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There were two ways to get to the inaugural Frieze New York art fair on Randall’s Island. One was to get in a car and trudge through traffic over the Triboro Bridge to turn onto Hell Gate Circle, travel past a looming, derelict-looking mental institution and a maximum-security prison, and park in a funky-smelling lot in the shadow of a tree that the artist Christoph Büchel draped, gallows-like, with dozens of pairs of sneakers. That approach—let’s call it Dante-meets-Shutter Island route—sent shivers up one’s spine.
Yesterday Artinfo published a sweeping look at 30 of the biggest celebrity art collectors, paying tribute to those starry actors, musicians, and designers who serve as ambassadors of art appreciation to the wider pop-culture-besotted world. We’ve sifted through this impressively researched—and breezily fun—undertaking to find the ten top luminaries who drop their millions on art. Our list is determined by a mix of analysis, level of fascination, and gut instinct (and artists whose work you can buy on Artspace are hyperlinked below).
In the triumvirate (“virate” used loosely here) of art critics who adjudicate the good, bad, and indifferent in New York’s art galleries, the profiles are rather clear: Jerry Saltz is the Whitmanesque street preacher; Roberta Smith is the close-looker and fine-thinker; and Peter Schjeldahl is the poet and feeler-in-chief, writing from the highest aerie (in a good way). So, while the first two frequently address the market in their critiques, it comes as something of a surprise to see Schjeldahl writing one of his rare New Yorker features about art fairs of all things—those buzzing pop-up souks where dealers hawk art hot and fast in an atmosphere more welcoming to day traders than people who care about Velázquez. Of course, art fairs are currently the premier place where art gets sold, careers get made, and museum exhibitions and acquisitions get hammered out, so it’s interesting to see what he has to say.
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The art world suffered a sad loss over the weekend in the death of David Weiss, who as one half of the Swiss collective Fischli Weiss has been responsible for some of the wittiest, most unpredictable art of the past fifty years. Known for their cryptic typologies and surrealistic combines of household objects into improbable sculptures, the pair is most famous for their 1987 film The Way Things Go—a Rube Goldberg-like set of chain reactions that uses fire, water, and explosions to propel objects through a 100-foot warehouse—and have twice represented their country at the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion in 2003. Passing away at the age of 66, Weiss leaves behind his collaborator of 32 years, Peter Fischli, and a body of extraordinarily varied work.
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Ai Weiwei‘s art has returned to London—thought not the dissident artist himself, of course, since he still can’t leave Beijing—in the form of an installation called A Living Sculpture at the diminutive Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. Consisting of an orange crab (and here fans will remember the “River Crab Festival” the artist threw prior to his detention, punning on “river crab” being a homonym for censorship in Chinese) circling a large cactus, it is a sly analogy for Ai’s spikily contentious situation in China, where he faces trumped-up tax charges in return for his outspoken political art. The artist can’t be tied down simply by terrestrial imprisonment, however, as he demonstrated when he appeared via Skype at an odd White Box benefit where he was subjected to speech after genuflecting speech by patrons.
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The Artists Rights Society is saying that James Cameron has to pay a second time for the right to use Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon in the 3-D release of Titanic—despite the fact that the artist kept the painting hidden in his studio until its pubic debut in 1916, and today it is safe and sound at MoMA—because the fancy-glasses-enhanced version of the movie painting constitutes a “new work.” At least the director has the tact to edit out a shot of the groundbreaking masterpiece sinking beneath the waves, replacing it with a more disposable Degas in the new movie. (NYT)
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“I wanted people to know the gallery is behind me… and this is a way to reach a broader audience. We feel that everyone should know about art. This way we’ll get some people into the gallery who like Playboy.” – Supermodel and Hole Gallery assistant director May Andersen on being the first “member of the art world (that) has ever been on the cover of Playboy”
New York magazine has published an art issue of its own, setting out to elucidate the state of the contemporary art world at its present “moment of weird equipoise, as the Art Death Star and the Rebel Forces are battling to the quick.” (If anyone can figure out what that means, exactly, they win a conceptual prize.) Since this issue is a meaty beast, let’s start by taking a look at the part that may prove to have the most lasting impact: the group photos of eight young artists that critic Jerry Saltz “believes breathes new liveliness into a frustrating system.”
Starting today A1 will have a slightly tweaked format, with the big story of the day separated out for its own post to be published later in the morning.
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“I’m not trying to be controversial. If I wanted to be controversial, I would have used photographs. But I’m not interested in being so literal and direct. Paintings give you more room for illusion and fantasy, more room to discover things.” – The artist Mickalene Thomas on the centerpiece of her upcoming Santa Monica Museum of Art show Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, a painting in homage to Courbet’s sensationally graphic painting of that title that she based on photographs she took of her own spread legs and intimate place.
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Whither art in the age of high technology? Trailblazing Internet art journal Rhizome.org hosted its annual Seven on Seven conference at the New Museum this week to discuss the intersection of these two enormously powerful cultural drivers, and the art critic Ben Davis writes that an odd inversion seems to be revealing itself: “A few decades ago, he said, it was the computer geeks who were the practical ones, and the artists who were trying to figure out how to screw around to make technology freaky and interesting. These days… the opposite is the case: The technologists are setting the pace in terms of pushing the frontiers of experience. The artists, on the other hand, have been reduced to the role of Jiminy Crickets sitting on their shoulders, pleading with them to think about the implications.” But there’s also the new incursion of a third creative group that warrants some consideration—the mass of neo-folk artists who are flooding the Web and social media with “user-generated” (what a strange term, if you think about it) visual content.