The Inherently Trivial Work of Pablo Picasso, et al.

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An Essay for my 14 Year Old

PORSCHE

By Adrian Schachter


Ferdinand Porsche in 1931, an Austrian engineer, started the company PORSCHE. He was working in the automotive industry in Germany and helped to create the first Volkswagen, the Beetle, which has sold millions and millions (Hitler actually stole the design from Josef Ganz when he discovered he was Jewish and handed over the brief to Porsche, though Ferdinand Porsche and his son only got to fully enjoy their success after they were released from internment for war crimes, which facts I happened to leave out of the school version). After World War II the Porsche Company began as an independent company with a rear-engined sports car called the 356, and the legend as we know it today was successfully launched. By fostering a program of development for motor racing, which Porsche came to dominate in many sectors, the road cars directly benefited from the advancements. The saying goes, race them on the Sundays, sell them on Mondays.


The Porsche 911 is a luxury 2-door sports coupe introduced in 1963 and designed by the son of the company founder; since then it has undergone continuous development over the years, but the basic concept has remained little changed throughout its evolution over nearly 50 years. The classic Porsche 911 was developed as a much more powerful, larger, more comfortable replacement for the company's first model, the 356. Originally the car was to be known as the 901 but the company Peugeot filed to own the rights to any car designated by a number with a zero in the middle! After i eat a big meal I sort of resemble a snake that ate a mouse which pretty much is the shape of a Porsche 911; maybe that's why i respond so much.


What makes the 911 and Porsche Company so great is that they have enjoyed a degree of reliability and excellence in engineering unrivaled by any company in the history of car making. The company is driven by engineering rather than flashy design or other tricks to make it fashionable and desirable employed by other carmakers. The consistency in design is I feel not a drawback to the company over the years, though some people might argue that the company has not really strayed too far over the many years making nearly what appears to be the same car over and over again. But this is not so as there have been subtle refinements over time reflecting technological developments from style and engine changes to new environmentally sound hybrids.


Personally, I love these cars (my dad has a few classic old ones from the 1970’s so I have seen, been driven in and smelled them a lot!), because they are cleanly designed, simple and elegant, and are incredibly well made. The colors of the early cars are wild and adventurous, like signal yellow, tangerine and viper green which you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the brand, but they speak of the time and they are like big art pieces. Though Ferrari’s are louder, way more attention grabbing, and say more about how much money you have then how you like to drive, a Porsche is more about your relationship to the road and experience behind the wheel. Also, even the old cars, if well maintained, will never fail to start with a twist of the key! (Funny, the day this was handed in to teacher my 1969 911E, just off boat from US, conked out leaving a gas station followed by a 1963 shiny red Ferrari Dino driven by a French woman-that was embarrassing. Also, first time in 15 years a Porsche failed to function; perhaps payback for assisting son shirk homework).


This reason the company is so successful, at times the most financially successful car company on the planet, is precisely because of the consistency of the product, the continuity of the design and excellence of engineering. Rather then stressing newness just for the sake of satisfying some marketing campaign, as people always seem to want the next thing, Porsche continues to innovate and invent but within a solid framework of delivering great reliable and desirable to own cars!! And unlike most companies and consumers, Porsche thinks that less is more (light weight and simplicity), instead of more is more.


Adrian: Amazing, this is a top piece of work. You clearly have an interest into Porsche. You should consider a career as a motoring journalist! Grade A

new world order. (excerpt)

The west is the new emerging market. Specifically, Italy is on the verge of IMF intervention, and on the brink or just past is: Greece, USA, UK, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France, and I’m sure I am missing a few. Why today a day cannot go by without lip service to so-called emerging markets? Sorry, but Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Russia, they are far from emerging, they have emerged; in fact they are dictating the flow of commerce. Driving commodities, property, gold, art, wine; you name it—that is more late capitalism then developing country. And we who think we are above the fray, above reproach, above it all, are not far from being reduced to hat-in-hand has-beens. A bit of cold, a bit of snow: Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport paralyzed for a week during Christmas; and, Kennedy Airport in New York, pretty much the same deal. But in a truly contrarian sense, give us 10 years or so to retrench, with technology leading the way, and perhaps we can return to the fray.

"The most groundbreaking art is coming from the East" Saatchi Gallery Debate for Asian art in London 11/11/10

I hate to start off on such a negative note but it’s is an absurd, jingoistic and presumptuous sentiment to even ask the question as to whether Asian or European art is more or less groundbreaking than art from any other place on the planet. Funny how American art doesn’t even rate a mention in the premise to this discussion. I once read a Jay Jopling quote some years ago that the only good art was being created in London (yet the rest England); it was as inane and meaningless a comment then about art from East London as it is about art from the East tonight.


I am admittedly not an expert on Asian art and certainly do not profess to be one, I only know what little I have seen in the galleries, books, magazines and auction houses. And with a population of over a billion in China, it would be rather surprising if there wasn’t at least some great art to emerge in the recent past. However, like George Washington, I am incapable of telling a lie: embarrassingly, I haven’t even been to the region yet, just another sheltered American living in London. But, with a grain of salt and without meaning to be flippant, what’s so groundbreaking in the sense of a true paradigm shift, about paintings made with ashes, depictions of family bloodlines, groups of smiley faces, baby Mao’s, Porsche and Pepsi signs and stacks of vases and chairs?


My point is that Asian art is no more or less exciting today then art from New Jersey, New Dehli or New Zeland. We live in a new, interdependent world order after years of lip service to globalization where artistic contributions with weight and quality arise from anywhere and everywhere. Such foolish, gratuitous and sweeping generalizations before us tonight are more marketing hype then meaningful. I’d say they are dangerous too, but in the context of the art world there is very little prospect of danger, other than being Ai Wei Wei or crushed by a toppling Richard Serra sculpture or whacked by a Christo umbrella.


If you phrased it in a wider sense, perhaps art from the emerging markets, including India, Russia, the Middle East but also you can’t count out South America, Africa … the world, it just doesn’t make sense any way you slice it. Great art emerges from all corners of the earth and the premise of this entire debate is rather superfluous altogether. Besides, not to be too cynical either, a lot of the art from the East seems calculated to titillate and feed into the voracious appetites and expectations of western collectors, a kind of reverse stereotyping where the art is an effort to give the buyer what they think Chinese art should be like for instance. In any event, the world is so homogenous with everyone watching the same crap on TV, same commercial movies, reading the same monotonous art magazines and web sites that often you would be hard pressed to differentiate art from one region of the world to the next.

Back to Ai Wei Wei, this truly is one of the only differentiating factors comparing art from one country to the next as there are very few places besides Russia where you put your life on the line just to express yourself; and, an artist can find themselves on the front page of the international newspapers and fundamentally threatened, thwarted and physically endangered just or picking up a paint brush or making an installation. Thus anxieties about loss of identity and cultural specificity are truly not the same in the West but they are also just as at stake in places as disparate as Cuba and the Middle East and any other regime where democracy is not fully tolerated or embraced as an option.

As far as the references to differing tastes, aspirations, and categories of consciousness, we are mostly all sadly striving for the same Prada defined spoils of mass consumerism. So yet again, I simply find many more similarities in the world today then differences. Thank you very much.

The Royal College of Art, 11/9/10 Design Relationships: The ways design relates to commerce and the ways it touches people

I don't differentiate between a chair, a sculpture or a car. As Sam has said to me in the past, cars are the most ubiquitous form of design in our lives, experienced on a daily basis literally thousands of times. Yet we don't see them while driving and leave them after parking. Though I must admit I keep mine in my office, with one half under my desk. 

Now I’d like to speak about what is called Design Art. This is a rather artificial term recently coined by an auction house to market high- end furniture like art. Design Art aped the art market releasing objects in limited editions, usually of 12 for no rhyme or reason, and in the process raised the bar of what you can get away with charging for a chair. This originated with the practice of casting bronze sculptures in more than one due to process of creating moulds from which to cast objects. And it worked: spawning countless design auctions, galleries and fairs, among the most prominent is the fair associated with Basel, the main event in Switzerland and the coming version in Miami next month.


Though design art may seem a gimmick to ascribe higher value to what is in effect simply another chair or a sofa, the key issue, which I feel can have dramatic implications for the car industry is that it does permit designers a wider platform to experiment with less commercially viable materials and technologies that could not readily be put into production.


Marc Newson, the poster boy for design art, has designed a widely acclaimed prototype for Ford and most famously the Lockheed Lounge, inspired by the riveted wings of a plane, which has been featured in a Madonna video and has fetched more that $2.5m in a private sale. Newson’s Locheed was fabricated in an addition of 8 with 4 proofs-if you add that up in total, you can afford a Lockheed plane with the proceeds of the edition, Conran’s should take note. More recently Newson has done a boat for Riva, a plane interior for Quantas and an actual spaceship, and regularly exhibits for the worlds most prestigious gallery-Gagosian, where in New York (Gagosian has about 500 galleries but that’s another talk) he presently has an exhibit solely based on the theme of transportation.


My point is that why shouldn't cars premier at museums and galleries and be marketed like works of art-like limited edition sculptures? I've been successful in convincing Phillips auction house most known for flogging Koons, to sell cars in their design sales (by the way, last night they sold a Warhol for nearly $63.5m in a $137m contemporary art sale, dwarfing last year’s $7m auction).


In 2006 I commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to design the Z Car concept, of which we have now done two iterations, a 3 and 4 wheel prototype. Zaha has created many transport relevant designs from a parking lot in France, a firehouse in Basel, the BMW factory in Leipzig, a new boat as well, and is nearing completion on the extraordinary Olympic swimming pavilion—a 17,000 seat arena. In an amazing act of democratizing the factory, the conveyor belt for BMW, where the 3 series is built, travels overhead though the cafeteria and executive offices.


The Z Car, of which we have a few 1:1 scale models, has traveled from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to Museums and galleries throughout Europe, the States and the Middle East. Major manufactures could learn something from such a bespoke design led approach. It takes the same money to design an awful car as an awfully nice one. And I'd visit any museum in the world to see a Frank Stephenson exhibit and be happy to collect his and other designer’s drawings. Sadly and undeservedly, car designers are the unsung heroes of aesthetics. But on a more practical level, why not use existing platforms like having Hadid re-skin a T25 Gordon Murray city car for the Olympics?


Though I am a bit extreme in my appreciation of all things cars, even as static objects, the public is being sold short by the degree of mediocrity in the world of vehicle design. Today, design seems so homogenous the world over, but its much worse in the states where driving down the motorway seems like a continuous block of metal—like soviet block architecture on wheels which is endlessly depressing. We live in a universe defined by an unprecedented degree of choice, so why not when it comes to cars too?

Paul Thek Artist's Artist, MIT Press, February 2009 Nothing but Time

Nothing but Time 

Kenny Schachter


The newspaper works of Paul Thek, which began in earnest in late 1960’s and continued unabated until his death in 1988, had a narrative arc defined by an idiosyncratic expression of hope and beauty, and ended in a more ambiguous state of disillusionment. They are narrative parables sharing as much with literature, history and religion as with the history of art. The early newspaper works at times resemble visceral children’s illustrations depicting Thek’s inimitable ideals of happiness and love with an eternal quality above and apart from the material world. Though he exhorted to “Fall in love with your life” in note pad musings, within the same page of unbridled optimism were signs of tragedy and torment, “We’re all crying children together”.1 

Though the newspaper works appeared random and at times resembled writing more than drawing, as a whole they constituted a visual diary and travelogue. There was an ascetic quality to the systematic way in which Thek recorded his life continually over the entire course of his career. You can practically hear the silence, the meditative nature of the process of the making of the newspaper works but they are also imbued with the quality of sheet music that reverberates off the page. In Thek’s work no subject evaded his mockery, mirth and empathy, a touch that managed to be both cynical and idealistic. Like fully formed pages from an oversized sketchbook, the newspaper works could appear classical, cartoonish, or like thought-bubbles, there was no telling. There were grapes on vines, potatoes, seascapes, landscapes, garden dwarfs, snakes, dinosaurs, hammers and sickles, and the Statute of Liberty—the whimsical and the lighthearted, but there was always more to be read. They offered an uncensored snapshot of Thek’s mind’s eye. These works were possessed of a many layered, philosophical, and ageless conceptual delicacy—a traditional conception of beauty in the hopeful, transcendent sense of the word. Not indulgent, self-congratulatory, or clichéd but celebratory and all embracing. On-its-sleeve emotional, and romantic nevertheless.


The spirit of Thek’s newspaper works encapsulated a hippy disregard and disdain for the establishment—subverting and undermining history and authorship—while in effect rewriting the news. The works were defined by a sense of utility in their making, by way of sparse and reduced means, while yielding immense fruits from these daily labors. History, religion, and politics of the day were replaced with Thek’s notion of a more tolerant Catholicism of his own devices. These paintings obliterated history while simultaneously creating it and traversed over the daily account of current affairs. Thek didn’t re-cite history, the canonized version or his own, but erased it like Rauschenberg’s notorious vandalism of a de Kooning drawing. He then added aesthetically and conceptually to the end product of Rauschenberg’s de Kooning gesture atop the everyday chatter of the International Herald Tribune. What became a routine for Thek was in a sense passive (repetitive markings on blotted-out newsprint) and concurrently, a Hegelian overtaking of the reportages on the condition of the world, ingesting the pulp in the process. In the many variants of his works, Thek foresaw the death of the hippy and the innocence it engendered at the hands of inexorable technological and industrial progress. Or what was perceived as progress. These newspaper artworks defaced the currency of the times, prior to the onset of the worldwide gaggle of Googlers, when newspapers held greater sway in the conveyance of news and information. Thek foresaw the condition of humanity in retreat in the face of the forward march of technology. What passes for life today largely appears on a glass screen.


Society has always devoured current events, thirsting for knowledge of the world around us; in turn, Thek consumed the news itself, marking his time and space with little concrete poems, in effect soiling the official account of the daily news like a housetrained dog. Creating lasting newspaper art was in contravention to the inherent instability, and valueless-ness of a given newspaper page. The disposable, good-for-a-day shelf life of newspapers was transformed into something immortal and everlasting, but surely the non-archival tendencies of his medium of choice were not lost on Thek. Old newspapers yellow and turn to dust over time unless measures are taken to preserve them, such as mounting on a fixed surface. Yet one slice of painted newspaper sandwiched between two pieces of Plexiglas was Theks favored method for serving them to the public. The preceding expresses the ever self-contradicting and self-negating nature of the artist himself: this was painting as wasting asset, the lifespan of the art slipping away unless curative action taken. Like the meat works, the newspaper paintings had decay imbedded, plain to the eye and touch. Like the meat works, the newspaper works symbolized fragility, vulnerability, and fallibility of the body.


By the late 1960’s Thek was abroad much of the time, hence the use of international papers with a ready supply at hand, but this could also be said to indicate yearning for what was left behind, a feeling of being homesick, and maintaining ties, a link, with the States. Thek’s self-effacing paintings might also have been an attempt to combat his absence from an America moving along without him. Missing from the New York-centric scene for so long without adequate representation in the US throughout the years, Thek was for all purposes presumed dead. How it must have eaten at him. In a way he was symbolically reinserting himself back into the picture. By using newspapers, Thek made a custom of staying abreast, keeping track, and crossing-off the passing days on a calendar. The habit of continuously working on newsprint, the familiar connotation of the newspaper—something we do first thing every day, has the characteristics of an absolution, a ritual—a discipline which is the byproduct of the hand and a confirmation of a daily work ethic.


These paintings also involved chance, in as much as the contents of a given newspaper page was never uniform or predictable and at times resembled games and brainteasers in the manner of Duchamp, employing wordplays and backwards text. Some were rendered as technical tour de forces, while others appeared crude and purposefully raw, reversing the old master level of skill he effortlessly displayed, flaunting built-in contradictions. Opposite a blank canvas, the newspaper paintings functioned as records contrasting the public and private; each work contained an unfolding social realism coupled with the personal memoir of a nearly solitary life. Entrenched in the seemingly arbitrary was the inevitability of the day-to-day goings on in the world. Thek accomplished the consummate high wire act, a feat as near impossible as improbable, of creating something conceptual and dazzling in a form practically invisible—shorn pages of a daily newspaper.


Braque and Picasso early on adapted the use of newspaper in paintings and collages cognizant of the multiple meanings implicit in such texts, but with Thek there was no collage, rather the use of the newspaper as a conceptual girder, a structure upon which to underpin the image with a built-in obsolescence like a disposable lighter. Robert Smithson’s notion of entropy depicted inherent disorder in various systems and entailed intervening in the natural landscape with human means of obstruction, like a slow glue pour in a strip mine, or shards of mirror deposited amongst a pile of boulders in a quarry. Decay, ephemera, and deterioration have long been components of Thek’s works from the meat to the scatter installations, not to mention the bulk of work abandoned through unpaid storage bills, museum neglect and nonfeasance on the part of the artist. For Thek there was a negation, exhaustion in the demanding, Judeo-Christian work ethic he firmly practiced until the end of his life.


One can imagine a detente with Warhol in which the means of mechanical reproduction were willfully laid down, in place of the reintroduction of the movement of the artist’s hand along the surface of a given page, a subject (renderings of his own pencil or brush-in-hand) frequently visited upon by Thek. The creations of Thek were on a prodigious scale, almost equal to the repetitive output of the screenprint presses of the times and touched upon some of the same Warholian issues of all manner of consumption and political folly. The Brillo Box sculpture Thek obtained and used to house his chunk of meat underscored his ambivalence and awe at the icon of easy art, and his attempt to shove some vitality and humanity back into the box.


Richard Long marks time by taking long walks, accumulating rocks and finally arranging them in patterns. Formally, a Thek newspaper painting was a simple geometric picture plane, a rectangle of pigment floating within the rectangle of the printed page, in the spirit of Jasper Johns saying to take an object, do something to it and do something else. Thek preserved and saw beauty in the mundane, fleeting character of the everyday by painting vignettes over the daily paper, with fragments of the news peeking through around the edges of the compositions. In doing so, he cast a veil over the main import of current events, partially obliterating and obscuring them, but always left a fleeting peep. He didn’t so much as kill-off the original text and image as damage it. Only a mist of the record of the time remained.


On Kawara repeatedly makes uniformly formatted paintings of a given day, date and year that compress a span of 24 hours to its most elemental form, with little or no visual dynamic. Thek went further when he wedded the conceptual effects of time to beauty. And he was the rare possessor of the painstakingly learned technical acumen to bring it off; this is something as uncommon today as it was at the onset of conceptualism. Franz West has likewise draped newspapers over furniture and installations, anchoring his works in the here and now: in West’s sculptures we are sitting on history, in Thek’s paintings we are unwittingly surfing over it while savoring the delight of a handmade image. Resembling the role of newspapers in earnestly spreading a message, Thek felt compelled to passionately communicate through his efforts.


Rather than refer to each and every artist that employed press as platform, suffice it to say that Thek’s two-dimensional dioramas were like looking through a keyhole into his personal world of imagination and concerns couched in the moment in which they were completed. Thek depicted Rembrandt in his notebooks, referenced Van Gogh in his writings, and employed the colors and brushwork of Monet. By using newspaper as palette and canvas, Thek made painting instantly historical, affixing himself to his era like a leach or parasite, physically inserting himself into advertising, politics, business and sport—and art. His means of expression were lowly and humble and readily available on every street corner at every minute of the day; the newspaper works were unassuming and scruffy like Thek himself and echoed the chore-like manner in which he took to chronicling his life. These pieces could be somewhat abject, while retaining the original function of explicating current events and occurrences beyond our immediate grasp. A delicate, feeble resource in the hierarchy of artistic media, newspaper could be seen as inferior not only to canvas but to drawing paper as well; but weakness was something valued by Thek, something in which he found strength and solace.


When Thek wasn’t painting on newspapers he was hanging them and discarding them in crumpled piles throughout the freewheeling, biblical and politically themed, room-scaled installations he constructed. They were his portable clocks to root things, freeze things in time. By choosing to save, preserve and utilize lowly newspapers, Thek was spinning garbage into gold (aesthetically, anyway) while stopping time in amber. Thek recycled before recycling. By the1980’s the city was going through an economic explosion of art, ready money and glamour. Thek was left out of this renaissance. There was cocaine snowing from the ceiling of Studio 54 literally and figuratively, and all was flash and glitter. This did not serve the politically ambitious but physically modest works of Thek very well. He responded by purposefully making work he himself termed bad painting to speak in the vernacular of 1980’s style painting (though still unassuming in scale), yet concurrently to critique what he saw as a well of mediocrity. With the infamous, probing list of questions he required of his Cooper Union classes in the early 80’s, taught for income, Thek took jabs at smugness, grandiosity, and pretension with interrogations on money and waste, and other largely personal inquires. These queries put to his students bordered on trespass, but Thek was not concerned with superficial meanings in his own life and work, nor in others.


Concurrently, AIDS in New York in the early 1980’s was like an untold scourge claiming the lives of many and especially hitting hard the creative fields. Sexual mores came under reassessment to an extent previously unknown and homosexuals were the human face of a contagious, incurable plague, inciting fear and further prejudice. It is hard to remember a time when such a diagnosis meant invariably imminent death. During the same period the prices of a Julian Schnabel painting the size of a house went from a few thousand to a hundred thousand virtually overnight, such was the contrasting frivolity of the art world. All the while Thek was creating small drawings and paintings on paper and board of a throwaway sensibility. Rooftop sketches, landscapes, fruits and vegetables, still lifes from a time past out of touch with the inflated gesture of big for the sake of big. This was a market rife with hype and hyperbole of talent (not dissimilar the 00’s) from the likes of the Italian trio then taking New York by storm, the three C’s: Sandro Chia, Francisco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi. In the Spring of 1985 Clemente alone had a triple venue show, embraced by collectors and critics alike, at Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Sperone Westwater. What looked like an ad hoc flourish on a sheet of newspaper by Thek must have appeared to pale, if register at all, on anyone’s radar by way of comparison. Though clear now from the 1980’s that volume would not replace content, at the time, Paul Thek was cast aside from the glamorization and expansion of the art market, and the rollicking community that inevitably adhered to it.


Now, artists barely gaining their footing are embraced by market and museums alike, directly out of university studios. Things eschewed by Thek during his lifetime such as gratuitous shock, market cultivation, and self-branding (without trace of poetry or irony) are among the commercial stratagems on the road to approbation and material wealth. Working in a supermarket and cleaning hospital rooms at what should have been an apex of his career and in the latter part of his life for most would seem demoralizing, but for Thek was a refuge. Thek’s career was a mature, slow burn of incremental strides, but still largely overlooked in the USA. Paul Thek would have been 75 years old in 2008 (b. 1933, Brooklyn, New York) yet without a major US museum retrospective to date, though debate lingers at a few institutions. Thek’s was a life of wanting and suffering in the name of a God that for Thek meant art, creativity and above all else, productiveness. Moving back to New York in late 1970’s left Thek out of touch, out of sight and out of the minds of those who made up the New York art scene. This left him demoralized and unable to work for a brief period, pained by a crisis of meaning in his art.


In the late works, the subject matter of the newspaper paintings shifted possibly in relation to Thek’s declining health, physical and mental, and lack of professional acceptance. The full onset of AIDS and the resultant deterioration of mind and body contributed to a content shift in the late works to a more subdued, internalized, less defined state of things. There is the muddy haze of the 1981 abstraction “Untitled (Little Yellow Pitchfork)” circa 1981 featuring a small pitchfork lost in a mucky field of brown, the tool of hapless farmer and devil alike. From the same period is “Untitled (Brick Wall) from 1982 that resembles a familiar pastiche of a modernist, geometric abstraction. There was a simultaneous vein that referenced dejection, isolation, and bitterness festering in Thek noticeable in works that struck out via subtle jibes and attacks. A 1987 painting on board entitled “An Erotics of Art” was no more than an infantile, fleshy-colored mess with badly drawn female parts, while the newspaper work “The Face of God” from 1988, consisted of a crudely drawn face of a clock: is it a cruel, cold god reduced to nothing but finite, predetermined time? Offsetting his need to connect with others through his work, Thek harbored intent to abdicate, to remove himself. The earlier optimism and wide-eyed enthusiasm were replaced by doom and gloom.


Thek was disturbed by what appeared like collusion and corruption on the part of the art world to purposefully reject him; he felt excluded from a club of his peers and the accompanying whirlwind around them that ensured success and acclaim. This all must have been experienced as a tragic fall from grace from the early acceptance of his noted Technological Reliquary series. Throughout it all, Thek never completely lost his sense of hope that someday he would be recognized, but he came to the conclusion that someday would in all probability be posthumous. In general, Thek’s work had the quality of outsider art, which in a sense it was, due to its utter neglect during his lifetime. For Thek, work was all there ever was: it was emboldening and above all, holy, but for Thek work was never fully calm, which wrought uneasiness and anxiety throughout his life, and resulted in an indeterminate and unfulfilled journey.


Near the end, Thek purposefully abandoned the refinement and representational insight of his earlier works reflecting his physical and emotional state, afflicted by an incurable, stigmatized disease and career neglect in his homeland. In the last newspaper works, gone are the childlike exuberance and celebration of nature, replaced by a duller form of abstractionism, signifying loss of love, innocence, and life. His version of Yankee enthusiasm, cheerfulness and energy, which remained throughout his sojourn in Europe, were hardheartedly quelled. After a shortened but fertile lifetime of unstoppable invention, Thek became a curmudgeon scarred by disregard and inattention. Even though he was cut down prematurely, Thek still managed to produce astounding, prescient and unparalleled work in every conceivable medium. The breadth of the newspaper works alone reflect a military discipline and self-control hardly seen during the time, and rarely so today. Thek’s was a restless and relentless pursuit only now being taken seriously into consideration in relation to art before and after. Like Tonio Kroger, Thek resembled the character in the novella by Thomas Mann, with his nose firmly and forlornly pressed against the wrong side of the window of a big party where everyone is frolicking, singing, dancing (and making more money), but during his lifetime, he would always remain on the outside, uninvited.


“I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at the moment.”2 Nothing but time can suggest a metaphysical expanse, a death sentence, or both. In Thek’s case, hopefully the passage of time will ameliorate the shameful lack of recognition for his deserved output.

The Bride Stripped Bare, Bared: The Art of Zaha Hadid, Publication Accompanying Exhibit at Gmurzynska Gallery, Zurich

The Bride Stripped Bare, Bared 


When the spheres of art, architecture and design collide as they do in the works of Zaha Hadid, the result is a tectonic shift in the notion of how form can be depicted. Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp hinted at an idea of the fourth dimension in art in the early 20th century, but Hadid has gone further in representing such a concept; the result is Cubism in space. Nothing is taken as a given in an installation, including the interior walls of a gallery or the distinction between what is public and private, inside or outside—with Zaha Hadid all previously held beliefs are suspended, blurred and ultimately overturned, but with mathematical precision. Here we have a vision of the elusive 4th dimension but in observable form. Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare” is a sculptural trope exploring the division of modalities in art, striving for new methods of artistic creation, physical, cerebral and allegorical. Hadid’s work is a similar exploration, devoid of the contrived psychosexual allusions. But beyond the Broken Glass, with Hadid, we have been sucked into another dimension of experience, redefining our visual orientation.


In Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” we are faced with an abstracted female figure who’s shattered geometric fragments call forth the idea of movement, as in a Futurist work of art. The shock was in the nomenclature he utilized, calling an assemblage of what appeared to be nothing other than a collection of painted geometric fragments a nude was a conceptual affront to the senses of the art-going public. With the art of Hadid, we have form itself, shapes spun into space seemingly willy-nilly, but with inherent accuracy in calculation and aforethought. There is no nudging the viewers, winking to them in collusion or provoking them with intellectual high jinks; rather with Hadid, we are witnessing the purity of Platonic forms as they relate to extrapolated architectural elements, giving rise to new life and beauty in the process. Since her early influence by hard-edged Constructivist art, I would say there has been a shift to a more naturalistic articulation, a position that relates to constantly conjuring a sense of motion derived from nature. Like Duchamp, who also competed as a chess master and wrote extensively on the subject, Zaha Hadid is fiercely rational, but also playful, humanistic, and filled with wonderment. With Hadid, you get less wordplay and more a focus on the manipulation of volumes.


The Suprematist grammar of Malevich in such works as “Suprematism. (Supremus #50”), 1915 “Suprematism (Self-Portrait)”, 1916, “Suprematism, Museum of Art”, 1916, could pass as studies for early Hadid works such as The Peak in Hong Kong in 1983 and any number of drawings and studies since. Malevich was influenced by aerial photography that was reflected in a topographical quality to the schematic layout of the shapes and compositions he painted, which in turn lent a very architectural flare to the early works. It is no surprise that he was such an influence on Hadid who seemed to be moved by the distilled and reductive summing up of art and its content that Malevich pioneered. It was an art devoid of gratuitous emotion, decoration or narrative; but could also been seen as touching and essential.


Though physically static, the reliefs, paintings and sculptures of Hadid are imbued with a tangible sense of rhythm, like a Merce Cunningham choreography or Matisse’s dancers. In these works, we are experiencing not so much the distilled, reductive shapes employed by the Supremacists, but rather Hadid’s personal expression of organic forms and fluidity. The newness of her constructed world, from the materials usage reflecting the present means of technology and fabrication methods at hand, to the ways in which she puts them to use, is nothing less than breathtaking. With walls askew, the intensely analytical interpretation of a three-dimensional area can be unsettling and confusing like an amusement park ride, but always thought provoking and unnerving. Hadid makes meaning out of chaos, ordering a world characterized by an unruly, fierce bombardment of information. With the rapidity of scientific and technological change accelerated at a pace felt as never before, Hadid translates this whirlwind into a digestible, international language understandable by all. She sees through the morass of tumult and shifting perceptions and shepherds us like a sage, helping and guiding us to clarity. Zaha Hadid makes order out of distorted reality and gives birth to a new material expressionism.


The world of Zaha Hadid is a masterplan for life, a macro view imbued with the aesthetics of art, design and architecture. Making your way through an exhibit or building of hers is like driving through explosive weather formation that is simultaneously calming and reassuring. Hadid is busy filling voids, controlling space and constantly morphing and transforming. You don't typically think of a city square as a malleable device pushing and pulling you into and out of an art gallery, but that is exactly what Zaha has done in the present exhibit. Using the public square as fodder for her art, Hadid has bracketed an entire gallery and it’s contents with the streetscape as a frame—the street is seen to bleed into the exhibit and vice versa.


The materials she employs from Plexiglas, mirror, fiberglass, vinyl graphics, to metals are as diverse as the objects she crafts like a mad alchemist, and they get reconfigured and recycled time and again. Drawings and past works are layered and layered atop one another like sedimentary rocks to make new works in an act of relentless recycling, and regurgitating. A drawing becomes a walk-in environment, a sketch becomes a large-scale canvas work, or printed directly onto the fabric of an upholstered couch. Compositionally, Hadid is similar to a rap musician, but rather than lifting and quoting from the works of others (like so many have done with Zaha's works) she samples her own history and past. The results are new definitions of art: reimagining and redrawing space and what is seen to go on inside of it. In “Victoria City Metal Pespective” thin metal tubing is used to make a perspectival drawing in thin air with an assuredness that recalls Hans Namuth’s famous film of Jackson Pollack painting on glass.


The reliefs, sculptures and models of Hadid expose her working processes via prototypes put on view as if in a state of undress. The individual items are voluptuous and seductive revealing a sublime, primal sensibility. She has no fear displaying what could be construed as unintentional or unavoidable accidents, as these are works in progress illustrative of her means and methods. Like nature, like life, imperfections are unavoidable. The shapes are at the same time bulbous, futuristic and retro. By having a dialogue with the past she climbs into the future. Somehow these pieces appear abstract, figurative, obscure and concrete all at once. The interplay of color and form bounce around in your mind like an atom smasher. It’s a wild act of creative destruction.


Some of these works hark back to the biomorphic curves from the 1960s but could equally be imagined in the 2060s. There is a distilling of the mystification of nature accompanied by a palpable sense of energy that seems to be missing a musical score for full dramatic effect. In the exhibit, there is a prototype for a fireplace resembling a vessel, a female form both sensuous and dynamic. Hadid doesn't take the gallery as static, but engages in an active conversation that is both lyrical and fantastical. There are correlations, juxtapositions, conversations, actions and reactions; it’s a lot to take in. For her it’s a normal way of thought. This is not art in vacuum but a proactive dialogue within space, it’s gallery as laboratory, theme park and think tank all at once.


With relief works like “Lunar Triptych”; “Performing Arts Center, Abu Dhabi”; and “Guggenheim Vilnius Museum, Lithuania”, Hadid breaks through the picture plane in more than intent. Here we see her broadening, stretching, and testing our perceptions. With works like “Kloris”, “Sofa” and the “Crater” table, we have buildings as furniture and in these works we see childlike play in the distortions and fissures of reality. What at times appears a lack of correlation between disciplines twist and turn into a convergence of all of the above. It’s a truly magical and unique thing to behold.


Jeff Koons recently designed an art car for BMW, a graphic explosion painted onto the exterior of a Le Mans racer, but Hadid one-upped him long ago by democratizing the BMW factory in Leipzig by way of having the traditional automotive conveyor belt pass overhead through the cafeteria and executive offices. Her body of work translates into an accessible, populous art form, and whithin the context of a gallery serves to domesticate architecture for home use.


It is said Picasso worked every day for more than 70 years, evidenced by his prodigious output in every available and imaginable medium at hand; still only in mid-career, Zaha has already accomplished the production output of many lifetimes. She is nothing less than Picasso-esque in her outpouring of creativity in every realm she pursues. Making the leap from one practice to another as seamlessly performed by Hadid is no easy task: but she glides through architecture, design and art, making it all seem so effortless. There is no one in her rear view mirror. Whatever was previously conceived in relation to the glass ceiling in societies inherent condescension and prejudices have, in the case of Hadid, been violently and forever overthrown. Zaha’s work is at times construed as futuristic and outlandish, but the reality is that it is entirely grounded in natural concerns. Hadid uses geometry as an artistic medium to paint pictures and craft sculptures of the physical world around us.


Witnessing the fractured objects in a Hadid installation is akin to a controlled explosion, like a broken dam with the charging liquid instantly contained. Hadid and her works are bold, proud and strong, displaying no fear in the territory they tread. The confidence is inspiring and unflinching: Hadid is a provocateur only in the sense of a probing intellect that knows no bounds or compromise. She loves to flourish and prod like a peacock with flaring feathers. Walking into a Hadid building or exhibit is like a blast of air, a gale force burst of action, creativity and personality. She is nothing less than a daunting physical power. All the planets must have aligned to give birth to such a star, a breadth of talent. Zaha Hadid is a maverick instigator, sharing more with punk than the establishment that has belatedly embraced her after a criminally overdue journey.

It’s a Mad, Mad Art World: the Market and Machinations from Soup Cans to Nuts

Andy Warhol dreamt about money, made art about money but never made the money he fantasized about till after his death. His auction record during his lifetime was a mere $385,000 in 1986 for a piece fittingly titled “200 One Dollar Bills” purchased by Paulina Karpides and recently sold by the same collector for $43,762,500, also fitting.


The difference between Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst is that with Warhol it was all about fame and money; fame he achieved, wealth only posthumously. Hirst has made his cake (or had it fabricated) and is eating it all the way to Coutts & Co. With Bono in tow, today’s successful artist can become a celeb too, with bona fide rock star status and the cash flow to match. For all his aspirations, Warhol was like George Best or American baseball player Hank Aaron: they expanded the audience to mass while opening future doors for athletes to earn corporate executive salaries, though Warhol was never able to sort it for himself like HIrst managed. One could not exist without the other.


Art used to be more like a religion, with educational, historic, technical, analytic and cultural aspirations; but over time, as most religions came to be replaced by the blind pursuit of material wealth, art followed suit, and swiftly at that. Forget Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism and any other -isms you can conjure, most art now is all about Economic-ism. Over the years, the balance of power has shifted from critics and dealers who used to be able to make or break a career to artists and collectors (and artists that collect) who are now ruling the roost.


People believe that art is subjective, and lacking inherent value—though I can on one level understand why it entails a certain leap of faith to fathom paying £75,000,000 for what amounts to £6.86 of pigment, canvas and stretcher bars. But what cannot be overestimated is the point that once art came off the cave walls, it’s been covetously and conspicuously collected. The first time contemporary art entered the realm of high-end, expensive evening sales at auction was in 1997 when a children’s heart specialist went to jail for embezzling money from a surgery fund in order to feed his collecting habit. Such is the fervor that grips collectors that one could even steal money from the hands of dying children to fulfill the desire for more acquisitions. That’s what I call a hardcore collector.


Calculable measures exist that can be systematically applied to ascertain the inherent values of art. There is a laundry list of things that contribute to constitute value in the art world: who’s selling (the gallery and it’s reputation, and auction exposure), who's buying (the stature of the collectors), who's writing about it and which museum is exhibiting, or rather, whose private museum is supporting it. Although it used to be that museums were museums: independent, quasi-objective, publically supported institutions with posterity at heart, today they are being replaced by private vanity enterprises resembling ornate bonnet ornaments atop a wealthy patron’s prized automobile. Private museums are becoming arbiters of taste and in the process, market credibility boosters. Or trying to.


Funny enough, the same piece of art can have as many prices as the depth of knowledge of the particular buyer permits. The difference between neophyte art collectors versus a jaded buyer is that a newcomer thinks they are buying something with a designated price requiring payment. A professional collector is like someone negotiating down the price of a container of milk, not paying for it for two years, and then canceling the deal because the milk went sour. Newbies have no idea what they can get away with in the snake pit of art. They are our favorite dupes. Just kidding.


Visiting the Basel Art Fair in Miami last year I eyed a Warhol portrait of Mao on canvas for a client when a friend called spotting serious dialogue going on with another potential buyer in front of the work I admired. I quickly made my way to the booth of the dealer and noticed he was in serious conversation with a doctor and medical entrepreneur I had only just had breakfast with that day. The art community is like picking up a rock and finding 300 intertwined worms, it’s that incestuous.


I parked myself behind my “friend’s” back and began my surreptitious counter-negotiations. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, due to my friendly relationship with the dealer, I was told what was offered on the Mao but that a further day to conduct due diligence was requested, which nowadays entails doing price research for comparable sales in the worldwide auction market on Artnet, a cheap pay-per-search tool that has revolutionized the way art business is conducted. I was offered a price six-figures less if I pulled the trigger then and there, which I did and made my way completely unnoticed during and after the ordeal.


Sadly, there appears a diminished amount of passion in the art world (for the art anyway) as the days of connoisseurship are mostly behind us; old school collectors who never sell and artists with no regard for private planes and Hello Magazine belong more and more in a vitrine in a natural history museum. Mind you, I find nothing wrong trading the multi-billion dollar Hirst market—the fact that you can rather pleases me, but let's not confuse the big money deals with appreciation.


When it comes to certain collectors and supporters though, you can't deny someone like Charles Saatchi his due in his relentless mining of artistic talent; it’s a full time job and a physically strenuous one at that. Constantly chasing young, new art (with my bad sense of direction) is a fulltime job way too exhausting and expensive to think about. But in the process, he rather foolishly dealt away masterpieces that would have permitted him to trade into retirement with impunity. Instead, Saatchi horse-traded his way into a lower tax bracket. The saying rings true that you sell art to make money and keep it to make wealth.


Not only are most curators, advisers, and dealers professionally non-qualified (many unqualified too) but also art is the last bastion of unregulated, multi-billion dollar business activity in existence. There are various ways to legally insider trade in the art world including front running major museum shows prior to public announcements. This entails being privy to information on the programming of a major museum (or gallery) ostensibly through board members or employees, as to who will be featured in upcoming shows and then buying (and selling) on such non-public knowledge for quick profit.


Perhaps curator and adviser are among the most misused descriptive words in the art world after the over-use of the word important in relationship to describing art works. Correct me if I am wrong in assuming art never cured a strain of cancer. Some artists certainly carry themselves in such a self-important manner like peacocks with their feathers in full display. But I admit there has been research to the effect that living with art can contribute to prolonging your life. I must admit I tend to agree—they say having dogs increases life expectancy so why not the same for looking at and appreciating art too? Besides, I’d much rather have a painting, or better yet, a dog hanging from the wall.


When it comes to making, buying, selling and presenting art we are, to a certain extent, all hookers of one stripe or another, which I readily acknowledge. But I know an art dealer of sorts, always surrounded by a bevy of girls, unfailingly gorgeous. When I questioned him about the somewhat seedy appearance of such a mélange, he replied: “How did we meet?” True enough, I did ask him to fix a friend up (yes, a friend), though it never occurred to me he’d be chartering for the occasion. He went on to relate how many billionaire collectors he made business with out of his procurement activities in the escort sector. As Malcolm X put it, by any means necessary.


As far as buying and selling at auction, you had better know what you’re doing as you are invariably up against the savviest purchasers in the world. And these days that really does mean the world over, as we are truly in an interdependent, global environment after years of lip service to that effect. In the past, dealers banded together at public sales to keep prices artificially low, and then bid amongst themselves after a given sale. Today it’s the reverse, or so they say. But even if you own buckets of Basquiats and you obscenely bid one up auction to bolster the market, nevertheless he who he who plays with a paddle pays.


In New York in the 1940’s, the amount of what we know as contemporary galleries could be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is merely a short time later there are a plethora of commercial venues worldwide. Also, for the first time in history, we are in an age of so many billionaire dealers and collectors, and what is more, dealers and collectors who are billionaires from art, including such legendary hoarders as the Nahmad’s, Berggruen’s, Mugrabi’s, Ernst Beyeler (recently deceased) and Bruno Bischofsberger, amongst others.


Safe to say most artists and galleries are like cottage industry entrepreneurs except for a gallery business model like that of Larry Gagosian who appears intent on nothing less than world domination, establishing beachheads far and wide, from New York to Athens via Paris, London and Rome. There is no one in gallery land in his rearview mirror.


A hedge fund friend at the onset of the recession said he’d hoped I realized the works I yearned for and dealt in would be rendered valueless. He obviously wasn’t the type to beg, borrow or steal for art. Having no means has never been an impediment to a true collector. In the past ten years there has been more growth in the worldwide art market than in the previous 100 years. Though the recession has clearly and concretely caused a shift in what is sought after and effected values, we are today at historic high levels for art. For every bust in the art market lurks a bigger boom down the horizon and vice versa. The art market is a lovely, endless cycle, but one that seems to grow and grow over time with no bounds in sight.


No one could ever have imagined how art fared so well in light of the crushing recession that brought the world’s economy to its collective knees. But clearly trends have shifted today—in the recent past, $25m Jeff Koons sculptures were being flipped like burgers on the resale market before the crates were even unpacked, and at the same time, you couldn’t give a Monet away. Today, contemporary art is a long way from selling for the prices of office buildings but Picasso’s, Monet’s and Van Gogh’s are reaching dizzying heights as we are in the midst of a flight to quality, with art viewed as a safe harbor in uncertain economic times.


Sure there continue to be plenty of naysayers and party poopers that moan that it’s an artificial bubble bound to burst. And true enough, there are many people in it for the wrong reasons, but this is also a good thing, as it only contributes to broaden the markets and create spillover opportunities for the various segments of art. With 1000-point intraday swings in stocks, interest rates at historic lows, banks teetering and companies uneven at best, art has never looked like a better place to be. And the dividend it throws off in good times and bad is the visual pleasure gained by looking. The continuing international economic instability is a major factor driving today’s market for art. And the ever increasing worldwide attention—there are more people today making, looking at, writing about, showing and buying art then at any previous time in history.


People are still endlessly speculating that this artist is overvalued and what that artist is making is not even art. When you go to an emerging art fair like Frieze, I would guess fully 85% on what is on view will become relatively worthless over time. Perhaps even more. But then again, there are also awful Picasso paintings. In the breadth of an artist’s career you encounter a bell's curve; but that is a good thing as it creates access points for people to enter the market at differing price levels. For instance not everyone could afford a Giacometti sculpture (the last public record of $104m didn’t help) but you can find what is considered a less prized etching, almost as gripping.


Most people in art only look at the pictures and adverts in art magazines unless they or their artists are themselves written about. To read, learn and discover more about today’s art forget Frieze and other specialist magazines, try bloomberg.com, the FT, Wall Street Journal—the financial press and fashion mags (and GQ!) do a much better job without trying to impress with unknowable art speak so often encountered in the art journals.


There was even recent coverage in the Economist solely on the past, present and future financial outlook of the oeuvre of Damien Hirst. Though this analysis was flawed (you need specialists entrenched in the field of practice for meaningful insight) it reflects that the times they are not a changing, but they have changed and forever. Too bad Warhol didn’t live to experience a time where there are charts and graphs depicting an artist’s price performance and aesthetic economic indicators and buy/sell signals; chances are it all would have ended up as grist for his canvases. And as for the wrongly long- term bearish sentiment on Hirst in the Economist, I forecast in 10 to 15 years time, the market for Hirst fakes alone will amount to billions.


Art fairs, most of which I have actively participated in at one time or another (and been thrown out of, hard to imagine), are the most effective and convenient way to do reconnaissance about what is afoot at any given time. They are wonderful information gathering affairs as well as the closest the art world gets to fostering a sense of community; we all travel to the same destinations and socialize with many of the same people across multiple time zones. But the fairs are also deeply hierarchical enterprises. The decision making process as to who gets to have a booth, and in which section that booth is located in are based largely on capricious, political factors. Even who gets admitted as a guest and when (there are earlier entry slots for the VIP VIP’s) are status-laden choices by the powers that be.


With the nonstop attendant social flurry, the Miami Basel fair is undoubtedly number one on the charts for schmoozing the art party circuit. However, in hot market times at fairs there is competition to purchase new material, and fast, which in such a public forum is not the ideal way to understand and participate in the market. Art should be a slow burn, a contemplative process, not an ad hoc, spur of the moment, decision-making experience.


The mindset of many students in today’s art academies seem to be as much about seeking tuition in PR, self-promotion, and networking as about learning to draw a nude accurately. After Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an exhibition and declared it art in 1917, the Yellow Pages have became an integral tool of the artist. The readymade, Duchamp’s term for plucking an industrial object out of a catalogue and re-contextualizing it in a gallery setting and calling it art had been replaced by what I call the had-it-made—where a few calls to a fabricator can overcome any shortcomings in virtuosity. How many art stars of today could draw other than a stick figure?


Also, the caution and conservatism you see at the graduate level in art is mindboggling; they are often no different than business or law departments, a professional finishing school readying the mini entrepreneurs to crack the art market. One student during critiques I was giving told me that a known visiting contemporary artist told her not to use a particular material for a work, which assertion in my estimation had absolutely no foundation in reason. The visiting artist probably couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I admit you really are on the spot in some of those critique sessions having to think on your feet all day to needy young artists. So what did the artist do? Of course she trashed and remade her work. At the grad level at least, it’s about connecting with guest lecturers and visiting artists and paving the way to a lucrative niche of one’s own.


Fifteen years ago I bought two artworks, one by Janine Antoni and another from Glenn Ligon both from a struggling artist who had been given the works as gifts. When I tried to sell the pieces years on the results were astonishing: both artists independently declared the works to be not art. In the case of Antoni, the piece was hand-painted plaster casts of her nipples that formed the basis of a later work made in gold. In fact, this was more “art” then the art she normally exhibited. And even more baffling, the Ligon works I purchased in good faith were classical charcoal renderings of some kids involved in a famous rape assault in Central Park at the time. Both artists made efforts to preclude me from selling the work I rightfully owned. It boiled down to issues of trying to control perceptions of the artists and the works. Only in art can someone equally state that an object lifted off the street or appropriated from a newspaper or magazine is his or her creation and simultaneously declare that something made the old fashion way is garbage. Anyway, I traded one and sold the other at auction as the houses don’t seem overly concerned about the intent of the artist when it comes to what is or isn’t art.


The museum realm, more mid-level than Tate or Serpentine scale, resembles small town politics, with little money and little opportunity to make a sizable impact. In a time when even the biggest institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, have been so strapped for cash they can’t paint the walls between exhibits, museums are losing their capacity to make a bang. Being in such financial straits has in turn reduced the scope and adventurousness of public museums programming capabilities and thereby removed the stinger of these venues. Many times, they can no longer afford to make a difference, instead opting for easy to swallow, crowd pleasing events. With less and less funding, there is sadly less at stake for institutions across the board.


Another casualty of the recent transformation of the art world is the slow death of the critic. To make an impact today, an art writer has to become a judge on a reality TV show to make themselves heard like New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz. What Saltz did do that will have lasting repercussions is utilize facebook to transform criticism as we knew it into a democratic participatory sport, and a contact one at that. I still remember quaking in my boots over 20 years ago every time his illustrious wife, New York Times writer Roberta Smith, visited a show I curated; her reaction could reduce me to tears—not to mention the joy (to my bank account) she could equally dispense with a favorable review. Those days are largely behind us. Even a bad article by Smith was capable of moving markets.


Don’t get me wrong, I am no cynic, but rather an art making, buying, selling, critiquing, presenting and collecting hypocrite. There is no place I’d rather be personally and professionally, mainly due to such ambiguities and gray areas that still exist in the wild, wild world of art. For the uninitiated, the art world has its very own language, but don’t be daunted. And it’s not all about money either; art is the only free lunch left in town as galleries and most museums don’t charge admission. Go on and try it.

a lovely rant sent to me 9/13/10

No need to explain your views, as your writing does that. It just brought back the question as to when art becomes entertainment. Regarding the dots, a strategy: Make something to sell the monied masses that can't stand to live with most of my stuff but still give them that much needed label to be able to say they have one. Otherwise why aren't we talking about those paintings in relation to Kusuma or Bridget Riley? Just old fashion geometric abstraction. Like admitting that Close is just old fashion super realism. All this conceptual construct to hide behind mediocrity or desperate sensationalism. Not asking for answers, just seeing a big blurr in everything ending up being about $$. Like the USA only talking about how much the movie made, not what it was about, good, bad or boring. But you know this. Anyway, got your essay on Thek in the big book. Hope England is more fun.

Water Damage, Aug 2010

I woke up to a half dozen dog droppings and urine puddles from our two “house” trained toy poodles—they only go in the house. I was doing a second reconnaissance to gauge the extent of the feces damage when I noticed a flood in the conservatory which houses a portion of my art collection, layered against every surface like sedimentary rock. I instantly surveyed the damage and assessed a few pieces partially submerged in water and a further two framed works directly under the flow that had originated from the ceiling. Once the immediate shock wore off, and that took some getting used to, I had to leap to action. First up were the two paper works, which were covered in water—though the extent of how much had penetrated the frames was still unclear. Next, an art chair crafted in wood that had already suffered visible buckling and varnish lifting, which had to be dragged from the deluge. More difficult to formulate rescue tactics for was a site-specific tree house installation, the scale of the real thing, attached to the ceiling and floor; had it been alive it would have thrived in such soggy circumstances. But it wasn’t and in fact was constructed in papier-mâché and appeared about to revert to that state.


The tree was literally too much for me to process, so utterly overwhelming, I left it for a time. I grabbed the two frames and proceeded to deconstruct them to determine the level of damp inside. In the corner of one drawing was a little pool like a child’s toy tilted from side to side to observe liquid flow. That the frame had been made 20 years ago was apparent by the series of endless little metal spikes, installed one by one, around the entire perimeter of the frame that amounted to a 20-minute extraction process alone. After both works were safely out of the frames they appeared fine and unscathed until a closer look revealed that both boards that the drawings were mounted to were indeed soaked. This brought on a terrible choice—i.e. to wait for a conservator to arrive later in the day (and risk suffering further moisture damage) or attempt to pull the works off their delicate hinges without tearing the drawings themselves. Last time I was faced with a similar dilemma I was unpacking a Polke on paper that had a piece of tape inadvertently affixed to the face of the paint. I ever so delicately and carefully removed the tape and the result was not pretty. The piece of tape with the bit of painting that lifted off had to be rushed to a conservator like a severed finger in a matchbox. Damn, conservators are good and convincing: the unsung heroes of the art world. In this case I managed to safely remove all the hinges and the drawings were fine.


Next up the looming tree house. Funny as my wife and I had been arguing of late that the tree should go into storage as it so thoroughly dominated the room, but I have been steadfastly resistant to de-installation. Either my wife precariously crawled out onto the roof to stuff waste into the gutter pipes or fate and nature are strangely compliant to her ways like everyone else seems to be. I managed to prune all the branches off the tree, which freed up the tree house portion to be separated from the trunk, thus enabling the base to be removed from the lake that had accumulated beneath. After an hour or so of terror, the worst was averted along with an insurance claim. In the end, no one can ever really own art, we are just temporary custodians charged with safekeeping, but beware: water is a constant threat and the scourge of art. And loaning to museums.

MBT Shoes: My Boring Trainers. MODERN Magazine, Fall 2010

MBT Shoes on work by Arik Levy

MBT Shoes: My Boring Trainers 

“Help solves knee and back problems; relieve tension in the neck; ease joint pains; help to tone and shape firm buttocks and thighs (!); while burning more calories when standing, or slow running compared to ordinary shoes.” Not to mention they make you a few inches taller. Imagine that! All without invasive surgery—please can you sign me up? Now! At my age, you can’t afford to dismiss every new-fangled, seemingly spurious claim. Besides, everyone is entitled to an opinion…to hope.


What I refer to are MBT shoes, the Swiss creation (never known for their maverick fashion sense) for power walking aficionados. The company web site, referred to above, employs the terminology “the anti-shoe”, a characterization more accurate than imaginable. These must be the ugliest thing for feet since 1970’s style orthopedic shoes were introduced to give credence to the idea that nothing good for you could taste, look or feel good. Not in the deepest recesses in Florida would these shoes fit in. But somehow for me, they work.


OK, I admit it, to engage in the process of power walking at full tilt in MBT’s, which resemble rubber rocking chairs, ends up recalling Sally Fields having a psychotic episode in the film Sybill or a goose-stepping SS soldier in a Mel Brooks movie. Needless to say, my kids are not amused. Especially when I team them up with a suit. But rolling on MBT’s is like floating on marshmallows, with an accompanying feeling of detachment; you can close your eyes and drift. I walk so much now I feel Socratic, I even coined a term: Walkism, to indicate the peripatetic process of giving up driving and running in pursuit of a different mental space, where time is slowed and thought expanded (other than when simultaneously Blackberry-ing).


But as we know, there is no free lunch, and MBT’s assault on fashion is not the only downside. If you check Internet forums, you would think wearing these ortho-sneakers is the worst thing since the plague health-wise. Also they are so towering, falling off them is a constant threat; but at the least, I can now commiserate with my wife’s 10-inchers. Another existential dilemma is that it induces what feels like paranoia, but with cause, as people from hooligans to innocent kids cannot help but incessantly mock your determined gait rocking to and fro while lurching down the street like a lunatic. At times it’s beyond disconcerting, feeling like the dupe of a mime in a public square every corner.


In the end, even if it’s a mere placebo, it’s enough, as I find it the only exercise (mostly) anxiety free. They even have an MBT standalone boutique in Harrods, which must mean something? And whether or not my buttocks gets further toned or even firmed for that matter, since reading the myriad MBT claims, I notice most men don’t seem to have an ass. And, for an avowed car fan, walking so much is the closest I've come to green.

Boffo Basel. Basel Art Fair 2010

There's been a tectonic shift in the market to conservative Impressionist, Modern and classic Contemporary art evident at the 41st Basel Art Fair, but I must admit it seemed as though everything was flying off the shelf indiscriminately. There was an orgiastic frenzy of activity from art transactions to hyper-networking, the boom is back. The fair layout reflects a hierarchy of more established, blue chip art on the ground floor and contemporary on the second. Nowadays, I would rather wait till it drops down a floor so there's more wheat, less chaff-its worth the extra hay.


Some of best art in Basel was the graffiti seen through the train window entering town. Seriously, the overall quality of material on display was staggering and would rival the best international institutions. The art market is like a fast train but with no destination. Can it sustain itself? Save for nuclear Armageddon, I fear to say it will, look for continued strong, record-breaking, headline making, art activity in the near future.


There should be a World Cup for hustling invites and passes at fairs. One morning after prodigious Basel party-hopping, I sent my suit to the cleaners and housekeeping returned with my passport, cash, and a large taxi receipt from Basel to Zurich. Rough night; no one ever said the art world was for the feint of heart.


Museums are akin to books, fairs more like magazines: a quick fix for those with short attention spans and a need for immediate gratification. For a while, a 30% discount on art was the new 10%; now, 10% is the new 20%. The walls they were a changing, with passing time the fair replicates itself in new form like a snake shedding it’s skin, as inventory is shifted when shifted and constantly hung anew.


After hours up and down the aisles I was left with a hammering pain in my toe more than any recollection of specific art works—now I know why I had observed so many on crutches. I never realized how anal the Swiss are until being scolded for public phoning on various occasions by locals who practically made citizens arrests. Also, while arguing with hotel security about entering a crowded bar, 15 simultaneously walked past. But the Jean Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation...what a site to behold, warranting the astronomical figures the paintings are now fetching. And going some length to explain their ubiquitousness at the fair. When an artist achieves a big museum retrospective or makes an unusually high number at auction, the works flood from the woodwork into the booths and public sales.


Another “new” 9-foot-wide Damien Hirst jewel- cabinet, entitled “Memories of Love,” sold at Basel for $3.5m. The price reflected a 50% decline from an exact work sold at the £111.5m Sotheby’s Sept 08 sale: “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, the day my headline would have read: “Merrill sold, Lehman fold”. In stocks, such market dumping is known as churn and burn, with Hirst, it should be known as churn and earn.


In 2008 I curated an exhibit with Pritzker Prize winning Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid at Sonnabend Gallery in New York upon which NY Times critic Ken Johnson reflected: “No architect has ever made good art and this is no exception.” Such sweeping generalization is at best dumb and worst dangerous. I wonder if he’s ever bothered to view a Le Corbousier painting. I helped to facilitate another Zaha Hadid show at Gmurzynska Gallery in Zurich during the fair (which fact seems to have eluded the gallery) that is an installation incorporating Constructivist masterworks by Malevich, Rodchenko, and Lissitzsky and Hadid herself. The installation uses the Public Square and façade of the building as a framing device transforming what originated as a 2D rendering into a walk-in line drawing with magical effect. Ken Johnson could cure his myopia if the NYT would splurge on a trip to Zurich sometime before the exhibit ends in September. Architecture as art is an up and coming new collecting category located between design and sculpture and a great new way to domesticate progressive architecture in a home setting. Look for values to progressively rise.

"From Long Island to London: A Memoir in 1000 Words" from A Hedonist's Guide to the Art World, edited by Laura Jones

Kenny Schachter has been collecting and curating art forever. The recipient of a Rockefeller supported grant, he has also taught and lectured all over the world. He does get around. He received planning for Zaha Hadid's first commercial building in the UK and has exhibited his own work at various galleries including the Sandra Gering Gallery in NYC and International 3 in Manchester. He is now open to suggestions. 


From Long Island to London: A Memoir in Art in 1000 Words (More or Less) 
By Kenny Schachter

I was born a middle class fat kid in Long Island, nearly catatonic due to a heavy-handed father and the early death of my mother. Cosseted in the suburbs, there was little in the way of cultural titillation other than reading car and sports magazines and collaging the contents onto my very 1970s, very cork walls.

Procrastinating from a law exam, I hesitantly visited the estate sale of Andy Warhol, which opened my eyes to the commercial side of art; prior to that, and because I had never before stepped into a commercial gallery, I naively thought paintings travelled non-stop from the studio to the museum. When I finally did enter the sterile white walls of a gallery, I was spontaneously smitten (and horrified), took an unsecured loan to acquire a Cy Twombly print, and soon began dealing in works on paper like an idiot savant.

Cognizant that there existed a gaping hole in the breadth of my art-historical knowledge, (anyone can become expert in post-war art in six months if they bother to read), I conned my way into a teaching position at the New School for Social Research rather than suffer another course as a student. After taking an adjunct position on probation, I wormed my way into teaching and lecturing - from New York University, Columbia and Rhode Island School of Design, to the Royal College of Art and Manchester University.

Self-taught about the past, I started curating hit and run exhibits of non-affiliated emerging artists, while also showing my own art and writing. Why not? In effect I had become a middle class, Jewish, outsider artist from Long Island.

Some of the people I exhibited prior to their gallery affiliation were Cecily Brown, Fred Tomaselli, Rachel Harrison, Wade Guyton, Andrea Zittel and Janine Antoni. My calling had become known, albeit as a late bloomer, not having entered a gallery until I was 28. In addition to supporting the work of younger artists, I worked with underappreciated and undervalued artists like Vito Acconci and Paul Thek. It has always struck me as odd that so much energy is spent supporting and writing about artists like Emin, Hirst, and Taylor-Wood who already have a massive network of support. So rather than fret too much, I use them (along with the likes of Jay Jopling and other media figures) as grist for my own send-up art pieces.

Though I swore I’d never open a gallery - I was curating but never much liked the process of selling (not the best mindset for a dealer) - I commissioned conceptualist-turned-designer Acconci to create his first built interior. Though the design was meant to be temporary it was comprised of thousands of pounds of steel, so when I determined to move to the UK, I was faced with a dilemma: store the entire gallery in perpetuity or find a way to flog the contents of the space. In the end, I auctioned the gallery including the front door, desks and walls at a design sale at Phillips. It seems there is always a way round a problem.

Being virtually the only collector of the late artist Paul Thek for years, I recently collaborated on an exhibit of his work at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain and a 500 page text with MIT Press, the only in English prior to upcoming Whitney and LA County Museum exhibits in 2010-11. The art world is finally taking notice 22 years after his death, so better late than never.

Despite a violent mugging at knifepoint while sitting at an exhibit I’d organized entitled I Hate New York in a temporary space in Shoreditch, I moved to the UK in 2004. The move to London might have been instigated by a midlife crisis, but I prefer to tell myself it was a mix of complacency, boredom with the homogeneity of New York, and some desire for adventure that drove me to jump ship.

I bought a site on Hoxton Square with a view to developing it with Zaha Hadid, prior to her winning the Pritzker Prize. Despite being one of the world’s most progressive thinkers and architects, I felt that she was largely ignored in the country she had lived and worked in for 35 years. Since then, I have organised countless exhibits and projects with Zaha from a show at Sonnabend Gallery to commissioning her design of a car. I then achieved planning permission to erect her first building in London to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Swimming Pavilion, although Zaha remains skeptical I can pull it off in this day and age of tightened credit markets. We live in hope.

In today’s fungible world, geography is less a factor in our lives then ever before; all we need are our Apples and Blackberries and we are good to go. But there are some subtle differences between London and New York: under the veil of civility, Brits are a fairly violent lot (football matches often being an excuse for a good brawl); the health care system in the UK (largely due to a distinct lack of hygiene) is more than a bit primitive, and the complexity of getting around town is mind boggling. I need a Sat Nav just to get to the newsagents at the end of my street; as for going to a handful of galleries, well that can take days.

But since moving, I have not missed New York for a day, though some things are hard to shake, namely my Long Island accent, which my kids will surely never let me forget.

I have participated in and been thrown out of art fairs due to both my outspokenness and my flouting of the capricious fair rules. I once facilitated an intervention by Vito Acconci in the Basel art fair that was deemed to cut off the circulation down the aisles. They threw me out. I then filled a booth at the Armory Show in New York with secondary market offerings. The Armory specifically precludes such material (or used to anyway). Again, I was thrown out.

As for the Frieze art fair in London, they never invited me to visit, never mind to have a stand. I suppose the series of articles I wrote highlighting the pretentiousness of the proprietors didn’t help much. The closest I got to joining was when I intercepted a VIP invite that was meant for a former inhabitant of my house, that I happen to know well. But let’s move on.

Despite the hiccoughs, I am still at it. By no foresight on my part, art became bigger than the big business that I initially ran away from. I went from dealing in the art of the young unknowns - a lot like selling t-shirts in a market stall – to dealing in Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. A shift I could never have dreamed of in the beginning. Working with artists, I have nearly been stabbed to death, been shot at with a gun loaded with blanks (at the time I didn’t know if the fluid on my lap was blood, urine or Margarita - thankfully it was the latter) - and repeatedly had my life threatened by disgruntled emerging artists. Hence my appreciation of artists no longer breathing: they’re much easier to deal with than the ones that still have a detectable pulse.

Art Market Spring 2010, Forecast: Clear Skies Ahead

The Spring New York Auctions of Impressionist, Modern and (even) Contemporary art all blasted through the highest expectations, in the midst of a stock market convulsing in an unprecedented manner; are we in a new age of uncertainty and chaos? Shares crash by day as art soars by night. But as suspected, art made new records after less than ten lots into the first sales—that would be the $106m Picasso if you have been buried in volcanic ash. To think art has reached parity with office buildings; but, better than shares, hedge funds, Goldman Sachs(!), currencies, Greece, Portugal, Spain (and UK?), where else can you achieve short term returns of 20, 30, 40%+ in today's markets?


The forecast is for a long-term boom in classical art, as well as recognized, signature works by contemporary practitioners. The New York Times stated re the contemporary sales: "Americans dominated the buying, in contrast with last week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art, where Europeans, Asians and Middle Easterners were the big spenders." Wait till the European, Asian and Middle Easterner laggards catch on to contemporary... Tomorrow’s next hedge fund star: the art manager.


Strangely, there are many day to day art professionals that bemoan the historic figures attained by art, says one: “…art that sell(s) at auction die two deaths: We do not see them again for decades, and cannot think of them without also thinking of money.” The first is the result of the free market system (consider the alternatives) and the latter the result of the free market system (alas, its all vanity). Why the constant pooh poohing about the big bucks Picasso? Why can't everyone coexist, the trophy hunters and enthusiasts in trenches? There is certainly a trickle down as one segment begets the other. But hey, guess what: we can all relax! In effect the $106m pays all our art world salaries. Even the $8m paid for young Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's proboscis sticking out of an actual hole in the floor; pretty much anything will go nowadays.

Royal College of Art Vehicle Design Department Lecture, 4/26/10

Re: car design, we don't notice it when we drive one, then park it and leave it. Cars are the most ubiquitous and overlooked form of design in our lives. Personally, i don't differentiate between a well done Porsche, plate or Picasso. However, much of contemporary car design reminds me of mainstream Hollywood films: produced for the lowest common denominator, and in the process, vastly underestimating the capacity of the public to appreciate good industrial design (and film!).


For example, why does the Prius look like the equivalent of cod liver oil or an orthopedic shoe—its as if it was created to be like a dose of medicine; shut your eyes, open your mouth, this is good for you. Not to mention the G-Whiz, which looks like a stubby toe. Surely, good design doesn’t cost prohibitively more than bad design, and even if there was a slight premium, I think people would gladly step up.


If you look at how spectacularly well the classic car market has preformed in the face of the world’s worst recession, this phenomenon is almost certainly a reaction to the homogenized design of most contemporary vehicles. Some of which can be said to reflect regulatory control but probably more so a lack of imagination and determination on the part of the auto industry.


One possible model going forward (sorry for pun) is that based on the movement of Design Art, a term coined by Phillips auction house to delineate furniture and design objects produced in limited editions. Although after much speculation in the market that saw a chaise lounge by Marc Newson (who also did an unproduced car for Ford) go for over $1.5m, the segment is settling in and here for the long run.


I don’t believe Design Art was sheer marketing folly to create exclusive things for exclusive people but rather a way to encourage experimentation in processes and materials for objects otherwise too labor intensive to go into mass production. Besides, the fact is that high-end furniture cost the same, or very close to, limited edition designs, so why not enjoy the possible upside of such an investment?


In 2006 I commissioned the London based Iraqi Pritzker prize winning architect of the upcoming Olympic swimming stadium, Zaha Hadid, to design a concept car based on her notion of (near) future transport. Its not as far fetched as it seems as in the past she has designed the BMW factory, and a parking lot in France—so why not focus on what gets made in the factory and parked in the lot? Though I never got as far as production, they say the car business is an effective way to make a lot of money into a little, I am certain I would be able to sell and sell well, a limited edition car to design and architecture enthusiasts. This is a nimble way to go forward to launch progressively designed cars for a niche market, possibly skinning an existing platform like Gordon Murray’s T25 concept.


Since the Z Car, I have commissioned engineer Cecil Balmond, architects Diller & Scofidio and a handful of artists, architects and industrial designers to do concept cars for a book and traveling museum exhibit. More than anything, I’d like to see one or more on the road! For years BMW has successfully commissioned art cars as a marketing scheme; but it’s beyond me why they wouldn’t have put all or some into production rather than shooting for brief spurts of publicity like the recently announced collaboration with Jeff Koons. And only today, after I posted a picture on Facebook of a Lancia I custom painted, someone commented: “So when will we see a Banksy car?” If only I could afford one!


Marcel Duchamp said art in museums should have a shelf life, then be disposed of from collections. There are many new and unexplored ways forward in car design, like cars with multiple panels that could be changed and disposed of like cigarette lighters, but industry needs to take a more aggressive and progressive stance to make it (and more) happen.