Thanks to a reader for the link:
From The Daily Beast: ‘Get Into Bed With Tracey Emin For $2 million: The Sale Of A British Art Icon.’
“My Bed” will be sold at auction at Christie’s on July 1, and has been given an estimate price of between £800,000 and £1.2m (approximately $1.35 million to $2 million), which seems astonishingly low given the piece’s cultural impact. Indeed, David Maupin, Emin’s dealer in New York who sold the bed to Saatchi in 2000 for £150,000 (about $252,000), has said he thinks the Christie’s estimate is too low. “It’s historic. It’s priceless.”
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‘Cultural impact.’ So, a lot of people noticed it? It took a lot of technical skill? People were shocked by it? People had a strong reaction after seeing it in person?
It made her a celebrity?
I generally prefer the art dealer’s self-interested marketing bulls**t to a journalist’s ‘cultural impact’ claptrap.
It’s worth thinking about Western culture and the travels of the individual artist through romanticism, modernism and post-modernism and to wherever it is some of those artists are headed now. As for Damien Hirst, it was probably inevitable that someone who couldn’t draw all that well, and didn’t have many of the basics down, would rocket in and out of the spotlight, capturing the moment.
‘Damien Hirst’s output between 2005 and 2008 – the period of his greatest success – has subsequently resold at an average of thirty per cent less than its original purchase price. Moreover, a third of the almost 1700 Hirst pieces that have gone to auction since 2009 have failed to sell at all. Most recently, in November, his gloss-and-butterfly collage Sanctimony failed to reach its lowest pre-sale estimate at a Sotheby’s auction’
Does Hirst possess native talent and technical ability that you don’t? Do you want him to?
Performance artist Marina Ambramovic and Jay-Z were together during a 6-hour lip sync performance-art piece to promote Mr Z’s last album.
Still, it’s probably more engaging than Tilda Swinton in a box.
Maybe Jeff Koons got there first, where marketing, money, and branding met pop art: A Reaction To Jeff Koons-For Commerce Or Contemplation?
Deep religious themes and commercialism. Sentiment, kitsch, the market and some native talent.
From this video:
‘I think that Warhol, as radical as he seems, still very much prized the idea of originality at the core of his working process, and it’s hard not to see him as being a very original artist in that sense. The idea of Koons rejecting all originality, I think, is central to understanding what his work was about.’
and:
‘The way Andy predicted celebrity, Jeff predicted branding.’
Here’s Robert Hughes being especially critical of an Andy Warhol modern art collector. It’s interesting to note that both the artist and the collector may want similar things.
Robert Hughes is skeptical:
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Some of this back-story might help in explaining parts of our current celebrity culture. The desire for fame, to see and be seen, and immortality.
Modern art, pop-art, pop music, fame and meta-critiques on fame are arguably melting in one big pot. There are lots of people waiting around for something…
What are we missing?
Related On This Site: …From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmodern Financial Crisis”
Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus. A very good Goya page here.
Joan Miro: Woman… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise
A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’
Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’