A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. but if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say [...]
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
thinking, thinking, thinking
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009Contemporary art, content, prices
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009There is a wonderful discussion of the subtle differences between modern/contemporary figurative artists over at Illustration Art. Figurative art in this case being nudes (so if you are offended by high art nudes, move on).
The crux of the issue is the difference between Adrian Gottlieb and Job Currin. The former artist is, arguably, technically [...]
Float like a (dead) butterfly, sting like a (dead) shark
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008At the onset and height of financial crisis, Damien Hirst has done something interesting. There is a series of Times articles (thanks Carol Vogel for doing the heavy lifting) about the anticipation towards, and outcomes from, Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale at Sotheby’s London.
The sale was significant for a few reasons. First, it [...]
Takashi Murakami and Burned Art
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Jennifer Lena and I have a new video up, a continuation of our conversation about the relationship between cultural value and monetary value. We’re talking about devaluation, specifically burned art – in the high art and pop art worlds. And we’re circling around a discussion of spheres/circuits/arenas of value.
Burned Art and Murakami from Peter Levin [...]
Why didn’t this work?
Friday, September 12th, 2008Remember the KLF? Sure you do. British? 80s-90s? Hrm.
Well, they created a foundation for promotion of avant garde arts, and as part of this they burned a million quid of their own money. Here is the documentary, in 6 parts. The burning is in part 2:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
By most measures [...]
Social Science as Art
Thursday, August 21st, 2008First, look at this post and tell us what you think.
Second, here are some lovely physical representations of graphical social data. As sculpture.
Of course, I would not necessarily trust the social science chops of an artist (when I ran the numbers, it looked more like:
But even with the faulty peaks and valleys, still lookin’ good [...]
Will you remember me?
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008In an otherwise interesting article on the Chinese Art market explosion (in the upcoming issue of ARTnews), Barbara Pollack sneaks in this line:
With the sheer abundance of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs in Chine, the larger art world is recognizing the power of the Asian market. Standing in an auction house in New York [...]
Something New – Markets and Art
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008As an experiment in sociology and blogging, Jenn (from whatisthewhat.wordpress.com) and I have put together a brief video on culture and markets, the beginning of what we hope will be a conversation at the intersection of culture, sociology, and economics. We’ll work on the lighting and switch off the big-head/small-head, but we hope you like [...]
All right, stop, collaborate, and listen
Friday, August 15th, 2008On Galenson
Monday, August 4th, 2008The New York Times printed an article today about David Galenson, and I have nothing really to add. Oh, wait, other than to say that:
1) Economists prey on disciplines with low self-esteem, and the fact that anyone in the art world would even bother with Galenson is evidence that art history, and the arts editors [...]
Anonymity, thing of the past?
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Jenn notes with sadness the unmasking of Banksky, and how she is both saddened and mildly implicated in the process. Authority and identity are largely left understated in someone like Max Weber’s societal theories on the trajectory towards rationalization, and picked up instead in Foucault’s notions of governmentality.
I wonder what it means for us [...]
Rethinking markets – market metaphors
Thursday, July 17th, 2008I think it’s time to regroup, and actually do some of the ‘re’ thinking of markets I’m always planning to get around to. I want to do so in the context of three recent observations:
The Examples
The first observation comes from Fabio Rojas, over at the orgtheory blog – though it is slowly becoming the orgborg [...]
Anchoring, art-style
Monday, June 2nd, 2008At the Tate Modern, there are a number of paintings by Pablo Picasso. Ten are currently on display (well, as of last week, this obviously changes). Interestingly, however, there is no room where you can see ‘the Picasso paintings’ in one place. Contrast this with the room of Gerhard Richter’s, or the gallery of Rothkos. [...]
Museums as value-chargers
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I have not worked out the distinctions between value and values, or the separate spheres arguments of Zelizer as it fits more generally into economic sociology – efforts to bend her work to my frameworks don’t generally work, and it’s a failure of my frameworking. Still, this excerpt from Kopytoff seems incredibly insightful to me:
When [...]
Chagall v Cezanne
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008I was a panelist yesterday discussing art markets, at the Christie’s education center. Great group of people, and really lovely of Marisa Kayyem to invite me. One of the more interesting moments was in our discussion of the primacy of market prices as a measure of value for a work. I had put up a [...]
No seriously, how do you know what you like?
Thursday, February 28th, 2008This article from the NYT today highlights “art anxiety,” the inability for wealthy folks to purchase real art for fear that they will either pay too much, or be outed as having poor taste. There’s interesting stuff here, though I’ve mostly given up on the Times’ feature articles nowadays (good gracious they’ve moved from interesting [...]
How do you know what you like?
Friday, January 25th, 2008While partaking in a stupendous lunch, the conversation turns to the question of how do people know what they like?
Drinking deeply from his Effervecense de Pomme, PL chimes: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take [...]
The Fightclub of Underground Art
Friday, January 11th, 2008That’s Tourettes without Regrets. But of course that’s not the punchline, it’s MC Jelly D that I want you to know about.
ye. gods.
Sunday, December 9th, 2007Ouch
How to price cultural stuff
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007Tricky tricky Dr. Lena. In her discussion of the great Canadian post-Woodstock, train-tour extravaganza, she asks the question: how should we price cultural stuff?