Michael Lind’s provocative essay Why Do Intelligent People No Longer Care About Art? was widely read but a concurrent piece by Michael Lewis makes a similar point even more precisely. ”The fine arts and performing arts have ceased to matter in Western culture, and they no longer shape in meaningful ways our image of ourselves. This collapse in the prestige and consequence of art is the central cultural phenomenon of our day.”
Ellsworth Kelly, the great American abstract painter died just before New Year. Robert Hughes described his work as “an art of spare, authoritative and infinitely refined forms, Matissean in [its] intelligent use of colour, on the basis of constant drawing from the observed world”. An illuminating interview with the artist, done in 2013 when he turned 90, is here (28 min).
Zeng Fanzhi is a prominent Chinese artist who emerged after the Cultural Revolution. This interview, which coincides with a New York show, outlines the stop-start exposure of Chinese artists to Western art. “Cézanne rendered the world flat. Van Gogh saw colors rather than three-dimensional objects. In that sense they are very similar to Eastern painters.”
The boom in contemporary art is having an impact in the august area of Old Masters. Recent auction results have fallen well short of even “low estimates”. A dearth of great new pieces coming to market may be partly to blame but this may simply reflect pessimism about likely sale prices. “It’s naïve not to realise we are at a pretty serious moment … There has been a massive taste shift”
With the press full of tributes to the musician David Bowie, it seems appropriate to acknowledge his interest in art. For a time, he sat on the board of the magazine Modern Painters. “Bowie loved the art world. He was an autodidact intellectual, an avid and voracious reader, I later learned, as I came to know him a bit better.”
Image: Google
The French modernist Jean Dubuffet had the family resources and connections to pursue his passion – “outsider art”. He was most fascinated by psychiatric patients, whose work he felt had “artistic purity and uncontaminated creativity”. Not only did these works influence his own art but, in the immediate aftermath of Nazi persecution of the mentally ill, his project had an emphatically redemptive quality.
There is nothing subtle about this series of photos. As the accompanying text comments “The device takes precedence over the person that is present and that felt wrong. It is a form of rejection and lowers the self-worth of the person super-ceded for a device.” Not surprisingly, this series of photos has apparently gone viral.
British writers, in particular, like to play the “GLA” game – who is our Greatest Living Artist? Their current GLA is Frank Auerbach and this essay explains why. “Auerbach’s brushwork looks simple, offhand enough to assert a lack of care or liability. Really, it is a kind of English sprezzatura, as artful a dishevelment as a frayed collar or too-bright socks.” This piece should be an entrant in the “BEOTY” game – best essay of the year.
Martin Wong could churn out portraits at street fairs for $7.50 each – hence his name “human instamatic”. While he hung out with graffitists, most of his effort went into exuberant urban realist landscapes of New York’s then decaying lower east side. Critical recognition has come slowly – following his AIDS related death in 1999, he is only now getting a museum retrospective. A short background video (4 min) is here.
Despite its somewhat silly title, this Paris exhibition has a good story to tell. In the nineteenth century, when they were barred from some areas of art, women were able to participate in the new field of photography. The intriguing question left hanging is not whether women were better or worse photographers than men but simply whether they notice different things. More images and a short introductory video are here.
New Photography is MoMA’s notable annual exhibition of photographic art. This year’s show had a clear intent – what is contemporary photo-based culture? – but the reviewer makes his complaint equally clear: “It has all the specificity of goulash… The curators ignored the individuality of the works… and instead crammed everything together inches apart, in the apparent hope that a new art form would appear.”
Singapore has just opened its new National Gallery after a 10 year building program. Sniping that the new institution reflects Singapore “boosterism” may be unreasonable given the paucity of public art institutions in the region. Anyway, it seems positively virtuous compared to the Louvre Abu Dhabi which is renting the famous French name until 2037 and has been described as “a shop window for a society that doesn’t exist”.
The impact of some paintings is immediate but others shout quietly. Robert Ryman’s white paintings are in the latter category. With white, he claims, “you can see more of a nuance; you can see more.” The reviewer thinks these are classical paintings but frets “The mental toughness that defined sophistication in art [in the 1960’s] is rare now. [W]hat’s missing is a confident assumption that there will be an audience eager to put up with it.”
Frank Auerbach is not the only artist to endlessly rework canvasses. The American painter John Lees has been known to spend over a decade re-touching particular pictures. And Lees sees his intensely worked surfaces as integral to his paintings. “If the paint does not go bumpity bumpity, what’s the point?”