Monthly Archives: May 2009

Buying Affordable Art: Go Small or Not at All?

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When I walked by Heist Gallery up the block from me yesterday, I noticed a thin row of Polaroids lining the walls, and this started a long train of thought. It was a group show entitled “12 Instances,” and interestingly the last exhibition I saw there, Papercut, was an assortment of affordable works on paper. Both exhibitions were put together with an eye to being reasonably-priced. Affordable, small-scale works seem sensible given the big “R” word (Recession) and they suit my budget. Affordable art might just be a case of buying small, but I find it interesting, perhaps telling, that given my enthusiasm for art, I’ve opted for not at all over small.

Polaroid by Braden King

Here’s the thing: I love art and I’m no Rockerfeller. I’m democratic and think art should be accessible to all. I like the idea of being able to afford art. YET I don’t want to buy the relatively reasonable Polaroid. I just wasn’t that impressed, and I felt the same way with a lot of the lower end works at the Affordable Art Fair. There were some nice enough postcard-size sketches, but I didn’t fall hundreds-of-dollars in love with them. Maybe my eyes are just bigger than my budget.

I’m more impressed with the website 20X200, which offers limited editions of new works each week beginning at $20. They go up through $2,00o dollars, depending on the size of the print. They have an impressive quality and some really nice images, and I’ll likely buy from there in the near future.

I’m even more impressed with my boyfriend, even if his plans for my birthday didn’t quite work out; he wanted to buy a (smaller, more affordable if possible) painting from an artist in Chelsea that I raved about. So he contacted the gallery, saying he was interested in this artist’s work. Nobody ever responded to his message. (Can you not leave a voicemail saying that you are interested in a certain artists work and expect to be called back?) I’m fairly certain said artist is 10 times above our price range anyhow, but I do find it odd that he didn’t hear back.

Buying affordable art seems to involve shrinking it on cheaper mediums. That’s ok, but I’m going to have to do a lot more scouring to find works that I love. As I have blank wall syndrome, I’ve filled my apartment with paintings of my own as a temporary (and not particularly impressive) solution. Suggestions welcome, both for blank wall syndrome and buying art.

To prove it’s not impossible to buy great art on a budget, check out the Vogels below.

Ravels in Review Memorial Day Weekend

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Ubi Roi, Hernan Bas at Lehmann Maupin

Yes, it has been a week already, and luckily things have calmed down since the fire on my block last week. In fact, they have slowed to a crawl, which is about the pace my sinuses can handle right now.

  • Despite the fog in my brain, or perhaps because of, I tried to explain the greatness of Erasmus based on the fact he named himself ‘Desire Desire.’ He did some other things too.
  • I questioned whether Francis Bacon could qualify as the greatest painter of the 20th twentieth, and got at least a few votes for greatness, if not greatest painter ever. I’m hanging out on a limb until I see the retrospective up at the Met now.
  • The oldest sculpture ever was discovered, and there is some very scientific discussion about how sex-obsessed early humans were.

All in all, a good week. Some things to look forward to in the art world, like Francis Bacon at the Met and promising-sounding Hernan Bas exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Lehmann Maupin, and a long Memorial Day weekend ahead.

H

Another Kind of Bird: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly

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Glutton for edification (or punishment) that I am, I finished Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly yesterday. Oh, you might say, the humorous points of that 15th century thinker’s wit shouldn’t be so difficult to follow (discounting the shifts in language usage, ignorance of medieval theological debate, or amount of interest in people speaking in the persona of minor Roman deities)? But I will reply, I was suffering from such extreme sinus pressure I couldn’t even remember the name of ‘that thing you take a temperature with’* when I was describing my awful pain to my doctor.** I was too fuzzy-headed even to post!

But Erasmus was a fascinating man:

Exhibit A: The bastard child of a monk, Gerrit Gerritszoon renamed himself ‘Desire Desire,’ first in Latin and then Greek (Desiderius Erasmus). That’s excellent.

Exhibit B: When Martin Luther led the Reformation and others defended Catholicism, Erasmus stood alone. Erasmus was one of the greatest critic of the Catholic Church, yet thought it should be reformed from within, and part of that was to translate the scripture as accurately as possible from the original Greek, leading to his Latin version of the New Testament. Erasmus wanted it to be free of corrupting Medieval theology. (Martin Luther found his translation useful when creating a German version of the New Testament.)

Written in 1509 and dedicated to his friend Sir Thomas Moore, In Praise of Folly would no doubt have been more funny to me if satirical portraits of princes and monks struck home. He is unrelentingly witty, saying of theologians, in the persona of Folly: ‘That short-tempered and supercilious crew is unpleasant to deal with. . . . They will proclaim me a heretic. With this thunderbolt they terrify the people they don’t like. Their opinion of themselves is so great that they behave as if they were already in heaven; they look down pityingly on other men as so many worms.” Erasmus leaves no one out, including the Pope, so you can see why the Catholic church prohibited this, and all his other works, from being read.

A freethinker whose only allegiance was to books, he was also a witty correspondent to some 500 of the most important individuals of his day. He died in Basel still at odds with the majority of the world. When Erasmus was accused of having “laid the egg that Luther hatched,“ he is said to have replied that he did, but he “had expected quite another kind of bird!”

*A thermometer.
**Apparently, I don’t even have a sinus infection like I thought, so I feel like a wimp. ; (