST IF SOMETHING IS ART If lots of really miserable depressed self-loathing people like it, its art. If not, its sports _Tony homo_Retweeted by Roberta Smith >>> KANYE WEST: ‘THE ENTIRE TIME, I’VE ACTUALLY JUST BEEN A FINE ARTIST’ Mr. West recalls his history with visual art: ”Well, I’m a trained fine artist,” he says. “I went to art school from the time I was 5 years old. I was, like, a prodigy out of Chicago.” Mr. West goes on to mention various national competitions and the scholarship that brought him to the American Academy of Art. “So the joke that I’ve actually played on everyone <http://tinyurl.com/mpztf2t> is that the entire time, I’ve actually just been a fine artist. I just make sonic paintings, and these sonic paintings have led me to become whatever people think of when you say ‘Kanye West.’” He dips into a discussion of Madonna, before moving on to his collaborations with artists Takashi Murakami and George Condo (who have done album covers for Mr. West and, more recently, customized a Hermès Birkin bag for Kim Kardashian)._GalleristNY >>> BEAUTY <http://tinyurl.com/o7drg5g> _viaTelegraphUK >>> WHY BRINGING THE WORLD'S MOST SENSUAL PAINTINGS TO LIFE KILLS THEM by Jonathan Jones What does it take to get a 21st-century audience excited about oil paintings? Well, they are all a bit … still, aren't they? Walking through an art museum, you pass so many landscapes and portraits that sit there in unmoving passivity. But what if they moved? Rino Stefano Tagliafierro's film Beauty begins with slides of 19th-century landscape paintings. Then a couple of birds fly over a painted lake. Uh-huh. From there, we are taken on a rollercoaster ride through pre-20th century European art, from Bouguereau's <http://tinyurl.com/24sxzma> waxy nudes – animated so that they actually cavort – to Caspar David Friedrich's desolate winter vision of a ruined abbey <http://tinyurl.com/lamodms> whose sun, in this version, eventually sets. Since the theme is beauty, we see some of the most sensual paintings in the world start to move uncannily. Titian's Venus of Urbino <http://tinyurl.com/md6o2oh> gracefully turns her head. Correggio's Jupiter <http://tinyurl.com/lwx3lgf> , disguised as a blue cloud, moves his misty paw up and down on Io's pale back. Meanwhile, Caravaggio's Judith <http://tinyurl.com/m2dd97a> – painted in a moment of eerie stillness in the act of beheading Holofernes – finishes the job and severs the head. It's not the first time animators have taken on art, but usually it has been done for laughs. Terry Gilliam's cartoons for Monty Python made surreal, hilarious use of the classics – the foot that comes down in the Monty Python title sequence is from a Bronzino painting <http://tinyurl.com/ykx6bkq> in the National Gallery. Before animation, caricaturists were already travestying high art. William Hogarth <http://tinyurl.com/ygwqb3l> fills his paintings with profane classical allusions. What's freaky about this film is that, unlike earlier such appropriations of fine art, it is not a joke – it is a meditation on beauty with not a belly laugh in sight. Or at least not an intentional one. It makes for a strange and striking hymn to culture. All art worth its salt begs to be remade and reinterpreted – from Shakespeare to the Three Musketeers. Filmmakers have restaged Caravaggio's paintings with actors playing his models. Why not animate them and see what happens when Judith finishes her bloody work? It's only putting on screen what our imaginations do when we look at powerful works of art. We are all film directors or novelists in our heads, imagining worlds inside the paintings, telling ourselves the stories incited by the pictures. Beauty makes those imaginative encounters luridly visible. Yet in the end, the stillness of paintings is not a lack or a failure – it is not something we have to digitally put right. The power of Caravaggio lies in his creation of moments of intense drama that are suspended forever – the dynamism and danger is all the greater for being arrested in a fraction of time. It is entertaining to see Judith actually chop off Holofernes's head, but it misses the whole point of Caravaggio, who makes us contemplate one moment of moral choice for all eternity. What a hard thing it is to kill a man, you think in front of the painting. Oh, it's quite easy, you think while watching the animated version. _GuardianUK >>> MASTERPIECE SMACKDOWN: WARHOL'S 'EMPIRE' VS. MARCLAY'S 'CLOCK' by Blake Gopnik Last weekend, I spent seven-plus hours watching all of Warhol’s great “Empire”, which consists of unedited footage of the Empire State Building that he shot in 1964. My account of the screening appeared in print in today’s New York Times, while all 5,500 words of the minute-by-minute notes that I took at the screening are up at my new Warholiana.com <http://tinyurl.com/nxyak2k> Web site. But for all that looking and thinking and writing, I missed something obvious, pointed out to me over drinks last night by Tom DeKay, former art editor at the Times and now editor-in-chief of ArtInfo.com: The obvious counterpoint <http://tinyurl.com/my54j7z> to Warhol’s meditation on passing time is Christian Marclay’s superb “Clock”, from 2010, which cuts together 24 hours’ worth of Hollywood images of clocks and watches and all things temporal, so that the collage of times seen on-screen match the real times on a viewer’s watch. The two pieces are analogues, yes, but also importantly and surprisingly different: In Warhol, nothing happens, and that’s its greatest virtue – it teaches cinematic patience; Marclay’s “Clock” gives us a constant stream of event, more like the insane flicker of an Olympic chronometer than the pace of a clockless day at the shore. It perfectly suits our current attention spans. I adore Marclay’s “Clock”, and have spent many hours entranced by it; it is irresistible and ceaselessly compelling. But I guess I believe the Warhol is the more challenging, complex, surprising piece. It overcomes our doubts, rather than confirming our pleasures._Newsweek/DailyBeast >>> REVIEWING ARTFORUM'S ADVERTISEMENTS: JANUARY 2014 <http://tinyurl.com/lsbngpg> >>> IS MOMA NAMING NEW TRUSTEE TO BOARD? The Museum of Modern Art (right) and building formerly used for the American Folk Art Museum next door. Photo: Getty Images After the Museum of Modern Art faced a storm of criticism for confirming expansion plans involving demolishing the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, Page Six has learned that the board of trustees has called an emergency meeting this week, with plans to install someone new. According to sources close to the museum, MoMA’s board — which already includes heavy hitters Ronald S. Lauder, Agnes Gund, Ron Perelman, Michael Ovitz, Richard Parsons and Sid Bass — will name at the meeting a new trustee to help guide them through the controversy. Sources told us the possible new addition could be Michael Bloomberg, but a MoMA rep said, “The information you heard is incorrect.” MoMA has said it will raze the neighboring 13-year-old building on West 53rd Street that was built by husband-and-wife firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Williams and Tsien have said publicly of MoMA’s plan, “This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many.”_NYPost >>> DIA MAY BE ASKED TO ANTE UP $100M TO BREAK FREE FROM CITY Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr met with Detroit Institute of Arts leaders for the first time Thursday and told them they may have to make a substantial contribution to a fund that would provide hundreds of millions for city pensioners and protect DIA art from being sold as part of the city’s bankruptcy, according to a person familiar with Orr’s plans. Orr did not push for a specific figure, but the city believes $100 million over 20 years “is a number the DIA can get to,” the source said. Museum leaders said Thursday that figure was “completely unfeasible.” The parties met to discuss details of a federally mediated deal that would raise $330 million from nine foundations and perhaps another $350 million from the state to create the rescue fund and spin off the city-owned museum into a separate nonprofit. DIA Chief Operating Officer Annmarie Erickson said the $100-million figure had come up in earlier negotiations, and the DIA said then the amount was too high. “It’s completely unfeasible to do that and continue to raise what we do to cover expenses and what we’ve committed to raise in endowment dollars,” Erickson told the Free Press after the meeting with Orr. “This is a delicate balance. If we can’t secure our financial future, everything will come undone, and that would be a tragedy.” The DIA operates on an annual budget of roughly $32 million, surviving primarily on a tri-county tax millage voters passed in 2012 that makes up roughly 70% of its annual budget. The DIA also raises about $12 million a year from donors. At the same time, the museum has committed to raising hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade in endowment funds — a nest egg that earns income — to replace dollars from the millage when it expires in 2022. Museum leaders fear a chilling effect on donations if forced to divert endowment funds toward city debt. Spearheaded by U.S. Chief District Judge Gerald Rosen, the nine national and local charitable foundations have pledged $330 million toward a grand bargain to solve two of the most contentious issues in the city’s historic Chapter 9 bankruptcy — reducing pension cuts and protecting artwork. Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Snyder asked state legislators Thursday to deliver $350 million in matching funds to the plan, bringing the total to nearly $700 million. Despite the large sums already on the table, the DIA is still widely expected to contribute to the pot, but specific terms including the overall total and time frame remain in negotiations in the mediation process. The grand bargain, in other words, may keep all of the DIA’s irreplaceable treasures on the wall, but it’s no get-out-of-jail-free card for the museum._DetroitFreePress >>> TATE SIGNS £5M SPONSORSHIP WITH HYUNDAI Tate Modern has inked a sponsorship deal worth around £5m with Hyundai, the South Korean motor manufacturer, to cover a ten-year programme of commissions for its Turbine Hall. The first commission, to be announced later this year, will be for autumn 2015. After that, it is to be an annual autumn event, with each work to go on show for about five months. Previous commissions, sponsored by Unilever, included Louise Bourgeois, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, Ai Weiwei and, most recently, Tino Sehgal. <http://tinyurl.com/m9as68p> _ArtNewspaper >>> TROVE OF ARMY’S ART AWAITS A NEW MUSEUM: FOUR ROCKWELLS TOP A LIST OF 16,000 PIECES The museum, which has been a decade in the making, is at least four years from opening and has less than half the money it needs for its construction, according to its chief fundraiser, Creighton W. Abrams Jr., a retired brigadier general. The Army Historical Foundation, which he directs, has raised $76 million of the $175 million it needs. Abrams said he expects the museum to open in 2018, at the earliest. It is also to be located at Fort Belvoir, six miles west of Mount Vernon. <http://tinyurl.com/n8twnoy> _WashingtonPost >>> V&A TO PUBLISH HITLER'S 'DEGENERATE ART' LIST ONLINE The V&A is to publish the complete list of Hitler’s confiscated ‘degenerate art’ online for the first time. ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art), which comprised mainly of modern art, was confiscated by the Nazi regime from public institutions in Germany during 1937 and 1938. <http://tinyurl.com/ln8qfw7> _IndependentUK >>> UC PRESS MAKES 700 BOOKS FREE ONLINE, INCL. IMPORTANT ART TITLES The University of California’s storied academic imprint is making freely available online 700 titles published between 1984 and 2004. The books encompass a broad range of topics, with a healthy dose of critical and historical writings on the arts. In the field of art history and criticism, the most notable releases are arguably Dore Ashton’s A Fable of Modern Art (1991) and A Critical Study of Philip Guston (1990), though a great deal of other titles are of interest: Edwin Hall’s The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait (1997); essayist and poet W. S. Di Piero’s Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art (1991); Paul J. Karlstrom’s On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950 (1996); and Ellen Wiley Todd’s The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (1993). Links here <http://tinyurl.com/kyqmv8x> _Hyperallergic >>> INSTALLATION AT JFK TERMINAL TO BE TERMINATED? Just as major airlines are shrinking seat sizes to fit more passengers, iconic works of public art are being ousted to make room in cluttered terminals. Case in point: This spring JFK will be permanently removing the public art installation “Curtain Wall,” <http://tinyurl.com/kff65zt> by Harry Roseman in Terminal 4. The removal of “Curtain Wall,” and of a protective curb that runs under the sculpture, would expand the walkways by 13 inches. It remains unclear what will become of Roseman’s work._ArtInfo >>> ON TOBIAS REHBERGER ON BRIDGET RILEY by greg I hadn't heard of this before. The Art Newspaper and several German sources report that a Bridget Riley and Tobias Rehberger have come to an agreement in a plagiarism lawsuit Riley brought last year in a Berlin court. Riley had demanded that Rehberger's work, Uhrenobjekt/Watch Object installed in the new National Library Unter den Linden <http://tinyurl.com/l243hja> , be removed because it copied her foundational 1961 painting, Movement in Squares. Last Spring, the court denied Riley's removal request, but ordered the Uhrenobjekt covered until the plagiarism issue was resolved. It was, and now the work will go back on view, with a new title, Uhrenobjekt nach Movement in Squares von Bridget Riley (Watch Object after Movement in Squares by Bridget Riley). This seems pretty reasonable. I hope Riley's cool with it. I know she's had to deal with knockoff/transformations of her paintings by the fashion industry since the beginning. The story of MoMA's Bill Weitz and Larry Aldrich deciding on their own it'd be awesome to make Riley-inspired dresses timed for the 1965 show, "The Responsive Eye" is a must-read <http://tinyurl.com/kplpbas> . Story of her life. So I was kind of fascinated as to what Rehberger's original idea for his piece was. Was it actually "from" Riley's work, or did it just happen to look like it? Wouldn't it be weird to namecheck her if her work hadn't been part of the process somehow? News reports don't give any details about arguments made by either side. Most German reports from the initial phase of the suit are sympathetic to the hometown boy, like this Tage Spiegel article <http://tinyurl.com/m3o8een> , and include a list of the specific differences between Riley's and Rehberger's Op Art grids, and lay out a random list of examples of painters borrowing and copying motifs through history. I'd say that the German interpretation of the case is that Rehberger "won." Again, though, what was his point in making this object? It can't be that he didn't know of Riley's painting; he's been soaking in Op for a long time, and Movement in Squares is Riley's foundational Op Art work, the one she credits with setting her on her geometric, optically invigorating, abstract path. It went into the Arts Council's collection almost immediately, and has been in tons of Riley shows and catalogues. [Amusingly enough, it takes a bit of effort to find actual pictures of the painting itself, something that doesn't look like a pattern. This may be a feature/weakness of Op Art, it's ready transformation into pattern and image. But never mind, here's a 2009 photo from the National Museums, Liverpool of the artist standing in front of her painting <http://tinyurl.com/lafa7tg>. It's 4x4 feet square, tempera on hardboard, a very human scale and presence.] So turning back the clock, I found this preview of the Staatsbibliothek project from the German architecture site Detail <http://tinyurl.com/lrhho8q> . The optical pattern is flipped, obviously, but more than that, the physical aspect of Rehberger's Uhrenobjekt is quite different: it's rectangular, fit to the doorway. And it's thick. Architectural. And it's way up the wall, and super-shiny. The text describes it as "an interpretation of" Movement in Squares with "partly illuminated areas that show time in an unconventional way." So yes, it's an acknowledged interpretation whose main feature is apparently to be a reflective surface for the play of light over the day. Which is not irrelevant, because determining plagiarism vs interpretation/transformation/whatever the German equivalent of fair use is, brings the whole host of differences between the works and their context into play. And then there's the fundamental distinction between Objekt and Bild, object and picture, and all that entails._greg.org >>> THE ELK? <http://tinyurl.com/ll8zp69> _AnonymousWorks >>> PARIS AUCTION OPENS CLOSET OF SCHIAPARELLI, DOYENNE OF 1930S FASHION Elsa Schiaparelli, doyenne of 1930s Paris fashion, may be long gone - buried in her favorite hue of shocking pink - but nearly 200 pieces from her closet, along with her fine art and furniture, may enjoy a second life after an auction next week._Reuters >>> FAIRLY POPULAR Before 1999 London had just one regular contemporary art fair, remembers Will Ramsay, boss of the expanding Affordable Art Fair. This year around 20 will be held in Britain, mostly in the capital. Roughly 90 will take place worldwide. One explanation for the boom is the overall growth of the modern-art market. Four-fifths of all art sold at auction worldwide last year was from the 20th or 21st century, according to Artprice, a database. London’s art market in particular has been boosted by an influx of rich immigrants from Russia, China and the Middle East. “When I started 23 years ago I had not a single non-Western foreign buyer,” says Kenny Schachter, an art dealer. “It’s a different world now.” And London’s new rich buy art differently. They often spend little time in the capital and do not know it well. Traipsing around individual galleries is inconvenient, particularly as galleries have moved out of central London. The mall-like set-up of a fair is much more suitable. Commercial galleries used to rely on regular visits from rich Britons seeking to furnish their stately homes. Many were family friends. The new art buyers have no such loyalty. People now visit galleries mainly to go to events and to be seen, says Alan Cristea, a gallery owner on Cork street in Mayfair. Fairs, and the parties that spring up around them, are much better places to be spotted. Some galleries are feeling squeezed. Bernard Jacobson runs a gallery opposite Mr Cristea. The changing art market reminds him of when his father, a chemist, was eclipsed by Boots, a pharmaceutical chain, in the 1960s. Seven galleries in Cork Street relocated this month to make way for a redevelopment; five more may follow later this year. Yet the rise of the fairs means galleries no longer require prime real estate, thinks Sarah Monk of the London Art Fair. With an international clientele, many can work online or from home. Although some art fairs still require their exhibitors to have a gallery space, increasingly these are small places outside central London or beyond the city altogether. One gallery owner says few rich customers ever visit his shop in south London. He makes all his contacts at the booths he sets up at fairs, which might be twice the size of his store. “It’s a little like fishing,” he explains. “You move to where the pike is.”_TheEconomist >>> LA ART SHOW: TIPS FOR YOUNG COLLECTORS “But a lot of people don’t know how to get started collecting, so that’s why we wanted to do this -- to have engagement with the art show on a more casual and approachable level." The tour ended, appropriately, with a whiskey tasting hosted by Koval Distillery. _LATimes >>> AMID BRIBES AND PAYOFFS, LEGITIMATE CHINESE ART MARKET HARD TO MEASURE by Marion Maneker The South China Morning Post recaps what is already a well-known feature of the Chinese art market, that it is a convenient venue for offering bribes because Chinese auction houses take no responsibility for a work’s authenticity. However, it would be a step forward if we could begin to quantify how much of the Chinese art market is a conduit for illegal activity and how much is legitimate sales: “The price of Chinese art is really abnormal,” Jiang Yinfeng, a painter and art critic told the Worker’s Daily. “Art has become the best tool for money laundering and corruption.” "China’s gift-giving culture drives up prices. Demand is driven by businessmen buying artefacts as presents for officials. Fake or genuine, an artwork presents an opportunity to ‘wash’ a bribe, WIC explains. A businessman gives a painting to an official, whose relative auctions it off. The businessman buys it back at an inflated price and the official pockets the cash. This leaves less evidence linking favour to bribe than handing over suitcases of cash. More sophisticated schemes exist but this is the general idea. "It goes without saying that a clampdown on dodgy art deals will hit all players in the business, but no one really knows how much is real." _ArtMarketMonitor >>> ONE CULTURAL VICTIM OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST by Georgina Adam Is the well-regarded Running Horse gallery in Beirut. Known for presenting younger artists and for exhibiting at the past two editions of Art Dubai, Running Horse closed at the end of last year; its founder Lea Sednaoui says she will communicate her new plans soon._FinancialTimes Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Art for Cars: art4carz.com Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
