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Archive for June 2009
decent docents
It’s only a pile of dried, grey brown leaves, swept into a mound, placed in the middle of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. They’re not particularly impressive looking leaves either; small and perfect shape, lacking in personality. They’re from the box tree, offers the Ikon employee sitting near the sculpture. He goes on to say that the… (read more)
a quantum of soul-less
In the never-ending comparison between men and women, to me the variations are never as stark as they are dramatically overblown. That philosophy proved to be true at the Pompidou Centre’s “Elle’s@centrepompidou” exhibition this past week. Unfortunately, that’s a bad thing for women. The works displayed were all 20th and 21st century pieces by women… (read more)
that’s ridickerous
Plowing through Adam Lindemann’s “Collecting Contemporary“, I ran across Martin Kippenberger, a German artist who died of liver cancer in 1997. He was 44. Hmmm, I wonder what his lifestyle was like? On the Saatchi Gallery site, his life’s work is said to be prolific, mostly because he claimed that anything could be art. As… (read more)
a world of one’s own
Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art. Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art. Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art… (read more)
we are an unnatural animal
Are the colours of modern society, un-natural? The argument made thoughout a recent exhibition at Tate Liverpool is that off-the-shelf colour (their term: ready-made colour) can’t be found in nature. Surely man invented the hyper-active, vibrant colours of such stuff as cars, signs and iPods. Wouldn’t their alien surface properties have to be natural because,… (read more)
david lynch creates (gasp) coherence!
Finally, a reason to like a film by David Lynch, the American film writer and director. In all of his films, the strangeness of people and their stories is magnetic, but in the end, the appreciation evaporates into common voyeurism. Good fun watching mysterious characters do creepy things. I always thought it was a bit… (read more)
galleries: a one way street
More outrageousness from “Collecting Contemporary” by Adam Lindemann: a little game that galleries enjoy playing that involves some heavy handedness. In the game of collecting, there’s usually an unwritten rule (although sometimes it’s actually written into a contract): when it comes time to sell a piece, the collector is obliged to give the gallery from… (read more)
can galleries be useful? no, seriously.
I’m reading a book called “Collecting Contemporary” at the moment, and it’s a rich source of the goings-on in the art industry. Interviews with (mostly) collectors and dealers reveal the professional expectations of both, along with advice for new collectors in the contemporary world. In many respects it’s filled with one-sided justifications of the various… (read more)