PUSS 'N BOOTS, DICK 'N HAND (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Summer 09)

At the most glamorous of the many fab parties leading up to the 2009 Basel Art Fair, the granddaddy of them all, a museum director related the story of a day trip to Venice to see the Biennial after which she went for a massage and was awoken by the sensation of something odd in her hand which ended up to be the penis of the masseuse. The only reaction it elicited was laughter. But afterwards, she passed a famous dealer friend in the hallway with more adventurous sexual proclivities that was unknowingly on the way to the surprise of her art season. A day later at the opening of the fair a design dealer recounted how when a famous industrial designer took delivery of a classic 60’s Aston Martin, he took his penis into hand and rubbed it across the length of the automobile. These separate but related art world incidents are illustrative of the childishness, sleaze and dicking around so prevalent in the art world of today. Overheard at the same party by the lake in Zurich was the comment: “if you wiped out the crowd here, there’d be no art world left”. Which goes to prove that there is nothing like art world’s strong sense of self-satisfied smugness.

First in from Zurich to Basel I was confronted with a Cameroonian taxi driver in who tried to sell me an African mask, “a replica of which was currently on view at the Beyeler Museum” and then offered to scout young talent for me in Africa. There is no mistaking when it is art fair time of year. For a change I was able to enjoy not having participated in one of ancillary fairs, as the main fairs are usually far too political for someone of my ilk to be admitted; I felt a newfound freedom to roam, to see and enjoy the peripatetic existence, living outside the Willy Lowman-esque ball and shackle of gallery-dom. In the process, I ended up with more business cards and less beholden.

Within the very fair itself, there is more of a social hierarchy than at the outside parties and restaurants. Within the buzzing VIP Lounge, there are VIP-VIP lounges, the most exclusive of which was fittingly sponsored by private jet company Netjets. After managing to get smuggled in like so much excess baggage, it was so hot and uncomfortable inside that it was like being stuck on an airless plane. But still, they stayed; content in the knowledge of how many flight hours it took to be invited. Throughout, art is being consumed this way and that, right under your nose, and after getting caught in the whirlwind, sometimes by you. It’s an elating experience to behold. Sure it’s rather gross in a depression, but art excites, and someone told me, has a measurable neurological effect that prolongs your life. Viva la credit crunch, the hiatus is over, I’m starting to collect again—though I must admit, after my return to reality and the collapse of my past 5 deals, I hope it didn’t amount to premature ejaculation.

A participant in the fair was quoted on Bloomberg confessing to a dirty little secret those in the art business are nowadays all too familiar with: the practice of dealer selling at substantial losses to maintain liquidity in order to keep things moving. It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. Though many dealers seemed to be selling, I heard stories of just as many who were not. But it’s the age-old lie, the art world’s version of original sin—to publicly state that they sold like hotcakes when in reality they lost a fortune. Are my peers becoming the model of a new aphorism of the YUPPIE variety, namely MUDs: Middle-aged, Urban and Downwardly mobile? Spending money used to be a profession; now finding any is a chore.

As I was actually sitting with a client, a specialist from a major auction house called him to tell how I had burnt the works in the collection by shopping them around too aggressively. Art is the only field where you are contacted to try and sell something only to be accused of diluting its value and ostracized for doing the very thing you were asked to undertake in the first instance. As my client hung up from the auction house, my phone rang with the very same auction house expert asking me to lunch the following week, knowing only I had full access to the work. Talk about a zero sum mentality, for which the art world is famous. One dealer sells, it is perceived, only at the expense of another. A few days later another gallerist (who might be from Canada) called my client to state he had seen the very paintings we were offering for sale on the Internet that would be the death knell to a discrete transference. Nothing could be further from the truth but that was beside the point; the front and backstabbing in the art world defies belief.

Emblematic of the degree of gossip, innuendo, and disinformation swirling around the art world in the attempt to undermine business are the following: one dealer “friend” called to relay he heard a painting I was selling through a dealer participating at the fair was being sold for more than I was let on to believe to a Russian with a famous girlfriend. Although the pricing story turned out to be false, the identity of the collector was entirely correct. The reconnaissance of the art world is worthy of the CIA and MI5 combined. In the end the show of public consumption for the sake of the girlfriend was followed by a swift cancellation only after the fair and invoice were complete. A few deals later I was contacted by the same deep throat dealer who again knew the precise details of a multi million dollar deal I was in the midst of. The only upside is that I was relived to know I wasn’t suffering from extreme paranoia due the accuracy of the third party information I am constantly bombarded with. Can someone explain why art world insiders have such big mouths?

Museums and auction houses are cutting more and more positions after Spring/Summer 2009 sales declined by three-quarters to 80%; while Sotheby’s debt is in the process of getting downgraded from junk that would make it…really junky. Last year at Christie’s in London, a Monet Water Lilly painting sold for more than $80 million, only a year later the entire Impressionist and Modern sale was estimated at $62 million to $84.7 million and achieved $61m. Two major Picasso’s both recently bought in 2005 for £2.7m and in 2000 for £4m sold for £5.75m, and £7m respectively. Which translates into the fact you can sell Picassos in a post-nuclear apocalypse. All in all contemporary sales are down nearly 80% in volume from only a year ago and Modern and Impressionist didn’t fare much better at a level 75% less than last year. On the contemporary side, a Richard Prince Nurse painting was valued at $3m and sold for just shy of that versus last year’s result of $8m for the same size nurse; though Prince inflation is still nothing to sneeze at considering they initially sold only 5 years ago for less than $100k, after depreciation like that you’ll need a nurse. But amazingly that was the only work in the sale with a third-party guarantee. For the most part though, the favorite artists in today’s market are dead ones. Mine too—they are a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Even so, just when it appeared the auctions stopped making records like the music industry, 18 were set at Phillips for primarily younger artists.

Only a short time ago, in my London neighborhood, I witnessed two Ferrari test-drives in one morning, if that’s not a ray of hope what is? And, I only just heard reference to the present state of the economy as: a “post crisis environment”. That's enough of a reason in itself to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Even more evidence of good times ahead, there is a group of hip, young New York artists I avoided assiduously until one became a recent auction highflier at a tender young age. I decided if you can’t beat them, join them so I bought one and was able to resell it for twice what I paid before I paid for it, which was still only fair market value, thus the glory of the inefficiencies of the market—probably the last largely unregulated multi-billion dollar one at that. Fittingly the subject matter of the work was an abstract depiction of animal shit.

PRICE-LESS (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Late Spring 09)

A Banksy graffiti was recently sprayed with graffiti itself: the tagline was: Price-Less. And true it is as the graffiti genre has been swiftly and broadly hit by the onset of recession. Yet, even something priceless has a price less today than a year ago. We have seen the pace of globalization subside as people travel less, spend less and nest more. Such are ideal times to forge closer familial relations. We are experiencing a widespread realignment after a tectonic shift in world economic and social systems. And the massive aftershocks from this earthquake/tsunami have far from subsided. For the time being, we are becoming more provincial in outlook regardless of how far afield we hail from. In the condition of entropy things have a tendency to resort to a state of disorder and disarray, falling to bits and pieces like the peeling paint and decomposition of an old house—not unlike the international economy.

A major auction house recently sold an artwork for under £50,000—when the bidder evaporated as payment was due, they went as far as physically paying a visit to the residence to demand payment. I suppose it wasn’t Bill Ruprecht or Pinault doing the bidding in this instance, but in light of today’s stunning setbacks in every sector of the art and auction market, it well could have been. That’s proactive debt collection. From Sotheby’s dramatic stock slide to the 75% Tiffany & Co. is down (unless people have soured to marriage), everyone is desperately solicitous for business. Formerly aloof restaurant staff the world over are now mimicking the lyrics of the theme song from Cheers: “where everyone knows your name”. It’s as though we are all acting without a script, working harder than ever and never making less. One possible upside is that there seem to be more people losing weight, maybe because its cheaper to be thin, and there is more time to spend (if not money) on fitness. On top of everything, it may appear too indulgent to be overweight these days.

Charles Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities with the line: “It was the best of times it was the worst of times”, a fitting description of the present predicament. People say how can anyone contemplate buying art in such historic trying times, but if you really like art, try trying not to. The urge to collect art is as primal as the facility to make it. From the first cave drawing came the first ravenous collector. Even in the recession-corrected times we are in, yes, things are less, but not all reassessments are created equal. Talk about an about face—but if you can’t contradict yourself, who can you? There were pockets of surging performances in the Spring 2009 auctions, and many records set in the process, though the trend is substantially lower volume and much the same with values. Overall, that collectors are still confident enough to continue to plow millions into pigment on canvas proves the notion that art really is an acknowledged asset class in the best sense of the term, despite the dire and relentless prognostications of the media. This only goes to prove we will get through this malaise with the market if not thriving as it once was, nevertheless intact. And a note to all the persistent naysayers, you can’t take away the sun (unless you are an avowed Gore-ian, global warm-ist).

A well known hedge funder expressed the opinion that art would come to have no value; funny how the art market continues to trudge along at quite an astonishing rate all things considered, while his fund, down 75% last year, will continue to drown deep under his high water mark. In art and design, signs of hope are beginning to abound. There was a recent strong Asian art sale, nearly all sold and more importantly, to all Chinese buyers (albeit more traditional works than speculative contemporary). A lucrative design sale where 45 year-old Australian designer Marc Newson’s dresser/bureau more than doubled the low estimate to sell at $517,000 was followed a few weeks later by $1,613,000 achieved for his Lockhead lounge, the highest price ever fetched for a living designer. Take note it’s an edition of 10 (Ten!) with 5 (Five!) “artist’s proofs”. It is now indisputable that design has reached parity with contemporary art as a recognized and established collecting category. The Yves St Laruent sale of the Eileen Gray $30m chair phenomenon was apparently no fluke: there’s a new benchmark for…the bench.

In the latest spate of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in New York there were nasty casualties such as an over estimated Picasso and Giacometti—no one and nothing is sacred from improbably high estimates. The art business today is characterized by the equation less art for less money equals more (solid results). Weak were recent high flyers like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, but there was still plenty of support even for such over-inflated artists by the likes of Larry Gagosian and other market preservers, and protectors. These players have vested interests too all-encompassing to permit collapse, or even the appearance of failure. In the past dealers colluded to keep prices artificially low to steal things on the cheap versus today where dealers and mega professional collectors frequently step in to provide a temporary fix to maintain and support the illusion of health and wealth in the system. Whether this propping will last is anyone’s guess.

Modern and Impressionism and Contemporary sales are two wildly different animals when it comes to market performance but hand it to Christies where the Contemporary results nearly mirrored the levels of Mod and Impressionist. When collectors are now flocking in droves to safer, historically established works, that’s as bullish an indicator as can be for recent art in particular and the market in general. As an addendum to the story of wealth barometers in the recessionary economy, a classic Ferrari just made over $12m, a record for a public sale, which was considered by the media a disappointment (the house was hoping for $15m it was stated). It’s enough to make tears well up when you consider the shortfall in expectations—could things really be so dismal that a car can’t achieve the price of a plane? I remember the days when a nice car could be had for a cool million.

Another Tale of Two Cities was the latest tale in the ongoing war of Sotheby’s vs. Christies. Sotheby’s held their May sales for Impressionist/Modern and Contemporary on consecutive Mondays while Christies followed on successive Tuesdays. This scheduling bifurcation of sales dates ended in very divergent results. In both Sotheby’s Monday auctions the buyers seemed to be only interested in testing the waters, looking for assurances that there was to be no Chicken Little moment, while such hesitations nearly caused the sky to fall on the market. The anemic and tepid bidding was disastrous, only to be followed on both occasions by firm and decidedly successful performances at Christies. That both early sales by Sotheby’s failed the first day of the week was no coincidence. In the bigger picture, what a difference a year makes for Contemporary as both houses are down in volume about 85% from a year ago.

I’d like to share a poem I wrote on the way to the bank to deposit the proceeds from the sale of two watches (hard times demand tough actions):

A Bad Date

A bad date it was for Sotheby’s!
A lucky date, a hot date
A date with fate
Better late
For Christies

TIME ISN'T MONEY (ANYMORE), Canvas Magazine, Art and Culture from the Middle East and Arab World, Spring 2009

I have made art for years for little or no audience—what better activity could there be in the face of such economic uncertainty? If ever there was an occasion for the mantra: Just Do It (Yourself), its now. Remember how time used to equal money; guess what? It no longer does. Procrastination may be an excuse but lack of time surely no longer is. Today is for taking stock; examining and considering what preceded the economic crisis and summing up how to positively move forward. In the midst of it all there will be a return to art about life in all its unadorned rawness, as content will revert to the social, political and spiritual, rather than the exclusively economic.

This is a propitious moment to establish new paradigms in how to patronize art. Not only should one negotiate with pomp and certitude but also try creative collecting, be as industrious as the artists you covet rather than strictly haggling. You can now have cake and pie: good art that is relatively cheap. Forget the last days of Christ, the last days of the art fair, or exhibit, or fill in the blank, is (a bargain hunters) paradise. But also, conjure new structures, new relationships with art and artists, what an ideal time for collaborations. Better still, shun art fairs altogether in protest, enough is enough, draw a line in the sand! Get into or back to the practice of visiting art galleries, local or remote, and ask to speak to the proprietor. Gone are the days when beyond the impossibly high reception desks gallery owners were harder to find than major CEO’s, only settle for an audience with the boss.

The British Arts Council has created a program of subsidized loans of up to £2,000 to purchase individual artworks (there is no limit to how many pieces a collector can accumulate) from a list of participating galleries and fairs. The Swiss government has started supporting local galleries to participate in fairs as well. So now your favorite gallery and art will be as government propped as your bank and car.

Or work directly with artists or galleries to find ways to help foster the production of art, take an interest in a particular artist or body of work or find ways to help disseminate artworks. A new era is upon us, akin to the American WPA (Work Projects Administration) that was the massive government aid effort to create jobs and foster arts during the Great Depression (will ours be the Greater Depression?). We are at the point where in some instances certain staples may soon be free, like food and shelter, as the alternative to families that can’t be fed or housed is not pretty. The newspapers report of plans being drawn to train British police to combat civil unrest. We have to go back to (get to) the future, but life will go on.

Contrary to popular belief, cash is not king, to be replaced by knowledge and experience. Old is the new new, the new young. We must reassess and value established but underappreciated and undervalued artists with a track record. No more historic prices for artists with no history. Why buy now what you can buy cheaper 6 months from now which mentality is paralyzing business. And there is no bottom in sight—at this point, even a plateau would be a blessing. Forget leapfrogging over one another in the scramble to buy art and other nonessentials. Some people are still searching for the next big thing, a home run when they should be concentrating on baby steps, relearning how to walk. The entire art experience had turned into a giant premature ejaculation, an encounter without much forethought or enjoyment. Those days are gone.

There is a new caveat emptor, so speculators beware, art is no longer for roulette spinners and dice rollers, for the odds have just gotten considerably worse. There is still possibly gold in the hills, but it’s closer to coal that might grow into diamonds over the long, long term (the diamond market is another recently decimated). We are at a new turtle’s pace, and not the one that beat the hare. Art will return to being viewed with deliberation and contemplation.

This is a post-economy economy in which losses replaced earnings. I don’t know a dealer that wouldn’t sell something at a loss to keep the continuity of cash flow. Banks have suffered total defeat, as the only solution to the near demise of the financial system has been to pour money on it like water on a raging fire. Sooner or later there will be accountability, expressed as inflation, mega bankruptcies or both and more. At which time a nicely rounded collection could be a boon. Stoking the art depression is the dying breed of collectors fighting the bonus onus: the burden of trying to get away with a seven-figure bonus (once earmarked for art) borne of taxpayer bailout money. For better not worse, buying stuff is no longer an acknowledged world pastime. The impulsive point of purchase transaction is finished as every penny is now measured with newfound urgency.

A Martian may as well have landed things have changed so radically from the recent past, namely, the demise of world’s economy and consumerism as we knew it. Is the economic calamity a coordinated Al Qaeda attack? Or have they been wiped out in bank stocks too? I am prepared to work for nothing today. Trying to make money is like flogging a dead horse, unless you are John Paulson shorting every bank across the land on a daily basis and single-handedly taking home a large portion of the world’s money supply in the process. Nowadays, three minutes can stretch into an eternity, thank god for the Internet to partially fill the void. Physiological manifestations like rashes and bodily pains are emerging among the population like weeds on a fertile field. Where every day is Friday the 13th, when the market goes up for an hour it’s considered a significant rally.

Stocks and other investments are beginning to sell at or below their net asset value. Citicorp has been trading for less than a dollar a share, about the price of a pack of chewing gum. That is unless things are sold in the context of the estate of some deceased fashionista’s over-decorated, lavish apartment, from Saint Laurent to Versace. Forget the Saint Laurent sale’s $11 million appropriated bottle of Marcel Duchamp perfume—a $30m chair is what was truly exciting (the amount fetched by an Eileen Gray unique piece from 1917-19—I hope it took her that long to make for that price). Imagine giving new meaning to kids, dogs and crumbs. As good as the Yves Saint Laurnent auction extravaganza was, it was no saint. These are still dark times getting darker, with the economy resembling a silent war being waged by a mysterious, unknown enemy that only makes it more perplexing and depressing. It feels like boot camp in preparation for an unforeseeable time when there will be a return to remuneration for one’s efforts. I have never worked harder for less.

We are faced with a mass mood of ascetics, where the creed has changed from How to Spend It (the weekend supplement of the Financial Times) to How to Keep It. in the article, How Art Killed Our Culture, by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian: “…art has become the enemy of truth, the murderer of decency. The modern world has screwed itself and art led the way.” Art has become the new boogey man, a scapegoat for the deep problems at hand. Through it all, when businesses are dropping like flies, if you are not gossiped about as being overexposed, bordering on insolvent, or even better, threatened by the Russian mafia or the target of a large lawsuit, you are nobody. Crating and shipping for international art exhibitions and fairs is as expensive as large designer handbags and now being doled out as carefully as caviar. What was formerly de rigueur is viewed as an indulgence. But even at today’s reduced valuations, there are inherent levels at which people will still pay.

We have to muster the strength to collectively will healthier times. For better or worse, people are like cockroaches, it will take far more than economic mayhem to bring us down.

CARS AND COUTURE (Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Spring 09)

There is a new meaning of art appreciation today that has nothing to do with rising investment value. Consider it a reversion to a quaint time in the recent past, say, pre-2004. The era of big, flashy, overproduced art is a thing of the past. Now I understand the etymology of an economic depression: it’s damn depressing, but at the same time perversely exciting. The new economic order we collectively reside in is emasculating, but reading the business pages reveals I am in good company. In days when government money is the only way the Dow can get it up, the art market is as dead as Detroit. GM and Ford have been forced to sell their private planes, will the same fate befall artists’ Damien Hirst and Richard Prince? The only status symbol left, surely not art, is to lose more money than your peers.

We didn’t save when interest rates were measured in real numbers, now they are .01%, not quite foam-at-the-mouth inducements. Nobody seems to know, pundits and armchair quarterbacks alike, which way the market will go—from recovery in 6-9 months or a deep, dark depression for all of eternity, everyone’s got a theory. A year, two years, ten years, twenty, will somebody please tell me…something? The variance of the prognosis is dizzying. We are paying the piper for recent past hyperinflation, a sour medicine that brings little joy or satisfaction. But maybe shopping or collecting was never really the panacea the world bought into. Printing money cannot be the solution either: Hirst’s painting tactics, the art world equivalent, overfed demand by way of flooding the (spot) market with dot paintings.

The backlash has been immediate and widespread from art to design. Recent London Impressionist and Modern auctions were down substantially by volume and value and Contemporary sales fared even worse. Moribund. One upside is that insurance expenditures will drop substantially reflecting the overall decrease in the value of art collections for purposes of premium calculation. Just call in the feds for another insurance company bailout. Nevertheless, there was some very strong sales activity taking into consideration the goalposts have been moved. Ok, so the posts are now practically together. Areas where there has been white-hot, rampant speculation, i.e. Indian and Chinese art, with a tenfold increase in fewer years, were obvious targets for decimation, and the market did not disappoint.

It’s a novel phenomenon when the shift in currencies, the dollar’s surge at the expense of the pound over the past few months, accounted for a proportionate increase in USA based activity in the London auctions. In the truly global marketplace that art has become, the financial markets serve as automatic leveler where countries step in to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities when they arise, smoothing out currency fluctuations and steadying things in the process. At today’s rates, maybe US should do a reverse takeover of the UK.

Phillips De Pury Auction house was taken over by a Russian luxury goods conglomerate and subsequently moved to appoint a former East German Stasi agent to its top corporate position. And an ex-KGB agent has bought The Evening Standard newspaper in London. Spies running auction houses and newspapers—could these be plants, a twisted plot in a cold war revival to win the minds and eyes of the West in some kind of newfangled economic warfare involving the press and contemporary art? Or is that just a symptom of fiscal paranoia on my part?

Bentley has fully stopped production in the UK, and a three-day workweek has been instituted at Aston Martin. I have a shorter workweek, but that is due more to collectors’ disdain rather than forced attrition. There are a few economic anomalies and bright spots in the marketplace though, namely collectible cars and couture. January 2009 car sales at RM Auctions and Gooding and Co. were more than 80% and 90% sold respectively and at Gooding, at a level of value a third greater than in 2008. And couture sales at some of the major houses have reported record earnings increases of late. Perhaps the rare and classic car market never escalated too far ahead of itself as it did during the last cyclical (cynical) uptick and now cars are considered a covetable, tangible asset and safe haven; as for clothes, what better time to look uniquely your best when others are on the floor, down and out?

The present state of the world economy has breathed new life into the word depression. Its depressing knowing the chance of consummating another giant deal in my lifetime is so slim. There is relief in the notion that splitting a dinner bill is now an acceptable method of settling restaurant tabs. But what is the economic answer to antidepressants? Shall I go out on a radical limb: will this economic climate bring us back into the arms of appreciation for traditional ideals of craft and beauty?

I went to galleries on my own accord for the first time in five years after being largely priced out and the experience has again become interesting, even in it’s reductive, redacted new form. Welcome back seeing, learning and connoisseurship. There has never been a better time to start buying art than today; in fact, this could be a once in a life opportunity. Never has art been so broadly based and global in reach: the array of available works from Africa to the Middle East to every corner of the planet is enormous and of better quality that at any previous point in history. Even more alluring than the art itself is the fact that galleries are hobbled by the recent economic slowdown so much so that collectors, for the first time in nearly 20 years, can call the shots with regard to prices, demanding discounts, substantially greater than in the past, to a degree not seen if ever. And to top it all off, recession art is frequently more engaging than art made during a time of complacency to feed a voracious market. Maybe a depression is not so depressing after all.

I LOVE SAATCHI (Artnet)

First there was the austere, New York-quoting Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road, akin to big museum halls, large and imposing with London artist Richard Wilson’s unforgettable oil-filled room, 20:50, tucked into a corner. Wilson’s work looked even more terrifying in Saatchi’s next space, County Hall, which had served as the headquarters for the Greater London Council for years. With a great sense of the absurd, Saatchi left the paneled rooms largely untouched.
During his reign at County Hall, Saatchi carried on about the virtue of exhibiting in unorthodox spaces, meaning no white walls, only to revert to white walls at his current Kings Road gallery, after he was ordered out of County Hall by a judge as a result of a dispute with his landlord.

During this protracted in-between time, Saatchi launched his Saatchi Gallery website, generating something like 600 million hits a day. Seemingly by default, and without even trying once, he again touched a nerve (this time of a mass audience).

Accompanying the new gallery is a publication called Art & Music, which seems like a cross between a zine and a culture version of a giveaway homeless publication, with that sense of irreverence and disposable immediacy. In a word, it’s good.

Saatchi is not a collector in the classical sense, as everyone in the art world knows. He’s more of a trader, or perhaps he should be called a new form of public collector with a short attention span. Yet, we have all benefitted from his obsessions, however brief their appearance has been.

A quirky impresario who used to hide from the press and still hides from his own openings, Saatchi nevertheless remains a consummate showman, adman and huckster. He was part and parcel of the marketing and funding phenomenon that helped to create Brit Art, and without Charles there would be no Damien as we know him, for better or worse.

Since the 1970s Saatchi has been crafting clever deals and partnerships that have continued unabated to this very day. He’s still very much on the look-out. Arriving one morning for a student art critique, I encountered on the scene, before finding even a single teacher or student, Charles Saatchi.

The signature Saatchi collecting method, as many call it, is the lump and dump: buy things cheaply en masse, the good, bad and ugly, then sell in the same fashion at auction, usually after a brief holding period. Some spaghetti could usually be expected to stick to the wall. His earliest use of the tactic, involving Chia, Clemente and Cucchi, was seen to have irreparably damaged careers, which from hindsight seems a prescient instance of de-accessioning.

The addition of chef Nigella to the stew only complements his appeal.

In the early ’00s, prior to opening his latest incarnation of a gallery, Saatchi seemed to become less relevant in a world of exploding hedge funds and artists wielding private planes rather than brushes. Hirst traded in art for economics and seemed to want to best Charles at his own game (hunting).

But Hirst the collector was more callow, acquiring art by stars and studio assistants rather than truly ferreting out talent. Whereas Saatchi prowled the world over with perseverance and tenacity, Hirst piled on Bacons and the like at public auction, and for a brief time his extravagance trickled down, affecting the rest of the marketplace, in a small way in relation to Saatchi historically.

You make money selling art and create wealth keeping it: if Charles Saatchi had held on to more, he might have found himself in the same tax bracket as Hirst. But in the end, that doesn’t seem to be what drives Saatchi. Rather, his aggrandizement seems to be a modern version of a classical patron, or enabler for art, artists and the public to engage.

Whatever his true motivations -- and without a doubt a passionate love of all things art is at the forefront -- we are all the beneficiaries.

The new Saatchi Gallery housed in the grand Palladian-style Duke of York HQ, is a sublime group of rooms with real generosity of spirit and freedom, offering the liberty to touch (even though you are not supposed to), smell and see art works up close and from afar, as they were made to be seen, with little interference from the architecture, ungainly barricades or multitude of imposing guards.

The place has 13 galleries, which in this instance is a lucky number, as the spaces are plentiful, well proportioned and full of light; at the same time, the layout is fractured and deceiving. That is the real continuing revolution, Saatchi’s hybridization of space, his manner of collecting and public presentation of works, which accounts for a meaningful shift in the experience of art.

The Duke of York HQ was formerly the Royal Military Asylum for the Children of the Soldiers of the Regular Army. How chaotic it must have been with 1,000 orphans -- 300 girls and 700 boys -- living in an atmosphere probably not unlike that of the inaugural exhibit, filled with wildly inconsistent and oftentimes juvenile Chinese art from the Saatchi collection.

Presumably the title of the first show, "The Revolution Continues: New Art from China," Oct. 7, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009, refers to an extension of the rebellion engendered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which gave rise to the pro-democracy movement. However, the title could just as easily refer to the Cultural Revolution, when China was expunged of liberal tendencies in society, like good art.

Saatchi’s Chinese collection resembles nothing so much as a potpourri of flotsam and jetsam readymade for the consumerist West. A new sculpture by Zhang Huan (b. 1965), the celebrated "East Village" performance artist who now splits his time between Shanghai and New York, features a stuffed donkey having intercourse with a model of the (formerly) tallest building in China, with a huge pipe representing the ass’ phallus. This "kinetic" sculpture was thankfully not functioning at the time of my visit, which was fairly late into the course of the exhibition. Aren’t we well past the stage of such boorish antics? Apparently not.

Also on hand are several multimillion-dollar "Bloodline" paintings by Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958). Seeing such a grouping of these large-scale works was enlightening: no matter how you draw it, the bloodline paintings are homogeneous and, after a very short while, dull. And the pile of faux shit by the Beijing artist Liu Wei (b. 1972), entitled Indigestion II (we are thankfully spared the first iteration), referred to in the exhibition pamphlet as "a monumental poo," was comprised of detritus including toy soldiers, which can be taken as a protest against rising militarism. All that was missing was some steam.

The formulaic and (allegedly) anti-consumerist paintings by the Beijing-based painter Wang Guangyi (b. 1956 or ’57), carry slogans reading "Porsche NO" and "Materialist’s Art," among other sentiments. Being a go-carting enthusiast, one wonders if Saatchi was attracted to the Porsche work simply as a statement about his automotive tastes. To the average sensibility, these comments on contemporary materialism are heavy-handed and obvious. How tedious it must be to have to experience these pieces for longer than a cursory glance.

One of the more successful works was Old Persons Home by the collaborative, Peking-based team of Sun Yuan (b. 1972) and Peng Yu (b. 1974). Not for the silly reason stated in the booklet: "these controversial artists work in extreme materials such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death and the human condition." Yawn.

Rather, the somewhat obvious work comprised of lifelike figures of decrepit, old political leaders cast in latex, randomly rolling around in self-propelled wheelchairs colliding into each other, was so enticing because gallery visitors are allowed unimpeded entrance to the free-for-all crash-up. After seeing the piece, you will never look at an aged person in a wheelchair the same.

(And for some wholly inexplicable reason, the Chinese wheelchair derby was still up and running during the subsequent Middle East show, kind of like a stand-in for Saatchi himself.)

The sprawling installation by Liu Wei (b. 1972), titled Love It! Bite It!, was a labyrinthine model city in a state of deshabile (and including a model of the White House and the Guggenheim Museum), all built out of edible dog chews, beige in color. Similarly, in the many Ron Mueck-esque hyper-realist sculptures of both Cang Xin (b. 1967) and Xiang Jing (b. 1968), the art was bad but all of it could be seen up close and unhindered by typical museum rules.

Overall, "New Art from China" suggests that Chinese artists certainly like the notion of the gallery-as-circus. As does Saatchi himself.

Saatchi isn’t thinking too hard when it comes to exhibition concepts, what with this fairly dim curatorial notion of shows whose roster is set by nothing more than common geography: China first, then the Middle East and India and Pakistan. This "It’s a Small World After All" approach to international relations may not be very realistic, but it works, at least as far as the art market is concerned.

Then there is the partnership with the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co., which provides for free admission to the Saatchi Gallery. Prior incarnations all came with a high entry fee attached, but now Phillips has stepped in to subsidize access. Though happy as the next person to pocket the pounds, by the time I reached the top floor "Phillips de Pury " Company Gallery," I was less certain this was quite such a deal.

The "Untitled (Chinese Paintings)" of Julian Schnabel were billed as "a serendipitous coincidence that the ground of this image" -- a faint image of a seated Chinese Buddhist figurine of some sort -- "happens to come from a Chinese mirror that Julian found 20 years ago for his then wife." Yes, how serendipitous, to plunk these works in the middle of a show of Chinese art.

Just when we thought he couldn’t get worse, we get a glimpse of Schnabel the Orientalist. On some level, I’d rather pay admission than view such crap. Because without Phillips, we probably wouldn’t have it, since Charles bailed out of Schnabel some time ago.

"Perspectives: Arab and Iranian Modern Masters," which followed Schnabel’s "Chinese Paintings" in the Phillips gallery, is organized by Sheikha Lulu al-Sabah, Phillips’ Middle East specialist, and is a much more cohesive and informative undertaking. While Saatchi was a bit slow with his embrace of all things Chinese, his embrace of Middle Eastern art is timelier, and helps to cast a net of coherence over an area that has seemed rather too busy with other things to join the international avant-garde.

Thus the Saatchi Gallery’s second show, "Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East," Jan. 30-May 9, 2009, presents works by more than 20 young artists, and turns out to be a breath of fresh air, albeit a politically charged one. Here we see Saatchi the good Iraqi Jew with a mind as open as his wallet. Nevertheless, the exhibition presents a beautifully installed esthetic of horror, chock-a-block with Guernicas and Screams. In "Unveiled," Saatchi masterfully manages to commodify war and strife but does so with eloquence and elegance.

One impressive installation, by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970), presents a phalanx of hollow, tinfoil apparitions in the form of burka-clad kneeling women, in what could be a pose of prayer. The large, long room is filled with 24 rows of 11 figures, totaling 264 ghost-like figures in a massive grid. Instead of faces, there are empty black holes. Though impressive, with a sense of mourning and dread, the work was also a little bit ridiculous, suggesting an elaborate field of Jiffy Pop or perhaps baked potatoes ready to explode.

The sculpture was made on site by wrapping scores of women with foil. Female guards from the gallery were asked to serve as models for free, while additional women from off the street were hired at £80 per head. This involvement of spot labor was reminiscent of the annoying antics of Santiago Sierra, and nearly ruined the work. But then again, at least it employs women in a public capacity, bringing however indirectly some sexual liberation to the notoriously sexist Middle East.

The paintings of the Iranian-American painter Tala Madani (b. 1981), whose candy-colored parodies of male domination in her native Iran are currently on view at Pilar Corrias in London, would do better in a show of more assorted nationalities, which I strongly suggest Saatchi contemplate next. She favors a cartoonish but painterly style, rendering men praying in pink maillots or massed in groups, holding their hands over their ears. In this instance I recommend bypassing the corny capsules in the Picture by Picture Guide, which can be had for £1.50, a new staple of the Saatchi program, lest it soil an immediate attraction to these works.

Wafa Hourani (b. 1979), a Palestinian artist who lives and works in Ramallah, has constructed a model-sized cinderblock refugee camp, complete with electric lights inside the shacks and twisted wire antennae above them. Watchful Israelis peer over impossibly high cement walls, replete with mirrors so inhabitants can wallow in their own despair. An Israeli water park lies on other side of the grim wasteland. This work is a hammer-over-the-head metaphor for oppression and subjugation but at the same time it strongly brings to mind a kind of political entropy.

As the art world is thoroughly global, Saatchi can be forgiven for seeking, as was seen in his China show and as is the case here, new artworks that may resemble foreign pastiches of his previous favorites from the U.K. Thus, the Iranian artist Shirin Fakhim, who shows with something called the Ministry of Nomads in London, is like a Middle Eastern Sarah Lucas. Her sculptures consist of figures made from stuffed stockings wearing loads of lingerie, replete with bulbous fruits for breasts, called Tehran Prostitutes. Surely one such maker of stuffed female mannequins is enough -- though perhaps these sculptures actually mean something in the Islamic Republic.

Similarly, Saatchi’s affection for art with a certain shock factor -- or is that schlock factor? -- is supplied by the cheesy photoshopped expressions of transgendered sexuality by Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975), whose works have been displayed at Art Dubai and sold at auction (though not for more than $10,000). Haerizadeh’s color photographs of distorted, tattooed hairy fat men in seraglio are an all-too-obvious statement in the face of regional repression.

As if to prove that he is never still, Saatchi has released an all-points bulletin: he plans to front a new TV show searching for the next art star -- don’t we have enough of those already? -- ingeniously titled "Saatchi’s Best of British." Though he won’t speak directly to the camera, he will be depicted in each episode surveying the lay of the land. After all this time, the "notoriously shy" mogul is finally, I suppose, admitting to his own Paris Hiltonitis. The Wizard of Oz is coming out from behind the curtain, as is shown as well by the fact that his name is plastered all over Duke of York Square in banner after banner. How difficult it must have been to keep up the ruse of diffidence all those years.

From dog shit and donkey to tranny and tyranny, Saatchi loves the tasteless avant-garde gesture. But in tandem there is always a glimmer of awe and a sense of risk-taking that something could go terribly wrong. One hopes that the initial two shows at the new gallery do not represent Saatchi’s sole take on art today, as something so easily pigeonholed. But Saatchi’s constant restlessness should at least keep things lively.

First Hirst, then the museums, the website, magazine, TV show (!) and the culmination of it all in Duke of York Square: together we are left with a residue of a vision, an illumination, albeit an inconsistent one, of the temperature of contemporary art today. The rest is for you to decide.


KENNY SCHACHTER operates Kenny Schachter / Rove on Hoxton Square in London.

FAIR FATIGUE (Art & Auction January 2009)

ART FAIR RETREAT AND NONE TOO SOON

Art Basel and Frieze have been bailed out, nationalized and are presently under federal administration. Not so far fetched in a world that was up in arms when Hugo Chavez nationalized a country club, yet embraced the governmental rescue of Goldman Sachs. In real life, the Swiss government subsidized the participation of eight galleries at Frieze this year. Welcome to the post-economy economy, worse than the end of history and direr than the death of painting. Despite some denial, today’s art marketplace is in a recession. Thankfully this could spell the end of economics-ism, the movement in which new art cost a fortune and which has fortune as its subject.

The booming times brought us many art fairs, which only seemed to breed more fairs. Was this a good thing? For a dealer it’s no different from spreading one’s wares on a blanket on St. Marks Place, which is what all of us may be reduced to shortly. The rough times we are in (this fact no longer up for debate), which is sure to be a long wade, will herald a vastly changing dynamic in fairs with many unfolding stories yet to come. In my circumstances the tales started well before the onset of recession.

My relationship with Frieze, to single out one prominent fair, has been contentious: I have written unflattering articles about the too-cool-for-school attitude they display, evidenced by a quote from one of its directors saying that the hardest work was deciding whom not to invite. My never getting in over the past 5 years since moving to the UK did nothing to endear us to each other. Fatefully, one night I was seated next to the wife of the director and proceeded to launch a wine-fueled tirade that Frieze is not the Tate and its principal far from Nicholas Serota, despite his beliefs that the fair is akin to an institution. My therapist suggested an apology letter; I guess truth is no defense.

My history with fairs includes being thrown out of the Armory and Basel for various indiscretions, some deserved and others less so. One year at Basel Miami I was asked to participate with an architectural intervention, so I commissioned Vito Acconci to create a crisscross framework upon which to hang Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Ed Ruscha, and Acconci himself (his photos, that is). Vito fabricated igloo-shaped armatures to serve as lattice and maze to wend around. Word spread that we were trying to sabotage the traffic flow and disrupt the fair (an absurd notion, as I was after sales as much as anyone) until a Viennese dealer on the selection committee came running round, arms flailing, screaming disapproval. The following year Basel Miami went on without me.

A few years ago at the Armory show—which was meant to be strictly for primary market material, but no longer—I installed a booth with historic Mary Heilmanns, Ross Bleckner’s birds and killer Karen Kilminiks. Though sold out, I was also forced out. Was it a long-time-ago brief fling with one of the committee members or the fact that I forgot to bring my primary pieces last time around?

A few years after Acconci-gate, I was allowed back to Basel Miami, but only in the shipping container section (low on the totem pole in fair hierarchy). I elected to forego the allotted container and build my own, designed by Zaha Hadid. The problem was the piece entailed the installation of 50,000 LED lights and was nowhere near completion at the fair’s opening; the jumpsuit-clad electricians might have been mistaken for performance art, but the booth could not be entered. Not a wise approach for selling the Hadid sculptures within.
At the last Design Art Basel fair in Switzerland I suffered a bad reaction to blood pressure medication while spieling to collectors and nearly fainted. The fleeting thought was the last thing I’d see prior to sudden death would be a series of overpriced design objects—which I had commissioned. After the brief trip to the Basel Emergency Room and the normal EKG I returned to the fair to tend to my objects.

During Design Art Basel (fair names are another topic for discussion at a later date) dealers and collectors were tripping over each other trying to ingratiate themselves to Brad and Roman. Is that what we have been reduced to? It sounds like a porn-producing team rather than the saviors of the art market.

Is the faltering economy the conclusion to the endless appetite for fairs? The need to find fairs that need you will become a much easier process due to the full-court financial press we are all now squeezed in. And with that the exorbitant participation fees and artificially inflated hotel rates will come under pressure—something I recently experienced by stalling to commit to a fair until just prior to the opening, resulting in lower rates. Who said procrastination is a bad habit?

As the stock market approaches zero and the discussion has shifted from recession to depression the laptops at frieze were frequently tuned into finance sites monitoring the DOW and the FTSE rather than ARTINFO.COM Beuys famously said “Everyone is an artist”; today, everyone is an economist. After the usual lies were told to the press about the extent of sales at the latest spate of fairs (the art world’s equivalent of original sin) the lights went out for the last hour of Design Art London, don’t ask, but one of the only one’s that will still have me, a fitting end. One upside to the bloodbath: the flop of the flipper.

Epilogue (Questions by Carol Kino for an upcoming Art in America article:

How galleries are retooling the way they are doing business at art fairs? I think the main thing galleries are bringing to fairs nowadays are lower expectations.

The type of booths they install? Galleries are bringing smaller, more portable works to cut on shipping which one cannot imagine the costs of, and how expenses mount for installation help. Just to add a socket or an extra lighting fixture is outrageously overpriced, with the fair management's false pretext of the multiplicity of unions involved.

The type of work they bring? The works are more conservative, sell-able, and sometimes more happy and colorful.

Whether they do a curated show, a solo show, etc.? Solo shows will increase markedly as galleries attempt to focus, simplify and bring concise groupings of affordable works together.

Or how they are not retooling but just sticking with the same thing--it could go either way? Sticking to the same thing is no longer an option for anyone, as the recent past in the art market and world of fairs will in all probability not repeat itself for close to a decade, if ever; these are fundamentally and drastically shifting times when unbridled speculation and hyper price inflation that spurred absurd jostling for art is practically as dead as Detroit.

And comments about your gallery? We are giving very serious consideration to taking a year's sabbatical from fairs altogether as much as for the down business prospects as for a personal protest against the ever increasing absurd fees attached that have been bordering on greedy. From the booths and associative costs to shipping, and hotels. Enough is enough.

NOTHING BUT TIME (Paul Thek, MIT Press, Feb 2009)

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.