Archives for January 2010

I interrupt this blog for a non-commercial, commercial message:

This Friday, the Partnership for the Homeless in New York is holding an art auction at Gagosian Gallery on W. 21st Street in Chelsea to benefit its Brooklyn-based Family Resource Center. The pitch calls it unprecedented — whether it is or not is immaterial; it’s a good cause. 

This “first-time” event was proposed by Richard Serra and his wife Clara (above) to the Partnership and they offered to chair it. Almost everything has been donated — the space, the auctioneering by Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s, a performance by Jessye Norman from the American songbook, and art works from more than 70 artists. They include Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Chris Burden, Vija Clemins, Chuck Close, Mark di Suvero, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner.

You can view their works here, and you can leave absentee bids for them. Or you can go to the event; tickets cost $175, and information about reserving tickets is on the same website as the art works.

The Family Resource Center, btw, helps homeless children keep up with their education and remain connected to their community and helps their parents deal with health, housing and other financial issues.

UPDATE, 2/3: The auction raised $2,075,000.

 

 

Are the visual arts coming to Broadway again? And what picture will be drawn? It’s not always “good” for art: Art was a winning play, more about friendship than painting, but it still reinforced some conventional antipathy toward art.

Now there’s word around New York that Red, a play by John Logan about Mark Rothko that opened on Dec. 8 at Donmar Warehouse in London, is likely to transfer to New York, probably this spring.

The play is set in 1958-59, and involves the commission Rothko won for a series of murals from the Four Seasons restaurant. The title stems from this quote: “There is only one thing I fear in life my friend… One day the black will swallow the red.”

Here’s what the Official London Theatre Guide says:

Under the watchful gaze of his young assistant and the threatening presence of a new generation of artists, Mark Rothko takes on his greatest challenge yet: to create a definitive work for an extraordinary setting. 

Red is a moving and compelling account of Rothko’s struggle to accept his growing riches and the praise heaped upon him, which became his ultimate undoing.

Alfred Molina plays Rothko in London, where the drama closes on Feb. 6. He would do it in New York, too.

London critics were mixed about the play. The Telegraph called it “second-rate.” The Independent liked it much better, saying it was “brilliantly acted,” and so did The Guardian.

But all agreed that the play gives theatre-goers a window on a great artist, deploying several bits of conventional wisdom. The set, Rothko’s studio on the Bowery, is a symbolic mess of splattered red paint, foreshadowing Rothko’s death. Rothko is cranky, somewhat abusive to the only other character, his assistant, who represents the younger generation of artists about to supplant Rothko’s generation.

That’s human nature. But the critics said the play goes on about art, too. I’m eager to hear exactly what…

Photo Credit: Johan Persson, Courtesy London Theatre Guide 

Let’s give credit to the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati. In the belief that funding for the arts — private and public — has hit a “plateau that has little to do with the current economy,” the group began a study of public attitudes toward the arts, trying to find out why people take little responsibility for financing them with public money.

The theory: if we change the message, maybe we can change their minds — but first we have to understand their minds. After a year of study, here are some of their findings:

• People view the arts as “entertainment,” and therefore “a matter of taste, not public responsibility” and as “an extra, not a necessity.”
• People expect to have “a mostly passive, consumer relationship with the arts.” The arts will be on offer, and they should succeed or fail in the marketplace, without the need for support.
• The arts are a low priority for most people, even when they value art.

To change all that, the group proses a new message that differentiates the arts from entertainment, stresses their public value, and includes all people in a region, not just city-dwellers. The message would center on the arts “ripple effect,” not simply the economic ripples (which, as I’ve said before, don’t stand up when compared with other economic investments) but the communal ripples. Among them is a “more connected population,” with diverse groups sharing experiences and learning new perspectives, and revitalized communitites that go “well beyond the limited dollar-and-cents economic argument.”

Is it enough? Is it correct? I think the approach has some merit. One thing I like about it is the idea that this problem requires new thinking, based on evidence, and that the report emphasizes that it recommends not a new slogan or image, but a new orientation toward communicating the value of the arts. How thoughtful.

You can read the 24-page report here.  

 

If a painting, drawing or sculpture sold at auction for more than seven times its high estimate, you’d read about it, want to see it and want to know what accounted for the gap. But there’s nothing in the newspapers I’ve seen this morning about the silver punch bowl that fetched a record-smashing $5.9 million at Sotheby’s yesterday. The previous record for American silver was $775,750, set twice, once in 2001 and once in 2002. This is the second highest price ever paid for any piece of silver at auction, Sotheby’s said.

Yesterday’s lot was Punch Bowl by Cornelius Kierstede, made in New York between 1700 and 1710, estimated to sell at $400,000 to $800,000.

So what happened? What did the buyers — two at the end, but six at the beginning — know, or believe, that Sotheby’s experts didn’t? Anyone know?

Here’s a picture of the bowl and here’s Sotheby’s description:

The bowl has descended in the family of Commodore Joshua Loring, whose stately home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the Loring-Greenough House, has been preserved as an historic site.  A Royalist, Loring abandoned his residence in August 1774 to take refuge in Boston, and the family emigrated to London in 1776.  According to tradition, the bowl was hidden in a well on the property during the Revolution.  Retrieved by the family, it descended quietly with them in England, completely unknown, until the owners sent a grainy photograph to Sotheby’s London silver department in March of 2009.

It weighs about four pounds and it in “amazing condition,” having never (or rarely) been used, according to a short item in The New York Times’s antiques column last week. A blog called Boston 1775 has more on the bowl (here), but the gap between estimate and price paid suggests there still more we don’t know.

Photo: Courtesy Sotheby’s

 

Thomas Moran, Asher B. Durand, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Hart Benton, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley…those are the kind and caliber of artists whose names have been associated with the collection being assembled by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. You can see the images here.

Here’s another, and it was a bit of a surprise to me: Walton Ford.

This week, the museum announced that it had purchased his 2009 work called The Island, described as a “writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs.”

Size helps: it’s 8 ft by 11.5 ft.

As the press release continues:

The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.

“Thylacines were mysterious terrifying phantoms in the minds of Tasmanian settlers,” Walton Ford said via email. “I wanted to create a delirious image that suggested the thylacine’s doom. The painting could be interpreted as the hallucination of either the man or the beast.”

According to the museum’s website, Alice Walton has purchased a few other contemporary works — one each by James Turrell, Mark di Suvero and Ted Jones.

And so the Crystal Bridges tale gets more and more interesting. Contemporary artists and art dealers could use a big, new, deep-pocketed buyer at the moment; maybe they have a stealth one.

Photo Credit: © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo by Christopher Burke Studio, Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum