Category Archives: contemporary art

Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Art’s commercial aptitude was apparent last night in the unlikeliest of places—my block. I’ve written about the spread of gallery hopping in Manhattan, but it’s officially reached the last stop of the F train in Manhattan. Seth Price had an opening at Reena Spaulings Fine Art last night. I googled the location, 165 East Broadway. I knew the google map was wrong because there was nothing on the block it showed but a Chinese restaurant.

How wrong was I, I discovered when I climbed the old stairs after a crowd of mid-20s folks who seemed to know where they were going. The floor above the Chinese restaurant is Reena Spaulings Fine Art. Instead of 4 people milling about, there were over 40 drinking, smoking and chatting around—oh yes—the art.

Sitting around the corner from said gallery now, having coffee, watching Chinese people practice New Years dances in the park across the way, the scene of the neighborhood just gets better now that I can include galleries. I understand why Renee Spauling and the LaViolaBanks Gallery, also on East Broadway, are here. The spaces are enormous. There are many tiny gallery spaces in the area immediately north of here, but these are massive. Based off last night, I’d say they draw a good crowd.

But where was art’s commercial potential last night? That takes us back to the art; Seth Price’s works are so polished and intelligent they might sell themselves even in this market.


Stressing the importance of dates, Price has created a series of calendar pieces where he has painted older paintings in a square in the top of a canvas and a calendar locating them in time along the bottom. For me, works like the one featured above, where molded objects or faces break through a flat, plasticine surface were less explicit and more appealing. I didn’t stay for the video, which I suspect was the best part.

Cindy Sherman: One Trick Pony?

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That glorious thing, a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, was awarded to photographer Cindy Sherman in 2005. As it’s only the beginning of 2009 now, she has this year to still enjoy the substantial prize money. But what does she do with it?

What’s she did before she won: dress up and photograph herself as other people, often women fulfilling cultural roles. Allow me to say, I like her body of work in general. She creates series of portraits as I described, as well as ‘film stills’ that aren’t film stills so much as portraits she shoots of herself. Sherman has dabbled in other projects as well, like video direction, but her art is mainly clever identity and gender politics photographs that are well-shot and fascinating. All the more intriguing when you recognize her face behind the makeup and costume.

Yet not endlessly intriguing. After years of portraits of herself as others, Sherman hasn’t really strayed, much less innovated. Some jokes aren’t as funny the tenth time around, some shticks get old. Sherman, who constantly reinvents herself in her work, has failed to reinvent the work itself. It makes me wonder if she didn’t merely happen on a successful trick of playing dress up and now can’t come up with (or is afraid to try) something new.

It’s easy to start out a genius, and it’s certainly possible to develop into a great artist bit by bit over a career of 30 years. It’s not always so easy to stay a genius.

“Beauty and the Best” and a Boyfriend

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“Artists should be separated from people who do creative things” was my boyfriend’s response to my description of Theodore Dalrymple’s article in The New English Review, mentioned previously here.

By that, he meant that saying a chef was an artiste was hyperbolic, only meaning he cooked very well. He also meant that more conceptual and non-traditional works of contemporary art, such as rings of circles in duct tape or performances where a person sits on a box for days or even Pippilotti Rist’s video and sound installation in the atrium at MoMA, are cool, are visual, and are creative but that they are not art.

Dalrymple’s trenchant article has stayed in my mind, but all my conclusions from it seem to be drawing lines in the sand, much as my boyfriend’s statement does. “This is Art; this is not.” As if there were a right and wrong, and a good and bad when it comes to art.

But in fact, isn’t there? Art requires a set of aesthetic values to be judged by, if we are to make judgments at all. Life and art, or at least my life and art, are more than a series of perceptions. They have meaning to me, and they do because I assign to all things value. This is no formal declaration of organizing principles either for myself or of culture in general. But as my life has meaning, and art has meaning to me, and I think some organizing principle guides my perceptions of art.

Dalrymple’s article feels true to my experiences. He considers popular contemporary art to be shallow and created by egoists who are too afraid to create something beautiful, not to mention lacking the technical means and knowledge of an artistic heritage to do so. Think of Jeff Koons, who he mentions, or Damian Hirst or Murakami. To strive for beauty seems too earnest, almost gauche today.

So perhaps my boyfriend and Dalrymple are saying similar things. One feels it is not art, the other that it is bad art. Perhaps I agree. My amusement and interest with much of contemporary art is just that; and those feelings are different than a reaction to something beautiful. People who look can find beauty and an expression of the human condition in a falling leaf or the texture of a wall. A beautiful work of art makes those qualities apparent to those who weren’t looking.