Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Paul McCarntey and Nicolas Sarkozy star in Art Gone Asunder

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Two fabulous headlines for your Wednesday morning: Paul McCartney left his head on a train and Sarkozy is ‘needled’ by voodoo doll.

Ahhhh…Wednesday morning news…
Paul McCartney’s Head?
Yes, it’s true. McCartney’s head has been lost, rather, the ape-like wax representation of it. Professional transporter/grand bobby Joby Carter was taking it to an auction in Berkshire, England, where it was estimated to fetch up to 10,000 pounds. Then Carter, similar to Mrs. Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, left the baby, ahem, the head. The BBC reports: “The head was left in a bag under a seat on a train from London at Maidenhead station in Berkshire on Thursday. The service would have terminated at Reading.”
I suspect McCartney paid him so that nobody would ever connect him with that terrible head again. And speaking of unwanted likenesses, Sarkozy’s in a bit of a stitch across the channel. Oh the power of the public image! Oh life as art! Oh unwanted portraiture! Oh the horror!
Nicolas Sarkozy is not amused.
As one can tell from the image of the French President, left, Sarkozy is not amused to have been transformed into a voodoo doll. BBC reports that “Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company if it does not withdraw from shops a ‘voodoo doll’ in his image.” It even comes with pins! According to BBC, “The publisher said Mr Sarkozy’s reaction was ‘totally disproportionate’ and has so far refused to pull the doll from shops.” Vive la revolution!
Ah, life and art don’t really change, do they? As I wrote in an earlier post, a voodoo doll bears a remarkable similarity to a medieval portrait, and here we see the voodoo doll as portrait. In the Medieval ages after a regime change, the new rulers would scratch out the eyes in portraits of previous rulers.
So what conclusions can be drawn from this morning’s news? If you are a public figure, people will do terrible things to your likeness, in which case you must either steal or sue the maker. Then after passing your hands three times over the false image, you must suck the tiny bit of your soul that is trapped in it out. (I recommend the breath they teach in Lamaze class.) Then you must burn the false, soul-sucking idol. Add its charred remains to the images you create of your enemies for a little extra oomph.

Housing prices are inflated? Let’s discuss art prices

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An artist, a recognized artist who sells his works, offered to pay my boyfriend in paintings. A little unorthodox, yes, but I was psyched. Then he told me he did not take it. A year ago I would have argued it was a great economic investment, not just a way for me to get art on the wall. But now, was his choice the wisest economically?

Even a year ago people considered he unprecedented demand and prices for fine art might be a bit of a bubble. Articles have been popping up left and right to debate that theory now. Here’s a selection, from The New York Times, The Business Times, The Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Note that there’s not an art rag among them.

Catherine Rampell wrote a blog for the New York Times entitled, dismally enough, The Art of Recession. Despite it being a dismal science, Rampell prognosticated on behalf of collectors, pointing to “the failure of a number of large banks may put their corporate art collections back on the market on the cheap” as an example of cheaper prices to come. Makes things a little insecure for the art investor though, with the prediction that “the market for contemporary art assets may soon plummet.”

On behalf of art as an alternate “passion” investment, The Business Times points to “Proponents of the segment argue that art, being a real asset and devoid of the mind-numbing complexity of derivatives, should retain its sheen as a ‘passion’ investment.” They have an interesting quote from auction house Christie’s president (Asia) Andrew Foster: “Art is a very real and tangible thing. Clients agree that art has inherent value….That doesn’t mean prices don’t fluctuate, but value is agreed upon and inherent, and it springs from cultural and global trends more than trading multiples.” Is that true, though?
Also of note, the article mentions the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. According to which, all art for 2007 rose 20 per cent, a performance only surpassed by some of the annual returns achieved in the art bubble years of 1984 to 1990–more than the 5.5 per cent achieved by the S&P. Yet art, too, “has its boom and bust cycles, as Michael Moses, the creator of the index, told Reuters earlier this year.”

But let’s consider results of some recent big auctions. A headline from the Times on October 20, 2008 is ‘Growing signs of art slump as Freud’s portrait of Bacon fails to fetch £7m’ and the IHT reports ‘At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on.’ These are not chipper reports on the auction front. Christies and Sotheby’s have their big auction in November, so that will prove the true bellwether. Yet buyers in the art sector, like every other, seem to be skittish. Souren Melikian writes for the IHT that “The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson.”
That’s why she’s saying. These do not herald good times ahead for people who count their worth in paintings. On the other hand, if you’re a buyer of impervious fortune, times are great. Less competition for cheaper prices on works you love. What I’m saying: yippee! A Lucian Freud of Francis Bacon for £5.42 million! Andy Warhol’s “Nine Multicolored Marilyns” for a song! If prices keep going down at this rate, I’ll be able to buy something in 10 years.

Until then, all you art investors out there, you have my deepest sympathy. You poor souls, locked in your worthless mansions, staring across your foyer in your silk bathrobe looking at the now moderately-priced Picasso.

The desire for life to be art: Oscar Wilde and myself

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“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Oscar Wilde


 I sat in my kitchen this morning, attempting to write a novel. Wearing my sick boyfriend’s overcoat and trying not to wake him, I was typing in the dark with cereal as my roommate and then his girlfriend came up from the basement wrapped in a blanket and a pashmina respectively. Allow me to state this is not the hip, drugged out bohemian love shack it may seem, although why my roommates slept in the living room with no clothes I’m happy not to know. I’m just relieved that the third roommate was not here. It left me wishing that life was different, was more like art.

To elevate the mundane and the ugly into something beautiful and irreducible is a creative act extraordinaire. To do so with one’s life, the prime material of all art, requires genius and unflagging commitment. I’m not sure that I have enough of either either. But I admire Oscar Wilde’s philosophy, and his statement that he has “put all my genius into life” rings true when one studies his life. Literature became his words, visual art his clothes and house, just as his plays were mirrors of his mind. In many ways, he, and Byron, have become patron saints of mine, for their lives as well as their works. Dandies and writers and lovers, they were controversial touchstones for the societies of their time.

My boyfriend has woken up and I can now crawl back in bed to type (if I can over the YouTube videos and complaining he produces). Wilde never had to deal with this. Actually Bosie was rather a no-good handful. But if only life could imitate art, or art I like more

A selection of Wildean-isms to inspire one on a Sunday morning:

  • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
  • Life is too much important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
  • It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.
  • To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
  • Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
  • It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
  • I can believe anything as long as it is incredible.
  • I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.
  • An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Note: In his honor, I have made him a patron saint of this blog, in whose hallowed cyber halls his fellow worthies shall begin to join him.