...`The hedge-fund people are brilliant. They get very good professional advice, and they have a tremendous amount of information on prices, provenance, condition, and so forth available to them through the Internet' ''
----------------
Well there was Peggy Guggenheim's money. She also had her kitch side. Check out her sunglasses.
Man, that's depressing shit to read.
I suppose on a theory level, though the match of contentless art that evaporates in air matches the contentlessness of the people and the money they buy it with.
Then thinking about theory, I tried to get through Tim Clark's Farewell to an Idea, and stopped on page 79. What are you saying? Get to it man. He is trying to write about the disappearence of the avant garde but for some reason Clark keeps retracing half thoughts that never quite jell. It's all nice and elegant, but thin on substance. I am finding out some historical details I never knew, like Pissaro was a political radical. The book is done up as a nice coffee table format with a lot of color prints. So there is that.
Thinking about what it's like on the inside when I started to figure out some conceptual art. What arrives almost immediately is the whole world of narrative arts---provided you know anything about them. After a superficial sort of survey (1972) I realized that most of the conceptual and performance artists that Artforum were pushing back then, were completely self-asorbed and knew nothing about the literary domain. Why not do theater, say Beckette for example? He was much better at this kind of work than the art world would ever be. Then there was Duchamp, the grand daddy icon of that long ago moment.
A lot of this is tied up with the narrative at a deep cultural level.
We still have narrative, but it is encapsulated into advertizing that positions the product within that narrative and does so within a few seconds; 30s something guy in bike tights and windbreaker marching out of rugged landscape toward SUV. The whole point to the narrative is enhance the product with some value that isn't a tangible component of the concrete product. This is what the arts that Deitch buys and sells seem like to me. The objects are supposed to evoke the exciting narrative of the New York art world. So when you buy an SUV, does the awe inspiring landscape come with it?
`` Deitch usually suggests the theme and the title, and writes and produces the catalogue - a striking visual document that extends the show's range beyond Athens and its other European venues. The title of the new show (it opened in September at Joannou's Deste Foundation) was `Fractured Figure.' It was being built around recent additions to Joannou's collection, and it centered on what Deitch, Joannou, and a small group of friends, including the artists Maurizio Cattelan and Urs Fischer and the museum curator Massimiliano Gioni, saw as the shattering effects on the collective imagination of recent political and social events - the Iraq war, international terrorism, environmental degradation.''
Here is the cover:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cTLigwVCL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
What's interesting is graphic design as the conceptual flight path toward global ruin, done as dehumanized ad-man cleverness of package. What's the narrative? The hedge fund clients buy it and keep it awhile as trophies of the ruin they produced? Here is the world I helped creat and ruin. Want to buy it?
``I asked Deitch if he thought that contemporary art was good enough to justify the astonishing prices being paid for it. `But that's a question I wanted to ask you!' he said. `O.K., for me the answer is yes. Of course it would be depressing, when I'm so involved in it, to think this period in art is nothing like the sixties, or the forties, or the years around 1910. But I do think contemporary art is exciting now. One thing these new artists have is a tremendous respect for their craft, for the way things are made. With some of the painters who had great success in the early eighties, their paintings weren't very well made. But people like Koons - even though he doesn't do the actual painting himself - are masters of their medium. I definitely believe their work will hold up.' ''
I can assure Senor Deitch it will hold up for what it is, which is a vastly inflated, bloodless eclecticism with a lot kitch tossed in. Yeah, what's with the animal fetish? Sometime in the mid-70s the art world I thought I knew evaporated and something else took its place. What took its place I can't really say except call it art-manque. These have been in recycle mode ever since. Some actually do manage to work as minor individual pieces, but outlandish scale usually defeats even that faint praise.
Deitch mentions some of his clients buy with only a digital reproduction. In this venue, the function of the perfect finish takes on an assured equivalence between the image of a computer display and the physical object. What's excluded is the presence of the object---which is part of the power of the visual arts. Key parts of that presence are the physical characteristics like surface, mass, composition at scale, all of which are removed by digital reproduction. It's the idea of the piece that counts, not its execution. There is a big problem between the idea of a work, and a work. Something about de-contextualization.
There are subroutines in Photoshop to reproduce the image of surface texture but they completely fail to creat or evoke the tactile sense of a object. One example are the problems of `painting' a wire frame figure. Another example, I saw Warhol's first big show (Campbell's Soup Cans) in LA in the early 60s. Well, it was a knock out. But, even so. Was that supposed to be satire? On who, the mechanized ad industry selling tasteless food or the drunk rundown AE painters still hacking away at painting? It turned out to be the latter. I think part of the inner dynamic of the period was this struggle on multiple fronts. How was a 1940s product label so new and exciting as something avant garde? If you ever saw early Warhol drawings and small paintings, he really sucked. Here is an example of who we were really dealing with:
http://www.arcanabooks.com/bookimages/016496.jpg
The Tomkins article actually explains some of the mystery disappearence of art in an indirect way I am trying to sort out.
As for respect for their craft, what a laugh. What Deitch called quality and respect for craft is simply the by-product of having enough money to pay someone else to fabricate the art.
Very good article. It closes with a comparison of prices between Warhol in at 72 million, Courbet under 3 million, which Jeff Koons bought. It's supposed to be something like this one, probably without the parrot:
And, one of Jeff Koons' puppies:
http://flavorwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/jeff-koons.jpeg
I was thinking this puppy only works, if it is positioned against a weathered stone facade. It would work even better in front of the Taj Mahal where it might start a war. For example if it was positioned in front of a Las Vegas Casino or Disneyland anywhere, would it even be noticed? Tacky-kitch doesn't really work on its own. Here is one of those kitchen things to meditate on:
http://www.collectibletreasuresblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/kitschyfrog1.jpg
And one of Warhol's Car Crashes:
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2009/4/7/saupload_warhol_car_crash_green.jpg
He did a multiple of the same screen on a bigger canvas. that's probably what brought in 72 million.
Conclusion. Wow, we've got some seriously sick elites running the show. And I am going to be sick now in the toilet.
CG
