Monthly Archives: November 2008

Unfinished and Unread Books

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Lately all these arts and culture posts have been artsy in a visual way. That’s fine in itself, except it’s a symptom of a greater malady. And no, not being sick of hearing about the presidential election. It’s that I can’t dig my teeth into any new book. True, I could be to blame. I did try to read up on medieval history and found my enthusiasm waned quickly. There were no pictures. But I also took out a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel, whose style is excellent and subjects are humorous and folksy. He has a great short story, Guy de Maupassant, and it inspired me to go for the whole oeuvre at once. Sigh…bad idea.

I went to the New York Public library online. It’s hard to search their catalogs, and I ended up almost ordering a dozen old favorites. However, the point is that I want new contemporary fiction. After my Milan Kundera phase, I want a new pet author. And I do not want this to became a fall of Dostoevsky or a winter of Proust. Dear god, I want to get through the winter without committing suicide. Classics thought they may be, my mind doesn’t seem to be up for a challenge.

So I went to Borders looking for a cure. Tragic. The books they put on those shelves did not inspire me to read, but to finish my novel in a hurry, while the general reading public has no taste. Maybe then my project would survive on the turbulent waters of publishing.

What else has fallen beside the wayside? Poetry. I love the 17th century British poets, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, and of course Lord Byron. Lately, nothing has moved me.

Any suggestions to stir me out of this apathy? Anything? I’m on the library website now…

Walls and Streets of Art, Relationally-speaking

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That imperious-sounding term ‘relational aesthetics’ might have been first introduced to me at theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim, as I reviewed here, but like so many things one jives with, I’ve started to find it everywhere. It’s not exactly that the exhibition so sensitized me to my surroundings that every piece of litter on New York’s streets makes me want to sing hallelujahs, although relational aesthetics does strive for that effect. Rather, I see in work I have already been following the same aesthetic tools of surprise, fun, ephemerality, untraditional medium, and irreverence, and fueling their creation the hopeful belief that the experience of life is beautiful.

The Wooster Collective, whose blog I follow, is “dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets” thus taking relational aesthetics one step further than using the exhibition as a medium, as street art creates a medium out of bare concrete and brick. The art it showcases is submitted from all over, so like the Guggenheim’s group show it is an egalitarian effort, and shows the range of diversity, from a bum’s hut in Poland to this Election Day poster.

Had they been punnier, they would have said “Chews with your gum,” but not everybody can be as clever as me.

Street art fits into the category of relational aesthetics. An article on the founders of Wooster Collective from 2006 discusses the tenants of street art much line relational aesthetics:

1. Location…A work of street art reclaims the public space and the best street art has a context, builds a relationship with its environment, dialogs with the city…
2. Surprise and delight: the works tap into our emotions and we get that WTF ??? moment…
3. Have something to say…the best pieces do not necessarily make a strong political statement but they will make you see the city under a different light. Artists let
passersby make their own interpretation of the work…

‘Relational aesthetics’, then, is a way of taking art out of frames and putting it in different, often surprising, relations to the viewer, and how it affects one’s perception of the object, which is not necessarily an object but a wall or hole that makes you reevaluate your surroundings. The blog form is suited to street art; it constantly changes rather than being fixed, is fragmentary rather than whole, and both mediums originated outside mainstream channels of expression and are becoming more recognized.

Another blog I follow, Art is Everywhere, tries to document the beauty of everyday objects by taking things apart, rearranging them, and photographing them for the web. It tries to resensitize people to their surroundings, and thus to the beauty and charm of life. As it’s states:

Observing the surrounds from different points of view can change the perception
of the reality. Among the endless possible points of view, we can find the one
more near to the beauty: that is to make art. Why should everybody make art? To
seek for the beautiful in the daily things it undoubtedly helps us to…live
better.

And that’s a lovely sentiment to be surprised with, in anyspace anywhere.

Change Comes in November

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The American presidential elections are coming up, and both candidates have promised change. However, I’ve been sniffing out more change in the air, and I think it’s going to make itself clear when people begin voting with their dollars at the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s this month.

November is typically a month of big auctions for these two art houses. Look at Christie’s calendar, and in upcoming days they are covering Impressionism, Modernism, Post-War and Contemporary Art. These are some big guns, and the Old Masters are still to come. Sotheby’s in New York is also covering Impressionist, Modern, and Contemporary art. The high expectations that have usually been blown through the roof will be harder to fulfil this year.

Why? Aside from people having less discretionary capital, art itself isn’t the stable investment it once was. As I pointed out in a previous post, art and housing prices might prove to be quite similar. Growth in art prices has beat the S&P for the past few years, and prices have skyrocketed. This kind of growth would be hard to support at any time, and prices are no longer buoyed by a growing economy. While prices going down might seem like bad news to the artists and galleries, it’s an opportunity for people who collect because of passion. So as other people are watching the polls, I’m going to be watching the auction sale results in the upcoming days. I feel confident promising you citizens that change is coming.