In light of the Scream sale

I have recently come across a few Reuters blogger Felix Salmon’s pieces regarding the art market. Salmon is an exceptional financial blogger and his insights into the art market are well worth reading.  

Here are a few recent ones:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/03/art-valuation-datapoints-of-the-day/ 
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/page/3/
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/the-business-of-art-fairs/ 
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/27/how-damien-hirst-recaptured-his-market/ 

100 Notes - 100 Thoughts, Documenta 13 

image via leftLOFT

As a lead up to Documenta 13, which opens next month in Kasell, the organisers have been releasing a series of wonderfully designed and interestingly conceived books in a series called 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts. The books, produced by the Italian design company leftLoft and Hatje Cantz, have been around for close to a year now. They feature artists, academics, curators, critics, and theorists contributing thoughts on a range of issues dealing with the contemporary world and art.  

I remember first seeing them on a shelf in Koenig books and being captivated by their simple design and poignant content. I bought two that day, No.08 Lawrence Weiner: IF IN FACT THERE IS A CONTEXT and No.09 William Kentridge and Peter L. Gallison: The Refusal of Time, with a number of others having been added to a growing stack on my shelf over the following months.

These clever little objects, in parts as well as in sum, constitute a well considered prelude to Documenta 13.

 image via leftLOFT

via ICA

A video production from the Publish and Be Damned event at the ICA. Have a look.

Image from Julius von Bismarck

Saw an article today about Julius von Bismarck becoming the new artist in residence at CERN and it reminded me about his Public Face projects. von Bismarck is the first artist taking part in the residency as part of the Collide@CERN initiative. Marking the occasion will be a public lecture on the 21st of March at 7:30pm (CET). The lecture will be webcast on CERN’s website.

An Occupy Reading List →

Thatcher’s Warhol via Verso Blog

Nice blog post today by Huw Lemmey about Damian Hirst and his upcoming show at Tate Modern. Also mentions #3 contributor Julian Stallabrass’ excellent book High Art Lite, a must read for contextualising the work made by YBA members.

Hirst’s show opens in a political, social and economic context far removed from the halycon days of Brit Art. Although we may, once again, be living under a Conservative government, Cameron’s administration is not one trapped between tabloid sleaze and stuffy Victorian values. Rather, the values of the YBAs, always a louche cheerleader of Thatcherite meritocracy, have transmogrified into the official, informal culture of Britain’s neoliberal political class. 

Read the full post on Verso

Waiting For Google

I came across this project from Stuart White of the Royal College of Art today.

Waiting For Google is, “inspired by website preloaders , the writings of Samuel Beckett and the time wasted procrastinating on the internet – waiting for something that never arrives.”

I think most of us can relate. (if you use the preloaders you can donate at his site)

“Cool Girls Got Off at Contemporary” and Other Findings From Alice Gregory’s Sotheby’s Ethnography

via ArtInfo

image from ArtInfo

Nice digest of Alice Gregory’s article. There are some real choice bits. The ones below are my favourites.

-nm

3: AUCTION CATALOGUE ESSAYS ARE FORMULAIC BULLSHIT 

The auction house’s most prominent gesture towards intellectual credibility is the copy that accompanies auction catalogues. Gregory describes the rote process of putting together one of these essays in a way that makes you embarrassed for the big-spenders who take them semi-seriously:

“I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (‘fey,’ ‘gestural,’ ‘restrained’) amid a small repertory of active verbs (‘explore,’ ‘trace,’ ‘question’). I inserted the phrases ‘negative space,’ ‘balanced composition,’ and ‘challenges the viewer’ every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary — which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light — ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades… It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise.”

and

5: SOTHEBY’S MEN ARE THE SPAWN OF DRACULA:

“The men at Sotheby’s greased back their longish hair with some sort of unidentifiable shellac. In their well-tailored suits and leather-soled shoes, they looked like patrician vampires.” Enough said.

Read the rest here

codeines:

Dear Stranger, by Shizuka Yokomizo

For this 1998-2000 series of portraits, photographer Shizuka Yokomizo left several anonymous letters on the doorsteps of random ground floor apartments that read:

“Dear Stranger,

I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…. I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening.”

The letter specified a certain ten-minute period during which the artist would approach, take the picture, and slip back into the darkness. She would only reveal her identity once her subjects received a print and contact information (so that they could let her know if they objected to their portrait being exhibited).

Yokomizo made sure that when the photos were taken, the light would be too dark outside to see her — it would only allow her subjects to see their own reflections in the window they were looking out of.

via NYT

That tantalizing sense of mystery and uneasiness are similar emotions viewers feel when they see one of Ms. Sherman’s elliptical photographs. Over the course of her remarkable 35-year career she has transformed herself into hundreds of different personas: the movie star, the valley girl, the angry housewife, the frustrated socialite, the Renaissance courtesan, the menacing clown, even the Roman god Bacchus. Some are closely cropped images; in others she is set against a backdrop that, as Ms. Sherman describes it, “are clues that tell a story.”