Last week I had the remarkable opportunity to have dinner with Irving Blum, Internationally renown art dealer and the force behind Los Angeles' legendary Ferus Gallery, Blum was a pioneer in the promotion of the post-war artists of the 1960's on both coasts - discovering and championing artists such asAndy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. I decided to watch the documentary The Cool School to learn more about the Ferus Gallery and Blum's tremendous impact both in Los Angeles and New York at that time. The Cool School uncovers and interviews virtually all of the artists, friends, collectors, and minds behind Ferus to explore how this short-lived gallery forever transformed the Los Angeles art scene. As the documentary describes, "the gallery managed to do for art in Los Angeles what the museums previously could not. Even though their modalities were as disparate as assemblage art, abstract expressionism and Pop, Ferus artists shared ideas, goals, workspaces and a lasting vision." The concepts and motivation behind both the success and closure of Ferus is further described by Blum in a 1977 interview with Paul Cummings. Blum describes that even with the excitement and rush of Ferus' exhibitions and openings, "there just wasn’t a heck of a lot of activity. There wasn’t a lot of movement, there really wasn’t. And the awful thing about selling out there, especially at the beginning, was that there was simply no pressure. So if somebody said, well, if you told somebody the price of a painting, they would say to you, “Fine, all right, let me think about it.” You’d say, “All right.” And they would think about it for a month, or two, or three and be relatively sure that when they came back into the gallery, that thing would still be there... And virtually every time out, it was still there. So they could take as much time as they liked to consider buying whatever it was they had in their head to do. Whereas in New York, if you see something and it’s really terrific, and if you say to the dealer, “Well, let me think about it,” the dealer will generally say, “Well, certainly, take 48 hours. I have other interests, I have other people coming in to look.” And you know that that’s true. In California, it simply wasn’t true. I couldn’t say, “Look, I can only give you 24 hours.” They would laugh! They would say, “Who else would buy that, for God’s sake?” And you couldn’t answer. And they’d be right, you know". When Cummings questioned Blum what he had learned over decades of dealing emerging and established art on both coasts, Blum responded that "if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have had other thoughts about doing the gallery business. I probably would have gone ahead and done it in any case, but at least I would have had a sounder base from which to operate. I would have known that it would have taken me six or seven years just to get even for example. That was something I had no idea of at the very beginning. And I would have understood that showing younger people or unknown people takes forever and is largely a thankless, difficult, expensive matter." Our conversation followed the thread of both the documentary and the interview. Blum's energy and enthusiasm for the art world continues to be contagious, his charm exhilarating. Transformation, passion, and honest examination of time and place is clearly a foundation to sustained growth and continued relevance in this capricious and mercurial world of art.
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Tuesday's evening auctions at Sotheby's London experienced an unprecedented moment - five protesters snuck into the room and disrupted the auction process. The protestors threw fake £50 notes in the air and then unfurled a large banner stating "orgy of the rich". The demonstrators belonged to Arts Against Cuts, a group of artists and students protesting a recent plan by the U.K. government to explore budget cuts for arts programs in the wake of the recession. Their protest began with moaning as Andy Warhol's Nine Multicolored Marilyns (Reversal Series) was presented by Sotheby's star auctioneer Tobias Meyer. The moaning escalated to screaming, shouting, sirens, and alarms while dozens of protesters rallied outside the auction house, shouting and waving banners. One particularly poignant sign read 1 Warhol = 1,222 tuitions. In the words of New York Times contributor Soren Melikian, "If this was a happening, as I overheard another dealer saying in jest, it was too close to the bone to feel like a joke. It chimed well with the Whatever the reality, this may have long-term repercussions in the market. People deeply involved in art, rich and not so rich, tend to live in their own cocoon. They are not used to having the worries of the rest of the world thrown in their faces." Rob Parsons and Godfrey Baker of the London Evening Standard quoted a protester explain that "it is obscene that the amount of money being spent at this auction could be the difference between having some form of local services which exists in the community and not." Belgian collector Mark Vanmoerkerke said the auction house took the interruption in its stride. He said: "It's fun to see people stand up for what they believe in. An orgy of the rich? They're not exactly wrong." My guess is that Vanmoerkerke's flash of insight did not influence his enthusiasm or spending, nor did the protest have any effect on the rest of the evenings sales. The notably small sale raised £44m. When combined with the results of the single-owner sale Looking Closely held the previous week, Sotheby’s total for its post-war art auctions fetched £88m - the second highest February in the auction's history. To follow-up my ongoing discussion of Steve Martin, his latest novel Object of Beauty (November 17), the recent implosion at New York's 92nd Street Y (December 2), and Dave Hickey (July 11) - the two men came together Thursday night at LACMA to chat. The topic of the discussion was Martin's book, his collection, and the art world in general. I think they also wanted to make New Yorkers look bad for not wanting to sit through Martin's talk at the Y. LACMA's Andrea Grossman opened the night by stating, "We in Los Angeles want to hear Steve Martin talk about art!" The evening's moderator Doug Harvey relays the opening sequence of events in his transcription of the conversation: Me: Dave, can I get a quote on how this is going to prove that Los Angeles audiences are more sophisticated than New York audiences? In your own words of course. Dave Hickey: I am going to wear my opera glasses to look at the audience. Me: By wearing opera glasses, are you implying that L.A. audiences are more sophisticated than New York audiences? Hickey: More buxom. As Harvey notes "This exchange, had with post-Vegas MacArthur genius Dave Hickey before he squared off with funnyman/collector/novelist Steve Martin onstage at LACMA Thursday night, was a pretty good indication of what was to follow...The audience was fairly star-studded for this kind of affair, with a cluster of comic genius at the back of the reserved section that included Carl Reiner, Eric Idle, Martin Mull, and Ricky Jay. I'm pretty sure I saw Beck kicking around beforehand, and I definitely spotted Martin's "Colbert Report" co-conspirator Shepard Fairey. Not so buxom a crew, but there was plenty of that to go around in the rest of the 600-capacity Bing Theater." Hickey delivered his typical Hickey-isms including: "That's the way I do art criticism – I try to raise the price of things that I think are underpriced, and lower the price of things that are overpriced." "Buying paintings with the prospect of financial gain is like shopping for your wife. It's never going to work." When he stated that "If I were trying to write a book about the art world... I really couldn't quite tell the truth, because as awful and grotesque as the party is, I want to keep coming to the party" he certainly described one of the challenges Martin faced when writing Object of Beauty. Largely taken as a satire, the book was meant to be true to the art world as Martin experiences it. He tried to write the book without naming actual names, which proved to create a distracted guessing game to those who read it (I can attest to that). When he used real names, however, he was criticized for portraying the characters too harshly, "I have Peter Schjeldahl [the art critic] sitting at a dinner and he delivers a bon mot," Martin told the crowd. "And Peter Plagens [another art critic] reviewed the book saying it wasn't worthy of Schjeldahl -- although it is actually something he said." One of the things I take away from Martin, Hickey, Object of Beauty, and the LACMA "scene" is that the art world is its own caricature so any storytelling - real or fictional - reads as satire. The reality of our world is that comedians become important collector/novelists, actors become artists who act like artists on TV, and collectors dress as custodians to get to pay millions of dollars for objects of art before anyone else. And that is just scratching the surface. Our fancy and lovely world of art is so outrageous that it is hard not to take as parody, which is why movies such as Untitled (September 28, 2010 blog) feel so harsh yet ring so true. Ridiculous. Sublime. Contemporary. And buxom to boot in LA - just ask Dave. In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer argues that art is a critical path to knowledge. Through the lives and discoveries of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stavinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf, Lehrer highlights that "it is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will even know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness." The Modern era was one of artistic struggle and hard-won innovation. It was a time when "the public wasn't used to free-verse poems or abstract paintings or plotless novels. Art was supposed to be pretty or entertaining, preferably both.... but the Modernists refused to give us what we wanted. In a move of stunning arrogance and ambition, they tried to invent fictions that told the truth." Throughout this fascinating book Lehrer cites examples of avant-garde artists forging the way to "truth" far before science and research caught up to their groundbreaking discoveries. Lehrer describes in his chapter on Igor Stravinsky the initial public reaction to The Rite of Spring. Its "remorseless originality" incited a full-blown audience riot. Throughout the chapter Lehrer examines the neuroscience of this anger and hostility towards new sound, yet how ultimately it came to be manifestly adored (in 1940 it was included in Walt Disney's Fantastia). After a long discussion of dopamine, neurons, nerves, and our coticofugal system, we learn that that dopamine (the chemical source of our most intense emotions) is released only when our brainstem finds something amiss - a pattern broken, an unexpected sound. Although our survival instincts tell us to stick only to what we know, without dopamine we would feel no intense emotions, have no powerful reactions. Our lives would be lackluster, "all we would be left with would be a shell of easy consonance, the polite drivel of perfectly predictable music." Dopamine's demand for experiential upheaval sheds new light on the critical importance of innovation in the arts. New art creates fury and hostility in audiences. Artistic breakthroughs can threaten belief systems people hold dear to their understanding of the art world and how it functions. I now understand, however, both the physiological desire for the status quo and our atavistic need for variation. "Works like The Rite jolt us out of this complacency. They literally keep us open-minded. If not for the difficult avant-garde, we would worship nothing but we already know...What separated Stravinsky from his rioting audience that night was his belief in the limitless possibilities of the mind. (The Right) is the sound of art changing the brain." Or as New York Times art critic Holland Carter wrote “confusion is demanding, but it’s a form of freedom, and it can be habit forming.” The next time someone angrily tells me what "isn't art" I now have the mind-stretching drug dopamine on my side. I love neuroscience. |
art in lifeThe world as I experience it - through people, exhibitions, books, talks, + random happenings that lead back to art. One way or another. Archives
April 2011
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