article for an upcoming conde nast car publication

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.

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

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.

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

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.

japan redux

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.

art about nothing.

why is there so much art about so little?

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

Warhol Changed the Way Art is Made and Seen.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

Nothing but Time 

Kenny Schachter


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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