abstract art

if pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has made it necessary.

- Fernard Leger

cubism

For a long time I never understood cubism and why some of its art is so expensive. This following excerpt helps explain why it developed but still doesn't answer why it's so damn expensive. If you do want an explanation, check out some of my previous excerpts on contemporary art:

The aim of cubism was not to reproduce visual reality but to record a response to an object - whether still life, landscape, or individual - that was developed over time and was both visual, in reflecting different angles of vision, and intellectual. What was important was not the sitter as he appeared to the world but the painter's conception of him. Kahnweiler likened the process to that of poetry, quoting the French nineteenth-century poet Mallarmé, who claimed that his poetic goal was "to describe not the thing itself but the effect it produces." Once photography had freed painters from the obligation to create a likeness, they could abstract the portrait in a variety of ways.

Pablo Picasso - Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910)

In order for the artist's subjective response to be considered the most important aspect of a portrait, it was necessary for a change to occur in the circum stances in which portraits were made. In previous centuries the relationship between sitter and artist had been dominated by the sitter: it was the sitter (or the person commissioning the portrait) who dictated how the sitter was represented, and it was the sitter's self- image that the portraitist was employed to convey. But when artists, represented by dealers, began to paint almost exclusively for the open market, portrait commissions gradually became less important to their financial survival. Since the late nineteenth century artists have been increasingly able to choose whom they paint. (Picasso's portraits were almost all of his friends, wives, lovers, and children.) Today when some one commissions a portrait from a leading artist he or she usually does so on the understanding that he or she will submit uncomplainingly to the artist's vision.

Abstraction in portraiture - which results from the imposition of the artist's own personal vision on the sitter - has many sources, but it always depends on the artist being seen as the more powerful partner in the transaction. However, when looking at portraits it is as well to remember how recent such a view is. Today we may remember Mona Lisa only because she was painted by Leonardo, and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews simply because they had the foresight to ask Gainsborough to portray them, but at the time they would have had no doubt that it was they who were calling the shots.

- Alexander Stugris

Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Paris Society

The German artist Max Beckmann captures the atmosphere at a rich high-society soirée in Paris. Each party-goer is a caricature, and the thick black outlines give the impression of a spontaneous charcoal-like sketch. Just as this rough style contrasts with the polish and veneer of the party, the grotesque faces contrast with the elegant clothing of the party­goers, who push against each other in the cramped space. Most seem not to notice one another, and certainly no one is paying any attention to the singer in the background. This society is shown as fragmented and hypocritical.

Max Beckmann - Paris Society (1931)

anticonsumerism conformity

Do you hate consumer culture? Angry about all that packaging, all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the "mental environment"? Well, join the club. Anticonsumer­ism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demo­graphic. Sure, as a society we may be spending record amounts of money on luxury goods, vacations, designer clothing and house­hold comforts. But take a look at the nonfiction bestseller lists. For years they've been populated by books that are deeply critical of consumerism: No Logo, CultureJam, Luxury Fever, Fast Food Nation. You can now buy Adbusters at your neighborhood music or cloth­ing store. Two of the most popular and critically acclaimed films in the past decade were Fight Club and American Beauty, which offered almost identical indictments of modern consumer society.

What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the market obviously does an extremely good job at responding to consumer demand for anticonsumerist products and literature. But how can we all denounce consumerism yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society? The answer is simple. What we see in films like American Beauty or books like No Logo is not actually a critique of consumerism; it's merely a restatement of the critique of mass society. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years.

That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can't get their head around it. So here is the claim, simply put: Books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it. This isn't because the authors, editors or directors are hypocrites. It's because they've failed to understand the true nature of consumer society. They identify consumerism with conformity. As a result, they fail to notice that it is rebellion, not conformity, that has for decades been the driving force of the marketplace.

Over the past half-century; we have seen the complete triumph of the consumer economy at the same time that we have seen the absolute dominance of countercultural thinking in the "market­place of ideas." Is this a coincidence? Countercultural theorists would like to think that their rebellion is merely a reaction to the evils of the consumer society. But what if countercultural rebel­lion, rather than being a consequence of intensified consumerism, were actually a contributing factor? Wouldn't that be ironic?

- Andrew Potter

don't conform - buy more of our shit

With the "alternative" facelift, "rebellion" continues to perform its traditional function of justifying the economy's ever-accelerating cycles of obsolescence with admirable efficiency. Since our willingness to load up our closets with purchases depends upon an eternal shifting of the products paraded before us, upon our being endlessly convinced that the new stuff is better than the old, we must be persuaded over and over again that the "alternatives" are more valuable than the existing or the previous. Ever since the 1960's, hip has been the native tongue of advertising, "antiestab­lishment" the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year. And over the years the rebel has naturally become the cen­tral image of this culture of consumption, symbolizing endless, directionless change, and eternal restlessness with "the establish­ment"—or, more correctly, with the stuff "the establishment" convinced him to buy last year.

- Thomas Frank

tacky art?

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,

And stare as long as sheep and cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

- W. H. Davies

contemporary art in quotes

I find that these quotes do a better job getting to the real foundation of what is going on in today's contemporary art world more than any book, article, or paper I read recently.

Art should chase life while the art world chases money; if you start chasing money with art the whole thing is fucked.

- Damien Hirst

Art prices are determined by the meeting of real or induced scarcity with pure, irrational desire, and nothing is more manipulable than desire...A fair price is the highest one a collector can be induced to pay.

- Robert Hughes


Art dealers are like surfboard riders.
You can't make a wave.
If there aren't waves out there, you're dead.
But the good surfboard riders can sense which of
the waves coming in will be the good one,
the one that will last. Successful art dealers
have a feeling for hitting the right wave.

- Andre Emmerich


Bernard Berenson [the critic] said to Bauer the antique dealer:
"A man as scholarly as yourself shouldn't be a dealer, it's horrible to be a dealer." To which Bauer replied,
"Between you and me there's no difference; I'm an intellectual dealer and you're a dealing intellectual."

- Rene Gimpel


On art dealers:
We act as a sort of broker trying to represent the desires of artists and the needs of private collectors and museums.

- Brent Sikkema


Art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them.

- Peter Schjeldahl


It is a great paradox of our times that visual culture should be vanishing even as the art market soars.
Abstract concepts take precedence over what the eye sees.
Artists' names matter even more, and the art to which they are attached ever less.

- Souren Melikian


There are no rules about investment.
Sharks can be good. Artists' dung can be good.
Oil on canvas can be good. There's a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art.

- Charles Saatchi


Money complicates everything. I have a genuine belief that art is a more powerful currency than money - that's the romantic feeling that an artist has.
But you start to have this sneaking feeling that money is more powerful.

- Damien Hirst


The museum has largely supplanted the church as the emblematic focus of the American city.

- Robert Hughes

buy me. you'll be cool too.

sprezzatura

Leonardo Di Vinci - Mona Lisa (1506)

Sprezzatura means, literally, disdain and detachment. It is the art of refraining from the appearance of trying to present oneself in a particular way. The sprezzatura of the Mona Lisa is seen in both her smile and the positioning of her hands. Both the smile and hands are intended to convey her grandeur, self-confidence and societal position.

Advertisement as Pornography

“If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.”

- Philip Slater

fast food and pornography

cheap. fast. convenient. but a proxy for the real thing.