that’s ridickerous
Martin Kippenberger
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 you might have noticed, ‘anything’ is exactly what the 1980’s were good at making and discarding, so the prospects for work were good for anyone with that sort of a philosophy.
Model Interconti
The more I read about him, the more I feel Martin Kippenberger was my kind of person. He seemed to treasure pointing out the ridiculousness and gullibility of the art industry to take itself too seriously. Particularly of his fellow artists. Reminding them they were just as human as the everyday man, and working in the materialism of the 1980’s, Kippenberger seemed to take every opportunity to poke the art world in the eye. He worked in all sorts of media, but his ironic wit was sharp throughout. Once he purchased a Gerhard Richter painting, which looked like the top of a coffee table, and made, well, a coffee table out of it. He purchased a run-down gas station in Brazil, and named it after a Nazi War criminal. He used a bar in Berlin to jam his paintings onto a side wall, after which he painted that very same wall as if it was a typical scene captured in the moment, preserved for art historians of the future to lavish praise on this “must be the most popular artist of the day”. Kippenberger himself, brands himself; an early form of today’s famous for being famous “celebutantes”. Why not. At least Kippenberger had the talent as a painter of realism, the cheek to promote himself outrageously, and self-perception to know it was all a game anyway. It was kind of sport for him, not art.
Paris Bar Berlin
The only problem I have with any of his work is that you have to know the inside joke. It’s a lucky art lover who might accidently find him or herself with an appreciative gallerist, critic, or curator who might be good enough to let the audience in on the obscure stories. Without which, the joke goes untold. Maybe Kippenberger would find that interesting anyway.