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There was an interesting story in the Money section of today's Morning Edition on NPR. David Kestenbaum talked about art pricing in the wake of a record-setting sale on an Ansel Adams photograph.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story by A.D. Amorosi on a show called "Don't Hate Because I'm Beautiful" at a cosemtic surgeon's office in New Jersey. I would be interested in your responses to how this is addressed (we can proceed from the premise that this article is not criticism, but as a lenghty bit of coverage, it merits our consideration in seminar).
Finally, everyone should look through the stories in the Friday New York Times before coming to class each week...there has been a lot of coverage of the New Museum's Rivane Neuenschwander show (a profile of the artist in Monday's paper, a slide show, a review today). What's up with that? She's so everywhere, I put a photo of her at the top of the page... this is what we will try to sort out each Friay.
If you want to get into the groove of this part of the class, you are invited to add your comments to this post. It may result in some form of extra credit, or serve as an insurance policy against a later absence, though I hate to leverage participation in grad seminars like this....
Have a great weekend!
Rivane Neuenschwander’s show seems to be all over the place. She’s got dripping buckets, frantic searching for bugs in the wall, ribbon wishes that provide viewers with the perfect souvenir. Whatever she’s doing it certainly is very attracting to folks who want to see some ART. Each piece seems so different from the next yet similar in having qualities which attract viewers. Seems that the individual pieces of the show are lacking because of this. They do not seem to come from the soul… from a deep and meaningful place… but more from the desire to entice and present something that looks like ART. The buckets look brand spankin new, the bright ribbons scream ‘come look at me and take a piece of me home’, the manic room projects an impression of the artist as this psycho, cool, deep and bothered persona…which is probably not an accurate portrayal of the real Rivane. I don’t know…something fishy is going on here… I think.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem to defy the old "where there's smoke there's fire' logic...I think one thing that may be affecting all this is the PR machine at the New Museum. You may have seen the hype that lead up to Jeff Koons' curatorial turn there this spring, a show called "Skin Fruit" or something equally goofy. It was relentlessly primed through the times in features, then panned once it opened. Similarly, the there was wall-to-wall coverage of the Marina Abramovic exhibit at MoMA - even a piece on her home in the Style section - and the unease of critics was largely ignored. one has to wonder, do critics even matter?
ReplyDeleteThe theme of my paper in the spring was looking at art in context of Nelson Goodman's theory of projection of predicates. He believes that we pick a possible world and the act of picking it means we value it. In the grand scheme of things, there are some people or institutions that have more influence on the picking than others. The New Museum picks Rivane (for perhaps irrational or chance reasons), others think the New Museum knows what they are talking about so they pick her as well, and suddenly we all value her work and talk about it some more; not because of any intrinsic value in her work, just because of who picked her work first. Don't worry, in class I will tie this in with pigeons...
ReplyDeleteSo I think I may have thrown my trick knee out reacting to the be-leathered beauty (Rivane Neuenschwander) pictured above. Something about sleekness and ribbons got my hackles up. Truth be told, I’m a bit of an art curmudgeon these days. (As the Human League put it: “I’m only human/Of flesh and blood I’m made/I’m only human/Born to make mistakes.”) My artistic visits of late have been firmly entrenched in the 1800’s so inevitably I have rendered myself fingerless. My antiquated technology (brain) got no traces of pulsating NOWness and/or hotness. That being said, as soon as I conducted a quick google search, I was made to discover that I had, in fact, seen one of Neuenschwander’s pieces (a collaborative video piece entitled Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue) at the Hirshhorn in DC semi-recently (2008). I’d wandered into the screening at random and I totally loved it despite myself. The video involved ants carrying colored confetti, an idea I would probably scoff at if described not experienced. In conclusion:
ReplyDelete1. As far as the Rivane-hotness goes, if I’ve seen her work in a museum it probably means she’s pretty well popping.
2. I must hesitate to speak for the work I’ve not seen but as for the work I have seen: there was, indeed, a quality I couldn’t put my finger on that I could definitely appreciate—and that’s a hard sell.
As for Jeff Koons, isn’t he currently a producer on the all too horrific new reality-competition show du-jour “Work of Art” (or as my mom calls it—“Art Wars”), or is that simple hearsay and conjecture?
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Rivane_Neuenschwander.html
p.s.---I'm not sure if the work is popping with meaning but it seems to be popping with popularity. Z's point is well stated and I look forward to see how he has related the theory to pigeons (though I can guess where the thought is leading....)
ReplyDeleteI was suspicious as well about Jeff Koons, but I can find no evidence that he is one of the producers. The executive producer is Sarah Jessica Parker, who apparently has absolutely no place in the art world, other than being from a family of "art lovers". I watched the first episode online and think that it is fertile ground for many interesting conversations about criticism.
ReplyDeleteI agree - it is something we will get to when we have session on criticism in mass culture (in July), so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to comment on the NPR story regarding the Ansel Adams...
ReplyDeleteHaving worked in the auction industry, we used "logical methods" to arrive at estimates, which included previous auction estimates for the artists, and then using a similar methodology to the one mentioned in the story, we would look at the size, subject matter, etc. to be able to come up with an appropriate estimate. However, even that is based largely on "non-realities." In 2003 and 2004 there was an upsurge in the desire and the prices of the Pennsylvania Impressionists/New Hope Artists. This "desire" was driven by two wealthy people who most likely enjoyed competing with each other more than they enjoyed the paintings. Because of these two people an estimate "bubble" was created; people rushed to sell their PA Impressionist paintings and buyers were happy to pay high prices in both the primary and secondary markets because the paintings were now "desirable." It went on for about two years and then the bubble burst. Today those same paintings rarely fetch what they did in 2003/2004, and soon after the bubble burst, until the market could catch up again, the paintings sold below the inflated auction estimates or went unsold. It's a very messy business that at times has very little to do with how the work looks or the skill of the artist.