This magnificent painting by William Bouguereau – L’Amour et Psyché (1899) – had its last public showing at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 and has been in private hands ever since. It will be featured in Sotheby’s New York auction of 19th Century European Art on 23 April. Its estimated value is $1.8m to $2.2m (title link). I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t sell for a lot more than that.
I often wonder whether curators who claim that some inartistic tosh is art should be prosecuted under The Trades Description Act 1968. Curator Lydia Yee is responsible for commissioning French “artist” Celeste Boursier-Mougenot to set up a purported art installation in The Curve, the visual art space of the Barbican, London. This installation is a walk-through aviary containing 40 zebra finches, with electric guitars for perches and upturned cymbals for bird feeders. The cacophony this produces is an auditory and visual experience for the visitor. Oh wow! What about the birds? Their hearing is at a much higher pitch than ours, and they cannot escape. I’ve reported their plight to the RSPB as a possible wildlife crime. Click the title link for a video of this rubbish.
I often wonder whether curators who claim that some inartistic tosh is art should be prosecuted under The Trades Description Act 1968. Curator Lydia Yee is responsible for commissioning French “artist” Celeste Boursier-Mougenot to set up a purported art installation in The Curve, the visual art space of the Barbican, London. This installation is a walk-through aviary containing 40 zebra finches, with electric guitars for perches and upturned cymbals for bird feeders. The cacophony this produces is an auditory and visual experience for the visitor. Oh wow! What about the birds? Their hearing is at a much higher pitch than ours, and they cannot escape. I’ve reported their plight to the RSPB as a possible wildlife crime. Click the title link for a video of this rubbish.
Here is a detail of a Renaissance fresco in the Cappella del Manto in Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy, showing three angels. The face of the angel on the right has been cleaned by laser ablation, which vaporizes the surface layer of dirt. This technique has been used in removing tattoos and in cleaning stone and bronze artworks, but frescoes are a far more delicate matter. Having achieved success, Salvatore Siano and Renzo Salimbeni have recently published their findings. Click the title link for details.
Here is a detail of a Renaissance fresco in the Cappella del Manto in Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy, showing three angels. The face of the angel on the right has been cleaned by laser ablation, which vaporizes the surface layer of dirt. This technique has been used in removing tattoos and in cleaning stone and bronze artworks, but frescoes are a far more delicate matter. Having achieved success, Salvatore Siano and Renzo Salimbeni have recently published their findings. Click the title link for details.
Do you know Tino Sehgal? You know, the artist that doesn’t allow any pictures taken of his works? And doesn’t write any introduction, or artist statement? Or make written agreements with museums? That wants no material artifacts in his works?
Does it matter what the works are?
They are performative. More: they are performances. They are people doing things in exhibition spaces. They are things happening with people within an exhibition framework.
They could be happening to others (say, someone kissing). Or to you (say, someone talking with you).
You might never discover which part was the work. Yet somehow, you often do.
Once again: Does it matter what the works are? Once you experience something, what good is the analysis?
But we are pretty smart animals. We may experience, and still want to think about it. We may want to decide what we think, and if we will go to see this thing again or not. We may rework this experience in our mind until we decide, say, that this is just not enough. That a good ice-cream would have done the job. Or a meeting with a friend. Or both combined. Maybe in a museum. Maybe accompanied by a stranger, having a conversation about progress. The luxury of conversational art. Now isn’t that progressive.
Then again, what is wrong with living a series of perfectly good conversations put into a gentle, clean formal frame? Can’t we just accept this? What is it that makes one (me) so voracious?
Is it the fact I’ve never actually seen a Sehgal, done a Sehgal?
Isn’t the picture enough?
Or the reviews that seem to make a huge effort in taking the mimetic weight off the image and putting some of it on words?
Paradoxically, all the effort put into keeping it live seem to make us focus not on the thing, but on this very effort. Would Tino Sehgal be at the Guggenheim had he allowed taking pictures? So what exactly is the work, here? How come I feel it so clearly, if it’s all about presence? Or am I just feeling its double, its fake, the afterthought? But isn’t that crucial in experience? Doesn’t that re-constitute the experience once it is over? Can one re-construct something one did not experienced in the first place?
You would have to have been there. The most dreaded sentence in the world. What are we supposed to do with it? Take a hidden snapshot?
Tino Sehgal is on at the New York Guggenheim until March 10.
First this week Superman hit the $1m jackpot for a comic book sale (CLICK). Now Batman has topped that mark. At an auction in Dallas, Texas, US auction house Heritage sold a rare 1939 copy of Detective Comic No 27 – the first showing of Batman – for over $1m (£655,000). The seller bought this comic in the 1960’s for $100 (£65). I’ll have to have a rummage through my pile of old comics: Kid Colt Outlaw, Matt Slade Gunfighter, Justice Traps The Guilty, Blackhawks and Mad Magazine (first three issues mint).
They say that one of the signs of ageing is that police officers look like 6th-form schoolboys. I must be getting really ancient, because this photo shows what appears to me to be an 11-year-old schoolgirl. She is Meriel Jeater, Curator of the Museum of London’s new gallery War, Plague & Fire (1550s-1660s) which opened this week. Catchy title that. The new gallery covers an area of history from the accession of Elizabeth 1 in 1558 to the Great Fire of 1666. Just what you need to keep the kiddies happy over the Easter holidays.
Here’s the winning design for the new US Embassy to be built in Nine Elms, Wandsworth, west London. Pennsylvania firm KieranTimberlake beat 36 companies to win the contest. I have a light fitting that looks similar. The new embassy will have a moat on one side, a ha ha on the other and will be surrounded by tall structures. Building work should start in 2013 and be finished for mad suicide bombers in 2017.
A rediscovered painting of a windmill by Vincent Van Gogh – Le Blute-fin Mill (1886) – has gone on show at the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. Where? Zwolle is a municipality and also the capital city of the province of Overijssel, Netherlands, if you must know. Please yourselves. This painting looks nothing like a Van Gogh to me, but it has been authenticated by experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Wishful thinking? If not, it looks as though the guy could actually paint in an amateurish sort of way before he went all expressionistic.
