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

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

LOVE IS REAL

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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

unilateral cyber squabble

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

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

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

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

TEFAF vs. AFF

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

stock market down 300, Giacometti up 100m

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