Wednesday, January 26, 2011

weed: another (assisted) speech for 13 yr old.

Last year I did my speech on being green, and how I thought we all had to do our part to make the world a cleaner and safer place to live. This year I am doing my speech on another kind of green—marijuana and whether or not it should be legal and if so, for what purposes.


Although I firmly believe that medical marijuana has its rightful place as being legal in our society to alleviate the pain and sufferings of cancer victims and help treat eye diseases like glaucoma, there is no reason to extend this and make it accessible any further. Besides, I bet more than half the people that use “medical” marijuana shops suffer from nothing more then the urge to get more marijuana. True, revenue could be raised by tax income from the sale of marijuana and there is something to be said for getting drug dealers, often armed and dangerous, off the streets. Also, if it was legal i guess some of the sheen of coolness would go up in smoke and maybe usage would go down. But I believe the downside outweighs the positive effects of full legalization.


THC (the active ingredient found in the cannabis plant) is physically and mentally addictive and can cause extreme intoxication, impairment and ultimately cancer after long-term use. The types of marijuana, like sensimelia have gotten stronger and stronger over time and thus the negative effects are more exaggerated. The more sense they smoke the less they seem to have. And it impairs psychological development and makes people psychotic, or more psychotic than they already were.


With use in children, marijuana stops growth and inhibits the strength of the body as well as the lung's ability to inhale air and the capacity to destroy cancer-causing cells. Secondhand smoke from cigarettes has been scientifically proven to be at least as bad as firsthand smoke and the same holds true for marijuana, but only worse, as marijuana is stronger than tobacco, contains more carcinogens and kills more brain cells. You should see some of my parents friends (that wasn’t actually in speech).


Driving a car under the influence of alcohol causes many unnecessary injuries and deaths and it is impossible to fully police and prevent these episodes. Imagine the increased difficulties for law enforcement trying to maintain safe roads if marijuana is even more available then it already is! They don’t even have the tools to check for marijuana in the system other than by blood testing so it is way more impractical then detecting alcohol. As a result, ensuring fully safe roads becomes even less of a realistic possibility or even impossible.


We live in a very, very competitive world with millions of people all after the same things—financial success, fame and notoriety. Why voluntarily make it harder for yourself than it already is by purposefully reducing your capacity to think clearly and focus? Sure I understand and appreciate the human desire to experiment and search for new ways of having fun and good times. And, perhaps there is something to be said for, at least once you reach a certain age and under controlled circumstances, the right to try something that won’t kill you if you don’t abuse it. But don’t forget, there is not a single heavy drug user that didn’t start with a casual joint! So in the end you have to figure it out for yourself as the decision is only up to you!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Chace or Dakota? Richard Phillips at White Cube London Jan/Feb 2011

The exhibit is called Most Wanted, I suppose referencing Warhol’s America’s Most Wanted series, silkscreen paintings of dangerous criminals on the lam. Here Phillips is presenting realistic likenesses via traditional handmade paintings of young movie stars: Chace Crawford, Kristen Stewart, Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Momsen, Dakota Fanning, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift and Robert Pattison. Phillips has already mined fashion, advertising and porn says the release, so what is left? Young, very young, actors!


Perhaps after Popes and Princes, Marilyns and Jackies all that is left is Chace and Dakota. From Liz Taylor to Taylor’s Momsen and Swift. Warhol put celebrities on pedestals now we seem to rather enjoy their long, hard public falls from grace. Or do we?


While I wouldn’t know a Chace from a Dakota, I suppose my kids are fully versed/immersed in the subject matter. Compared to the recent batch of paintings and sculptures allegedly of Kate Moss at least the few celebs I did know were recognizable in Phillips’ work. Is he playing to the youth market? Is this Phillips’ ideal notion of beauty (or his conception of ours) as found in today’s heartthrobs and starlets? These faces are forever young, faultlessly beautiful and are what we most admire as a society and culture (at the box office, anyway). Is this body of work a reductive flash in the pan; no more than empty fodder for shallow (art) consumers?


Maybe painting by hand is the new radical, compared to the over fabrication practices (bordering on fetishism) and lack of traditional abilities exhibited by many artists in the recent past. Maybe realistic likenesses are as shocking and “unsettling” as the gallery would let us believe.


These paintings are in the end easy on the eye and immediately gratifying. Are these eye candies our most coveted objects of desire, or our mortal enemies? Somehow I doubt the artist and collectors much care.

Internet Dating Art World Style: Final thoughts on VIP Art Fair.

The Internet based VIP (View-In-Person) art fair was launched with great fanfare, supposedly the new format was said to forever redefine the notion of how we encounter and collect art. After initially registering, the only encounter I had was with 15 error messages without managing to see a single work of art. Viva la revolution! Maybe the net should stick to what it does best: porn.


After finally gaining access I found it slow, plodding and dull. Good for professionals and hardcore collectors to feed their addiction, but listless and unrewarding for the eye nevertheless. Personally, I often buy art based on jpeg or catalogue representations, as long as provenance and condition are trusted, but let’s be clear, buying and appreciating art are two different animals. The VIP art fair when you boil it down is like getting caches of jpegs from galleries that wouldn’t ordinarily send you any material.


Once I got the rhythm of browsing on the site, I must say it became contagious—a distraction, yet another means of procrastination. The experience is nowhere close to seeing the stuff, but certainly a good way to kill an hour. I even bid on something and thought the system had progressed quite well after the early glitches, working better and better over the days. The result is new, less dimensional way to communicate and consume art, but something new and effective like facebook, all the same. The artwork I tried to buy was on hold and later sold.


A group of 10 ceramic Ai Weiwei pieces were depicted at both Faurschou Gallery and Hyundai Gallery, thankfully none of their cars were exhibited. The artist haphazardly splashed hot, vibrant colors across the tops of the clay colored ancient vases. When I viewed the first group I contacted the gallery and queried if there might be some similar artworks about, as I am aware he’s made tons—not as much as the sunflower seeds, but plenty. The dealer replied that each piece was unique in the sense that the groups of10 vases were comprised of all slightly different Neolithic ones. Twenty minutes later I stumbled on what appeared the identical work. When I asked the first gallerist if she was aware of the other she replied: “Nope, which gallery? I did not have much time to look around due to chatting with clients.” I guess there are more net similarities with real life that one would have imagined. And Ai Weiwei is beginning to sound like the Asian equivalent of Warhol courting political controversy Instead of celebs.


I also liked a beautiful, austere Paul Thek painting on newspaper at Alexander & Bonin, with the same title and composition: “1 to 1”; Ray Johnson works at Feigen; Bruno Bischofsberger: I’m a sucker for pretty much everything he does; Henry Taylor’s crude figurations with blotches of abstraction at Blum & Poe and Untitled; Gustons at McKee; and a Jim Shaw sculpture of disembodied legs and half eaten feet entitled “Dream Object (Hanging legs made out of fiberglass with toes bitten off to demonstrate effect of animal traps), 2007 “ at Metro Pictures.


Frustrations did linger finding oneself playing cat and mouse with endlessly dropping, always unintended, menus. And please don’t mention trying to communicate with the participating galleries, supposedly via “Instant Messenger”; the result, far from instant, was never more than another more annoying and less functional dropdown menu. Digital Kafka.


But of course my kids figured out how to instantaneously communicate with gallery personnel online, though scarily in my name. It’s not enough to waste the entire family resources on Internet music, fashion and everything else they covertly attempt to cyber-consume on a practically daily basis.


There were times I was scanning my screen so fast left to right, my head resembled a Wimbledon spectator. Some exhibitors’ image format was so incompatible with my computer that pictures came out microscopic. With my rapidly deteriorating eyesight it’s hard enough to coherently recognize regular size nowadays, not to mention print.


When fairs are normally recapped and reported they are accompanied by photographs of the on site happenings; perhaps VIP visitors should submit pictures of themselves in front of their respective computers/i-pads/i-phones/blackberrys in whatever garb they were sporting at the time. Now that would be interesting Internet art!

Monday, January 24, 2011

Dennis Oppenheim, RIP

In appearance, Dennis Oppenheim was like a raggamuffin, slipshod in dress, kind of frozen in the 70s. The works were all over the place too but with an undeniable magic touch, from the sunburned book impression on his chest to his wacky machines - Rube Goldberg wedded to Samuel Beckett. Perhaps that he jumped from genre to genre hampered his commercial success and acceptance but he always seemed to have major public and private works on the go. There was a palpable sense of optimism from the man and his art; he seemed assured in his talents and knowing that the rest of us would eventually catch up and he would finally catch on.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Warhol: A(nother) Speech for my 14 year old.



Warhol Changed the Way Art is Made and Seen.


What comes to mind when you think of Brillo Boxes, Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup Cans? Andy Warhol, an artist that changed the way art is made and seen.


Warhol made art like a director would shoot a movie, not to mention the body of films he made. He directed assistants, which is not unlike the renaissance studio of an artist like Rembrandt, to help create paintings in a most removed, impersonal way, though the subject matter was (mostly) his idea.


The method by which Warhol made these assisted works was with a silkscreen that is a form of stencil printing in which an image is produced by using a squeegee to push ink through a stretched mesh fabric that was historically silk. In the case of Warhol, the stencil was made from a photographic reproduction of a newspaper or magazine image directly onto the mesh screen. When you think about how a painting was made in the past: paint applied by a handheld brush to the surface of a canvas that stood on an easel – Warhold forever changed that by fabricating paintings on the floor the way a commercial object was constructed and printed in the past. Or even the way a comic strip or t-shirt is printed.


In the process the paintings went from being handmade by the artist to being mechanically produced. The images themselves went from being imagined or painted from a photo to using readymade images from newspapers and magazines re-photographed and applied directly to the canvas.


From Brillo Boxes to Marilyn Monroe, movie stars to cultural icons, Warhol elevated consumer objects and celebrities to works of art. For Warhol, movie stars and consumer goods were one and the same – something to be put on a pedestal and not only admired but elevated to god like standing. He saw before anyone how much status society would come to place on the personal lives of celebrities and how consumer driven the world has become. The subject matter of Warhol could be said to emphasize and highlight the importance we place on material things and people.


Early on, paintings drew upon subject matter from history and religion, to landscapes and abstraction. With Warhol, he took painting somewhere else and turned it into conceptual art – that is art based on ideas but expressed with images and paint.


Warhol foresaw the idea of celebrities as icons; He chose Mao as a subject for a series of works, not because he was the leader of the world’s most populous country, but because he was the most famous, recognizable face on earth. Fame and celebrity and our endless appetites to idealize and consume them formed the basis of his history changing art. In addition, he put everyday items that we usually take for granted on a pedestal by signaling them out for subject matter of his works and in the process he made celebrities out of soup cans and Brillo pads too!


He changed his name to Warhol from Warhola when he first started to publish his early magazine illustrations, and wore a signature leather jacket and white wig so that people would easily recognize his persona (and perhaps he was uncomfortable with his looks); in other words, he made himself one of his own icons. He was in effect his own greatest creation. Not since Picasso had an artist so successfully woven their identity into their work so seamlessly.


The world has fully come to appreciate just how important Andy Warhol’s contribution to art history has been. Not only did he change the way we look at art, but also how much we were prepared to pay for it! In 1986, his painting “200 One Dollar Bills” which was a silkscreen image of just what was described in the title, sold for $385,000. Only just recently the same piece was resold for $43,762,500. Even more amazing is that the nearly $44m price was topped twice in a week last November, and his record at auction is $71,000,000. That goes to show you just how much his work is valued today and is an indication of how big an impact people believe he has made.


Warhol said good art is good business and he was right light years ahead of everyone else. Today, economics is practically a school of art in itself. Sadly, as Andy Warhol practically dreamt about money and made art about money, he never made the money he fantasized about till after his death.


You might say Warhol mechanically produced his paintings and sculptures because he is a bad artist and couldn’t paint. The series of Warhol sometimes took on gigantic proportions stretching into the hundreds of a single image so in effect they are not much different from prints. The art can be seen as too impersonal and lacking personal touch, without any trace of craft. His pictures of products transform products into more products, for no other reason than to feed market. The work can appear shallow, dumb (do we need to stare at soup like a religious artifact?) and lacking thought and content.


However, although repetitive, no two are alike and there are different colors and qualities to the brush strokes. Though the subject matter may at times be viewed as trivial, it touches on aspects of culture that we all deeply care about. Warhol fused photography together with painting to make a new genre that didn’t exist before—hand painted silkscreen prints on canvas. He foresaw the blind, universal admiration and devotion to celebrity; but how he would have reacted today to the everyday superstar that is born on reality TV shows is less clear.

anti aging

Running slows down the space time continuum, for some the process is faster than for others (others like me and jeffrey deitch).

Saturday, January 22, 2011

VIP (View in Principle) Art Fair

The internet based VIP (View-In-Private) art fair was launched with great fanfare today; supposedly, the new format is said to forever redefine the notion of how we encounter and collect art. After registering, the only encounter i had was with 15 error messages without managing to see a single work of art. Viva la revolution!

$1b baby.

An indisputable source reveals a painting recently sold for $250m, a Cezanne; not far from my prediction of a one billion dollar work of art.

first tier works

arguments aside about the marriage of art & economics, i read about a collector who only believes in the market viability of "first tier works"; but, oftentimes the greatest values lie in drawings and lesser paintings of well-known artists. the best works have what could be non-remunerative premiums built in at today's levels (i.e. $150m pieces).

a dying breed...

"newly made period pieces that are already, as you read this, beginning to fail the test of time" a brilliant, searing zinger by roberta smith on piotr ulanski in yesterdays ny times, criticism the old fashion way: critical.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

symmetry

“Car traders are a bit like art dealers. If they see a great profit in something, they’re not going to want to pass it on to the investors.” Used car dealers, art dealers, perfect symmetry.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

shaken and stirred

I suffer from protein urea whereby my kidneys can't process the protein in my system, which leaks into urine. Known as hypertension, I am basically exciting myself to death. A telltale sign is suds or dense bubbles in pee-like you are literally being shaken and stirred, and your balls are the olives. In a sense I'm imploding as my mind consumes my heart. My doctor gave me a meditation upload (very 00s) that was so annoying you have to relax or kill someone. The only effective fix was a soliloquy about my mechanic on classic cars that brought the heart rate down. Sur-really.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Love is blind, money blinding.

“A&F (Art & Farce?) Markets proposes a new, centralised and liquid marketplace for art. Through its unique structure, A&F Markets allows investors to buy and sell ʻsharesʼ in major artworks (www.artfinance.fr)”. Sounds like a surefire measure to moneterize unsellable dogs in closets. Is this what we have been reduced to? Apparently.


The founders of the IGA Automobile Fund, hoping to raise $150m to buy and sell classic cars and predicting annual returns of 15%, claim classic cars have “outperformed almost all other commodities (Ingear, The Sunday Times, page 5, January 10, 2011)”. As much as I love cars, can anyone other than the CEO of IGA verify that?


Houses you don’t inhabit, wine you don’t drink, art you don’t see, and cars you don’t drive. Not to mention a $330,000 truffle—which you were meant to eat, but at that price I’d rather put it in a vitrine or bronze it. Is it 2007 all over again; can our memories be that short? It’s missionary materialism run amok. Love is blind, money blinding. Don’t get me wrong, I am in it deep.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Larry G.

Larry Gagosian, with 11 galleries in 8 countries, has for the first time in art (dealing) history created a viable model that practically transcends the primacy of the founder. Why not a leveraged buyout, hostile or otherwise, a listing and float? If Norman Foster can be private equity-ized, why not Gagosian bought and sold like Giacometti?

Painting & Sculpting.

Chuck Close, Lucien Freud, Alex Katz, Marc Quinn, Gary Hume, Stella Vine and countless others have painted or sculpted Kate Moss (why is another issue); yet not one is recognizable as her. Can't contemporary painters and sculptors paint and sculpt?