16 Miles of String: Andrew Russeth on Contemporary Art and Art History

Olav Velthuis’ Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, 2005, published by Princeton University Press

One of my great joys this summer was reading Talking Prices, journalist and sociologist Olav Velthuis‘ detailed study of how primary-market art dealers set prices for the art they show. To write the book, Velthuis interviewed 37 dealers — 18 in Amsterdam and 19 in New York — about their practices, promising them anonymity. It turns out that dealers say some pretty great things when they know that their names will not be attached to their comments. Velthuis also meticulously researched journalistic accounts of the art market that have been published since the end of World War II, digging up some old gems in the process. Here are eight especially great quotes, from Velthuis’ anonymous interviews and his archival research:

• An anonymous New York-based dealer discussing Jenny Saville, who started showing with Gagosian in 1999: “That girls is 29 years old. If she is not going to make it, she is never going to have a career ever. That’s like live and die, these are live and die prices, motherfucker. We are going to kill your ass, and you are going to make it, let’s see. You want to be famous? We are going to make you famous or you are going to be unknown tomorrow. Then you are not even going to be an artist. You are going from 150 grand down to 15, and that is a lot of humble pie. I don’t know if most artists could handle that.”

• A young, anonymous dealer: “When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine became this huge success in London. He won the Turner Prize … but when I went to see him in 1994 or 1995, he was that burnt-out alcoholic, bitter, old horrible art world prune. You know, he became so hot, and then it was like … pffft.”

• An anonymous Amsterdam-based dealer: “Look at the difference between something that costs €10,000 or €50,000: you will get another audience with either price level, and you may find one sort of public nicer than another, to put it in general terms. Maybe it is more pleasant to sell things that cost €10,000 guilders, because the people that can afford it are nicer to deal with and speak to.”

• New York dealer Matthew Marks, quoted in a 1998 ArtNews article, on selling art: “All of a sudden, you have this slightly sick feeling — Did you sell it for enough?”

• Jim Dine, on being represented by Ileana Sonnabend, whom he eventually left: “I never saw a statement. If you asked her for money, she would pull out this wad of bills in every possible currency, and peel off a few.”

• Julian Schnabel, quoted in a 1987 Anthony Haden-Guest article published in Vanity Fair: “It was as if the artists were tubes of paint, and she was the real visionary. We were the earrings to embellish her aura.”

• Dealer Leo Castelli, quoted in a 1988 Art in America article by Carter Ratcliff: “Now the news about high prices has captured [the public’s] attention. This has its unfavorable side, of course. Yet some who became interested in a superficial way have gotten truly involved with art.”

• Dutch artist Rob Scholte: “The only real thing about an artwork is the price.”

Left: Sonny Smith and Chris Leon, Sonny’s Cosmoramic Jukejams. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It took a decade, but someone has finally put together a collection songs that makes Stephin Merritt’s 69 Love Songs look a little bit underdeveloped. The man responsible for that feat is Sonny Smith, leader of the group Sunny & the Sunsets. Smith asked 100 musician-friends to craft album covers for a handful of fake bands that he created, and then recorded a song to accompany each cover. Those recordings are playable on a free jukebox at Cinders Gallery through September 5, alongside every one of the covers. The jukebox, loaded with all 100 original songs, is only $14,000, which is a bargain in my book. Truth be told, the presence of a piece by Ed Ruscha (which is not for sale) brought me into the show, but I stayed for the relentlessly inventive covers and the solid-gold jams. My personal jukebox recommendations: D5 (a tale about a man named Mario falling for another man) and C3 (by a band called The Happy Endings). Cinders has posted a complete compendium of all the covers in the show, but you have to visit the gallery to hear the hits.

Ed Ruscha, 1/2 Wayward Youth

Sonny Smith, Petite Lafitte, and Kottie Polloma, Happy Endings

Rebecca Miller, Hazel Shepp, and Grant LaValley, Wayward Youth

Teppei Ando, Earth Girl Helen Brown El Rincon; Eric White, Helen Brown & Versatile Kyle; and Rebecca Miller, Hazel Shepp

Teppei Ando, Earth Girl Helen Brown El Rincon

Sonny Smith, “100 Records”
Cinders Gallery
103 Havemeyer Street, #2
Brooklyn, New York
Through September 5, 2010

Thomas Houseago, Untitled (Red Man), 2008. Bronze, 156 x 60 x 48 in. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Thomas Houseago, Untitled (Sprawling Octopus Man), 2009. Bronze, 101 x 84 x 60 in.

Ten giants currently fill the lawns and walkways of Manhattan’s City Hall Park. They are made of bronze and aluminum, colored pink, green, silver, or gold. Six sculptors are responsible for the work (Pawel Althamer, Huma Bhabha, Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan, and Rebecca Warren), which has been selected by the Public Art Fund. A Rebecca Warren bronze, placed on a pedestal along Broadway, resembles a sculpture that Mike Kelley and Tom Otterness might make if they worked together: cute but vaguely scatological. It earned frequent, good-natured laughs from passersby when I visited. Huma Bhabha’s creepy 2007 bronze, The Orientalist, a skeletal figure perched high on a chair, proved to be a surprise favorite for photo shoots, but the three Thomas Houseago sculptures won the most attention from visitors. They are big and unsettling and occasionally humorous. “Statuesque” is up through December 2. If it snows (and let’s hope it does), those hulking Houseagos are going to look great.

• The Public Art Fund has posted interviews with some of the artists.
• More photographs are posted on Flickr.
• Aaron Curry signs his name on his sculptures in the style of Alexander Calder.

Matthew Monahan, Nation Builder, 2010. Bronze, 107 × 62 × 27 in.

Pawel Althamer and the Nowolipie Group, Sylwia, 2010. Aluminum, 126 x 48 x 36 in.

Aaron Curry, Big Pink, 2010. Powder coated aluminum, 105 x 102 x 62 in. and Aaron Curry, Yellow Bird Boy, 2010. Powder coated aluminum, 114 x 97 x 60 in.

Plaque in City Hall Park

“Statuesque,” curated by Nicholas Baume
City Hall Park, New York, New York
Public Art Fund

Martin Creed, Work No. 878, 2008, at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Photo: 16 Miles

“It is bad form, however, to cut in while the artist is doing a snow job on a potential buyer, buttonholing a critic or curator or licking the shoes of a more important artist.”

– William Grimes, “When Art Puts on a Party Hat: A Guide to Gallery Openings,” NYTimes, 1995

• Really big photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark works. [History of Our World]
• “What happened to the house in that first Matta-Clark photo?” you ask. SFMOMA owns it, thanks to the generosity of the late Phyllis Wattis, a collector “admired for her unpretentious character, her astute eye and her adventurous embrace of contemporary work.” [NYT]
• Tyler Green points out that the Dallas Museum of Art now has a blog, and DMA conservator David Marquis has a fascinating post on two very similar Gauguins. [Uncrated via MAN]
• Fifty days of mayhem: Brent Burket is documenting his journey through Japanese noise musician Merzbow’s 50-CD box set, Merzbox. [Heart as Arena]
• A full-scale reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters‘ sprawling Merzbau installation will be included in the Menil Collection’s upcoming retrospective of his work. [Menil Collection]
• Get read to hack Artforum. On a barely related note: I can’t believe no one has scanned and uploaded the old “Ed Ruscha says goodbye to college joys” ad onto the Internet. [Greg.org]
• Art-theft pundit Turbo Paul weighs in on Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris’s reward for information leading to the return of the missing Cairo van Gogh: “He is a billionaire and the cheapskate offers $175,000 reward for a $55 million Van Gogh. That’s 0.3% zero point three per cent of the value. Get the fuck outta here. To be fair he is just following orders from art loss investigators and Egyptian authorities. It is called the psychology of low worth.” [Art Hostage]

24th Street and 11th Avenue at 1:00 p.m. today. Photos: 16 Miles

Some of Dan Colen’s skateboard-ramps-turned-sculptures were unloaded this afternoon outside of the 24th Street branch of Gagosian. (Alex Gartenfeld had the story on that last month in the New York Observer.) Those hoping to redeem themselves after not skateboarding in Deitch Projects‘ skateboard bowl during the winter of 2002-03 are out of luck: there will be no skateboarding allowed in the artist’s solo show, which opens on September 10. For another reminder that the new season is almost here, head up to the Park Avenue Armory, where Yoshitomo Nara and his assistants are hard at work on pieces for the artist’s blockbuster retrospective at the Asia Society Museum. Nara’s temporary studio is open to the public today and tomorrow from 4 to 7 p.m. His show kicks off on September 9.

Still from Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, on view at Alex Zachary, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

There is always a sense of sadness after watching a great work of video art in a New York gallery: barring a miracle, one is unlikely to see it again any time soon. We can snap photographs of our favorite paintings or sculptures and revisit them later (however imperfectly), but time-based work disappears after a show ends. Thankfully, the redoubtable media archive UbuWeb has been uploading just that type of work at a ferocious pace, including many works that were on view just this past season. Here are three favorites from that bunch, plus one classic New York-art documentary

1. Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010: This was the sleeper-hit of the the past year. After debuting at Alex Zachary, it made an encore performance this summer in Berlin, the setting of much of the film. While occasionally impenetrable, Okiishi’s reworking of Woody Allen’s 1979 panegyric to New York should be remembered as an elegiac document of a particular time in the contemporary art world, as it struggled through a recession and expanded into new cities.

2. Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007: This gem appeared at Invisible-Export’s “A Vernacular of Violence” just a few months ago. A man applies a poster in a French subway. Then he applies another. And another. A slow-motion, highly mediated depiction of extreme destruction begins to appear, as commuters — unaware — go about their business.

3. Brion Gysin, Demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software, 2010: This computer-generated poem is not the most thrilling section of the New Museum’s current “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” show, the first U.S. retrospective of the artist, but watching the program slice apart a short text by Gysin and write out all of the possible permutations of its contents isn’t a bad way to spend a few minutes.

4. Nigel Finch, Arena–Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988: Shot the year before Mapplethorpe died, this hour-long documentary includes footage of the photographer at work and features interviews with some of his subjects (not all of the enamored of his work). “Pay attention,” gallerist Robert Miller says, when asked to define Mapplethorpe’s artistic message. “Time’s going by.”

Mike Wallace at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 “The Responsive Eye” exhibition for CBS, Part 1

12:51 PM Update: Greg Allen, who originally came across the video, has done a massive, wonderful post about the history of the television program, its fabulous soundtrack, and the connection between MoMA and CBS.

I could list all of my favorite parts of Mike Wallace’s television program on MoMA’s 1965 group exhibition, “The Responsive Eye,” but it is probably better for you to just watch the video and enjoy it for yourself. (All the credit for this find goes to Greg Allen, who came across it on Mary & Matt. The timing is superb since I was thinking about Op art yesterday.)

Two notes: 1. Wallace tells the viewer: “It is a fact that the guards at the Museum of Modern Art have obtained permission to wear sunglasses while on duty at this show.” As Tyler Green has noted, this is not the first time that a work of art has required museum guards to utilize protective measures. 2. “The Responsive Eye” was organized by curator William C. Seitz, who was the first person to earn a degree from Princeton with a dissertation on Abstract Expressionism (in 1955). He also founded the school’s non-credit painting program and taught Frank Stella, who appeared in MoMA curator Dorothy Miller’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” show at the age of 23 the year before Seitz joined the museum.

Part 2

Part 3

Tauba Auerbach, Quarry, 2010. On view at 820 Washington Street, New York, as part of Whitney on Site.” Photos: 16 Miles

For an installation at the site of the Whitney’s future downtown branch, Tauba Auerbach has wrapped trailers and storage sheds near the High Line with high-resolution photographs of marble, transforming those temporary structures into huge blocks of the precious material. It is another strong piece to set alongside the uniformly sumptuous, meticulously crafted works that have filled her oeuvre. (It also doubles as a low-budget riff on Martin Creed’s luxurious and ostentatious marble floor at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, which will soon be installed as a staircase in Edinburgh, Scotland.)

The shift from shed to block is not seamless: the ripples of the metal storage sheds are visible, and air-conditioners jut out from the trailers. Auerbach is not aiming for a perfect transformation. Her most fascinating work has to do with the gap between sight and knowledge, things as they appear and things as they actually are. By changing the spacing of dots in her Op art works she gives the appearance that they have been damaged. In her “Greater New York” pieces she turns canvas into other textiles, painting minute folds and creases.

Auerbach knows that close inspection will always reveal the artifice of her creations. While Op art aims to lead eyes into optical illusions, her art mimics that optical play and then alters it just slightly. The trick breaks down. That is a remarkable feat: finding new material in Op art, a movement that has long been thought of as an artistic dead end, and it has earned her spots in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum triennial, and MoMA P.S.1’s “Greater New York.”

Unsurprisingly, she has also been anointed as a possible art-market superstar. “I feel like it’s a LeBron James announcement,” art adviser Lisa Schiff told Bloomberg earlier this month, speculating about the lucky dealer will represent Auerbach in New York, now that her former gallerist, Jeffrey Deitch, has left town. Her Whitney commission, which closes on Sunday, will do nothing to dull that excitement.

Alexander Calder, Cactus provisoire, 1967. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

• The New York Times Magazine asked 13 photographs to use iPhones to take photographs to illustrate Robin Marantz Henig’s article on “the life of 20-somethings.” Highlights include LaToya Ruby Frazier and Curran Hatleberg, who paid a visit to MoMA P.S.1’s James Turrell room. [NYT]

• Linda Yablonsky on Nathalie Djurberg’s recent show at the National History Museum in Basel: “Then again, a storeroom full of animal bones was appropriate for an artist whose territory lies somewhere between the grotesques of Goya and the darker regions of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Says Djurberg: “… I realized that 99 percent of the people seeing it are white, and it was obvious how segregated the art world really is.” [T Magazine]

• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art pays a visit to the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s new sculpture garden, 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, and reports back with photos and commentary. [Unframed]

• Depictions of mens’ backs. [You Have Been Here Sometime]

• Cold Beer Beautiful Girls. [Ms. Jen Bekman]

• Mark Cameron Boyd documents a performance by Ding Ren that involves her completing documentation as performance. [Theory Now]

• “Doomed to Fail?” Considering James Cohan’s new online art fair, The Pit asks, “Is this going to be the Gilt.com of the art world? If so, I’d love to know what the return policy is going to be.” [The Pit]

• A new Alex Katz at LACMA has a very specific “literary product placement,” William Poundstone points out, as he investigates the history of those rare references. [Los Angeles County Museum on Fire]

• Alice Neel painted of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street back in 1935, well before the High Line became a park. [Art Observed]

James Rosenquist, World’s Fair Mural, 1964. Oil on Masonite, 240 x 240 in. Courtesy of the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis.

I still don’t have an answer to the question of who made the bizarre Warhol mosaic in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, but I did come across a strange little 1964 World’s Fair side story that involves art dealer Leo Castelli and his connections to Minneapolis. First, we need a little bit of background.

In her new biography of Castelli, titled Leo & His Circle, writer Annie Cohen-Solal posits 1964 as one of the dealer’s most triumphant years, marked by Robert Rauschenberg winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Oddly, though, she does not make a single mention of the 1964 World’s Fair, in which Castelli was almost equally dominant, thanks to some help from his friend Philip Johnson (a connection highlighted by reader @allllliee).

Johnson was designing the New York State Pavilion and the fair and picked three Castelli artists — John Chamberlain, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg — to be among the ten artists responsible for decorating his building’s exterior. By the end of the year, with the fair still running, Castelli had shown two more artists adorning the pavilion (James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol), meaning that half of the artists on the prominent building — visited by more than 100,000 people by the time it closed in October 1965 — were represented by Castelli.

While having Rauschenberg win the Golden Lion no doubt earned Castelli an extra boost of credibility in the art world, having five of his artists (or at least, four, since Warhol’s contribution was painted over, then covered with a tarp, and finally removed) shown at the government-sanctioned fair couldn’t have hurt his standing with the general public, and with potential collectors.

Roy Lichtenstein, Girl at Window (World’s Fair Mural), 1963. Oil and Magna on plywood. Courtesy of the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis.

In any sense: why the World’s Fair obsession? I was at the Frank Gehry-designed Weisman Art Museum a few weeks ago and had the pleasure of seeing two wonderfully massive murals that had been created by Rosenquist and Lichtenstein for the World’s Fair. What are they doing in Minneapolis, 1,200 miles from the fairgrounds and Castelli’s adopted hometown, I wondered?

Christopher James, the museum’s director of communications and events, was kind enough to investigate and shared that Castelli apparently asked Walker Art Center director Martin Friedman to commission (read: pay for) the Lichtenstein and Rosenquist murals. Friedman agreed. However, after the fair, Friedman generously offered the murals to Carl Sheppard, the chair of the University of Minnesota’s art history department, if he wanted them for the university’s art museum (which was not yet named the Weisman). “Sheppard was glad to accept them,” James writes. He would have been crazy not to: they’re incredible pieces, well worth a visit to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. (Bonus: admission to the Weisman is free every single day.)