contemporary monkey

olde worlde graffiti(e)

Some art galleries are better designed than others.  Indeed some are so well designed, they’re more appealing than the art presented inside.  Take the London’s Saatchi Gallery.  When it first opened, I wasn’t impressed much with the random pieces that Charles Saatchi called art, but the building’s flooring was visually and vastly impressive.  In fact, the Saatchi’s front desk at the time provided brochures featuring the flooring maker.  It was probably the most memorable thing to come out of the Saatchi Gallery since the Big Room of Oil.

The Wallace Collection in central London is another example.  The collection itself seldom gets any press.  “Hidden gem” is the tag usually attached to it, Odd Bag of Camp might be another phrase for it, but either way, it’s not always on one’s tour of contemporary art galleries and museums in London.  But as Damien Hirst has just moved in, art lovers are suddenly interested.  The Wallace Collection is a hodgepodge of bombastic Rococo style furniture, mantle pieces, French porcelain, and other collectibles, most from the 17th and 18th century.  If you’re interested in modern or contemporary art, you’d hate this stuff.  More than Jeff Koon’s basketballs, you’d hate this stuff

The gallery is filled with olde worlde trinkets that appeal mostly to 80 year old grandmothers and 8 year old granddaughters.  To the rest of us, it’s the Las Vegas of the art museum world.  It’s not my cup of tea, but to house so much of this eye candy in one place is impressive.  Whomever Wallace is, his or her collection is exhaustively consistent…and eye splitting.  I give it due credit, though, as it’s much more focused than the family collectors featured in Art + Auction magazine, who seem to hammer together a variety of styles and periods of history into one collection.  With the Wallace Collection, there is no doubt: the older and bolder, the better.

Dutch + Bacon + Hirst = Dull

Which is why the Wallace Collection is a peculiar place for Damien Hirst’s new attempt at creating art through his newfound friends, the paintbrush and the canvas.  Possibly he sees The Wallace as an inspiration to historical standards and now’s the time to shed the burden of putrefying animal carcasses.  Every one of his paintings, however, is a direct retrograde of somebody or something else: Francis Bacon’s chalk lines, 1990’s digital compositing, Dutch historical vanitas symbolism.  Running out of people to copy, Hirst even remakes himself using his own shark jaws, dots, and skulls from previous sculptures.  The whole scene felt more like an art school critique room than any sort of mature work by an established artist.  I guess that’s Damien, done.

Beyond the paintings, however, and much more importantly, is a Hirst contribution more profound, more substantial, and ultimately more significant to the art world.  In his effort to hang his canvases, Hirst has had to hang fresh wallpaper behind them.  The silvery, silky Victorian fabric fits the style of the interior perfectly, but also introduces a modern take on an old idea.  I found the wallpaper to be more visually absorbing than any of Hirst’s work.  It’s a damn shame most of the fabric is covered by someone’s mediocrity, but I suppose that’s the price of seeing new art.  We all have to do our bit by enduring the desperate in order to get at the quality.  I don’t care what Hirst does in the future, but whatever it is, he can show his next exhibition in my apartment if he needs a venue.  (Note to Hirst: the interior style of my apartment is mostly modern minimalism, and the wall colour could do with a little warming up.)

In order to further assist artists with their efforts in gaining a following and thus increasing their importance to the brotherhood of man, I thought to create a mathematical model that explicitly describes a winning formula.  “Simian’s Theorem of Grasp” is a useful device for eliminating those individuals, who, in the end, don’t matter enough to the lonely artist, while optimizing the number of people in the world who do.  We can all do with a little closet cleaning, and to no-one is this activity more important than to the starving artist.

Simian’s Theorem of Grasp states that

x = y - (a + b + c + d);

where the constants and variables are explained to the forlorn artist as follows:

a = you, and, with the possible exception of Grayson Perry, is always constant at 1.  Realistically, if you hope to have a chance with your art, your influence should attempt to reach beyond this lonely number.

b = your friends (variable in number, decreasing with time, and usually insignificant in this filthy business of art.). This group will never tell you that your art is rubbish, and will therefore most likely lie to you when asked by you, “This art, do you get it?”  Your friends are one thing, your friends in art are quite another.  In fact, your true friends will probably thank you for literally leaving them out of the equation.

c = art patrons.  These individuals are usually quite wealthy in cash, but poor in judgement in matters of art.  People in this group can include British bankers, Russian oligarchs, American hedge fund managers, Mexican drug runners, and Charles Saatchi.  When we speak of those with “more money than sense”, it’s this group of whom we speak.

d = sycophantic art culture hangers-on (similar to “b” above, but even less significant in the art scheme of things).  Those in this group act differently than variable “b” in that the number may actually increase with time if you’re represented by powerful, yet delusional, agents.  Please remember however that knowing more of the wrong people doesn’t help you with your goal of making a real difference in the world.

y = everybody on planet earth; including those hard to count tribes in Indonesian jungles.

x = this is perhaps the most important of the variables: this the magical number of willing individuals who seek to derive meaning, or feel emotion, or exhibit love toward your art.  This group can include those that, unprompted, unpaid, and unrehearsed, say they like your work.  The higher this number, the more influential you will be to mankind.  This variable is the antithesis of a,b,c and d combined.  Think of x as the Jedi knights, while a,b,c and d are, well, you know who…

Success in art is really this simple.  It’s been proven to be true by those that have high “x” factors, such as Anish Kapoor, and perversely proven true by those, such as Damien Hirst,  with high “c” and “d” factors.  Please be advised that, because of its greater potential, “x” can be an extremely large number.  The wise artist will use this to his or her advantage, and will soon find that the c’s and d’s of the formula soon become useless and trivial.

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.