Hayward gallery’s Shrigley exhibition next year will have one foot in the art world and the other in popular culture
The president of an historic art academy has quit in protest over ‘populist’ exhibitions just weeks after a 22ft Damien Hirst statue was erected outside the building.
Simon Quadrat, 65, believes that displaying pop art ‘undermines the integrity’ of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, which was founded in 1849.
He has been locked in a long-running feud with board over what he considers to be ‘feeble’ exhibitions which are designed only to appeal to the masses.
Controversy: Damien Hirst is displaying his centre-piece ‘Charity’ statue above the entrance to the Grade-II listed Royal West of England Academy of Art
The final straw is believed to be an exhibit of work by Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, whose pieces are widely available online and in High Street shops.
Made from 500,000 individual cigarettes and weighing an incredible 440lb, this mock tiger skin rug is the creation of master artist Xu Bing.
Currently on exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the painstakingly put-together tobacco artwork is meant to highlight global trade, packaging and how people are seduced into deadly smoking habits.
Tiger feat: Chinese artist Xu Bing’s art work made of more than 500,000 individual cigarettes designed to look like a tiger skin rug pictured in Richmond, Virginia
Eleanor Bauer in her performance piece “(Big Girls Do Big Things)” at New York Live Arts, part of Performa 11 biennial. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The Performa biennial, now in full outrageously outsize swing across the city, is known for its big events: parties and premieres that, as is usually the case in the arts, have far more flash than substance.
Real magic is often more easily conjured in smaller offerings, and this year’s version, Performa 11, is no exception. Some of these events, whether presented by the biennial or its myriad partner organizations, have only a tangential connection to Performa’s central focus, which is new visual-art performance, or to the specific biennial’s themes. (This year’s include Russian constructivism and Fluxus.)
It’s curatorial sprawl, for good and for ill. Sometimes you wish more choices had been made; sometimes the grab-bag mayhem works out swimmingly, as it did for me last weekend at a cluster of events (all of which the smart young Performa curator Lana Wilson had a hand in). Composition is, after all, in the words of one of the pieces I saw, “about making a choice, including the choice to make no choice.” Continue reading
The Cultural Leader’s Handbook – How to Run a Creative Organisation by Robert Hewison and John Holden
You can also visit johnholden.info
Leadership has never been more important to the cultural industries. The arts, together with museums and heritage sites, play a vital part in keeping economies going, and, more importantly, in making life worth living. People in the sector face a constant challenge to find support for their organizations and to promote the value of culture. Leadership and management skills are needed to meet the mission of creative arts and cultural organizations, and to generate the income that underpins success. The problem is, where can you learn these essential skills?
The Cultural Leadership Handbook written by Robert Hewison and John Holden, both prime movers in pioneering cultural leadership programmes, defines the specific challenges in the cultural sector and enables arts leaders to move from ‘just’ administration to becoming cultural entrepreneurs, turning good ideas into good business. This book is intended for anyone with a professional or academic interest anywhere in the cultural sector, anywhere in the world. It will give you the edge, enabling to you to show creative leadership at any level in a cultural organization, regardless of whether your particular interest is the performing arts, museums and art galleries, heritage, publishing, films, broadcasting or new media. Continue reading
The artwork, entitled When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling, consists of a trough under a wooden tower of slats. Photograph: Bernd Thissen/EPA
An overzealous cleaner in Germany has ruined a piece of modern art worth £690,000 after mistaking it for an eyesore that needed a good scrub.
The sculpture by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation until his death in 1997, had been on loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund when it fell prey to the cleaner’s scouring pad.
The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn’s anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new.
A spokeswoman for the museum told German media that the female cleaner “removed the patina from the four walls of the trough”.
“It is now impossible to return it to its original state,” she said, adding that it had been on loan to the museum from a private collector and was valued by insurers at €800,000 (£690,000).
She said that cleaning crews had been told to keep 20cm (8in) away from artworks, but it was unclear if the woman – who worked for a company to which cleaning had been outsourced – had received the memo.
If Kippenberger is now turning in his grave, he may find solace in the fact that he is not the only artist to have his works ruined by cleaners. In 1986, a “grease stain” by Joseph Beuys valued at about €400,000 was mopped away at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.
At least the artwork didn’t end up in a skip. In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain in London threw away part of a work by another German artist, Gustav Metzger, after mistaking it for rubbish. The cleaner failed to realise that a plastic bag containing discarded paper and cardboard was an integral part of Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, and not just some litter. The bag was later recovered, but it was too damaged to display, so Metzger replaced it with another bag.
Germans are not the only victims. In 2001, Damien Hirst lost a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups, meant to represent the life of an artist, when a caretaker at the Eyestorm Gallery in London cleared it away.
Kirstin Broussard, a guide at the Museum of Modern Art, gathered a dozen senior citizens in front of Joan Mitchell’s exuberant 1957 painting Ladybug one recent afternoon to discuss the luscious blue, green, and orange slashes animating the large expanse of white canvas. “It’s chaotic,” observed one visitor. “But it’s beautiful chaos.” When Broussard wondered aloud why Mitchell had titled the picture Ladybug, another member of the group suggested that it captured the spirit of spring. “No! It’s set in winter,” protested another. “Look at all that white.” And a fourth participant offered up the ditty: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away.”
Had other visitors passed this group, they might not have guessed that the participants had something in common in addition to the their ages: Alzheimer’s. Part of the museum’s broader effort to reach diverse and underserved audiences—such as people with vision, hearing, physical, or developmental disabilities—the “Meet Me at MoMA” tours give people with dementia and their caregivers a chance to enjoy modern art. Continue reading
Julian Schnabel © Mike LeavittYou’ve seen his sketches, now marvel at the masterwork of Mike Leavitt, the artist’s artist. Saturday, September 10th, his Art Amy Royalty will be on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York. The show includes never-before-seen action figure versions of art stars Matthew Barney, Christo, Chuck Close, Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Tom Sachs, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker and Ai Weiwei. Continue reading
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Photograph by Sean DonnolaMEDIA MIX MASTER | Despite his bad-boy antics, Tom Sachs, photographed in his New York City studio, manages his 15-man operation like a Fortune 500 company.“Creativity is the enemy” is the first rule in artist Tom Sachs’s recent short film “10 Bullets.” “Stick to what has been defined for you to do.” A collaboration with filmmaker and former assistant Van Neistat, “10 Bullets” is a brilliantly twisted homage to corporate training films as well as an amusing look at Sachs’s exacting studio process. At the end of the day, for example, all of the workstations must be “Knolled,” meaning to group similar objects parallel to each other—a word Sachs picked up from his time working for the furniture company.
Still, beneath the pop-provocateur veneer, Sachs has always maintained a childlike awe of the golden age of industrial might and technology, most recently in his fascination with space exploration. This spring the Park Avenue Armory will be the site of his artistic expedition to Mars, complete with a biology lab for Martian plant cultivation. (Sachs borrowed the technology from marijuana growers.) And this month his show “Work” opens at New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery, featuring pieces like a Japanese tea ceremony and a version of Roy Lichtenstein’s razor-blade painting “Duridium,” made here out of screws.
“If you worship money, you’ll always feel poor. I worship innovation and I always feel like I’m not doing enough new stuff. That’s my impulsiveness.”
“My mind is like a tape recorder with one button–Erase,” Andy Warhol wrote in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” in which he chronicles his love of TV and his tape recorder.
Doubtless the Pop Art wizard, who died in 1987, would have reveled in the sheer ephemera that is the Internet. A new app brings an in-depth examination of his works to your mobile device.
The Warhol: Art, available in the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace, contains archival materials, letters, source images, film and video clips, as well as audio recordings. Continue reading
