This is the last regular issue of The Easel for 2017. Next week, and the week after, the newsletter will highlight the most popular stories of the year, as indicated by your reading patterns, dear readers. There will then be a break of two weeks before The Easel resumes on Tuesday January 23.
Many thanks for your interest over the last year. 2018 promises to be better yet!
Season’s greetings to all.
Andrew
A key idea behind Pop art was to depict everyday reality, unprettified. Having hung around Warhol’s ‘factory’ in New York it was natural that Shore would bring this radical aesthetic into his photography. He helped create a “new photographic vernacular: a flat, deadpan aesthetic that thrives on the deliberate blandness of its subject matter and a rejection of artistic conventions.”
After Spain’s colonization of Mexico, the Church acquired great wealth. Paintings were one way for it (and an emerging local elite) to promote itself. And it did – thus supporting a vibrant local artistic community. A first ever survey of this late Baroque art is “spellbinding. [It is] an extraordinary artistic era just coming into focus … and the show a remarkable curatorial achievement, one of the most memorable exhibitions of the year.”
Balthus had a thing about adolescent girls. Amid the furor about sexual abuse and #MeToo, should New York’s Met comply with a petition and take down an apparently lascivious work? Definitely not, according to this writer. Art is full of sexual imagery. “The danger in the wings is a new Puritanism … The challenge now is to define codes of behavior without throwing out the maps that got us to the place we are now.”
Art has always seized on new technologies with enthusiasm. Will artificial intelligence be another happy example? Some think not, fearing it will shift “more of the creative legwork to machines”. Job losses in commercial art is one concern. Longer term, AI software may compromise artists’ ability to claim ownership of their work, if the software is deemed responsible for “the lion’s share of the creativity.”
The Incas believed jade and turquoise were sacred and thus valued these materials highly. Gold was pretty but not that special. “[F]inely woven tapestry garments and feather works were among the most labor-intensive and highly prized luxury objects of all.” Sadly, the Spanish conquistadors had very different ideas about value.
Andrew Wyeth is the itch that critics just can’t help but scratch. James Panero is the latest to join the doubters’ ranks. Wyeth loved action movies and brought to his painting “a dreamy brand of realism. A coastal [elitist] who romanticized but also valorized the struggles of the overlooked … his compelling images still offer up a voyeuristic escape, all with the timeless stamp of inauthenticity.”
How important is Britain’s Turner Prize for contemporary art? It boosts a particular artist, but beyond that? Himid, widely seen as a deserving recipient, thinks its significance is that it’s a celebration of culture. “I think ordinary people understand how important culture is to our lives, it’s policy makers that try and strangle it, cut it, or ignore it. But people on the street get it.” More images are here.
A carefully worded offer by the French President to repatriate stolen cultural artifacts has highlighted African grievances on the topic. “Westerners are quick to argue that Africans have created nothing worthwhile but at the same time high-jack our cultural artefacts … the illicit traffic [in artifacts] exists because Western museums have been willing to buy objects they know must have been looted or stolen.”
A huge controversy ensued when the Whitney exhibited a painting by a white artist of the murdered Emmett Till. Now that things are a bit calmer, what can be said about the artist and that painting? “It’s not a work of assuagement [but it] encompasses contradictions … enough ugliness to register the horror of what happened to Till, while paying tribute to him as a human being .”
The pulse of the market at Art Basel Miami Beach. Some $3.5bn of works were offered and “hundreds” of sales occurred in the six figure range. Older collectors are selling, newer collectors buying. Mid-sized galleries are “challenged” and some expect “an industry-wide reckoning” on costs and strategy. Dealers and collectors both feel “art fair fatigue” but 41% of gallery sales come from art fairs.
What is the significance of protest art coming out of Russia? Is it reflecting a popular mood of dissatisfaction or only the Moscow intelligentsia chafing (understandably) under limited freedom of expression? Perhaps optimistically this writer concludes that this show reflects “a certain spirit of extremism that has historically played a part in Russian culture. The ghost of Dostoevsky hovers somewhere just out of sight.”
Galleries and auction houses provide elaborate – and thus expensive – services. So if high profile artists can avoid using them what is wrong with that? “Buyers don’t care anymore about waiting for the verdict of history; they’re consuming Hirsts in the exuberant present, while those who believe in art’s eternal verities try desperately to avert their eyes.”
What, really, are painters doing when they paint? Answering this question has become more difficult over time as the painter’s options have grown – perception, perspective, narrative, feeling, abstraction, colour, medium. One suggestion – a painting is “a corner of nature seen through a temperament”. A more declarative alternative is that a painting is the artist saying “I exist, and therefore you, the viewer, do too”.