KENNY SCHACHTER BLOG

article for an upcoming conde nast car publication

2011-10-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

We are facing an unprecedented confluence of international macroeconomic conditions that have collided with the unintended result of pushing prices for rare and desirable collectibles far into the stratosphere. Never before have these forces raged with such ferocity and velocity, bringing into alignment the disparate markets of art, classic cars, wine and property. Crystallizing the general malaise, there is the fear of inflation, uncertainty in valuing currencies, wildly gyrating stock markets (trending lower still), banks teetering, interest rates hovering near zero, sovereign debt bordering on worthless, commodity prices under pressure and dramatic political uncertainly and turmoil. It’s depressing just listing the plethora of negativity preoccupying world markets. So what better time to buy a pretty picture, a good bottle of wine, a nice set of wheels and a big garage to park it in?

Seriously, tangible assets have never before in history been so universally viewed as attractive and safe a harbor to park cash in. Coupled with an offsetting explosion in the generation of wealth in emerging markets over the recent past and you have all the ingredients in place to redefine the criteria for the valuation of collectibles. The beneficiaries are a $250,000,000 Cezanne painting and a $16,400,000 Ferrari. Sadly, with values rising so meteorically there is something tragic about the notion of paintings we don't hang, wine we don't drink, houses we don't occupy and cars we never drive. Other than an art collection of masterpieces, there is nothing to compare to the lineup of the RAC TT Race at the Goodwood Revival with Cobras and GTOs galore. Julian Treger, principal of Audley Capital, a fund the Financial Times called one of the world’s best last year, stated about art and cars: “They are both hard assets in a world of shortages of the best. Though art and cars have different collectors they have the same dynamics. Ferraris are very sculptural, but also incredibly well branded.” Where and when it will all end is anyone’s guess, but neither a $100 million car nor a $1 billion work of art would surprise me.

It may appear somehow wrong and that one should feel a sense of guilt enjoying the pleasures, delights and accompanying rising values of collectibles in the face of such seemingly universal hardship, but business has no moral compass. And although many remain skeptical, I am firmly of the belief that art and cars have inherent, calculable values. The factors driving escalating prices among art and cars coincide: rarity, history, provenance, and condition. The Supreme Court of the United States were asked to decide a case involving pornography and the Chief Justice replied he couldn’t explain it but he knew it when he saw it and the same applies with a great work of art or a sublime piece of automotive design and engineering. Only just recently, seven of auction house Gooding's top 15 Pebble Beach sellers were Ferraris: why does Ferrari above all other marques tend to dominate? Is it down to aesthetics, or provenance? Art and cars have become indisputable asset classes and Ferrari and Picasso are the gold standard against which all else is measured. However, markets are very unforgiving ecosystems so you had better know your stuff cold or stand a good chance of being run over, and separated from your money in the process. A Warhol from the same year and the same size can sell for $60,000 or $60,000,000 and a Ferrari is no different. There are better and worse Hirsts and Astons. Sadie Coles, one of the most significant and influential international gallery owners states that cars are somewhat easier to define value: “The valuation of a contemporary art work can be mysterious, subjective and unquantifiable. Rare cars are functional objects and however beautiful or rare they may be, they also have easier to define provenances - how many were made, during what dates, who owned them and how many miles they have.” I don’t entirely agree with the above reasoning and think there is as much disingenuousness and indeterminism in unraveling the mysterious, subjective and unquantifiable in cars as in art. Art is admittedly the last unregulated, multi-billion dollar business.

Though the high prices for art and cars can be hard for people to swallow, they are here to stay in at least the near term and with good reason. With art, its who’s buying, selling, writing about and exhibiting the work—these are all contributing factors playing into the notion of determining value. And it’s not all that different with cars; though, rather than which museum the car was exhibited in (this adds value too) its more a matter of which historic races the car was driven in and by whom. Whether cars are equal to art, and vice versa, depends on which is fuller, your walls or garage—it is more a condition of taste and opinion. Hardcore car lovers will say you can’t drive a painting, but art throws off a visual dividend and ease of coexisting beyond what cars can offer. True, you can't jump in your Van Gogh and race a Monet or head off to the country, but by the same token you can't climb into bed and drool over your Testarossa. Cars are the most ubiquitous form of industrial design and we see thousands per day, but we don’t see them when we are behind the wheel or when we park them up for the night. That really is unfortunate, as I have my cars in my office and under my desk, and if I could, I would have one under the duvet too.

There appear more and more crossovers between the bedfellows of cars and art, including the phenomenal Renzo Piano designed museum atop the Lingotto building and examples like BMW art cars and the recent sponsorship deal between Volkswagen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Art and cars also share some not too positive attributes like the problem of liquidity: try and call your broker in the middle of the night to swiftly dispose of your car and/or art collections! Though art and cars are proven stores of value, nothing goes up forever, despite our strongest wishes. And there are those who climb into either category of collecting to ascend a social ladder, like nailing bags of money to the walls or stuffing notes into the garage and parading around like a peacock with fully exposed feathers.

With art and cars strictly as investment, divorced of aesthetics and functionality it all seems rather perverse. There have cropped up a number of classic car and art funds that look at both as nothing other than asset classes with untapped upside, stripped of use and enjoyment, but they are missing the point—art and cars are so great as investments because of the usability and joy, not just the reductive quality solely as appreciating assets. Shares, bonds and gold go into safes or drawers and draw no satisfaction other than the potential to increase in value. There is more to life— studies exist that say living with art (then why not cars?) can increase your life expectancy like having a loyal golden retriever. I can fully understand and appreciate the notion! Personally, I don't differentiate between a fork, chair, car or painting. Anything done exceptionally well shares qualities with art, and in the end its simply a matter of nomenclature, of naming and categorizing things that serve no purpose other than creating false hierarchies.

Richard Bremner, one of the UK’s foremost car writers weighs in on the art vs. car debate as follows: “For some, a car can be a thing of beauty, exquisite beauty even, and even the lowliest motor is the result of a creative process that has involved some artistry, no matter how modest. The vast majority of post-war cars, and some pre-wars too, were designed using not only the artistic skills of sketching and rendering designers but those of sculptors too. The result is an object that's quite capable of pleasing the eye that carries its own story, reflects the era in which it was conceived and the culture of the manufacturer that built it. As with art collecting, classic car acquisition can be about money of course, besides the displaying, coveting and hoarding of these things.”

An exceptional car is nothing to turn your nose up at, but there are many that would do the same with a work of contemporary art. Unfortunately regarding contemporary cars, over regulation and mass production sometimes aid in homogenizing design, which only adds to the values of classics. And in contemporary art, oversupply to feed demand can also lessen the values. There is nothing that can replace passion and connoisseurship in either endeavor including all the endless analysis a private bank could muster. Where will it end? Will it implode, like it did in the late 1980s, or are certain top vehicles now immune to the vicissitudes of the market? Though nothing is endless, art and high-end collector cars are not over leveraged like what might have been the case in decades past. For the most part, we are faced today with end users who have the wherewithal to stay in the game and not have to go prematurely running off the track.

Adam Lindemann, a highly noted collector and writer on art and design, who famously flipped a Jeff Koons sculpture for many millions in profit before it was packed off for shipping, told me that: “Cars are not at all like art, they are like ‘Design’. Buying a great car is like buying a great piece of Art Deco furniture. What matters is provenance and originality. There is no such thing as rolling art, there is however rolling design. The fact that we live in an age of computer chips, and technology molded into carbon fiber, means that the hand made machines of the last century will be valued objects of the future without a doubt. Over time the great cars can only go up in value, the question is deciding and sourcing the ‘great’ ones from all the other ones.” I find as plausible the thoughts of Kai Schachter (my 14 year old son and no car fanatic like his father) who said, “A car is a piece of art and even though you drive it around, it’s as fragile and delicate and needs to be cared for as much as any painting or sculpture.”

The downside in the public consciousness is that there is a bifurcation in the economy, a wider and wider chasm separating those that have from those that don't and many are dialing down their standards and style of living. The baby boomers are coming to the end of a party (and a good run It was) and facing the realization that someone is going to have to pay. Countries face the same harsh dilemma: debts are swallowing us all and it can’t go on and on and... It wouldn’t be the best of looks to roll into an Occupy Wall Street protest in your Ferrari with a Picasso in your tent. But let’s face it: since art came off the walls of a cave, it has been coveted and the same goes for life after the combustion engine—once it was invented and inserted into the bay of a car, we’ve had to have them. There is unparalleled seduction in a great car and artwork; the smells (even paint smells enticing), the feel, textures, and sight—a feast for all the senses. Unfathomably in a world wreaked by social, economic and political instability, it has been a record year for auction houses in cars and art, part of the ever-increasing acceptance of the rarity, preciousness and transcendent qualities of both: more so than anyone might have imagined in such recessionary times. We are only but custodians of things, charged with maintenance, preservation and appreciation of unrepeatable, glorious objects. And as we get progressively priced out of markets in cars, art, wine and property, the definition of what is desirable and covetable will only expand.

Requiem for an Engine

2011-10-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

VMAX JUNE 2

Why are wheels being soda blasted ?

They are chromed , no cost for refurbing wheels ? That alone could add thousand or so ?

What's the guarantee offered ?

Dyno sheet from engine ?

VMAX JUNE 2

Charged twice for dyno £880

No piston or liners listed ?

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 2

Hi Kenny, there is only one Dyno charge listed and it is at a discounted rate to 660 ?? and the piston kit is also on there at 2635.00 so I am not sure what you are looking at ?

The balance owing including vat at the moment is £5055.81

The wheels are in the finishing stages and should be ready for me to collect mid next week so completion possibly by Friday depending on wheels.

VMAX JUNE 2

I think it would be appropriate for him to give a total cost to put them back to standard anodised Finnish and not expect you to make a decision without giving that

VMAX JUNE 2

I don't think soda will remove chrome and he should know that also , chrome is removed by electricity in a salt water bath with low voltage current

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 2

Kenny, nice wheels but no chrome anywhere to be seen just a good polish job

is this a problem !!

VMAX JUNE 2

For an expert in the field there's still a lot of unknown costs

' the wheel refurb costs are up to date other than the cost for the refurb' says it all

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 2

Kenny, I really don’t have time for all this

A - the costs on your wheels were originally as you requested to change the “Chrome” in to satin this work was started and the rims were soda blasted as it is the most environmentally way to achieve the finish.

B – I mailed you and told you that the wheels could be put back to Original Porsche finish for not a lot more than the cost to just blast and paint, this you agreed to hence the wheel costs so far!

C- I have agreed to let you pay direct to suppliers saving you any charges from us for us incurring time organising and phone / email time.

D- I have moved and collected your car FOC from the paint shop although not far but still taking a total of 4 hours of my time including inspecting the strip.

Just what more do you expect

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 16

Hi Kenny to add to your issues, when the oil is hot in the car there is a oil leak weeping from around the oil level sender on the oil tank, and also the relay mounted on the relay board in the engine bay that controls over run shut off solenoid for the fuel injection pump is also not operating, i have swapped one of another car i have in at the moment and it is the relay that is at fault.

Do you want me to deal with these two issues.

Wheels, you are paying the guy direct for the referb do you want me to ask him to pop up and refit them ! or do i have to do it free of charge, I am trying to help you in every way possible to save money, but the fact is if you had have had the car inspected by a competent Porsche expert you would not be in this situation ! and unfortunately i cannot be held responsible for "your Mechanics Expertise" i will be in the shop most of tonight as i am running in engines. Drop me a line.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 16

Hi Kenny let’s get thing straight

1 car was dropped off and was booked in afterwards for a engine inspection / rebuild

2 we advised you that on removal of the engine that there were issues with the chassis.

3 we addressed the essential issues that were outlined on the quote / invoice.

4 Wheels you requested them to be de “chromed” I suggested the soda blasting and re-paint as the only way to do this without doing too much damage, then you requested a more original finish all this is detailed our corresponding emails.

5 Engine – Rebuilt Detailed and back in the car after being run in and tested for power, report is with the chassis and can be collected, Given the facts that the engine had been “bodged” to sell one side of the engine had severe damage to both head and piston areas. This is now all complete and finished.

6 I have NOT overcharged you for anything and the fact is I have helped you in many ways to save money by paying suppliers direct.

I will fit your tyres and refit your wheels in good faith and you can arrange collection as soon as I have the vehicle on its own wheels and off the ramp, you will be the first person to know as soon as this is done.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 27

Hi Kenny,

Stuart Has Collected the car, just to clear up a couple of things that arose from Stuart.

1 I told Stuart that your wheel caps were not shipped back with your wheels Alan was supposed to email you and tell you, when they arrive I will post them down to you.

2 Stuart commented on the exhaust smoke at start up, [Choke on ] it will clear once warm. As it did.

3 He returned the car saying the oil light cam on at idle at the main gate and the oil pressure gauge was low.

Oil pressure as per factory book should be engine warm and 4bar [60psi] @ 4000rpm your car gauge read's over 60psi at 4000 but I would dispute that your gauge is still reading a little low as the data from the Dyno is showing 6+ bar, the data is in the folder that Stuart has, the data from the test cell is very accurate unlike a old analogue gauge of some 39 years old

4 I also did tell Stuart that there was only probably 25 > 30 litre of fuel in the car as we have been driving it in and out of the shop.

Any problems give me a call and enjoy the drive.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 28

Hi I will call you shortly re the oil pressure but firstly can you firstly gather some information for me as the whole point of my 500K test cell it to ensure there is no faults with engines before they are re fitted to the car, to this all the date and engine information is logged and dated and can be recalled at a future date for comparison.

1- Vehicle left our premises with over 60psi on the vehicle pressure gauge at 4000 rpm

2- At 4000rpm 80deg C the oil pressure was constantly above 6 bar [90psi]

3- factory Specification is one of two 4bar @ 4000rpm + or 5bar @ 5000rpm + [your engine meets this criteria easily]

4- Your independent test procedure -

5- Oil Temp ________

6- Oil Pressure ________

7- Test RPM Used _________

Could you please fill in the missing results for me.

If there is a problem I do not mind coming and collecting the vehicle and bringing it back to investigate the fault if there is a fault with the engine that is not related to the chassis I will rectify and return FOC If there is no fault with the engine I would advise that I would charge for my time and expenses to recover and inspect.

The procedure that would be taken is that once the vehicle is back we would check the oil temperature and set to 80deg using a independent sensor to measure the temperature, a independent calibrated pressure gauge would be fitted to the main oil gallery and the engine rpm be set to firstly 4000rpm and then 5000rpm the results would be compared to the data from the Dynomometer results from the final run #16 dated 09-06-2011 @ 18-14-37

Will talk soon

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 28

Hi Kenny,

Stuart has just called to say that he has re checked the oil pressure and it seems to be OK !

I don't want to seem like I am your worst Technician / Engine builder, but your mechanic of 10 years should stick to driving and car cleaning and stop wasting my time and yours!

I have always based my work on actual facts and information that is correct and relevant to the work completed and any testing is always done in a professional manner with equipment that can verify the results, I have invested over 500k in my engine test facility and don't need some knob to tell me that there is no oil pressure.

My wife has just looked at this email and said "I gather you are pretty pissed off by this Stuart guy"

Sorry if this a bit abrupt but I think that after working with Porsche cars for nearly 40 years and racing them myself for many years, put all this together with running and building historic cars and engines, I think I am justified in my comments.

I hope we can meet up shortly so you can see that I am a genuine enthusiast for the marque with a wealth of knowledge and I hope we can carry on to do business in the near future.

VMAX JUNE 28

I thought I was being pretty reasonable - the car had 10 psi reading on the gauge at idle when I stopped at the exit of his estate , after all if the engine had gone wrong and I said 'oh yes noticed it had low oil pressure so I kept driving it ' it would have been lack of care .

The conversation I had with him today , I told him while driving the gauge temp is 210 f about 98 degrees c he said it shouldn't run that hot ( it's the halfway reading on the gauge ) , and that it was missing an oil cooler at the front , I suppose a road test by him would have shown the same temp? Maybe no road test ?

The alternator is not charging the battery ( would have been good to check it while off the engine?) so gauges maybe reading inaccurately , so when I got back to the workshop I checked the oil pressure with a mechanical gauge and it showed lower than the dyno readings he relates to . When the engine has the new alternator on again , I'll run it up to operating temp and check it again .

In terms of wasting his time the brief conversation on pickup and today's tel. call amounted to 5 minutes , I'll give anyone 5 minutes of my time .

Tell him I don't clean cars !

KS JUNE 28

No need to be personal he's just doing his job to his best

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JUNE 28

Apologies, but glad to see you have a sense of humour.

VMAX JULY 4

Charge light on:

One battery low output (9.5v other 12.05v) causing alternator over load , removed alternator , changed all blown diodes (6) refitted with 2x new 063 batteries

Checked alternator output on test rig and again when re-installed , voltage stabiliser checked - ok

Oil pressure : gauges were reading lower when car was collected , probably due to low charge voltage ,

test results are :

Idle 4000 rpm

Gauge w/ coll Cold. 40. 80

Warm (180f) on dash 10. 40

Gauge today cold. 60. 100

Warm 20. 80

Mech gauge today cold. 50. 100

Warm. 15. 60

60 psi/4000 rpm warm tested with a mech gauge; although not immediatley alarming it shows a loss from the dyno sheet which showed 6 plus bar/ 90 psi .

Readings in psi , 'cold' test is 2 mins after initial start before dash gauge reaches lower temp mark of 120f on gauge ,

Round town driving shows 180-190 on gauge , constant motorway at 70 mph 200-210 - but still lower half of standard dashboard gauge - mech gauge is snap on oil pressure tester. Air temp for tests was 20-28 degrees c .

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd JULY 16

Hi Kenny, just to clarify, you are stripping the engine! To take internal photos, if you do this outside of my guidance your rebuild / remedy will be at your cost, please advise or have the vehicle dropped off on Tuesday for my personal inspection on Wednesday.

PLEASE ADVISE

VMAX AUG 1

When I collected the car he said it did not need super unleaded fuel - I asked specifically-

I have not heard of different fuels producing more smoke/ moisture.

No problem with stater motor while I had it , what seems to be the issue?

Leave the gauge I'll get it calibrated at TAG aerospace

VMAX AUG 4

I thought the engine had been run in/bedded in on the dyno, full power testing for the figures supplied is supposed to be done afterwards there was no problem with the stater motor when i last drove it why does it need changing ?

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd AUGUST 31

Hi Kenny,

I traced the oil to it entering the back of the #3 intake valve, to be safe I have replaced all the intake valve stem seals with a different type to the original ones, I also re checked the valve to valve guide tolerance and this is less than 0.050mm, the permissible wear limit is 0.150mm so I am happy that the problem was not mechanical related and was probably the stem seal material, there is no overrun smoke on road test and therefore the new seals are now working correctly, however the engine still produces a lot of moisture on start up as before and the moisture is also dripping out of the tail pipe as it did before ? there is not a lot I can do about this and can only put it down to the climate at the moment and the heat cycle on warm up of the engine once the silencer and heat exchangers are hot this is not a problem.

I will call Stor-A-Car so it can be collected in the morning for you.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd SEPTEMBER 1

Hi Kenny I took the car out of the workshop at 6.15 this morning and it was parked in front of the workshop until the chap from store-a-car moved it at this point I was not aware that it was covered in bird shit? And when it went into the trailer I didn’t see any, if there was any I would have washed the car but it has been in the shop from the day it was delivered to us.

The engine oil leaks please advise as to where as it has not dropped any oil in the workshop and having had the motor out it did not have any evidence of any.

Oil smoke ? again when the delivery driver started it there was only condensation after 30 seconds.

Leaking water from exhaust there is not a lot I can do about this as its obviously air cooled and the water is condensation from the atmosphere and fuel.

If you want me to have the car collected and valeted and if you can let me know where the oil leak is from I will rectify it immediately.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd SEPTEMBER 2

Hi Kenny Oil pump seal defiantly NO and as for your car smoking all the time it is NOT oil smoke it is condensation your engine when warm has no evidence of smoke at all in the warm-up cycle the engine is emitting moisture only.

The issue with a oil seal on the oil pump would fill the crank case and if it was on the scavenge side of the pump it would draw air into the pump and therefore not oil as the oil is harder to draw I have known amateur builders to leave them out but as the seal is 20 / 25mm dia depending on which one it is usually never a issue as it is also a square section seal sat in a grove in the case.

It is very difficult for me to visualise just what smoke you are now talking about as you are now saying the engine is smoking all the time! This is defiantly not the case I have driven the car myself and it drives lovely and it did defiantly not smoke even after driving it for 15 min on road test.

Please give me more details or please feel free to pop up in the car as after driving it for a few miles I am confident that the exhaust will have got to temp. And the moisture smoke will not be there.

VMAX SEPT 8

But you said plumes of smoke appeared, that's not fine!

VMAX SEPT 14

....and so the sssaga continues .

VMAX OCT 18

Asking questions now about how the throttle linkage was connected (or not ) is rather pointless , a quick test drive would have shown there was a problem as you found kenny , and he then would have had the opportunity to rectify it .

I have not adjusted any any part , so torque and hp should be unaffected .

I think now we need to look into the engine smoking which has been a continuous problem since it was collected after the engine rebuild .

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 18

Hi Kenny, I am beside my self-having driven the car for 60 + miles myself and Rob collecting and driving the car back to you with no fault, my only thoughts are there is something in the car I am quite certain that the engine is good, you could have an electric fuel pump that is faulty or contamination in the fuel tank.

Please take the time to explain to me the fault that you are getting, if I can help or assist I will.

VMAX OCT 18

The riddle appears to be the smoke me and kenny see , but you do not . It's not condensation just oil smoke coming out of the exhaust from cold start, and at warm idle you can also smell it although visibly it's less.

Shall I remove the exhaust and check for oil at the guides / in the cylinders or do you want to do it ? Changing the exhaust is not going to fix it .

The off side banks' throttle linkage was not connected . It's possible it came off but as you also noted the balljoints are in good condition and locate positively when connected.

VMAX 18

It seems the smoke on initial startup - which points to oil residing in the chamber or ports -, is leaking down while the engine is cooling and /or mixture too rich when cold causing bore washing .There is some smoke visible when hot also exiting from the tailpipe.

I think removal of the exhaust when cold will show whether guides or seals are to blame also checking in the bore for any oil residing , this will also point to where the hot oil smoke is coming from .

And a cold start check while monitoring the air fuel ratio will see if the mixture is too rich while warming up causing bore washing .

Really this is becoming like a pub quiz with specifications measurements and such , ways to diagnose , probable cause, likely components etc

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 18

Hi Not sure what your man is on about as there is only one link to the pump and this is set at 114mm centre to centre and it was correct and fitted, both ends of the link rod are on snap on ball joints and were all in good condition. Both the pump timing and the ignition timing were optimised when on the Dynamometer and therefore should not be adjusted or if they are then the Torque and HP / drivability will be affected.

Could your Mechanic explain a little more precisely what linkage parts were incorrectly fitted, as I said there is only one link rod to the pump and the car will not drive if it's not fitted.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 18

Hi Kenny,

Pointless or not the question is still there, If Rob had left some thing off then it would have shown up when I drove the car, as you will see from your speedometer the road test mileage was more than adequate to show up any fault, and the car had been delivered by driving it back to you as a further precaution. I seem to be missing something Kenny as if Rob drove the car to you without a problem, I also drove the car before it was delivered and found no fault with either the pump or the oil dropping onto the exhaust, the warm up condensation is something I cannot as I said before really do anything about, the only thing that could help this is to use a steel exhaust system this could possibly help due to the steel absorbing the heat quicker and the water content may be not as apparent at the tail pipe, but the engine on stop and start is not consuming oil or smoking.

If the Motor was a rough oil burning motor with no go in it then I would be a bit concerned, but as the engine is, as documented healthy powerful and giving good torque then if we have an issue with cold condensation so be it, if we are using a litre of oil in 500 miles [which we are not] then this would be a different story.

On a final note could you please get your man to explain the fault in plane simple English not a riddle so if I do have to issue a Monster bolloxing to Rob I am armed with the correct information.

I can also then apologise to yourself for the issue and inconvenience.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 18

All I can say Kenny is that given the mileage, it as hung on a long way before popping off as it was not removed when the pump was taken off for repair so I can only assume it is a unfortunate incident, I cannot put the blame on any one and certainly not on Rob as I have just tried another S that we have just finished and without the rod connected it is virtually un-drivable, and it certainly would not have got the 60 + miles from our works to you?

I apologise if it is necessary.

My thoughts on Smoke are, given that guides and seals were replaced, if you feel it necessary to inspect the exhaust guides by removing the exchangers the vehicle should be run first and a oil consumption test be carried out in accordance with Porsche recommendations, [this has already been carried out on the Dyno and was found to be nowhere near factory limits i.e. new] but if you feel it to be beneficial Kenny please take the time to drive to me so the car is in a run condition and the oil is at its thinnest. I will personally remove both exchangers and we can both inspect the exhaust ports,

I can put the camera down the plug hole and you can inspect the liners, but as the car dose not smoke on the overrun it is unlikely to be a guide issue and as it also doesn't smoke on acceleration it is unlikely to be a piston ring problem.

As a final thought we could also drive to Bob Watson Engineering as he is not so far away and he can pop it on the rolling road and we can watch the exhaust as the car is run under different load conditions for Oil Smoke and he can give you a appraisal of the engine as an independent ?

Please accept my apologies about the throttle rod but I am sure there would be a simple reason it would fall off after such a long test / drive but I cannot for the life of me think why at the moment.

Please forward on to the Mystery Mechanic my regards for his comments and thoughts but as always in engineering things must be assessed and reported, tests conducted on solid evidence of faults in a methodical and controlled sequence to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. [ at the moment there is a lot of water exciting the tail pipe of your air cooled engine on start-up and a minimal amount of oil smoke if it can be distinguished from the condensation ]

If you need my help please let's look at the issue in person on third hand.

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 18

Hi Kenny, as pointed out before all the parts are new and within factory specification, are we now talking about fuel smoke or oil smoke or defiantly condensation?

1 It is very unlikely that oil will run uphill therefore how is it going to run down an exhaust guide ?

2 The oil visible in an exhaust port has to be from a intake guide as this is the only guide that could possibly have oil soak from the stem / spring? [Unless it was in a condition as yours was when delivered for repair] Or the cylinder has approx. 180cc of oil in it as this is the amount it takes to reach the seat of the exhaust guide and therefore be able to run into the port.

3 The Fuel enrichment device on your car as like all is a two part system the warm up is take by means of the pump main rack being adjusted by bimetal thermo washers expanding due to heat from the exhaust, the main cold start is by way of pumping in to the manifolds neat fuel from 6 jets whilst cranking therefore wetting the intake tract and cylinders until the engine fires,

4 If you want me to carry out the requested operations again I.e.
removal of heat exchangers and looking in the bore with bore scope when cold
I will do so.

5 If there is a problem with the injection pump internally there are only 2 people in Germany that can address this properly and probably 100's of others that will have a go at it!

We now seem to be getting back to my previous mail about

" My thoughts on Smoke are, given that guides and seals were replaced, if you feel it necessary to inspect the exhaust guides by removing the exchangers the vehicle should be run first and an oil consumption test be carried out in accordance with Porsche recommendations, [this has already been carried out on the Dyno and was found to be nowhere near factory limits i.e. new] but if you feel it to be beneficial Kenny please take the time to drive to me so the car is in a run condition and the oil is at its thinnest.

I will personally remove both exchangers and we can both inspect the exhaust ports, I can put the camera down the plug hole and you can inspect the liners, but as the car dose not smoke on the overrun it is unlikely to be a guide issue and as it also doesn't smoke on acceleration it is unlikely to be a piston ring problem.

As a final thought we could also drive to Bob Watson Engineering as he is not so far away and he can pop it on the rolling road and we can watch the exhaust as the car is run under different load conditions for Oil Smoke and he can give you an appraisal of the engine as an independent ? "

Please don’t assume I am being difficult but having spent 36 years of my life working with Porsche air cooled engines I am finding it difficult to carry out "on line training" as we have already instructed your driver that the car does not have an oil light, it's chassis is not in an original condition and most of the equipment is going to be 37+ years old so don’t believe everything the gauges say as gospel.

Please let me know what you want to do other than enjoying the 202 bhp and 173 Ftlb Torque

VMAX OCT 19

The car smokes on start up , its blue smoke , oil smoke , its not supposed to smoke hot or cold.

It needs fixing, the 202 bhp is enjoyable , the smoke is embarrassing , and not expected after such an extensive rebuild at considerable time and cost .

BSMOTORSPORT Ltd OCTOBER 23

Hi Kenny, Starter motor was not changed as the only option at the time was Porsche as Bosch had no exchange units, I did advise you that I could fit a non-original but much better unit but you declined, from memory the Porsche starter was over 1K ? and I thing an exchange one is around £400 for OE Bosch or 300 for Lucas or the better high torque unit £285 + vat in stock.

Smoke at start could be both fuel / condensation after start and even though the Mystery mechanic said is smokes when hot I did tell you it didn’t, carry out a Porsche 1000klm oil consumption check it will be perfect.

If you need my help please just shout, I am always hear to help, but please no more riddles or online training! And once again I apologise for the throttle link popping off the stack but I still cannot see how it stayed on for so long.

The Art Market is the Best Judge of Good Art. Debate at Saatchi Gallery, October 7, 2011

2011-09-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Art Market is the Best Judge of Good Art. Debate at Saatchi Gallery, October 7, 2011; Position: Against.

We can end this before we start. The best judge of good art is simple and unequivocal: experience, education, scholarship, and passion. The market, and namely money which is what we are talking about, is a snapshot of current whims, fashions and fads. Oftentimes, the crowd leading the auction scene is not the culturally brightest bunch at the brunch. Not to mention the rampant manipulation, speculation and deceit that is part and parcel of the auction process, with all due respect to members of the respective houses. But that’s why we love the art market, the last unregulated multi-billion dollar business.

What is the best judge of good art? Art is a lifelong learning curve and the market is no substitute for putting eyeballs directly on it—smelling it, tasting it and touching it. You need to lift it, hang it, insure it, frame it, pack it, ship it, live with it, damage it, hate it and idolize it. And read it like a book, day in and day out. That is the best judge of art: experience and tactility. Honing your eyes is of paramount importance; people always refer in art to having a good eye, but I say one is not enough.

All markets are by nature, inefficient, at least at moments. When the stock market goes up, the good, bad and ugly follow suit, same when it goes down; and, it’s the same with art. Auctions die because of lack of confidence, and quality works are often the casualty, call it death by (un)friendly fire. Reputations go up and reputations go down, history is revised regularly, so why depend on any one signifier of value when in effect it is many variables that contribute to worth. Don't get me wrong I am a true believer in art and money and think they make cozy bedfellows, but the “market”, or rather dollar value, being just one determining factor.

Manet couldn’t find a gallery to sell his work or a collector to buy it early in his career so he was reduced to borrowing money from his mother to build a temporary structure to house a one person exhibit of his work as no one else would have it. Duchamp barely sold his own art so he ended up relying on interior decorating and art advising rich patrons; he also pulled off wildly unsuccessful and impractical entrepreneurial flubs, like cardboard optical illusions for children that spun on turntables and a shirt dying enterprise. Try to buy work by either now.

Consider Warhol’s market before and after his death. During his lifetime, his auction record was about $285,000 in 1986, a fact that disappointed Andy to the core: the painting, 200 $1 Dollar Bills, went to Greek born, London based collector Paulina Karpides who sold it in 2009 for close to $44m. When Warhol died in 1987 due to medical malpractice after what was routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital, he was more known for cheesy portraits of Pia Zadora, hanging out at a different type of studio—Studio 54, a guest appearance on the Love Boat, and handing copies of Interview Magazine out of a satchel in Soho. Hardly the glory days of the $100m painting where we are today. Which market characterization makes more sense?

In fact, the art market is incapable of judging anything about art other than what one person (not necessarily of sound mind) will pay for something at a given point in time. There are no assurances or guarantees that there is anything backing up a price other than capriciousness. There are countless instances of collectors, speculators and dealers getting fired up and excited about the day's soup de jour that turned into nothing, that is nominal scrap value or perhaps less. Rather than good, the market can be a very bad judge of markets—and value.

There are many, many instances of meteoric rises offset by swift declines: for example, since the early 80s, the markets of Donald Sultan, David Salle, Julian Schnabel; and the triumvirate of Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cuuchi (I think Mr. Saatchi himself might have had a hand in their decline but let’s leave that to another debate, at another venue). They are not all bad artists, though some most assuredly are; the market certainly thinks so now—but it certainly didn’t think so then.

As much as I admire Damien Hirst and I do, the late 80s to mid 90s stuff anyway, in the art world it’s like admitting to reading the Daily Mail (that's another debate, I should do programming for the series). It is human nature to find something sexy knowing an artwork is worth a lot of money, or we wouldn't be so obsessed. But the Qatari’s, the alleged purchasers at auction for $19m of some metal shelving laden with garish tchotchkes: you have been forewarned. Beware of ever-decreasing insurance valuations.

In today’s terms, think of the most glaring recent examples of market madness. There is the $250,000,000 paid for Cezanne’s The Card Players, the highest price ever for a work of art, fittingly about gambling; $105,000,000 for Giacometti’s Walking Man to Lily Safra, call it gilding the gilded lily; and $150,000,000 for Jackson Pollacks and Willem de Koonings, and that’s meant to be plural. My question is for the market-equals-value pundits: couldn’t the money be put to better use even in the age of zero sum returns on cash, from charities to investments? Where is the upside from outer space?

Upcoming, unedited GQ feature: A Porsche to Die For, or Dying Made Fun

2011-09-05T04:08:00.000-07:00

A Porsche to Die For, or Dying Made Fun

This is about death, cars, craft, and the power of contemporary art to suck it all in and spit it all out, or shit it out in this case. I took my wife and four boys aged 14, 13, 11 and 8 on a world-wind trip to Ghana to visit the Joseph Ashong aka Paa Joe Workshop outside of Accra, a folk artist specializing in what he calls Proverbial Caskets, one of which I had commissioned. In the west we buy Warhols to display wealth and status, in Ghana, they get buried in a Mercedes. They are crafted according to the station in life of the deceased (or soon to be departed): the Mercedes would be for a businessman; corn, tomato or onion for a farmer; cell phones; coke and beer bottles; and crabs and so on. One is more colorful, cartoonish and kitschier than the next in the best possible way. Paa Joe calls them “intriguing imaginations of helping to convert the departed in flamboyant manner to the world of the unknown while providing him/her a royal ride into the next world.” Sounds like the next best thing to a royal wedding. My coffin will be in the form of a 1973 Porsche 911 2.7 RS in baby blue. I have always loved Porsche design since childhood, the simplicity and cleanness of the lines, not to mention the reliability. Some are Ferrari people, others not; in fact, I relate to the car so much, I feel that I resemble the shape, like a snake that swallowed a mouse. I suppose as an art dealer, I should have gone for a giant Duchampian urinal; instead, after my trip to poverty stricken Ghana, I am practically too embarrassed of the materialist nature of my choice to even post about it.

I first encountered the artist and his designer coffins at Jack Bell Gallery in Vauxhall. The dealer tried to get me to buy two Paa Joe’s stating how much shipping and customs duties could be reduced with the addition of another coffin – to which I replied that I would only die once. Must admit I was as nervous about the trip as the macabre nature of what I was getting myself into – literally and figuratively. At first it was more just another artwork among artworks that I thought would look rather cool plunked in the middle of my house. But then it occurred to me that I might be tempting fate by putting my sculpture, which happens to be a coffin, smack in the middle of my bedroom. In retrospect perhaps it wasn’t the brightest or cheeriest of ideas, as it seems too much like inviting the scythe wielder into bed. I guess I was enthralled by the notion of a bespoke demise, a last lap around the track.

Before we even started, the adventure had begun. This would be life outside the comfort zone: the things that one has to do to avoid Starbucks. For my children (and me) who are generally more accustomed to the Saints, as in St. Moritz, St. Tropez or St. Barthes (a slight exaggeration but sounds good) we were ready for something new. From the get go, my wife was none too amused with my holiday planning. The night prior to our departure, CNN posted a quiz before a commercial break: “What is to the east of the Ivory Coast, mired in civil war?” Er, that would be Ghana. Next off came visits to the vaccination clinic, there was malaria, cholera, and many other ailments to worry about. There were pills to be ingested before, during and after the trip and a plethora of shots to be had. The nurse implored us to stay calm and not to overreact; easy for her to say as she called off the list of possible diseases we’d be exposed to like the specials in an exotic restaurant. The sensation of my three-course meal of shots was a burning pain that lasted for days. Out of all malaria drugs, funny how the pill with the least side and after effects cost fifty percent more than the rest. And don’t forget the sun screen, insect repellant and spare needles should you need a blood transfusion during your holiday festivities. Did you know tsetse flies prefer blue? There went my wardrobe hue of choice. Shortly after the series of vaccines, the kids all became stricken with a mild form of yellow fever, an apparent common side effect, which only increased the consternation of my already hesitant wife.

Though we made dash to attain traveling documents, my family hasn’t planned more than a few days in advance for anything—needless to say we didn’t come close to meeting the deadline for securing visas. Once off the plane, armed with no traveling documents, already not speaking to my wife, the dark clouds of divorce loomed. After about an hour of phone calls and haggling it was agreed we could pay our way through, good thing after two planes and eight hours of flying. When I handed over the cash, the officer returned two $20 notes, stating they were too dirty and the bank wouldn’t accept them. I didn’t know quite what to make of that other than the fact I would accept currency dripping in malaria. The moment we exited the airport the money grab began, literally, as it was snatched out of my hands by an unruly group of taxi facilitators, i.e. guys who follow you to a cab and try and take your money for a tip as you get in. An auspicious way to start, we were definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Once we arrived at the hotel, I was determined to eat anything and everything that came my way in the face of my wife’s utter resolve not to. The presidential suite I decided to treat my reluctant family to was closer in feeling to the local council. And low and behold, the first person I encountered in the hotel restaurant was a Jew from Boston. My first impression was how strange it was to be in a place with no art market, in fact I don’t think that had ever happened to me before. Imagine how out of place and utterly wrong a £20m Hirst vitrine or Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture would be? How did it feel? As if I was naked. Many people in Ghana live in what is nothing more than modified shipping containers and they travel by foot balancing all manner of stuff on their heads, for transport purposes and goods for commerce; in the case of one guy, he had 4 steel street signs atop his. Baby’s heads pop out of rucksacks front and back like little figures with bobbing heads you see in the back of some American cars. All over the markets and curbsides, they sell swollen sandwich bags ready to pop filled with water to fight the heat. My kind of diet—you lose weight while standing in place.

To start our sightseeing, we visited Jamestown, the poorest harbor town amongst the poor. We were touring in two cars and rolled up to a lighthouse at the seaside and picked up an impromptu guide along the way to take us through. We bounded up the decrepit structure where the wooden stairs became more irregular, like missing teeth. Once on top afforded panoramic views of the shantytowns, yet the protective railings could best be described as barely present. Maybe there is something to health and safety. The fishing shantytown at the harbor was like a pulsating, 3D Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, exposing raw unspeakable poverty with bodies thickly and chaotically strewn about. We were told it’s impossible to drive down the streets in the area at night confronted with a carpet of sleeping people.

After the lighthouse, our off the cuff tour guide asked us if we’d like to venture through the actual fishing village. In doing so, we encountered a sometimes-hostile group of inhabitants screaming and hissing their displeasure at our intrusion. There were bands of youths, many with weeping eyes from drink and drugs, variously threatening and cajoling us. My kids were nearly relieved of their sunglasses by pickpocketers, one who swiped the camera out of the hands of my 14 year-old, only to hand it back moments later. Though an everyday occurrence on Kings Road, to say he was rather surprised would be the understatement of the century. I can understand their consternation, as we seemed rather gratuitous and pretentious in our foray into their modest village, but our intent was only to see and learn. We felt like bait, boldly protected by our fearless guide. Sadly, the history of the port included a fort where slaves were unceremoniously led from underground tunnels to awaiting ships, surely an atrocity worse than death. Fitting this about a coffin. The poverty would shock a fish in a tank of formaldehyde. The only bar in the desolate harbor town was called the London Bar, an apt reference to the hard drinking UK - that's what I call a reputation!

After a brief stint in a traditional crafts market, otherwise known as a tourist trap—unannounced, my crazy wife ambushed the kids and I and arranged for a visit to an orphanage. I guess the little figurines at market weren't enough. We were sat in the office and it was explained to us that the process would necessitate a series of meetings with social workers both in Africa and the UK to see if we were fit for such onerous parenting duties. They should have asked me, I would have readily admitted we weren’t. Within an hour, they brought out a brother and sister (one is never enough for my wife), so much for the assessment process. I was surprised there were any kids left in the region after Madonna, Angelina, Mia, and Sandra. Though thankfully she didn’t pursue it further, on Easter morning my wife did visit a local supermarket that was closely watched by armed guards, and then flooded the orphanage with food and gifts while I and a few of the kids hid in the hotel.

The only gallery in Accra is a spiraling, seaside disused hotel with all manor of wares from purely folk and decorative art to Paa Joe and other contemporary, more conceptual practitioners. The Artists Alliance Gallery, free of art world conceit and snobbery, was refreshing, accessible and priced a third less than the London counterpart, and priced about 20% less than the art purchased directly from the artist studios who could see us suckers coming for miles. Later that afternoon, the trip by car to Paa Joe’s studio witnessed a long snaking line of purveyors of everything from food, to clothing to household goods, all held aloft on the heads of the traveling merchants. The motorway, for the duration of the hour-long journey, veered seamlessly from asphalt to dirt and back.

When we finally made it to the studio of Paa Joe, whose nickname originates from the fact that his studio is apprenticed by a handful of the 8 children he has sired, they seemed to be laughing at us, but in a nice and disarming sort of way. Rather than for money, the traditional craftsman gain work experience in exchange for food, some booze, a goat, a pair of sandals, a roll of fabric, and a few quid; but, that relationship can go on for years until one breaks out on their own.

The workshop had no lights or electricity, and being in the midst of the rainy season made it darker than a winter day in the UK at 3pm. There was mold on the studio walls that would make any Londoner proud and though his marketing pamphlet alludes to sophisticated tools and machinery, these seem to be comprised of nothing more than hammers, nails and hand-operated wood carving tools. Rather than a negative, this constitutes the charm of the enterprise. And somehow, by hand-eye coordination and an intuitive response to the subject matter, they seem to get it just right.

My Porsche was taking shape nicely and was an amazing process to witness. Seemingly unrelated pieces of wood were nailed and glued to the frame, which initially looked nothing like the car I commissioned, until, using no more than a hand trowel, the surfaces were smoothed into the familiar form of the 911 2.7 RS. Granted, the shut lines of the lid appeared slightly off, as they do with most Ghanaian coffins, but its all part of the attraction and unwittingly, probably contribute to a virtual feast for bugs when these things are put into actual use. Come to think of it, Paa Joe never asked, nor did I, for a fitting. For the hedge funder, there's a smart lace-up brogue and I have seen a bible shaped coffin, the interior of which was fully illustrated; perhaps I should have chosen a life sized issue of The Daily Mail, admittedly my bible. My 8 year old couldn't resist jumping in one of the finished items and taking it for a test drive…

“For a Ga (the dominant ethnic community in the region surrounding Accra, the capital of Ghana) it is better to incur lifelong debts than to cut back on funeral expenses.” Going into Darkness, Fantastic Coffins from Africa, Thierry Secretan. Thames and Hudson, 1995, page 7. With my wife, incurring lifelong debt would be the cause of the funeral. Pointing out how these works of art are beyond any economic cycle, one of the leading lights of the trade of coffin making, Kane Kwei, said “all a dead person owns is his coffin.” Going into Darkness, page 20. The funerary art form of custom coffins, by nature intended to be appreciated only for the brief period of a funeral ritual prior to being buried six feet under, is that these objects of art have a shelf life before they are obscured forever, never to be seen again. Imagine doing that with your Damien or Tracey?

After our visit and purchase of some more small pieces, albeit over the mark, Paa Joe even pitied the taxi driver and shared some of the spoils with him prior to our departure, leaving him with a fiver. Not to be outdone, our enterprising, intrepid taxi driver pulled to the side of the hotel after our trip and tried to extort $1,200 Ghanaian dollars (40p for one Ghanian Cedi) for the ride. Thronged at the airport, thronged at the market, thronged at the harbor and thronged at the beach, we had reached our threshold after only two full days, but full they were. I called the travel agent from our roped off lounge chair on the roped off beach and planned our retreat. The squalor was otherworldly, heartrending and had taken its toll. On the beach alone, we struggled to ignore the onslaught of aggressive sellers; sellers of shells, paintings, sculptures, clothes, horseback rides. With some of the nutters gallivanting on the sand, it became clear the UK doesn't have a monopoly on eccentricity.

So, we a bailed a day early, and the UK never looked so good upon our return. When I got home I cried. My kids and wife, it feels like we all experienced the same simultaneous wound. When I mentioned the trip briefly on Facebook, within one short second after the post I had a reply from Paa Joe himself, which led me to believe that there was a secret, well-equipped underground nerve center to the operation. The experience in total made much of my life seem rather absurd and futile; the realization that half my obsessions revealed themselves as obscene was less than flattering. And I never saw my kids so sober-minded, which is a good thing, but my wife is still threatening to adopt. Though the bright pink Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture I mentioned might seem about the most irrelevant and frivolous thing in the world going forward, I could understand how it might brighten things up a bit. Maybe contemporary art is not quite nutritious, but thirst quenching nonetheless. Sadly with my insensitive, degenerate kids the effects didn’t last long: the lessons learnt about the ill effects of rampant materialism were short lived at best.

Inevitably, with all the prophylactics and vaccinations, we all got diarrhea before and after our return; I was struck down at a society luncheon in London shortly after touchdown. One by one we all began to spend more and more time either on the toilet or lording over it. There wasn’t a bathroom in the house without some residue of a Jackson Pollock splatter. My wife bundled up the kids and herded them to a series of doctors for tests, convinced a biological Noah's Ark of micro-organisms had lodged in the collective organs of my family

I focused on the words characterizing our trip and let my kids fight over whose images would pass muster with GQ’s photo editor. It became a competition with the end result that my 13 year old shot 4,773 images. What with the kids turned into a roving photo agency, I unwittingly created a group of mini Mario Testino monsters. As adamant as the kids were about photo credits, they were also persistent in pleading, “please don’t make us go back to a developing country for half-term.” In truth, in the past I never thought much about visiting Ghana or Africa for that matter. After my trip, it colors all that I think about and I can't wait to get back – I only hope I don't end up in my 1973 Porsche 2.7 RS coffin before I get the chance to. Is Africa going to be the next China in terms of development? Let’s hope so. Another upside to this episode in our lives, I received an indication my wife has moved on from the idea of taking another child on board-in one form anyway. Here is a recently received text: "I want to adopt an elderly person and we can take care of them so they don't have to be in a home." That could be my next article.

Epilogue

An email message from Paa Joe popped up that his fall gallery exhibit had been cancelled—a New York collector had purchased the latest body of work in its entirety and decided they didn't want it shown. Then Paa implored me to "find him more collectors." Though it honestly never occurred to me (a rarity, that), my coffin seemed to be appreciating in line with the car it was inspired by. And Paa was beginning to sound less like a hokey outsider and more like a middle-aged, aspirant YBA.

The eagle finally landed, after nearly a year in progress, it arrived; albeit a bit banged up after the long trip from Ghana, but it's a car, what can you expect. Not many people can say they welcomed, looked forward even, to such an unveiling. It’s a car that drives you to the next world, yet with my sense of direction, I will probably manage to get lost. I posted a casual phone picture on facebook and I was asked about the head peering behind the steering wheel, but strangely, in the real article, there is nothing (or no one) inside the passenger compartment. It’s an eerie apparition, the ghost in the machine or the ghost in the coffin. It’s that cool, who could blame him.

The exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum is titled “Power of Making” and is open from 6 September 2011 – 2 January 2012. It will focus on design and cut across a wide scope of areas. The Lion coffin is due to be a major feature.

simon's bar mitzvah

2011-08-26T04:57:00.000-07:00

We were leaving a party in Jerusalem and decided to forego the bus back to Tel Aviv and make a dash to the hotel. We got into a random taxi outside the Dung Gate (a highly memorable designation) of the old city and the driver was of Saphardic descent. My wife asked: are you going to kill us? If you don’t, I will give you extra 100 Shekels; can’t deny her logic, its good to incentive-ize people. After we safely made it back we planned dinner. Another ostensibly less threatening taxi ride ensued where we argued the merits of a traditional Arab meal vs. the Israeli counterpart. You can imagine who took which side between my wife and I with the cab driver weighing in of course…it is Israel. After a salad and meat packed feast, my 15 year old’s face began to alarmingly swell, amidst a breakout of hives. So we had an after dinner drink at Tel Aviv’s very busy emergency ward—where the ambulances were demarcated as originating from New Jersey—I guess its hard to find good health care in the State’s nowadays. A little Cortisone and three hours later he was good to go.

In the morning I went for a run, with my glasses—had I gone without like last time in the rain, the ramifications could have triggered an international incident. When you think of the (sometimes heavy-handed) politics of the region, there is no reason the Jews, long persecuted, and Palestinians should not have peaceful places to prosper and co-exist. I went to the historical, stunning Arab city of Jaffa. I passed a gallery with kitschy, cartoonish paintings like a Palestinian Peter Saul—I actually ran through the exhibition; I am sure there is a joke there but I am not going to search. When I (barely) made it back in the scorching midday 30+ degree heat, I plopped down on a hotel bench and the security guard reprimanded me: “don’t sit after you run.” It is Israel after all.

Wet Run

2011-08-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

It was raining so hard I had to run (didn't have to but need to seize the initiative when it crops) with no glasses on, the result was kind of like Mr Magoo. I am a step or two away from legally blind not to mention a stigmatism—my corrective lens need to be ground down so as not to resemble bulletproof glass. Wasn’t so much harrowing for me as for the hapless passers-by. Not being able to focus so much on my other-than-immediate surroundings was like going into a trance. I read of an ancient Arabic scholar who used the word unlearning to describe peasants who, with no formal education, could memorize the Koran by heart. This was more a matter of unseeing. At one point a postbox resembled a woman and at another, a group of four tourists huddled together in hooded raincoats I mistook for a horse. I stepped off the sidewalk to avoid pedestrians and when I tried to remount didn't realize the curb was two-tiered. My foot slid across the top level and I saved myself just before falling headfirst into oncoming traffic and becoming road kill. Near the end I resembled a wet t-shirt contestant, but more like a slightly chubby one on reality TV. A runner called out to me and I didn’t know if I knew him or he was voting for me. Maybe I should do an existential experiment and take off my specs for a week. If so, watch your flank.

"Gold and Picasso: Going Topless", for the Fall 2011 issue of Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.

2011-08-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

Gold and Picasso: Going Topless.

Sotheby’s (BID), the world’s largest publicly traded auctioneer said second-quarter earnings rose 48 percent for its best quarter ever, though the share price is, at the time of this writing, down over 40% since May 2011. It has been repeatedly pointed out that about every time the shares experience such a decline (and precipitous may be too gentle a description in this instance), a spike in the same direction for the art market in general is all but certain. That would not seem to portend a happy fall season for the upcoming spate of auctions, fairs, private treaty sales, exhibits, etc, etc. More like a happy fall in the loopy prices seen in the market of late, like the purchase for $250,000,000 of a Cezanne painting, the Card Players. Throw in the downgrading of the USA—how they deserve even an AA+ beggars belief, if I performed as badly surely I’d struggle for a B-; the imminent collapse of Europe; and the summer sacking of the UK in riots that witnessed mass pillaging and worse. It was always clear if widespread hardship rendered people unable to buy food, they’d ultimately take it. Rice was among the items depicted in the arms of London looters. Thus, all the ingredients would seem to be in place for the ideal recipe for the death knell of the art market as we know it.

Guess what? Not for the sake of being a gratuitous contrarian, but I am still bullish for the upcoming 2011-12 art market, and foresee records tumbling, not to the downside but rather falling upwards as new highs will be achieved before there is any palpable correction. Talking about fundamentals, the factors fueling the recent frenetic art market activities are only becoming magnified in the face of such worldwide jitters and uncertainly. Shares? If 500-point intraday swings don’t make you queasy, I am sure there are some strategic opportunities on the horizon. Currencies? I don’t think anyone in their right mind would proffer a guess as to the short term gyrations we are about to experience, other than the Swiss Franc seems poised to continue to behave like a balloon freshly filled with helium. Property? Still a mixed bag, with only the best of the best in the top regions performing, and there are less top regions by the day. Commodities? A whipsaw investment not for the unwary as speculation about the sustainability of China’s continued growth, pressure on demand, and spiraling costs. Interest rates seem to reside full time in the doldrums, unless you find zero an exciting number. Cash is going to earn negative returns for the next two years according to Bernanke’s statement last week and bonds can’t go much higher—and there is no sovereign default risk with Picasso. In a macro sense, the USA appears to be morphing into the new Japan, according to Bill Gross (more or less), who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. quoted on Bloomberg.com. Such a grim scenario gives new meaning to the doom and gloom in the GBD Report, which perhaps should consider dropping the boom in favor of a few extra heaping portions of gloom and doom.

But every cloud has a gold lining, if you are an art collector or holder of physical gold, which seems to have been going topless all summer. Where will it stop? I can imagine $2,400 to $2,800 an ounce in the short term, in the same fashion as I can comfortably accept that sooner rather than later the $250m Cezanne record will be eclipsed, pushing further into the clouds the stratospheric value placed on unrepeatable trophy art. Gold equals Picasso, and Picasso = gold. Picasso is the measure of value against which all else in the art market is compared, not to mention Warhol hasn’t been faring too badly either, thank you very much. Let us put to rest the notion that art is an erudite, unknowable, illiquid vehicle seen as a frivolous pursuit of the wealthy to impress upon their friends. Previously I would have said it was a pastime led by the Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund elite, but markets and investigations have pretty uniformly battered them all of late. Art is a store of value, a systematic, objectively (for the most part) measureable asset class viewed in such a way by more and more collectors, investors and institutions, even. As a whole, art has never been as liquid, global and covetable as it is now, from China to Brazil, New York (still) to Russia, and India and Europe (still). These are good times for art and will continue to be so, for at least the next year or two. Baring some unforeseen, unspeakable tragedy all things art will trend up, but even a cataclysmic event can add to art’s allure. People want art so badly nowadays they are literally prepared to steal it; there's been a spate of art thefts, it's that desirable.

Some rather curious art world manifestations (shenanigans?) that have come to light recently are the notion of a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) to list on the London Exchange’s AIM, somehow involving art works and SplitArt, an actual art exchange to buy and sells shares in specific works of art. In their own (not entirely convincing) words: “SplitArt will operate the first regulated market for art, indeed the company is in the application process to obtain its license from the CSSF (financial sector supervisor of Luxembourg) and thus establish an electronic trading platform for art securities (MTF Multilateral Trading Facility) that will offer a wide audience access to a new transparent and potentially liquid market with low transaction costs.” I am not so sure how many people would be lining up to have their Picasso’s fractionalized like a time share in Florida, but one you can’t use for holidays. But stranger things have happened. Also, there are more and more funds with tangible collectibles as the core of their holdings like cars and wine, and more banks willing and eager to jump on board, from lending facilities to advisory services. These are all telltale signs of a maturing market with wider breadth and acceptance than at any prior stage in history. In my estimation, the plethora of new art initiatives, even the far-flung and unorthodox, is ineluctable evidence of the concept that art is more, much more, than a pretty picture. In effect, art is flying off the shelves faster than electronics in a London melee. We are in an age of art's rising economy; call me the voice of Boom amidst the chorus of Gloom & Doom. The right art is a safe harbor in today's rocky waters and a great place to dock cash.

Art4August

2011-08-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

Today’s art collecting tidbit: Do NOT purchase art at art fairs, any, ever. Demand steeply exceeds supply (or so you are led to believe) and one is bound to get caught up in the irrational exuberance and impulse of unconsidered buying. The same applies for auctions; simply don’t. Ditto buying at commercial galleries during what is considered high season—for me that is eleven months a year. Rather, engage in what I call Art4August, Get the dealers when they are down on their collective knees, or cash flow anyway. Turn the tables on the typical master slave relationship that is the norm when patronizing snooty art galleries. Summer collect! When business crawls to a near halt, vist spaces or reach out to dealers for jpegs. The art supply is more or less consistent whether its Calders or Colens; there’s always death, divorce, taxes and pruning in all seasons, and contemporary continues to be churned out at an alarming pace, I meant carefully and willfully created. Sure the rule still applies to buy what you love, but make sure you love what you buy—do diligence!

freudian slip

2011-07-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

freud was very much like uk version of phillip pearlstein, a stubborn realist. his early paintings AND drawings are kooky, weird and eccentric and should, in the long term, be the most esteemed. 7 days a week he had a dinner reservation at the wolseley-he painted the owner which went to sf moma-where the food is mediocre and the atmosphere sublime. he once asked me if we knew each other from the house of some socialite or another to which i replied, insincerely but honored to be acknowledged, in the affirmative. he was an artwork unto his artful, elegant self.

info mafia

2011-07-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

From an Observer article on Ted Talks, "Is 'Facebookistan' the most powerful country on Earth? Rebecca MacKinnon of the international bloggers' network Global Voices Online claims it is starting to act like one. Private companies are starting to behave like governments. They're applying censorship or responding to requests from regimes and creating what she calls "a new layer of private sovereignty". In the old days, there were nation states; in the new world order, there are supra-national corporations exercising power without restraint." Watching the slimy Parliamentary phone hacking hearings, News Corp is the super duper, super evil, superpower bar none. Father/Son Murdoch make the info mafia of fb et al look benign.

Life After Art School, Royal College of Art, June 29, excerpt

2011-07-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Our Life After Art School event on 29 June 2011 was an honest, wide-ranging discussion of issues ranging from how to deal with the vagaries of the gallery system to the importance of emotional maturity. Here’s an extract.

The speakers:

Kenny Schachter, Collector, art dealer and writer
Martina Schmuecker, Performance artist and lecturer
Kit Grover, Director, Kit Grover Ltd
Charlotte Schepke, Gallery Director
Richard Wentworth, Artist and Head of Sculpture, RCA
Sarah Douglas, FuelRCA

Necessary making

Kit Grover: I needed to make work, and if I didn’t have the money for paint I would have used mustard. I don’t understand the pressure exactly to instantly leave school and be represented and be aiming for this success. I guess I had very humble aspirations. I really only cared about paying my rent, that was the only thing that scared me, I figured that my identity as an artist did not depend on any gallery, any of my friends, anything except what I felt like when I was doing it.

Martina Schmuecker: But that also has something to do with time… Certainly when I graduated, the time pressure of 2005, before the financial crisis, was to present products, to have finished objects, and this place [the RCA] has always tended to be very in favour of the object. From my personal experience in the final show here, I did the same thing and was in the last half year here very much on track with producing products. I produced three products which I then left in the space for the technicians to deal with. I didn’t even pick them up after the show

Richard Wentworth: So they’re gone?

MS: So they’re gone. Yeah. Exactly.

Build your own infrastructure

Sarah Douglas: Martina, as someone who makes work which is not very commercial, do you feel your identity as an artist depends on any infrastructure?

MS: I definitely need an infrastructure, everybody needs to make money. Everybody needs to pay the rent. But for my work, I discovered a year after I came out of college how interesting and how good these people were I studied with, and how much you can actually do with them, and I was quite surprised to then work with people that I absolutely did not get on with while I was here, who were then brilliant in putting on shows, writing texts, giving me advice. Basically I think I need approval of the quality of my work, definitely, but I think this critique comes from my peer group, which is very important for me in making and showing my work. So in terms of public representation and galleries, I have not really found the space or that gallery that I would like to work with. I always think this is a two way relationship that you can have with somebody who is a collector, a dealer, a gallerist, and this has to work in two [directions]. If it is just this relation with somebody who you fear but who you can’t talk to but maybe they’re from somewhere like White Cube, maybe you want to be there in that glow –

RW: That’s not a glow.

MS: Maybe not any more.

RW: Never.

MS: OK, but I think that as an artist, this will not get you very far, it will not work for you and it will not work for your work. And I think in this time after the financial crisis anyway there is now a certain level of freedom to have a life, I think, as an artist, as well as having success, and I think that’s pretty good.

SD: What do you mean by a life as an artist?

MS: To have some sense of agency, or mission in a way.

SD: So that it becomes political?

MS: It almost becomes political, although I can’t say that my work is political. I definitely have political interests with it, which I follow, and I think that political side of the work becomes more important in the world. I work on that very much. I don’t know, art is still a product, you make it and you sell it, but there might be more to it now, which I think is really good.

The red herring of youth

SD: I remember going to a talk when I was here when a renowned gallerist said if you haven’t made it four years after you graduate then give up, do something else.

KS: That’s revolting. I think that’s a ridiculous notion, there are emerging artists that are 80 years old, as well as students right out of school. I think when you talk about the market or what’s creative success, it’s a complicated question. Before the crisis, in 2004 to 2007, very young emerging artists were the rage in the market, and for me it just got boring. I always said I wouldn’t pay historic prices for artists with no history. I’ve seen it on every side, making art, critiquing art, staging exhibitions and selling it, and selling everything from artists first out of school to working with Picasso and Impressionist and modern paintings, and it’s sadly an extraordinarily reductive process that leads towards success. I’ve worked with collectors and worked with curators and worked with institutions but in the hardcore world of the marketplace the thing that drives collectors is really sad. If you really looked into it you’d all change careers and slit your wrists or something, it’s rather horrific. I mean people want to buy the art that’s in the same vein as the art that other people make, and people make 3000 of the same painting for a reason. For instance Vito Acconci, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, he’s not making art any more because he’s done an about-face and he’s doing industrial design and he’s a self-taught architect and this is a person who’s been “emerging” for 50 years. I think Vito Acconci is like a brain with two feet, and he’s not even cognizant of these materialistic forces that drive the entire world, from China to me. At the same time, when you think about making a living in the art world from your work only, to cater to the collectors and the galleries, it’s all a rather sad master/slave relationship but it’s unavoidable. It really is a sheep mentality. Last auction a young kid, 26 years old, had a painting that’s estimated at $50,000 and sells for $300,000 and he’s the soup du jour you know? I found a way to make a living outside of it, I think when you focus too much on the commercial side it soils the whole relationship. The things I love doing most are the things with zero commercial ramifications, to the consternation of my wife, but really that’s what you have to do, of course you can succeed on your own terms in the art world but you have to have alternative means so there’s a safety net. It’s just a very difficult, arduous and long running process.

KG: I wanted to say something that kind of picks up on a combination [of issues] – I know you didn’t mean that thing about artists having a life as a separate thing, but just, a very short personal thing which I think affects a lot of young artists is that when I got picked up when I was 24 –

KS: By what gallery?

KG: Holly Solomon. My emotional development as a person with a life was absolutely zero, I was just really good at making stuff, and I was very shocked that people bought it and the speed at which they wanted it replenished, and that was horrific. The problem was the discrepancy between, just for lack of better word, my natural talent and my intellectual growth as just a young person, and they were wildly out of synch, and they never really got into synch in that context, ever with a dealer. So I just think, it’s something you have to be very aware of. Everyone’s hunting for new blood, and I’m sure many of you do things which are drop dead wonderful, and seductive to these voracious collectors and people who have an interest, but it may not be in your best interest. You have to check your own self knowledge… I had this one skill which was way up here and the rest of me was way over there. And I’m sure that maybe some of you share that and if not you may know someone who does. It’s important in this context, with how rough the commercial world is, especially aspiring to these notions of success.

Other people’s patience

MS: But can I say something in defence of the collectors or the buyers? I mean they are a lot of people around that are quite patient and quite interested in things that take a longer time. Also, what I realised after college is that most of my peers who are from London or England, probably had been talking through their BA or through their time before, to people already, whereas I didn’t have that.

RW: You mean talking to collectors?

MS: No, not really talking to collectors but talking to people who were interested in their work, and some of them might have been people who might start to buy stuff or collect stuff, and some of these people are quite good at waiting and at looking what is happening with your work over the years. I only found that out a couple of years after I left here, that this was actually what was happening. Also in working within the art world, you make relations, and some of them are good and some of them aren’t, you learn along the way, and in a way you have to keep a quite open mind of who is good for you and who isn’t.

RW: Is that description of other people’s patience, does that run parallel with your own social maturity as you realise that that person who bored you, frightened you, seemed predatory, all the things that people can seem – we meet people all day long and we like them or we don’t like them very quickly and later we change our mind a bit… Is that thing of people being interested in you something to do with you giving off a different temperature?

MS: Probably. I’m not really sure about that because I think the interesting thing I learned in London was how good small talk is, and how useful it is. In Germany you don’t have small talk, if you have small talk you’re complaining, that’s the German version of small talk

KG: It’s not just Germans!

MS: Maybe not, I don’t know. Once I sort of got that, I found it easier to have conversations or to start conversations – still not very easy but – and then you kind of realise that you need people to relax in your presence as well, it’s not only that you need to relax in other people’s presence. They might be scared of you as well which is quite odd. And yeah, it probably has to do with social maturity.

9/11 10 Years On: An Admission

2011-07-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

I was sleeping recovering from something or other, probably self-induced, when the phone rang and my wife informed me a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Knowing her propensity to hyperbolize, I dismissed it as at best a random small aircraft incident, but turned on the TV nonetheless. First one, then two planes were depicted crashing into the buildings, the smoldering towers became a shocking, gaping hole in our collective consciousness (literally and figuratively). I stood on the corner of my West Village residence a mile away from the wreckage and watched in disbelief. At the expensive of being horribly desensitized, I was sorry I walked back in when the actual buildings went down. I admit to the morbid human frailty of the impulse to rubberneck. Yes, the deaths must have been agonizing beyond imagination; the suicidal jumpers went missing from the local media. The devastation will never be lost on us. I wouldn’t dream of belittling the events of the day, but there was something, somehow unthinkable and grandiose at the same time when two of the world’s tallest towers were nearly simultaneously razed flat. Terrorism as spectacle. How can you read fiction when no imagination can conjure such a massacre? The immediate fear of gas mains bursting resulted in our being evacuated - the smells alone that ensued for months were a putrid reminder of all that was incinerated human, manmade and other. I visited the devastation and the area was white-dusted with an eerie dry snow, piled high. There was a single, smallish, lattice-like skeletal presence of structural remains. It was otherworldly. Nowadays, 9/11 colors all we see and think and the towers remains in their absence, like missing teeth from the NY skyline. 10 years on we can only stoically await what will come next whether a dirty bomb, or small scale nuclear or chemical conflagration.

Royal College of Art, MA Lecture: Life Outside

2011-06-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

Life Outside: About the realities of life outside art school

What it actually means to embark on a life as an artist - a whole life.
And in some senses, how one might 'survive' or relish this choice/path.

What does a 'career' as an artist really mean? A lifelong commitment to eat, drink and sleep art.

Personal values and ethics versus ruthless careerism... The differences between making art and the art market... How to navigate those two different spaces? You need to follow an inner path, not fall into line behind the market or one’s perceptions of the market. Don’t give the people what they want or you think they want. Make it personal.

Can you be successful and keep integrity? Of course otherwise what would be the point?

What does successful even mean in artistic terms? Again, those parameters are truly up to individual. Some people want fame and money, some critical response and others something altogether different.

What makes good art? Like the Supreme Court pontificated on the issue of pornography, I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it. For me, good art integrates the past, is born in the present, with an eye beyond.

Tell me 3 things you have learned about how to 'get on' in the art world? Not to be funny, but I don’t think I have learned how to get on yet. That is part of my problem (charm?). But I found a way around it by being more concerned with getting on with good and interesting people and things. Being hyper social doesn’t hurt either, but drinking too much at inopportune times can have repercussions, more so in the States than UK (thankfully). But then if you have good stuff or do something well, it doesn’t matter—for the most part. And, you might think I am being disingenuous, though it took me a lifetime to learn (and still…), being thoughtful and considerate goes a long way. It certainly makes you stand out in the art world.

What advice would you give to young artist graduating from an MA in London today? Work work work, socialize socialize socialize, be industrious, and look past the obvious routes of dissemination for art and information; and, as Malcolm X said: By any means necessary.

$12 Million Drivel: What a Cow

2011-06-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

“Bright colors do better than pale colors. Horizontal canvases do better than vertical ones. Nudity sells for more than modesty, and female nudes for much more than male. A Boucher female nude sells for ten times the price of a male nude. Figurative works do better than landscapes. A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit, and roses are worth more than chrysanthemums. Calm water adds value (think of Monet’s Water Lilies); rough water brings lower prices (thin maritime pictures). Shipwrecks bring even less.

Pure-bred dogs are worth more than mongrels, and racehorses more than cart horses. For paintings which include game birds, the more expensive it is to hunt the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of the painting; a grouse is worth tree times as much as a mallard. There is an even more specific rule, offered by New York private dealer David Nash; paintings with cows never do well. Never. “

I always read books non-linearly, and started Don Thompson’s “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” from the back. With an ending like that I am beginning to wish I never started. Even from someone who appreciates the comfy bedfellows of art and money, I find this drivel, even if true, a bore.

race-ism

2011-06-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, jokes involving race and religion are not funny even when they are funny and not racist. I am clearly not speaking about the joke that is galiano and james brown (uk hairdresser in this case).

But here’s one nevertheless: Lewis Hamilton blamed his being black as the cause of his 5+ penalties in as many Grands Prix, referencing Ali G on camera in his protestations– not the cleverest tack when launching an appeal to marshals. Never mind the 5+ people he crashed into along the way. Call it race-ism.

hong kong art fair: a feint whiff (of business and ai weiwei)

2011-05-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

Judd Tully provided excellent HK art fair coverage for artinfo.com. He noted that In the first few hours of the preview, one dealer sold to a European collector she already knew. Another gallery that featured a Chinese star “fielded significant interest” at $2 million and then sold a print for $15,000. A New York gallery sold Asian art to a US museum and NY collector, well worth the trip, I am sure. But there was an actual sale to an actual Chinese: a watercolor for $5,000. So the good news is that there truly is a burgeoning Asian art scene…if your goods are $5,000 or less. In the coming years though, it seems all but certain the machine will gear up to join the international parade assimilating wave after wave of art. I was surprised Judd didn’t mention Ai Weiwei which must have been like a stale cloud hanging over the fair; or maybe, with business as usual there was nothing more than a feint whiff.

Good Housekeeping

2011-05-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

I went to a dinner tonight for The G.R.E.A.T. initiative: Gender rights and equality action trust. In the news recently Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as the chief of the International Monetary Fund after allegedly chasing down a house keeper in a hotel suite, forcibly coercing her into blowing him then having blood letting anal sex. On the other hand, an example of the way an enlightened gentleman treats his housekeeper, Arnold Schwarzenegger had consensual sex with his overweight, aged, Hispanic cleaning lady for years and years, who wore his wife’s clothes and jewelry during the act in the martial bed and reared a child by him. They all cohabited for ages sort of living like Bin Laden and his wives but Arnie’s wife had no idea. Chivalry lives.

garoffice

2011-05-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

I decided to convert a garage in my house into an office emulating a Hirst vitrine by erecting a glass wall to view a car like sculpture, and worked with Ab Rogers to carry it out. When we drive we can’t see the design and when we park, we leave them. The cars ended up swallowing more and more space until now the snout of one is lodged under my desk. I have the lungs of a mechanic but one that doesn’t understand motors: once the key turns I draw a blank. With a car habit, a mechanic is both therapist and medicinal-in our case its been a bit of role reversal-I now teach about vehicle design, having commissioned and lectured on cars and he's begun making conceptual art after hanging around for so much and for so long.

Intelligence Spared

2011-05-10T04:38:00.000-07:00

I recently participated in a debate at Saatchi organized by the group Intelligence Squared as a last minute fill in when Matthew Collings double booked. Though I found the premise jingoistic and ridiculous (“The best, most interesting art today is from Asia”) it all went rather well and I was asked to join for another on occasion of the upcoming Hong Kong International Art Fair. Just as time was drawing near and with no indication from the organizers, I coincidentally bumped into one of the principals who stated, oh you never confirmed. Whenever I am asked to do anything of the sort I am always so surprised and flattered by the offer I’ve yet to decline; so, that I didn’t confirm was disingenuous at best. Having lunch with a writer friend the other day, I mentioned my dejection at having been unceremoniously dumped from what I thought would be my virgin voyage to the land of unimaginable opportunity. Funny he said, as he was invited on a panel that he was eagerly anticipating. Funnier, when he described the topic of the discussion, he had in fact been chosen to replace me. Ha ha.

Pee & Poo

2011-05-10T01:28:00.000-07:00

Our two "toy" poodles are house trained. They only go in the house. Last night I went cascading across the floor like dancing on ice after sliding in shit in my foyer. The result resembled a Richter abstraction. They say Pollack was inspired peeing on a rock-does Richter have any dogs?

olympic waterboarding

2011-05-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

showing a picture of osama with a hole in his head “is not who we are", says obama. but waterboarding has become a national sport.

ps: i asked my 11 year old how to spell osama and he said write obama and change the b to and s.

starving collectors.

2011-05-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

just travelled back from berlin gallery weekend; the dealers and all the collectors were seated in the rear of the plane, and two of the duos of first-namer artist celebs, gilbert & george and tim & sue, were sat in business. today, it’s starving collectors (and dealers), and the prosperous artrepreneurs throwing them crumbs…

a royal ride into the next world

2011-04-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

World-wind Ghana trip with family that would shock a fish in a tank of formaldehyde. Went to visit Paa Joe workshop outside Accra, a folk artist specializing in what he calls Proverbial Caskets, one of which I had commissioned, and will write on. They are crafted according to the station in life of the deceased (or soon to be departed): Mercedes for a businessman; corn, tomato or onion for a farmer; cell phones; coke and beer bottles; and crabs and so on. One is more colorful, cartoonish and kitschier than the next in the best possible way. Paa Joe calls them “intriguing imaginations of helping to convert the departed in flamboyant manner to the world of the unknown while providing a royal ride into the next world.” Sounds like the next best thing to a royal wedding invite or kate's honeymoon.

robert smithson, entropy and my shoes

2011-04-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

Robert Smithson states on the subject of entropy, “You have a closed system which eventually deteriorates and starts to break apart and there's no way that you can really piece it back together again. Another example might be the shattering of Marcel Duchamp Glass, and his attempt to put all the pieces back together again attempting to overcome entropy. Buckminister Fuller also has a notion of entropy as a kind of devil that he must fight against and recycle." SELECTED INTERVIEWS WITH ROBERT SMITHSON, Entropy Made Visible (1973), Interview with Alison Sky. In my estimation, entropy is when a few of your favorite things, in short order, f-ing fall apart.

The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia Interview by Andrew Taylor

2011-04-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

Last year, you predicted that we would soon see a billion-dollar work of art. How many years away do you think that is?

I say confidently in 3-5 years a painting will sell for $1b.

Who do you think is likely to shell out that amount of cash?

Someone worth more than $1b. An obviously very rich man or woman, probably in a filed such as commodities, shipping or inherited wealth.

Do you think it would be made public or remain a private transaction?

In the facebook days we live in, nowadays every time you fart its Google-able. I don't even believe the concept of private information is any longer possible or viable.

We've seen $100 million + paid for a Picasso at Christie's, $110 mill for a Jasper Johns flag and $104m for a Giacometti sculpture. And you've wrote about the $1 billion block sale of Andy Warhols. How do you explain this art price arms race?

The art arms race is being driven by a few things: unheralded unencumbered wealth from natural resources as much as from the formation of information behemoths like Google, Microsoft et al. Then throw into the equation China, India, Russia, South America, and the Middle East and you have more than an arms race, a veritable feeding frenzy. To top it off, there will be no more van Goghs, Monets, Picassos, Warhols or even Basquiats.

In the competition to acquire art, who is winning? Do public galleries have any hope of competing? Who is winning?

Not Charlie Sheen. Collectors who had the courage to go out on a limb with no collective consensus and buy art prior to high prices or even those that bought at high prices! Anyone with great art is winning. Many museums had the foresight to buy great stuff and continue to not only support new art but help define what get's canonized. Sure they can't compete in the $100m arena, but who says taste at those precipitous levels corresponds with quality? There is plenty of art around at all price points.

What single piece of work do you think will achieve the $1 billion price mark? An old Master like Da Vinci, such as Lady With An Ermine, or Picasso? Or a modern work?

The $1b picture will be Picasso: after van Gogh cut off his ear and created the cult of personality, no artist has had as much far reaching impact and influence coupled with a degree of virtuosic achievement in a such a stylistic array. This feat has never been equaled not to mention the colorful and grand life-and tragic if you were married to him, his child or his grandchild. Unless maybe it’s Warhol, who in addition to creating such a multitude of masterworks, was shot and survived!

Is the art market a bubble comparable to the US property market?

The art market is no bubble, none at all. The difference form the late 80s runaway boom; 2007's frothy contemporary art speculators; and today, is that now we are faced with end-users fueling market activity. These are worldwide accumulators; whether for vanity or pure passion is not the issue, they are there and in force.

Will it burst?

I see nothing on the horizon, short or intermediate term, to change the trajectory of the art market. The train will roar ahead.

Is acquiring art a trend that will be overtaken as the wealthy find other ways to spend money and show off?

With ever increasing art prices, art will always be a handy place to show off. What better way to nail a few hundred million to the wall for the benefit and enjoyment of friends, family and associates? Art has the historic gravity and gravitas to please, entertain and amuse for ages and ages-and ages to come.

Do you have nay thoughts on which Picasso could fetch $1b?

Unfortunately, i don't know enough about the specific oeuvre of monumental paintings by Picasso to predict which, he painted so much, and I am far from an expert.

Are there any in private hands that could potentially be sold in the next few years?

There is zero doubt that every billion dollar painting that will hit the market in the coming years, and there will be more than one, is in private hands now. I heard George Soros is predicting a setback in art market in the short term; yes admittedly one would be stupid to lock horns with Soros, but if he could, he wouldn't make billions this time shorting the art market, I believe he is flatly wrong.

more crap on the artmarket: a lecture on art as asset for a bank.

2011-04-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

Alfred Barr, the first curator at one of the very first museums of modern art (that would be the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened in 1929), stated that art is more important than war. I think that is a profound and telling statement especially in light of the worldwide political upheaval today at the same time as the attention for art and the higher and higher prices it seems to garner.

I consider art and the voracious collecting so much in the press today, a healthy disease, and a profitable one at that. I left my family in the Bahamas yesterday which was a 22-hour trip to be here today. That shows how desperate I am for a forum to think and speak more about art, or the fact I wanted to get away from my kids. There’s also an art fair in Cologne tomorrow, another in Brussels at the same time and a few client’s to see in Switzerland. So please excuse my jet-lag!

But art has long been about money from a fund set up in Paris in 1904 to speculate on paintings – they quadrupled their money in 10 years, to the $54m that was paid for Van Gogh’s Irises in 1987 and $82.5m in 1990 for the portrait of his doctor, Dr Gachet.

High prices for art is nothing new. It’s just the breadth of the market that has exploded and the price levels. I should say markets, as there are many distinct offshoots. And the explosion has been to the tune of billions. The contribution from developing markets like China, India, Russia, the Middle East, and South American play a big role in this phenomenon.

It’s been some time since we have been inching closer and closer to what I predict will be the onset of the billion dollar single work of art, something I have been thinking about for a few years now. I only just got a call this morning from the Sun Herald in Sydney about this notion.

Here is a bit of inside information: A Cezanne painting, The Card Players, recently sold privately for the largest sum ever recorded for a painting: $250m. Try today and raise $50m for a private equity deal or property transaction vs. selling a 1960s Warhol. For the Warhol, I could raise twice the amount in half the time. I know as I recently offered the sum of an office building for one and was summarily turned down. In fact, its more a problem today that great art is so valued that no one wants to sell (the good stuff, anyway) which partly accounts for why prices have been going up so swiftly.

I also recently tried to pry away the entire contents of a very high profile private collection for an unimaginable sum in the stratosphere, but the reply to my unsolicited offer was “not even tempted”.

This sentiment, bordering on shocking, hits the nail on the head: Where else can you put your money today and look for steady and healthy returns? What are the alternatives? Stocks, banks (with near 0% interest), gold, oil, property, cash? So much for the old adage that cash is king, today cash is like a hot potato: nobody wants to hang onto it for too long.

Amazingly, not even billions could tempt owners of vast private collections today: art is seen as a safe harbor in times of continued economic uncertainty. Namely, the returns they have achieved in the past and, as importantly, continue to expect to achieve in the future. The most distinguishing part of some of today's mega collections are that they reside in freeports, outside the jurisdiction of taxing authorities, and are viewed (not with eyes but) strictly as a fully fledged asset class.

There has been a mad dash with money flowing into tangible assets such as collectibles of all stripes ahead of expected inflation. But there is something a bit sad about the situation when people buy cars they don’t drive, wine they don’t drink, houses they don’t live in and art they don’t see. In my case, you trip over it in every corner of my house, thankfully my kids not only respect it they appreciate it and I have proven more likely to damage it (through carelessness) then they or their friends.

I have lectured on the subject of pricing art at both Sotheby’s and Christies which have accredited institutes of art in both New York and London. I am probably the only person participating in the market that will admit that most artworks have different prices depending on the knowledge of the prospective buyers in front of it. That’s one of the characteristics that differentiates art for the uninformed and uninitiated and why pricing knowledge is so important. Services like Artnet.com and Artprice.com provide the capacity to research past pricing history at auction so that is one clear way to avoid being caught out.

There are speculators trading virtually around the clock in Warhol’s with their noses against the screen like on a trading floor. A 40-inch square painting is like a 60s Ferrari - a market I still don't understand though I collect cars too, one similarly scaled painting can sell for $60k or $60m, and same with the cars. But that is also why there is something to be said for an artist like Hirst-with so much production floating around there’s plenty of goods to feed an ever-growing market. Not to be cynical of course.

I tried to internet research the numbers for the British Rail Pension Trust which put together an art fund across many different collecting categories in the 70s to hedge against inflation. With returns achieved in excess of 11%, they handily accomplished their goal. The funny thing was that the info was contained in a prospectus from an art hedge fund fully illustrated by a series of technical analysis graphs depicting how art has historically outperformed everything from stocks to gold! The times have changed.

I had dinner recently with some friends in finance and they expressed popular misconceptions about art and the market. The first was that art is illiquid and the market miniscule. Maybe in the recent past (i.e. just about 10 years ago where markets didn’t constrict, they evaporated during downturns), but that has demonstrably been proven not to be the case this time around in the latest down cycle. Art has outperformed the expectations of most everyone involved.

Another misconception is that if a person buys art in depth, it’s enough to move a market. I am afraid art is a mature enough market today with more than enough breadth to far outweigh the intent of any one person or small group to manipulate things on a grand scale. People only wish they could impact markets like the Hunts did with the silver market in the 70s, and perhaps people like Saatchi did in the 1990s.

But this is clearly no longer the case. Sure there is some market manipulation where dealers or big collectors try and drive up prices at auctions to protect and bolster their inventory, but that could end up being a very expensive proposition. And I doubt someone pays $40m for a Warhol with such an end in mind. Though I admit, art remains the least transparent, and just about totally non-regulated multi-dollar business.

Another fallacy in art market perceptions is that art has no inherent value. This again I believe to be blatantly false. My point is that quality is not an elusive concept, that art, good art, has a provable and sustainable value. Since it came off the walls of caves it’s been coveted. And will continue to be so, well past many current and future wars. Which is a good thing. I sound like a preacher or worse, politician.

Appreciating, collecting and investing in art is pretty much like anything: you have to develop a feeling for it, a sense gained by taking the time to look and read; and, if you do so, it’s a never ending road of continuing education but one of the most enjoyable. Going to galleries is the only free lunch left in town. For me, the beauty of art is that it is all so largely undefined as a practice, career and even the market itself; and, that it morphs quicker than the latest ipad model.

If you like art and have a feeling for it, or a trusted advisor, it is also a pleasant way to make good money. And the dividends-which in case of art are visible- are there in good times and bad. Art could be a very lucrative holding, but you must be in the know to prosper, as it’s a competitive world and not for unwary

I was asked to address a few bullet points:

Why do collectors collect? Because they can. And its an enjoyable, possibly lucrative way to make great returns, both in the short and long term.

Is art a real asset class to invest in? Yep, and more.

What are the main categories? There are too many to recount; from first edition early Superman comics to old masters, Scandinavian Ceramics, Chinese, Indian, African, Middle Eastern classic and contemporary art, as wide a net as the imagination can cast.

How do you buy and sell? Know your markets cold before you venture to buy and or sell in galleries and auctions.

Examples of returns (vs inflation if possible). You can safely beat inflation and possibly the stock market indexes buying quality art at present market values.

How do you value art? Highly. I just follow the market: past, present and my idea of future value.

oy vey vey

2011-04-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Its incredible to think, at this stage of game, that an artist can be still be considered a politically destabilizing threat. But that is the present fate of Ai Weiwei, who's head has been kicked in and now resides, courtesy of the government, in a prison cell the location of which is remains unknown. Like Warhol courted celebrity, Weiwei provokes staid bureaucracies. At the expense of seeming flippant, another mystery is the whereabouts of the sculpture I bought awaiting an export license.

AQUAVENTURE. NON-STOP WATER. NON-STOP FUN.

2011-04-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

The things we do for kids-extreme water sliding amongst the sharks at Atlantis in the Bahamas for Easter. Without being too glib and condescending, how can you describe the depraved level of kitsch and bad taste? The Dale Chihuly's in the casino (you must pass through to the beach) look downright da Vincian. Enough to make John Waters puke. Is it my imagination or are we getting fatter and uglier?

Art from A-Z. GQ Magazine, Art Special - May 2011

2011-04-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

Artists: There are many wonderful things about the arts and artists, especially the childlike innocence involved in the act of making things as a career choice. Artists have license to spend a lifetime involved in childlike creativity; they never have to leave the sandbox, let alone they get paid handsomely for it. A dose of mischievousness and eccentricity is not only encouraged but rather expected. Slicing off your ear is considered a run of the mill hazard of the profession not to be questioned as out of the ordinary. The Korean video artist Nam June Paik said he became an artist so he could sleep in.

On the other hand, artists can be a capricious and self-serious lot. Correct me if I am wrong in assuming art never cured a strain of cancer. Some artists certainly carry themselves in such a fashion like peacocks with their feathers in full display. Some years ago I bought two artworks 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 not to be art. In fact, both pieces were more “art” then the art they normally exhibited—but both artists made efforts to preclude me from selling the works I bought in good faith. It boiled down to issues of trying to control perceptions of the artists and their 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. Among the American artist Richard Prince’s most prized and valuable works are a series of photographs “re-photographed” from a Marlborough advert. I bet the original photographer of the ad was less than amused that he got a stipend for his efforts while Prince has been and continues to be paid princely sums (well into the seven figures) for his efforts. Anyway, I sold both disputed works of mine 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.

Auctions: Auctions, like gallery and fair openings were not always the glamorous, star-studded events they are today. Art and auctions were largely ho-hum enterprises peopled by professionals in the trade. Nowadays, auctions are very public social forums where some love nothing better than waving around their paddles like swinging dicks in the most public displays of consumption.

But when it comes to 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 it is said. 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.

Bloomberg: Bloomberg.com is the new art magazine of the 21st century in the money obsessed world we reside in. Most people in art only look at the pictures and adverts in traditional art magazines unless they or their artists are themselves written about. To read, learn and discover more about today’s art forget specialist magazines, try websites, like the FT, Wall Street Journal—the financial press and fashion magazines (and er, GQ) do a much better job covering the territory without trying to impress with unknowable art speak so often encountered in the art journals.

Commissions: Commissions can range from 50% to a gallery when they represent an artist or 2% if you sell a £25m painting. Auction houses today greedily grab 25% on the buy side—you must add that to your winning purchase price, not a good thing to forget during bidding. Not to mention they take a sizeable chunk on the sell side too. Who said you can’t get it both ways? But its all a giant gray area when it comes to percentages in art transactions both public and private where the rule of thumb typically is: get what you can. There are certain galleries, without mentioning names (hint: one has been involved in several landmark lawsuits), that don’t just go after a slice of the sale proceeds, but make a grab for the whole lot. It never seems to be enough, which fact is rarely if ever communicated to the collectors or for that matter, the artists.

Collectors & Connoisseurship: 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 display case 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.

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. 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.

Strangely it’s not unusual today for some collectors to buy with their ears rather than eyes; as who’s buying art seems for some to eclipse what it is they are actually purchasing. But whereas in the past it was critics and collectors like Saatchi that were moving markets, today it’s more likely to be what’s in the shopping carts of Prince, Koons and Hirst that collectors are tripping over themselves to emulate.

Contemporary: 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.

Nevertheless, even contemporary art is gradually clawing its way back to (obscene) 2007 levels. Cash is king no longer holds any credence with most of the financials still resoundingly in the toilet: in effect, things are king, and art of all stripes looks better and better to more and more. We are even seeing a return to waiting lists and deep six-figure price tags for the soup de jour, today’s latest hottest young thing. Whether that’s a good thing I leave to you to decide.

Critics: Another casualty of the recent transformation of the art world into a vast money pit 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. 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, see above) who are now ruling the roost. Even a negative article by critics past was capable of moving markets up or down, those days are way behind us. Soon critics may be viewed as a quaint profession of the past replaced by the glossies and movers and shakers that rule the roost of the market.

Design Art: This is an artificial term recently coined by an auction house to market high- end furniture like art. Design aped the art market releasing objects in 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. And it worked: Marc Newson, the poster boy for design art shows at Larry Gagosian Gallery and has sold one for $2.5m: Conran eat your heart out. But in the recession, the design market plummeted, suffering from premature ageing disease where tragically a small child goes through an accelerated process ending up with the characteristics of an 80 year old before reaching their teens. Only in its infancy, design soared then hit the floor, though look for it to steadily recover over time.

Death: Death is welcomed and embraced on all fronts in the art world. Firstly, its handy for prying masterpieces out of long held private collections (as is another “D” word, divorce), secondly it’s a surefire way to lift an artists market out of the doldrums, imagine there finally being a definitive cause for no further spot paintings? As for content in art, death like religion goes a long way to make an artist look as serious as mature.

Equality: Or rather the lack of equality for females and minorities that still exists in the art world in relation to opportunities in galleries, museums and moreover, the effect in the marketplace. If Mary Heilmann, one of America's leading abstract painters had a penis and Brice Marden's looks, perhaps the disparity in their auction records wouldn't be, respectively, $182,500 vs. $9.6m.

Experts: 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. 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.

Emin: Since moving to the UK some six and a half years ago, I have read no fewer than 1,297 magazine features on Tracey Emin and another few thousand on Sam Taylor Wood. The endless media fascination boggles the mind; in the States, over the past 10 years prior to my departure there have been maybe a handful of articles in the popular press about contemporary artists, though that has admittedly changed over the recent past with the advent of art and artists as media fodder worldwide. Must be the press has run out of other things to obsess about—you can only report on reality TV stars so much I guess. The Daily Mail on a Sunday devoted an entire page 3 to Tracey’s recent relationship status and Taylor Wood’s widely reported social exploits give new meaning to the “boy” in boyfriend. It’s just a reflection of the mainstreaming of artists where in the past art was considered erudite and for the few, now its like open season for grouse.

Frieze: 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 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. When you go to an emerging art fair like Frieze, I would guess fully 85% of what is on view will become worthless over time. Perhaps more.

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.

Gagosian: 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. You could make a flow chart of the prominent families from which his entire staff hales.

Giacometti: People are still endlessly speculating that this artist is overvalued and what that artist is making is not even art. But then again, there are also awful Picasso paintings. In the breadth of an artist’s career you encounter a bell's curve of what is good, bad and ugly; 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 £75m didn’t help) but you can find what is considered a less prized etching that is almost as gripping.

Galleries: Sterile places where are you are judged from head to toe by well-dressed adolescents regarding your status and prospective wallet capacity. They also display art and usually have a uniform architecture composed of clinical white walls and cement floors. Though you cannot dismiss the vital role of galleries in presenting art, archiving the activities of their artists and disseminating the art far and wide to collectors and institutions, why do most have to fulfill that role with such snobbery? Galleries are also about control and sometimes do not have the interests of the artists they represent at heart when at times they forsake opportunities by keeping the works close to their chest rather than facilitate sharing (commissions) with other galleries by spreading works to additional markets.

Hirst: For better or worse and to a greater extent than anyone before, Damien Hirst has done more to spread the word about contemporary art to all corners of the globe from New Jersey to New Delhi. From humble beginnings by pure chutzpah, determination and raw talent, he has risen to the status of global brand and made zillions in the process. Living in London in art, not a single day goes by that his name doesn’t pass often-pursed lips. He tackles the big issues of the day such as life, religion and death and everything between. Though he repeats himself endlessly and without fear that alone cannot detract from his vast accomplishments. His spot paintings refer to pharmaceuticals and most of us don’t get up in the morning without having a personal relationship to popping a pill of one sort or another. And his animals suspended in formaldehyde are the natural conclusion of the traditional still life. Hirst has made his cake (or had it fabricated) and is eating it all the way to Coutts & Co.

His most famous work is the floating shark caught between inciting terror and trembling, between life and death, entitled “The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. With Bono in tow, Hirst has become an international celebrity too, with bona fide rock star status and the cash flow to match. There was even recent coverage in the Economist solely on the past, present and future financial outlook of his oeuvre. As for the wrongly long- term bearish sentiment in the article, I forecast in 10 to 15 years, the market for Hirst fakes alone will total billions. Though his latest foray abandoning his legion of assistants and attempting to make paintings by his own hand flopped, if he sticks to this long enough, I am sure he will master it as well. Measuring one’s life and accomplishments against Hirst is a no- win situation engendering a new sentiment, namely: “The Impossibility of Damien Hirst in the Mind of Someone Not Him”.

Haggling: 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.

Hedge Funders: When the market for hedge funds crashed, and crash it did, the traders picked up where their funds left off, trading in art. Stevie Cohen among the most renowned has accumulated what I call an encyclopedia collection, everything he buys, usually for about $158,000,000 each, is the iconic, stereotypical image you would expect to see depicted in a reference book.

Insiders: 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. I wouldn’t dream of it.

Impressionists: What people don’t realize is that when the Impressionists were first exhibiting their sun-dappled effusions of color and light they were considered cutting-edge contemporary and unanimously derided by the public and critics alike. That was before they became surefire means for cash strapped museums to bring in a crowd and multi-million dollar trophies to impress upon your peers.

Immortality: The notion of evading death by making lasting marks for posterity endlessly serves as the motivation and content of artists and art.

Juries: The mostly arbitrary groups making arbitrary decisions about who wins arbitrary prizes like the Turner. Once you do a certain amount of weeding to separate wheat from chaff, art is a personal, transcendent thing, not a sports competition. In the end, these events are nothing more than marketing schemes to reel in more bodies to hapless institutions.

Kenny Schachter: Born overweight and alienated in the suburbs of New York with no notion of art or the commercial structures surrounding it. Since then, like an idiot savant, I've come to curate shows at some of the world's most prestigious museums, written books on the subject and taught on the graduate level at institutions such as Columbia University, NYU and the Royal College of Art. If your skin is thick enough, art truly is a (relatively) democratic realm with a (relatively) low entry threshold. Go ahead and give it a try.

Koons: The (self-created) myth goes that he was a commodities broker who went from hawking them on the trading floor to creating them for collectors. Koons’ work has always expressed a color-filled world of childlike wonderment for life, perhaps aside from the “Made in Heaven” series where he is depicted having explicit sex with Ciccolina, his former porn star wife, in just about every orifice imaginable. Today, Koons is best known for his sculptures of inflatable pool toys cast in aluminum and elaborate shiny fabrications of balloon dogs, hearts and flowers, made at a cost of millions and sold for many times more. One of his most notable pieces, entitled Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off) from1985 consisted of three basketballs suspended in a tank which besides suspending belief, in all probability spawned the vitrines of Hirst.

Leisure: Art is a fun, social, life transforming experience not to mention a great way to kill a few hours. It’s also a rare instance when shopping without spending can actually be enjoyable. One can peruse galleries and spectate without getting bogged down by the responsibility and overtly physical thing-ness of collecting and owning art. There is so much new stuff to be learned every day by reading about and viewing art. It’s not all about money; art is the only free lunch left in town as galleries and most museums generally don’t charge admission.

Liquor: The art world has moved on from absinthe to abstinence. Gone are the freewheeling days artists were seen as reckless characters brawling in bars and living a life of bohemia, now its tea and teetotalers. There are paintings entitled “The Absinthe Drinker” from Manet, Degas, and Picasso as well as tales from the legendary Cedar Tavern in New York half a century later where de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollack drank in a dank setting before most were banned from returning for bad behavior. It’s also the place that cemented the Abstract Expressionist school of painting. Skip forward another 50 years and there are colorful stories of the YBA’s going on week long benders, waking in parks, prisons in puddles (of pee). There was Tracey drunk on TV and Damien serving up his willy on a tray to unsuspecting Groucho patrons. Yet today, artists are too preoccupied tending to their careers, stock portfolios and manor house gardens. I’ll drink to that.

Money: 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 dominated and 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.

Museums: The museum sphere, 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 an impact. 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 (see Impressionists above). With less and less funding, and more and more cuts, there is sadly less at stake for institutions across the board.

Networking: From the endless parties, openings, fairs, auctions and biennials, it’s all rather exhausting and nearly impossible to keep up, but keep up one must: out of sight out of mind. That is not even taking into consideration online social networking sites: facebook, Twitter, blah blah, blah. Its enough to make one long for the simple days when there were a mere 6 contemporary art galleries in the world, but there is no going back, if anything it will only get worse.

Old masters: Art is a world of specialization akin to medicine; each niche has its own language both visual, visceral and verbal. There are antiquities, renaissance paintings, British modernism, American painting and so on and so forth. There is no such thing as generalizing when it comes to art that one can have an umbrella understanding of the overall field without a great deal of studying and acquired knowledge. To think one can jump across genres and make the leap from an ability to grasp meaning of one aspect of art to another is foolhardy. For instance, Old Masters is a language I just do not understand, I wouldn’t know a Holbein from a Holiday Inn painting, and I’m not afraid or stupid enough to think otherwise. When it comes to contemporary art, I feel an intuitive relationship with the works enough to render a judgment before there is a collective consensus by other professionals. With so many experts in the field you had better know your stuff or you will be left with your pants down.

Pricing: Funny enough, the same piece of art can have as many prices as the depth of knowledge and experience of the particular buyer permits. A collector off the street might not be aware that discounts are built into the asking prices of art as they are taken for granted by long term collectors (see H for Haggling). Because galleries and the creeps that work for them can be so intimidating, potential purchasers may not venture to ask for any savings off the asking price or timidly attempt to shave as little as 5 or 10% off. But the bold and beautiful collectors are not beyond asking for anything and everything up to 50% or more off the ticket price! It never hurts to ask. But with the market firmly in rebound mode, we are almost back to the point where you are lucky to achieve a 10-15% savings vs. the 20-25% that was only recently available.

In the not too distant past, a dealer could ostensibly buy a work at public auction, as previously mentioned these were sparsely attended professional events, and turn around the next day and quadruple the price in the gallery or at an art fair. There was no way to know, no system of checks and balances. This was radically changed with the advent of widely accessible Internet pricing databases like Artnet or Artprice, which are cheap pay-per-search tools that have revolutionized the way art business is conducted. These services entail researching sales results in the worldwide auction markets and can be conducted according to parameters such as titles, dates, sizes and mediums of specific works. Buying a work of art has never been the same.

Visiting the Basel Art Fair in Miami last year I eyed a Warhol portrait 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 underneath, 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 painting but that the doctor wanted a further day to conduct due diligence on the price history for such a work. I was in turn 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.

Picasso: Picasso said anyone can learn to paint but it takes a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Picasso is the benchmark, the gold standard against which all levels of creativity are measured. A prodigious life and output produced countless works in a multitude of media. He went through styles as quickly and thoroughly as he went through the woman he depicted. Picasso was among the first market savvy practitioners well versed in the value of his art and not shy about manipulating things to achieve vast material wealth during his lifetime. Picasso was not above pre-dating his recent output to reflect the fact his earlier works fetched more money than the later ones. Clearly Koons and Hirst could stand to learn from the master and do not have a monopoly on schemes and shenanigans in their capacity to print money.

Private Museums: 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 value and credibility boosters. Or at least they are trying hard to have such an impact.

Prostitution: 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.

Quotes: When a dealer entered Picasso’s studio, viewed a new painting and queried: “What is that painting about?” Picasso shot back, “About 50 grand to you.”

Reserves: When you put up an artwork at auction there is a high and low estimate of what it is expected to achieve on sale; as a seller, you are held to your reserve that cannot exceed the low estimate, so you must take care. The last sale of Impressionist and Modern sales in New York saw some extraordinarily high estimates, which bordered on avarice and resulted in very public, horrible failures. When art doesn’t sell at auction it becomes burnt (publicly scorned and hard to resell). In art, its seller beware!

Sculpture: Objects are inherently more difficult to collect than paintings as they take up more space and are not as portable. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal years ago to the effect large paintings will always be worth less due to the real estate necessitated to exhibit them. Nevertheless the art world is always after the next new thing and now sculpture is the new painting.

Students: 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 (including Hirst)?

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 logic. 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.

Skulls: Damien Hirst has forever ruined the impact and desirability of the representation of the skull by flogging it to death in the form of diamonds, prints, shirts, jackets, paintings, sculptures…

Saatchi: When it comes to certain collectors and supporters, you can't deny someone like Charles Saatchi his due for 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 more than 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 in perpetuity. 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.

Traders: Art has become a fully-fledged asset class. If you want to get seriously involved you had better know what you are doing and have great access to information, as there are hordes with their noses constantly pressed against their computer screens trading art like so much corn.

Undervalued: When the market resembled a crazed crack addict short of a fiver, I abstained for 3 years refusing to pay historic prices for art with no history. Today with lots of heat still whirling around so much art, I find prints and drawings to be inherently undervalued by the general flashy art collecting public and a great way to roll up your sleeves and jump in.

Value: People believe that art is only subjective, and lacking inherent value—though I can on one level understand why it entails a certain leap of faith to fathom paying tens of millions and more 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. 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.

A friend in finance, 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. 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.

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.

Van Gogh: He cut off his ear in an act of desperate, creative, destruction for reasons still little understood today; and, with one swift act of self-harming, he launched the cult of personality as we know it today in the world of art.

Vitrines: What began as a glass display box in a history or science museum became the signature framing device masterminded by Koons and Hirst to confer value on worthless basketballs and road kill.

Websites: As previously mentioned, forget art mags, there is artnet.com, bloomberg.com, artsjournal.com, artinfo.com, theartnewspaper.com, lindsaypollock.com, artforum.com. In fact, there’s barely any reason to go out of the house anymore.

Warhol: 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. 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. 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. But there would be no Damien without dear old Andy.

X-rated: I am no prude but I find the countless art seen today comprised of frontal, explicit tits and ass in art in all manner, shape and form to be gratuitous and calculated to titillate. I’ll pass, thank you very much. That is what the internet was invented for.

YBA’s: Young British Art was once a significant art movement (perhaps the last) that put Brit art on the map. It was cemented by the triumvirate that saw Hirst make the art, Jopling exhibit it, and Saatchi buy it. Most of it was made to shock and that it did, if for if only for about 5 minutes, before seen more as schlock. Now the artists are no longer young and the statement by Jopling that the only significant art today is being made in London is as stale as the formaldehyde in the first (of many) tanks.

Zoo: Zoo was once an art fair for young, affordable, undiscovered art and artists, but since the art world came to resemble a zoo in the frenzy of primal, animalistic activity surrounding the market, it is now extinct.

Prince-ly Hubris

2011-04-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

Richard Prince recently lost a copyright case lodged against him for using 41 (not 1, 2 or even 5) unauthorized photographs by Patrick Cariou in his “paintings”. Let us avoid passing judgment on the merits of collaging in a guitar, hands and adding a few splodges of paint to someone else’s existing works; what grates is the princely hubris of the artist (and dealer for defending AND appealing) entailed in not acknowledging the source material by simply paying rightful dues (i.e. a licensing fee). Look at The Rolling Stones vs. The Verve. This is not a copyright case, its a case of unbridled greed and arrogance.

the merchant is the enemy

2011-03-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

“Le marchand—voila l’ennemi”, the merchant is the enemy, said Picasso (Making Modernism, Picasso and the Creation of the Market for 20th Century Art, Fitzgerald, 1995, University of California Press). If that was the case, it gives new meaning to sleeping with the enemy. In the same book, Picasso was quoted that he’d “like to live like a poor man with a lot of money.” In the grandeur he grew to inhabit, that is an expansive notion of poverty. Lastly, Renoir stated: “There’s only one indicator for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sales room” (ibid). You get the feeling he’d be fabricating today.

japan redux

2011-03-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

With Japan on the brink of nuclear meltdown after the loss of life and tragedy of an earthquake and tsunami, it seems more than superfluous, absurd and insensitive to speak about art, but things march on. Even commodities, which along with art have been the recent darlings of the marketplace, have taken a swift hit in the aftermath of the unfolding Japan crisis. At the risk of being macabre, I have long felt that there would be a terrorist plot involving surgical dirty bombs, biological or nuclear, in a city such as London or New York, and wondered what the ramifications would be for physical works of art so exposed. Now in Japan, such a scenario is upon us; we know the horrific, unspeakable effects of radiation on the body, but what of the implications for objects? The upside, from what was reported on CNN is that there was neither death, nor long-term illness recorded from the Three Mile Island core meltdown in 1979. In light of the unprecedented daily global uncertainty, I can only believe art will, even in the face of such human catastrophe, continue to be coveted as voraciously as of late.

Cash is Crap, Sell the Kids, Buy Art

2011-03-11T02:41:00.000-08:00

An executive at a top art insurance company told me that a Cezanne painting sold privately for $250m - that stands as the highest price ever paid for a single work of art to date. Not bad for some pigment on a bit of canvas. Many would say that such a lofty number is a ludicrous concept in a time of great political unrest and systemic poverty worldwide. I say why stop there; that the benchmark will steadily rise and in no time at all we will live to see the day of the $1-billion dollar painting. I can hardly wait. I feel entitled to have forged a life in aesthetics, and that you can now attain such high levels of remuneration only makes it that much more pleasant. So, in the age when cash is crap, not to mention the toxic dollar that has become the currency of choice for short sellers, the 1988 Christopher Wool painting Apocalypse Now sums it up perfectly: “SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS”. And buy art!

Dancing on Ice Part 2

2011-03-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

We continued our assault on the environment today with helicopter rides strafing the cars racing along the frozen lake and then a 2-hour snowmobile ride before getting towed by hapless reindeers to the dinner venue. The snowmobiles go 100 km an hour and are very unwieldy due to the weight of the vehicle and difficulty steering. The fumes they emit are asphyxiating. I had a self-fulfilling prophecy that I would pull the accelerator rather than the brake upon a difficult stretch of navigation and just such a scenario played itself out on a long patch of ice. I was dramatically thrown off and the snowmobile got wedged in deep snow. It took 4 burly guys stronger then me to dislodge it, not a pretty sight. Needless to say, my excursion provided plenty of fodder for dinner conversation and beyond. Why do people drinking shots feel compelled to foist them on those not? Tomorrow I depart a day early to avoid the inevitable fierce competition for the evening timed car race. I sent my 11 year old the accompanying photo and he said i look Chinese; with such a raging economy, i should be so lucky.

Lapp Dancing

2011-03-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

I am within the Arctic Circle, the northern most reaches of Finland (Kittila), a region formerly occupied by the Lapp people; though now considered derogatory, I find the term rather sexy. An ice driving program brings me here with a group from Germany and Switzerland, some of whom I know, others not. To be holed up with 20 people, taking every meal and activity together day in and out, is like being in a 1970’s EST-like self-help group. Driving on ice is a whole other phenomenon with absurdist implications beyond an environment snub—but a 6 km track carved into a vast frozen lake resembling a lunar landscape is something sublime, not to mention sliding across it sideways. When the wind blows the snow along the surface of the ice its like moon dust. When you careen off the track and lodge deep in the snow bank, a tractor must tow you out and a badge around your neck gets stigmatized by a hole punched each time, as you get competitively passed by other drivers on the course. There is nothing quite like a little peer pressure, even at our age. I think a glass (or 2) or red wine would actually help in my case. With such a short attention span, after a few hours my mind wanders causing the car to follow suit, so perhaps this may not be the most logical of diversions.

Springtime for Hitler

2011-03-01T02:22:00.000-08:00

I watched John Galiano’s loving ode to Hitler on the Sun’s website, which was surreptitiously filmed on a phone. Such a drunken outburst was like a cartoon in a macabre, Anna Nicole Smith kind of way. Not only does he despise dirty Jew faces, but even more so, ugly Jews with unfashionable boots. When queried whether he wouldn’t prefer world peace, he said not for ugly people. Not to mention ugly Jewish people. Perhaps he should be immediately sent to Libya as a mercenary as though I doubt the good Colonel Qaddafi is Jewish, he is certainly ugly. Maybe Galiano and Mel Gibson could respectively design costumes and star in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof with a cameo by Charlie Sheen.

dark, wet uk winter.

2011-02-28T03:54:00.000-08:00

I was just unceremoniously informed my text could not be sent due to the fact it was a “semantically incorrect message”: evidence of the strong, paternalistic arm of Blackberry censors. And my bad grammar. Admittedly, I incessantly anticipate the blinking red light of incoming messages. What is normally a 20-minute school run took 1:34 minutes in traffic today. No wonder I have gained and lost 10 lbs in both January and February, and seen the bottom of a glass with too much frequency of late. Must be the long, dark, wet, cold UK winter again.

collect

2011-02-26T23:42:00.000-08:00

A good collector never let's money or lack thereof, get in way.

brain brawn: vito acconci fan club

2011-02-26T01:50:00.000-08:00

I saw Vito Acconci speak at the University College London for The Bartlett School of Planning; after all these years, I can never tire of such an exhilarating experience. The lectures have morphed into what the performances use to be: physical concrete poetry, rhythmic and lyrical, moving and jarring. With repetition and bodily swaying, his spoken words have sculptural presence. And Acconci is hilarious in his deadpan celebration of abject failure. Though I wasn’t name-checked for previous commissions and facilitations, I was grateful to be in the presence of such old school brain brawn.

front stabbers

2011-02-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

I know this sounds pretentious (it is) but the art world is an old fashion (mostly) gentleman's market with small talk, billions and daggers. They don't stab you in the back, but rather the front; then you are compelled to have dinner as you can't afford to alienate a source, lawsuits notwithstanding.

Picture That

2011-02-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

In two art meetings in 2 countries 2 people asked to see pictures of my wife. Funny, it used to be just pictures. The art world is like the pony express or proto-internet in that packets of info travel (usually) discreetly from lunch, tea through cocktails and dinners. Jasper Johnny Appleseed.

Art and Alcohol from London

2011-02-21T09:22:00.000-08:00

I heard on the radio this morning that 200,000 will die in England from cheap alcohol; does that mean freely available or poor quality? Or both. Then I arrived at Heathrow at 7am and they were handing out samples of Baileys and it all became clear.

According to Kelly Crow in today’s Wall Street Journal (the 21st Century art mag), $375m of Richter’s have been sold since 2005 at auction. After recent London results of $11.5m and $5.1m for abstract paintings both small and large that went to China and Russia respectively, at the risk of exposing myself to (further) scrutiny and potential ostracism...I still think they are cheap.

walk like an egyptian

2011-02-21T00:36:00.000-08:00

In the wild west of the art world, the last unregulated billion-dollar bastion of business, they do it like Egyptians with hands extended at 90 degree angles in opposite directions. In other words, they get backhanders and fronthanders.

Yo Pablo!

2011-02-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

Though there is no mention of it on their website, there’s a show of new paintings by Sylvester Stallone at a gallery in St. Moritz; by the looks of it, I think he’s going through his abortion period. This gives all new meaning to the famed 1901 portrait by the master: Yo, Picasso!

open admissions

2011-02-17T19:30:00.000-08:00

A friend wrote from the Architecture School at Harvard today and mentioned she was studying with the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko about the theory of monuments and on the curriculum was a book I co-wrote with Vito Acconci. Sure I wouldn’t be there were it not for Vito, but, hey, I can finally say I got into the Ivy League.

fickle pickle

2011-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

The art world is a fickle place with a constantly shifting target of value. Get on the wrong side and its not pleasant; but, with care and consideration there's not a better space to be.

a.r.t.

2011-02-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Malevich, Duchamp and Picasso; for me, that’s the origins of contemporary art. Malevich for exploding and reducing the picture plane, Duchamp for sticking two fingers up at the portentous world of art, and Picasso for being such an adept chameleon, changing stripes at will.

sothebys 2011 feb auctions london

2011-02-12T20:27:00.000-08:00

For a change, the biggest prices went for the smallest works; a bacon, dali and freud-14, 13 and 5 inches respectively. Finally, something matters more than size alone.

negative affirmation

2011-02-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

I found myself the brunt of someone else's joke for a good portion of lunch today. Rather then take affront I realized there is something positive in such negative affirmations.

Happy Haters

2011-02-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

I was in such a state of exuberance at scalini's last night the man at the adjoining table asked me to step out for a fight. Though I have a proclivity to swear and am American, fisticuffs was not quite what i had in mind on the menu. Happy haters. And, no surprise with me, its not the first time.

art about nothing.

2011-02-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

why is there so much art about so little?

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

2011-01-26T11:16:00.000-08:00

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!

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

2011-01-25T22:39:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-01-25T22:38:00.000-08:00

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!

Dennis Oppenheim, RIP

2011-01-24T00:29:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2011-01-23T23:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

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

VIP (View in Principle) Art Fair

2011-01-22T20:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-01-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

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...

2011-01-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

"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.

symmetry

2011-01-19T23:43:00.000-08:00

“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.

shaken and stirred

2011-01-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Love is blind, money blinding.

2011-01-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

“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.

Larry G.

2011-01-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-01-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

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?

The Inherently Trivial Work of Pablo Picasso, et al.

2010-12-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

In an article entitled: Picasso: Most of his Work is Inherently Trivial” in the UK’s Guardian by feminist Germaine Greer, she quoted Picasso: “I am only a public entertainer who has understood the times and has exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than might seem.” Now substitute Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takahashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and on and on for Picasso and you have a picture of the circus that is the today’s contemporary art world. The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl coined the term Festivalism to define the roving biennials and international exhibits that invariably draw the art world collectors, critics, dealers, curators and hanger’s on, like a pack of nomadic sheep (and/or rats), many with checkbooks at the ready to buy out of these supposed institutional shows. In Basel Miami, it’s more akin to Partyism, the relentless boozing and schmoozing by the very same crowd—which has rendered the art party into a competitive contact sport.

Today we are presented with the St Barts School of Art, the distinguishing characteristics of which are wraparound Bono-style sunglasses for every occasion, day or night, and private planes instead of trains. The Prince’s, Hirst’s, Koons’, and Murakami’s of the world are ruling the contemporary art roost. ArtTactic said, “The…(Art) Risk Barometer jumped 22 percent on concerns over the short-term economic outlook. Fifty-five percent of 138 contemporary-art collectors and professionals see little improvement over the next six months, though overall confidence was 4.2 percent higher than in December 2009.” What the fuck are they talking about? This is supposed to be art for heaven’s sake, remember what that used to be like?

"Due to laws within your region, you are unable to view content for this website." 1. i am in switzerland, not bejing; and 2. that was tmz, celebrity gossip and entertainment news, not slut.com. a sad little poem for 2011: the daily mail, ny post, radar and tmz-they seem to do it all for me.

An Essay for my 14 Year Old

2010-11-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-11-16T01:03:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-11T18:51:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-09T13:21:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-09T09:53:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Royal College of Art, Vehicle Design Dept. Lecture, "The Role of the Vehicle Designer – Where is it Headed?"

2010-04-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

Incredibly, barely a week goes by without the announcement of a new car company—many with green credentials, hopeful to make the world a cleaner, more efficient place; but just as many are for extreme vehicles with no rhyme or reason in today’s ecologically minded landscape. With markets expanding exponentially in China, India, Russia and the Middle East there are probably more opportunities for expansion in the realm of car manufacturing and design than at any point in history since the industrial revolution. With such flux, paradigm shifting models like the Nano,Tesla and Gordon Murray's T25 are sure to arise with greater frequency including degrees of personal customization unimaginable today.

LOVE IS REAL

2010-04-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

I went to a nearly one weeklong bar mitzvah in Israel, previously not one of my favorite destinations, for the daughter of a fabulous art collecting couple from the UK. It kicked off in Herzliya, a beach resort just outside Tel Aviv. To build up tolerance for the marathon parties that were to come I went running or should I say crawling the first few days. If you've ever seen Jeffrey Deitch’s daily turtle like trot along the Basel Miami beach, you know what it means to not be able to give him a chase. The politics in Israel are palpable in a way not many places feel, and feel as relentlessly. The moral and ethical weight of war and existence is felt at every dinner conversation. The planes flying overhead are usually not badged Delta. Hope? Perhaps Middle Eastern art (also good long term buy), better communication and political flexibility could at least help.

In London I am hosting an upcoming (Mid April) exhibit of young artists who have lived and worked in Tel Aviv which show would have had an altogether different meaning in New York, and one which I would probably not have considered staging there. In the UK sometimes there appears to be a subtle resistance to anything with the word Jew associated with it. In fact, the curators were denied a British Arts Council Grant on what I thought were clearly spurious grounds, when even I have received such a grant in the past! Thus my involvement by way of the exhibit in Rove Galley in London’s Hoxton Square for a month called Jaffa Cakes TLV.

Jaffa Cakes is actually the first ever exhibition in the UK devoted to contemporary art from Tel Aviv which will open on April 16 at 33–34 Hoxton Square and will showcase works by seven artists. Although artists from Tel Aviv have started to gain attention in the United States and Europe, they have not been shown as a group in the UK until now. The participating artists are: Maya Attoun, Michal Helfman, Nogah Engler, Know Hope, Yochai Matos, Naama Tsabar and Mika Rottenberg.

Regarding the show, a friend wrote: “Read about the upcoming exhibit and was thrilled that the UK Art community will finally see that there's an amazing creative energy in our city TA, and that we are not all about aggression, war etc.” Anyone who knows me knows I’m no proselytizer, but prejudice in any form, well; most of it anyway, makes my back go up. But in the end, we can all rest assured as Julian Schnabel has taken it upon himself to resolve the Arab Israeli conflict singlehandedly with his next film and affair with the Arab screenwriter.

From the first venue the party en massed picked up and move to another: Imagine floating like a basketball in a Jeff Koons tank. That’s the sensation of swimming in the Dead Sea; there is suspension, stillness and thick silence when you close your eyes and float. You feel resistance unwind out of your body. Like the new age suspension tanks they had in early 90s, it’s very meditative and peaceful. With closed eyes it could be between sleep and awareness.

At first your hear blood coursing through your circulatory system. Then one could sleep and drift off to Jordan just across the inlet to the sea. But the prevalent salt is like sandpaper rubbing on your eyeballs when it gets in, and its inevitable lying prone some will. You almost perversely want it to happen at first. When the sea is in your mouth it must be like ingesting millions of McDonald's French fries worth of salt.

To further prepare for the rollercoaster’s worth of partying, I went for a long hike and asked the security guard at the gated entrance of the hotel-a strange thing, that-and asked if it was dangerous to walk for a few miles outside the grounds, to which he replied in broken English "about 50/50". Nice, I imagined my escape route at the thought of getting kidnapped along the mountainous desert road. I was going to send a joke email to my wife that I was abducted but I was afraid I'd be disappointed by her response. I haven't seen so many hitchhikers since the 70s, there's still an unfortunate hippie residue here.

There is a military checkpoint for all to pass through along road leading to the resorts, I was given a sharp glance by a soldier-maybe my ugly MBT walking shoes didn't agree with him. But what a vivid, jarring landscape to have go in! When there are no cars on the highway, there is an eerie silence between sea and mountains. Especially when I am typing away on my Blackberry writing this. I should call my postings Blogberry.

A few guests I spoke to were largely strong supporters of Israel and ardent in their focus and determination. At one point I got into a fierce disagreement with a German who's family suffered in the Holocaust. The next morning I couldn't quite place what his position was, but maybe that was a good thing.

Sartre described the moment of embarrassment not in looking through someone’s keyhole but in being seen doing so. Sort of like my dancing with extra fervor at one of the parties filled with friends and business associates. What was I thinking? Being on a 5 day whirlwind party celebration with a few hundred people, more than a handful friends and acquaintances, is the closest I will get to a Scientology retreat. Hopefully by the end of the trip some of the many collectors of all stripes will become more than acquaintances. What a trip- jogging, floating, hiking -- then party, party, party.

In the final morning breakfast get together, with most of us on all fours from drink and exhaution, there was an under 10-year old kid industriously selling the costume jewelry trinkets they were giving away at the bash the previous night as party favors. My table mate tried to buy a necklace but had no change to which the kid replied, “I can break a hundred”. Only in Israel, keep obvious jokes to yourself. He will turn out to be the next Bill Gates or behind bars.

We ended the trip in Jerusalem, the old city of which is layered with a series of narrow nooks and crannies seemingly fit for the width of a moderately sized human, but actually serving as roadways. There is a potpourri of religions and their respective temples shoehorned in the old city with practitioners clad in exotic, flowing garb that made me envious for a robe of my own. In what sounds like a one liner, we dined in an Arab restaurant seated next to a table of priests. What is amazing about a city that appears frieze dried in a prior epoch is the promise and possibility it shows for coexistence. I saw a girl walking down the street and when she passed an empty packet of potato chips on the sidewalk she knelt and picked up the garbage. A minor, insignificant event yes, but one that was somehow magical (she should be invited to New York by Bloomberg). In the end if the extravaganza lasted any longer I don’t know if I’d have survived the food and drink, but surely it was something I will never forget.

facebook: meta community or life inhibitor? when the wall comes tumbling down

2010-04-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

As the sage John Cougar Melloncapm put it so aptly: Some people say I'm obnoxious and lazy That I'm uneducated And my opinipn means nothin' But I know I'm a real good dancer Don't need to look over my shoulder To see what I'm after Everybody's got their problems Ain't no new news here I'm the same old trouble You've been having for years When the walls Come tumblin' down When the walls Come crumblin', crumblin' When the walls Come tumblin', tumblin' Down Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah

unilateral cyber squabble

2010-04-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

“Kenny: You have to learn to post your comments in the thread; you can't only post on the Wall. Cut-and-paste these into the...thread. I am going to delete them in the next hour. Thank you" this was message i just received before my postings were unceremoniously deleted. lost to posterity. all due to not adhering to protocol i was unfamiliar with. ahh the anarchy of the web, you must love it.

Instead of a gentle comeuppance for my lack of net decorum, I received a digital slap-down. Ouch. And to boot, the language i was chided with bordered on didactic. When I crossed the invisible but solid line of facebook etiquette the repercussions were swift and unequivocal.

Why not a kind, soft landing of complaint rather than a scorched earth? Or am I paranoid. We express our own worst fears about ourselves when we claim to criticize others (one of my erased texts).

Our walls are our own(ed) cyber "space", though public and private simultaneously.

TEFAF vs. AFF

2010-04-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

While the world descended on the latest iteration of TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation), the Maastricht fair with literally billions worth of art on view, I made it to AFF, (the Affordable Art Fair) the only T being served in the café of the tent in Battersea Park in London that housed the event. While the private jet set mulled the old masters, and cream of the impressionist and modern offerings, I was left adrift in a world of thousands of art works with no discernable, name brand recognition factor to grasp onto. It’s a sobering experience to test one’s mettle and attempt to cull some wheat from so much chaff, only to realize how dependent and complacent I’ve become on the comfort of the canonized.

Billion Dollar Baby. Marc Faber's Gloom Boom & Doom Report, Spring 2010

2010-03-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

Are we headed for the billion-dollar picture? It certainly appears that way with $104m+ paid for a Giacometti and Stevie Cohen’s $110m acquisition of a Jasper Johns Flag (worth more than the country it depicts) ahead of the sale of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton's $100m private collection, featuring a smaller version of the flag. Steve Wynn sold his Picasso for nearly $150m before he decided to collaborate with his elbow to the chagrin of Lloyds of London. Surely these purchasers are expecting major upside on their jumbo transactions. Though they've come closer than ever before, art and the art market are two very different bedfellows, albeit both strange.

Art is more unavoidable today than ever before. China, Africa, the Middle East and beyond—art and the universe it inspires is ubiquitous, you can’t help but bump into it. From merchant bank’s involvement to fodder for hedge funds, it’s an art, art world. But what does it all say about art and it's meanings? Participating in the art business, I rarely get to speak on such issues. Art is reportage of our collective unconscious made more pertinent in the face of governmental and economic institutional failure and the dissociative loss of everyday humanity fueled by laptops, i-phones and the blackberry (upon which I am typing while ignoring the beach). Here are some further thoughts on the meaning of art in list format at the expense of being flippant, reductive and silly:

1. A filtered impression and reflection of our surroundings at a given time.
2. Art is life's stain, like the trail of a slug.
3. An expression of the previously inexpressible.

In the end our batteries have only one charge and the realization that monumental effort must go into creating a fulfilling existence may finally be dawning upon us. That is unless art is no more than another social climb up the ladder of conspicuous consumption. In all probability it’s a mix, in some cases healthy, others not, like there is no such thing as pure altruism, Mother T. not excluded.

It takes more than one sassy Safra (as in Lily, who purchased the record Giacometti sculpture) to tango to the tune of $100m at auction. There was someone real bidding right behind her (the Qatari's I hear) in her quest for what would become the word's most expensive publicly auctioned artwork. And to think it was economically forecast that in today's marketplace paintings wouldn't be worth the $3.79 cost of pigment and canvas at this juncture. The upside is that finally there is some perceived credibility and glamour to the art world I've inhabited for more than twenty years vs. the rather glum shop-keeping image it had at the outset.

For reasons good and bad, the next spate of auctions featuring art of all stripes will continue to go off the charts, even eclipsing previous records (a Picasso will reach a new level). Art not only withstood recession like alcohol, tobacco and McDonald’s, but also morphed into the big business I initially ran away from after university. Let the bids flow, $879,000,000.00 here we come.

stock market down 300, Giacometti up 100m

2010-02-05T07:23:00.001-08:00

Stock market down 300, Giacometti up 100m: who would believe it? Kate Moss recently made headlines when she said nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. The societal focus on being slim, both male and female, has never been more acute. Then Walking Man I, a 6-foot tall lumpy but anorexic looking striding figure becomes the most expensive work of art ever sold at public auction. What kind of message does that send to our children? Seriously, it is hard proof art is a world acknowledged asset class, and besides, for the right material, a safe haven in continually rocky times. To top it off the work was sold on behalf of a bank; if financial institutions had more art we'd have less financial problems. The freefall that is real estate in Miami and Madrid plunges at unabated pace and the sentiment expecting a stock market correction is practically unanimous. But art soldiers on, albeit only the grandest, strongest, undisputed masterpieces. Now more than ever this variety of artwork will be so sought after it should be near impossible to attain anything of value for value. $100m is not what it used to be in this universe. When I began curating in the recession of the early 1990s there was no inkling of nine-figure art on the horizon. We have officially entered office-building territory. Like the Giacometti figure, you have to walk and don't look back.

a speech for a 12 year old and a 13 year old: A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots; SPOTS SPINS AND SPARKLES: IS IT ART?

2010-01-28T12:05:00.000-08:00

A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots

When you look at a piece of art what thoughts pass through your mind? One of the first things I think of is what went into making it and how long did it take. Art is an amazing process: besides the making, why? When I look at Damien Hirst art I think the opposite: what little thought, effort, content, and the why usually has to do with making money. Besides isn’t it cheating if someone does the struggling and another claims the credit? The question of the validity of Damien Hirst’s art is the topic of my speech today.

The Spot Paintings

Rumors say there are over 2,500 paintings by Hirst with multi-colored spots painted on them. They are supposed to have something to do with pills and medications but I see an excuse to make tons of the same, unimaginative paintings—millions of spots costing millions of pounds. The canvases are in every size, shape and color not to mention the prints on paper which number in the tens of thousands. Was it such a good idea to begin with? Does it warrant endless replication like hydras? Are these paintings, or a recipe for printing money without getting arrested? I think they are no more than wallpaper (which he has made too of course).

The Spin Paintings

Not even painted really, the spin paintings by Damien Hirst are made by pouring paint into machines that splatter over rotating canvases; all in the name of art, or spitting out product, literally. And yet again, the output of these so-called paintings is measured in the thousands. I used to believe art was unique. These contraptions and formulas are just that: art by design, by strategy, not about creativity and inspiration.

The Diamond Skull

Damien Hirst made a sculpture with diamonds, the cost of which was announced far and wide. Well, for one thing he didn’t make it and on top of spending millions for 8,000 diamonds to glue onto a platinum skull, he had to pay the people to do the gluing. A Van Gogh cost £3.75 for materials and is priceless; Hirst rendered £8m worthless. So they wouldn’t be embarrassed, the gallery announced the skull was sold for $100 million dollars to a group including Damien Hirst himself, his dealer and possibly a collector. In other words, after a worldwide media blitz no one was convinced the skull was art, nor I.

The Shops

Damien Hirst opened two retail shops in London alone and another in New York in partnership with his art dealer. How can one person generate so much stuff to fill galleries, museums and stores all over the world all the time? The answer is they can’t. What suffers is the content or should I say the lack of content. In the end, is this art or just another form of trading football cards?

The Market Judges

In the past months alone there were at least six new Damien Hirst shows including three in London, and shows in New York, Zurich and Mexico City. Can any artist produce so much without affecting quality? From a public auction record of nearly $20,000,000 in 2007 many works have since gone unsold. The art of Damien Hirst seems more about gambling on ever increasing prices then about appreciation. Big business wins out over artistic expression.

Handmade

Damien Hirst has now switched to crude paintings said to be made by the artist himself. Funny that its news when an artist decides to make his own art. In order to fulfill all his commitments, Damien Hirst is flooding the market again but this time with art he makes himself. Can you really learn a new craft from scratch in your mid 40s and expect instant mastery? From the looks of the last exhibits, the answer is no. It goes to prove you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

SPOTS SPINS AND SPARKLES: IS IT ART?

The spot paintings of Damien Hirst may all look the same, like wallpaper or candy wrappers but if you look closely they are each somehow different. What I like most about these paintings is that when you look at them, no matter your mood or the weather, they make you happy. They are cheerful, colorful and make you think of birthdays, parties and good things. Funny enough though, they relate to the colors of medications we take when we are ill. But when I learned of this it made me think that these works that look like fun are really about how pills help us when we are sick—about how through science we live longer lives!

When I was a kid in New York they had a toy called Spirograph where you used these little plastic devices and pens to make perfect symmetrical drawings that made me feel like I was a better artist that I probably was. As a young child I felt a great power at being able to make what looked like professional drawings from a few plastic contraptions that made me feel I had skills beyond my imagination. Damien Hirst has created a giant scaled toy to make paintings that look like they were made by a curious child rather than a professional artist. These paintings spring from a machine created by the artist where paint is poured through and lands on a spinning canvas to make a psychedelic splatter sometimes with the images of skulls lurking underneath. It seems simple or almost like there is no art in the art! But when you look at the result it looks like something I’d really like to have on my wall and that is probably as good as any proof of good art!

For millions of dollars Damien Hirst bought like 8,000 diamonds and glued them to a skull cast out of platinum, a material that is more valuable than gold. Never in the history of art has anyone made a sculpture where the materials cost as much as an office building. When you think of art you think of canvas and paint, like a Van Gogh painting which probably cost as much as £3.70 to actually make. But Van Gogh would probably be a different artist if he knew about Lady Gaga, Madonna, and football players like Beckham who signed a contract to play in the USA for something like $250,000,000. The glittering diamond skull of Damien Hirst was something like if we held up a giant mirror to our society and took a close look at each other and ourselves. What we would see was a group of people obsessed by money, shopping, glamour and possessions. So how can anyone criticize something that only was a reflection of who we were? In the end, contemporary art is nothing but a way to look at our likes, dislikes, our passions and our dreams for the future.

Yes, its art and more than that it’s us!

THE CULTURE SHOW, BBC 2, Upcoming Film on Michael Landy

2010-01-08T03:56:00.001-08:00

Garbage God

A large part of Michael Landy’s career is about garbage, which is rather interesting as our lives are consumed with so much of it on a daily basis. in addition to installations Landy makes phenomenal black and white drawings that are exquisite in their detail, with subtlety absent in other works. In New York the sanitation department had a resident artist who largely worked in a garbage dump, perhaps that’s something for Landy and London to look into.

In earlier work, Landy picked up garbage off the street (for Scrapheap) then threw all is own stuff away (Break Down), now he wants to dispose of your stuff. Not just any stuff but your art. And not just any of your art, but the art he deems acceptable for the giant Perspex vitrine that he is presently having fabricated for his upcoming exhibit at South London Gallery called Art Bin. It’s a goldfish bowl of junk. He calls it a “monument to creative failure”. I say the whole thing sounds like someone else’s work.

No doubt Damien Hirst’s fabricator, who built an incinerator featured in Landy’s Scrapheap installation (this was proudly alluded to in a Tate Modern release), will also have a hand in the ambitious clear garbage pail being built for this project. But I guess the fabricator has nothing but time now that his biggest client has gone painting. in Art Bin, Landy is using our art as stand-ins for spot painting studio assistants.

Rather than the notion of creative destruction, which seemed prominent in Break Down, where Landy destroyed his personal belongings to make art (and a point?), here we have destructive creation, where he makes art but only at the expense of art by others. Landy’s destruction of other’s labors in the creation of a media spectacle and readymade artwork seem a bit gratuitous. When US artist Beth Haggart destroyed all her belongings in 1995 prior to Landy’s installation, she just did it without a fanfare and then joined the Peace Corps.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, as you can see everywhere around you. But art is a slow burning process, and what looks like crap today, can be tomorrow’s gold spun from hay. I'm sure there are more than a few of my own things that are ready for the trash heap, things I’ve collected and even made, but I’d rather save that job for posterity, or for my kids when I croak.

Then there is the page full of legal disclaimers on the official web site to sign up for the right to throw your own art away. “Michael Landy or his representative will decide which works go into Art Bin.” I wonder what special training it entails to be his representative, to make such discernments. Sounds like getting into Studio 54 in 1978.

Apparently there is some unspoken, very subjective hierarchy of aesthetics involved in this monumental creative failure. Which is an apt name. Or was it monument to creative failure? If he doesn’t choose you does that mean you didn’t make the grade because your art was too good? Is it a success to fail to be chosen? Or if you are chosen does that mean you really suck as an artist; so though you made it to the South London Gallery, isn’t it really under false pretenses? Michael Landy has gone from the Picasso of trash to the God of garbage. It’s the ego as expressed through castoffs, first it was street trash, and then his own, now yours.

“Art Bin exists to promote art and not to denigrate it.” Promote whose art? Certainly not the artists suitably awful enough to have their art accepted in the dump. “It is in no way the intention of Michael Landy to comment on the quality of any work placed and/or disposed of in Art Bin.” But he said it was a monument to failure. Is that not a qualitative comment?

“I forego my moral rights to my work” by agreeing to have it considered for Art Bin. Can you do that by agreeing to bury your art in someone else’s artwork? Can you divorce yourself from your own moral rights to something? It’s a shame to think moral rights don’t transcend art like a soul from a body. In the end the art will be worm ridden amongst empty beer and tuna cans, a fate not suffered by the art alone.

In Scrapheap, Michael Landy picked up garbage off the street, fashioned it into dolls and incinerated it. Then he systematically threw away all of his own possessions in the name of art. Now he’s throwing away your stuff. What’s next? Is he going to clean out Tate Britain of art he feels superfluous or that takes up too much space? Or will he permanently move into a garbage can like Seseme Street’s Oscar the Grouch, who put it so concisely in his theme song: “I Love Trash”:

“Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
I love trash.”

First Day of Trading 20-10

2010-01-06T02:57:00.001-08:00

Back to School

On the first trading day of 2010, oil topped $80 and gold gained $25 to $1121.50; what is art but another asset class in today’s commodities driven economy. Manufacturing is expanding and money is sticking to art like glue. Look for it to continue to do so but only for acknowledged quality works. There should be gradually expanding auction results in contemporary and design and in the impressionist and modern markets there will be a plethora of records. Galleries will experience similar moderately rising results. Re: prices of art, there has been a firming up since June 09, and the formerly wide-open discount window is slowly closing. China, India, Russia and the Middle East will see continued strength in artistic output and performance in the market, though off recent stratospheric levels; American and European art will continue to flourish as well. Even in light of diminished values and volumes of art sales in the recent past, there has still been a monumental expansion of the art-aware universe, and the base of buyers continues to grow. Once art came off the cave walls it’s been coveted—and like morphine, when hooked, at the least only a steady fix will do. After much searching, I was able to locate two quasi -rare 1970’s classic cars in excellent condition that were specifically expressed as being for sale. Between December and January, not one but both sellers reneged on agreed upon deals when I matched, then exceeded the asking prices. What was frequently the case the past two years was the opposite—jittery buyers pulling out of deals after a meeting of the minds. Then, the same thing happened with three 8-figure impressionist paintings. If this isn't a good omen for the economy I don't know what is, or is it a changing of the guard from a period where financial institutions and instruments were equally trusted. Now only the things themselves will do, art, property and the raw materials that will fuel future growth. It’s also rather frustrating when you were hoping to drive a couple of those things into the coming year.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2009

2009-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Like a casino, with no natural light or sense of time and about the same odds of beating the house, so goes another iteration of the Basel Art Fair, this time in Miami. Fittingly, gaming impresario Steve Wynn made the rounds towed by a towering blonde, presumably as much for his eyesight issues. But perhaps a high-end trading floor is a better analogy, peopled by the Prada clad rich, famous, infamous and in between, rather than stock exchange jobbers in their lab coats. With more art coursing through the system than ever before, even still at these diminished volumes, it’s a wonder so much content can be absorbed into the system fair after fair, exhibit after exhibit. And so it goes.

Some early drama unfolded an hour before the exclusive VIP preview when tricky financer cum tricky art dealer Asher Edelman effectuated a seizure of works by uniformed marshals to satisfy an outstanding judgment against another gallery. The works confiscated far exceeded the dispute value but all is fair game in the wild world of the art market, the last unregulated bastion of billion dollar business. Not that anyone’s hands were probably particularly clean in this instance, but what an unnecessarily heavy-handed (very) public show of force.

The world of art fairs wasn’t always such a moneyed, glamorous arena to see and be seen in, they are known as trade shows after all. I can even remember the time before nine-figure painting deals and prior to the evolution of Sylvester Stallone’s mature painting style, examples of which were well represented at the fair. There was John McEnroe dropping big dollars on works, Val Kilmer, as noted for his weight as his pink cowboy hat, Naomi and the usual gaggles of Steve Cohen hedge fund cronies. But unlike the Swiss version of the fair, Miami is as much (if not more) about the plethora of parties than high-end art transactions. Sitting with a bunch of collectors before the official opening we compared the hierarchy of admission times on our VIP cards (earlier the better) and invites to parties--a practice known as status Miami style. I am not above subscribing to the self-invite. But compared to the last year, Miami 09 was a rousing success as art proved to be a credible place to park money in light of the uncertainties still pervading worldwide financial markets. Incredibly, Stallone sold more than one of his expressionistic abortions (for $50,000 and up) as he triumphantly made his way around the fair in oversized black sunglasses; an ideal means to appreciate the works of his peers. God bless him though, it’s no easy feat to match Damien Hirst’s painting prowess.

The first rule of law in the art world is never to believe the word of the gallery when it comes to reflecting upon levels of business, especially at a fair and more so to the press. However, the one empirical barometer of sales is the physical turnover on the walls when art is replaced during a fair. In this case, after hour upon hour of rounds, like a single person at a nightclub, I witnessed such biggies as a $6m 1960’s Warhol being removed at Gagosian. And this was far from an isolated case—moving something from one wall to another only counts as indecision. The upside to visiting as a guest as opposed to participating is that aside from hotel rates all else: booze, food and transport, are free. Which is no inconsequential amount. Why can't London be like that upon my return?

What I never understood was what a truly competitive machismo sport art collecting is. Inevitably at the fair, reference is made to the male organ in art and the conversations surrounding it, especially with the exploits of Tiger and his tales circulating madly. When I thought I recognized someone in the bathroom who was engaged with both hands on two phones, I realized I didn’t know him but couldn’t help noticing he was packing something that might have been his own personal cell phone tower dangling from below. And it dawned on me that much of the swagger of the mostly male hoard of collectors is akin to feral animals swinging their assets around in an effort to prove who has the largest, most important…collection. It's no longer the family jewels that count.

Even I was engaged in a shoot out when I attempted to buy a painting on behalf of a client. As I negotiated via text message with the proprietor of the gallery to settle on a satisfactory purchase price, a friend informed me that someone was in the booth simultaneously trying to wrestle it away from me. Normally when a dealer states further interest in the very work you are after it gives rise to nothing more than disbelief, but in this case it was perfectly so. Off I scurried to the scene, which with 260+ galleries unsystematically installed throughout endless halls of a massive convention center, is no easy feat. An acquaintance sat in one corner of the both, his back turned to me, unaware he was in midst of a chess battle with an unknown-known opponent. As a famous artist said to me ages ago when we were in a minor spate (hard to believe): “the world is small and the art world is miniscule”. Actually the art world today is worlds bigger than it was then, but the adage still holds true. Though my bid was more than 10% less the collector wanted a 24-hour holding period to make a determination; I was willing to pull the trigger then and there. Notes were exchanged out of the sightline of the seated client illustrating past auction history, a must with secondary market goods. Based on my relationship with the dealer and willingness to commit, I ended up with the work. Welcome to the land of anything goes.

ArtTactic Podcast (Oct 20th, 2009)

2009-10-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

Click to listen to the podcast: http://www.rovetv.net/ArtTactic-podcast.html

In this episode of the ArtTactic Podcast, Kenny Schachter, writer, independent curator and owner of Kenny Schachter Rove dissects the results of Sotheby's and Christie's first Major Contemporary auctions of the season, which were held last week in London. Further, he provides his overall impressions of the entire week and how he thinks the market looks going forward. Also, Kenny elaborates on an article he wrote in July in the Daily Mail, in which he stated "as an art lover I actually welcome the recession." Finally, Kenny gives us his initial reaction to the inaugural Art & Design Fair, held in London last week, in addition to how the economy has affected the Design industry.

Frieze

2009-10-16T01:45:00.001-07:00

When the Daily Telegraph titled an article “Frieze Has Lost their Cool” it signaled more than anything an era of change in the contemporary art market. The subject of the piece was that 40 dealers less than the previous year had been accepted. After the article went to press the fair tried to have it retracted disputing the number and threatening the journalist. Five years ago the same writer chronicled the exploding success of the fair by quoting the owners to the effect the hardest work they had remaining at that stage was to decide whom not to invite.

Frieze prided itself on who wouldn’t be let in to what amounted to yet another exclusive, private London club and in the process seemed to become quite self-satisfied. But they managed to alienate more than a few in the process. Such heavy-handed schoolyard politics have gone a long way to contributing to boost FIAC in Paris as the next up and coming fair.

The fair speaks of new initiatives to showcase younger art, mostly from fading Zoo, but it’s more like the dearth of booth takers instigated the initiatives.

It’s the democratic forces of a deep recession transforming despots into benevolent dictators. Besides reaching out to new emerging art structures at Frieze, perhaps they should take heed of the fact that the Tate is free and so should Frieze.

The glamour is still there though, and many jostled for invites-I am sure the total number of viewers will hold steady or even increase this year. It is still a wonderful way to see the vitality of a cross-section of recent art under a single roof. This is especially so in London where it so complicated and time consuming traveling between galleries. However, rather than buyers tripping over themselves to consume art like there is no tomorrow; nowadays will see caution, restraint and lots more tire kickers.

For sure the volume and values of Frieze and the upcoming auctions will be down, but there is no better place for a quick fix to take the temperature of the art world. It’s also a good opportunity to see what the kids are up to these days. Recent strong results of Chinese art and design art auctions have found their footing at lower levels and are holding their own and even slightly improving. With unprecedented uncertainly in markets art is a rational place to park some assets. Like Hirst always says, there are a lot more collectors than people think, they’ll just be buying a lot this time around at Frieze. But the point is that even with diminished sales, the art world is bigger and more global than ever.

In the financial markets money makes money but then art morphed into another way to arbitrage cash into more cash. Art divorced from aesthetics is never a good thing and thankfully no longer a viable approach to collecting. There is, by default, a return to appreciation and connoisseurship rather than trading art like corn. In world terms, the enthusiasm is stronger and broader than ever. Also, there is a sense of community in the art world, evident in fairs like Frieze, among artists, collectors, art world professionals and the public that will far outlast 75% of the art on view.

When I first moved to London I used to intercept the Frieze preview invitation addressed to the former occupant of the house. Today it seems more people clamor for them than ever, and for the first time, I was sent one. With my past of not publicly seeing eye to eye with fairs, it shows just how serious the recession really is.

Scrap Scrappage

2009-10-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

As the modern car industry has ground to a halt and valuable older cars are being wastefully crushed to stimulate new car buying, we must seek out the undervalued and underappreciated designs of years past that are well-worth preserving and investing in, rather than destroying. The quick fix to the economy and harm to the atmosphere hardly justifies a pack of brand new Prius' with lead batteries that in fact will prove much less easily disposed of. And in fact, beneficial environmental conditions, not to mention the improved aesthetics of the streets, will be the result.

Appetites...

2009-10-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

Two recent articles on Mauizio Cattelan and Damien Hirst made note of their formidable art collections. According to Hegel, when a child finds opposition in the form of the other, the first inclination is to eat it. Could that account for the voracious art collecting appetites of Koons, Cattelan, Prince and Hirst.

Rethinking the Shape of Everyday Life, By Alice Rawsthorn, NY Times, Oct 4, 2009

2009-10-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Bangle, former head of design at BMW, expects future car owners to be less concerned about the exterior of vehicles and more focused simply on the interiors. That’s why the resale values of BMW’s are so and he’s no longer designing them.