Archives for November 2009

The art world has a budding star, an 18-year-old named Lauren Mincher.

Mincher is the winner of the Saatchi Gallery-Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools, 2009, which I wrote about here earlier this month. Open to students around the world, more than 22,000 entered, and the British newspaper announced the winner and two runners-up in yesterday’s edition.

Mincher portrayed her grandfather in her entry, at right; runner-up Ghan Chansuwan, 18, made a photographic self portrait called Identity, and third-place finisher Katie Lewis, 17, painted a work that brings the style of Francis Bacon to mind. (Go to my earlier post — link is above — to get to their work easily.)

In all cases, the artists and their schools will receive a prize. Critics and artists judged the contest.

All 20 works that made the short list of finalists in the competition will be featured in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London from Dec 3 to Dec 14. Charles Saatchi told the Telegraph, “I love seeing the gallery full of schoolchildren enjoying the art. The rooms we have for the schools to display their pupils’ work are very popular with the public and I’m thrilled with the selection made by the team of judges.”

I love seeing young people participating in the art world; as I wrote a few weeks ago, this breeds art enthusiasts. I’d love to see a competition like this based in the U.S.

Photo: Lauren Mincher, Courtesy Sunday Telegraph

  

Provacateur artist Ai WeiWei is the subject of the Saturday profile in today’s New York Times. You have read to the end to get to the money paragraph:

Lately, there are indeed signs that the government is reaching its limit. His blogs on Chinese Web sites, about issues political and otherwise, have been shut down. Someone has installed two video cameras outside his studio. The police are said to be scrutinizing his finances, an ominous development in a state where other political critics have been prosecuted for what appear to be concocted fiscal misdeeds.

The Times interview doesn’t add much to the body of knowledge about Ai and his positions. He’s been outspoken, and is readily available to the press, in person, on the phone and in email interviews. And the art press has paid attention. But today’s story may raise the temperature in China, which in the past, at least, has cared about what the Times says (and other Western media, too).

China has on occasion blocked access to the paper’s website, and I’d be curious to know if today’s article is available there.  

Ai, one of whose “Bowl of Pearls” is above, is given the last word:

I came to art because I wanted to escape the other regulations of the society. The whole society is so political. But the irony is that my art becomes more and more political.

Here’s the link.

Magnum: even today, with photography and photographers every where, the reputation of this 62-year-old photojournalism cooperative is magic. The agency opened a gallery on the left bank of Paris last Friday (it already has one on the right bank), and it wasn’t hard to get interest from the general press here — in this case, I did a short article on the gallery, with a slide show, for The Daily Beast.

Magnum’s space in Saint Germaine-des-Pres, near Brasserie Lipp and Cafe de Flore, has started out with an exhibition curated by Robert Delpire, himself a photography legend. It was Delpire, now in his 80s, who published Robert Frank’s landmark Les Americains in 1958, when Frank hadn’t yet found a publisher in the U.S. — among other things.

The show is called demain/hier and it showcases works by the younger generation of Magnum members, those who joined after 2000. They include Alessandra Sanguinetti (one image from her On the Sixth Day is above), Trent Parke, Mark Power, and Cristina Garcia Rodero.

But the gallery shows older works too, and it’s hoping to create a salon-like atmosphere. As I wrote:

Magnum wants visitors to look, linger, buy and eventually perhaps even sip Champagne [there]. The choice of [the coop’s] name, after all, had everything to do with the founders’ serious affinity for champers.

Sounds like another reason to browse and to linger in that neighborhood. For evidence, check out the Beast‘s slide show. 

Photo: Courtesy Magnum  

When the Brooklyn Museum’s “What’s Happening” brochure landed on my desk recently — a close-up of Tina Turner’s shining, smiling face on its cover — it was hard not to spend a little time reading about Who Shot Rock-and-Roll, its exhibition of photographs capturing the music of the baby-boomer generation. (Which is to say, me!)

Whatever you may think about the idea that rock photography is an art form, the show — which I breezed through far too quickly last Friday afternoon — is interesting and fun to see.

But a much smaller item in the brochure caught my eye, too: the announcement of a Teen Guide to Art, “created by teens for teens to make looking at art in the Museum both fun and thought-provoking.”

This does raise a question: outside of school trips, how are art museums engaging with teenagers?

Brooklyn’s guide — just 12 pages — calls itself unique. I found it both charming and somewhat lacking — but understandably so. On the charm side, it’s practical (telling where to get a map and where the elevators are) and doesn’t condescend. I like that it explains how to read labels (including a decoding of accession information) and urges teens to use their own eyes. The works it chooses to explicate, however briefly — Pat Steir’s Everlasting Waterfall, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps — would not have been my choices, but… Maybe the next time, the teens will choose at least one work made before 1975 — more diversity!

Here’s the link. (Brooklyn also has a teen page on Facebook, btw, but I didn’t go there.)

Roaming around the web — to perhaps a dozen museums, most but not all of the usual suspects — it seems that Brooklyn’s claim to be unique in this may be correct.

[Read more…] about Museums And Teenagers: Care And Feeding — UPDATED

Since last week, when I wrote about Art and Illusions: Masterpieces of Trompe-l’oeil From Antiquity To The Present at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, I’ve learned that the Center for Contemporary Culture there has a companion exhibition which is just as interesting. Maybe less amusing, though.

It’s called Manipulating Reality: How Images Redefine the World. The works of 23 artists, from around the world, including the U.S., are on display: Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Aernout Mik, Gregory Crewdson among them.  

The show’s concept is hardly new — that photography and video art may falsify, as well as record, the world, that what you see is not what you get. But it goes hand in hand with trompe l’oeil. And once again, there’s a very good website, with wonderful images and much explanation.

I’ve put a sampling of images here — Rosemary Laing’s Groundspeed above left and Thomas Demand’s Presidency V below right.

Don’t know why I’m fixated on the Strozzi: maybe it’s just that I do long to visit Italy again.

Photos: Courtesy Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina