A famous artist today is a star , he’s a brand , so different from the bohemian icons of the XXth century.ART ADVISOR ITALIA

Artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, Anish Kapoor, Maurizio Cattelan are rewarded with a popularity worthy of the movie stars, encroaching on the environment of fashion and rock.

As an example, first of all,  the collaboration of Jeff Koons with Louis Vuitton. Fashion has an aesthetic search that goes beyond the  value of an object.  Above all, via Koons, it is a symbolic value.

Art should go beyond this: it goes beyond the ephemeral because it expresses values, expresses ideas. One wonders if in these contaminations is more the fashion brand to impose itself on the value of art or vice versa.

This contamination between  the brand and the star system is the result of a movement that has to be cited to understand how we got to this point: Pop Art.

According to Arthur Danto, after the exhibition of the ‘brillo box’ in a museum, it seems that Art was dead.

‘The end of art’ is  meant as the end of art history. First, this does not mean that art can not continue on its path, but it has now finally reached that degree of freedom which favors plurilateral developments. Today art develops in all directions.

The Pop Art, therefore, has completed that historical task of investigating the essence of art, on which the avant-gardes had clashed.

Brillo Box has made  acceptable that anything can play the role of a work of art, has made artists free to run each in the direction they want and the paths of art today branch off in all directions.

With Pop Art, the development of the history of art (in which avant-garde movements alternated, in search of the essence of art) stopped, because we have arrived at what Danto considers the essence of art and that is his “aboutness”.ART ADVISOR ITALIA

This process, culminating with Pop Art and Brillo Box, involves, according to Danto, the liberation of art from philosophy and history.

 

Death of art, however, has been talking about  for a century, but in reality art never dies: it changes. It change skin;  since that box has entered a museum, art has been shaken.

A comparison can be made between the idea supported by Danto and the ideas on history  of Fukujama; according to him, with democracy and the free market history is over; in fact, the democratic and liberal countries do not conflict with each other, and they coexist peacefully.

Almost the same in the arts, as there are no more avant-gardes, but multiple contemporary directions in the market, more and more relevant, more and more aberrant, unequal, dystonic.

A market in which precisely the brand prevails, and the iconic artist of today is himself BRAND.ART ADVISOR ITALY

Let’s take an iconic example .

Damien Hirst was worth 100 million pounds at 40: Warhol and Picasso pulverized in a blink of an eye. His sentence is “turning into a brand name is important: it’s the world we live in”.

He worked on a classic binomial: life and death, eros and thanatos, but from there, he moved in a spectacular way.

First,he creates  ‘A thousand years’ with  decomposing animals. Second, he creates   the shark, that gave the title to the text ‘One million dollar shark’, by Donald Thompson. Then,  he plays  with pills we treat and poison.

He then  goes on, most importantly,  with  the ethereal butterflies symbol of short life.

All  these works  express the power of Hirst’s thought, his idea of ​​death and dissolution, taken by F. Bacon, but also the desperate search for a sense linked to the cycle of things and their ineluctability.

 

Emblem of an era is the skull covered in diamonds, ‘For the Love of God’, a gothic-rock-pop human skull that seems to play, in a glamorous and mocking way, a medieval macabre dance.

The biggest stone in the skull is the emblem of a conspicuous waste, almost to wring the eye at the idea of ​​waste as an ephemeral passing and, at the same time, almost to make an apotropaic rite against death.

Making it beautiful, precious, even desirable, death become an icon, too.

Hirst explains that in England, “For the love of God” has two meanings.

First, the literal meaning :  you act to please God. Second,  it is  an exclamation, like “For the love of God!” when you do something wrong. Your mother would tell you if you break a plate: “For the love of God, why did you do it?”.

It is iconic and ironic, it has both meanings.

 

The skull is, exactly, iconic and ironic: it’s almost rock, but, most importantly,  it costs like nothing else  in the world. it is as iconic as Masaccio’s skull  in his Trinity, but mocking like a fake expensive stone.

It’s a Totem with a mocking laugh.

Hirst then created an exhibition in Venice in which he invented a phantom vessel .

Via a mesmerising  storytelling, he says that everything you want to be  true,  becomes true, including a rediscovered treasure, which is an invention in order to create busts inspired by Barbies and tributes to Mickey and Andy Warhol (not by chance).

‘The treasure from the wreck of the unbelievable’ is an  exhibition where the game between reality and fiction is an heir of Marcel  Duchamp and more than ever a post modern and frankly irresistible creature.

Is it just a big commercial trick with the initial support of Saatchi? NO.

According  to  philosopher Josè Jimenez, this provocation is not inferior to the reach of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ in the second decade of the twentieth century or Man Ray’s  iron with nails. They are  short mental circuits that redraw the role of contemporary artist today.

Hirst said he loved having a factory (like Warhol with the factory) that produced his work, but not a factory for ideas.

The idea is everything. The idea must be preserved. This is why the shark has another title, which obliges us to rethink its meaning: ‘The physical impossibility of death in the head of a living being’.

Here is the brand: there is Damien Hirst who produces Damien Hirst. Like Prada or Gucci: just, to enjoy it, you pay more. You buy the name, the idea. But we buy an immortal idea, out of time, out of space, out of trend.

Hirst plays the game of meditation on death that goes from Duchamp to Warhol, in a contemporary key.The skull is the point of arrival of its aesthetics of death in a contemporary way.

“I’ve always liked the skulls, since my girlfriend told me ‘ You can not make skulls, they’re too glamorous ‘ and I decided to make skulls.

Probably, that’s why I made the one covered in diamonds. I love  skulls, I have a house in Mexico, they love skulls, and I like to keep doing them even when they are out of fashion and then fashionable and then out of fashion “. As a result, Art has ‘brands’ …

Koons is festive, he moves in a more playful universe,  Emin in  a pop-psychoanalytic universe with phrases from a sort of   private diary  , but the idea of  brand is the same.

 

Let’s hang from the  smiles of Murakami: Brand and icons everywhere, with a jump into performances in order  to undermine the physical order of a life invaded by labels.

To understand whether art today is a matter of entrepreneurship, a vocation, an aesthetic philosophy or  entertainment, there is the magnificent text by Sarah Thornton. The title is ’33 artists in three acts‘. About this book, Orozco said ‘we were all in underwear when he interviewed us; some of us managed to keep their socks’.

Here, the system is laid bare  to discover the artists’ talents and defects, in an intimate circle as fascinating as a novel, that leads back to Danto: art is out of history and totally free, among a thousand contradictions.

https://www.thearttime.com/it/art-contemporary-reviews-and-interviews/

Contemporary Art, from the twentieth century to today, is essentially the abstract universe (that is, abandonment of representation) or the breaking of the canvas (up to the transition to physical reality and the environment).

In the case of Barbara Matera, an italo-American artist who was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Art is made up of highly material abstract fragments, in an evocative yin and yang in which spirit and matter, idea and physical object duel in a battle that is harmonious even if dynamic.

There is, in her works, a chromatic tension supported by the thick consistency of the surface, a tension however devoid of danger: we are on a tightrope between the quiet Zen and the movement of natural forces, between blue, cobalt blue and gray ultramarines that have a dimension of a dreamlike and emotional space, that is  noetic and logical at the same time.

The artistic research moves and focuses on the materials that embody the idea, panoramas of the mind or the soul, depending on how you want to read them . In a word, it is an art free to ‘wander’, but it does so by speaking a clear, linear, even concrete language.

We are in front of works that refer to a canvas of Abstract Expressionism, of Rothko in the first place, with  primary energies, a subjectivity of the author, a painting of “depth” come to light, as in those painters. Even with unequivocal references to that New York School, it is a new art, a new way of creating artworks.

As in that school, you stay on the canvas but you tend to go beyond the margins, you do not come out of the paper, through a performance, for example, but ‘perform’ on the paper, you let the space tends to cross, that the color drips, that the knots of the material – felt intertwine autonomously as threads of scattered, but controlled thoughts.

They are works like fields of circulating energies, like something ‘happened’ captured in the moment of their epiphany, in a hunger of trespassing sometimes evident, sometimes held (in long and narrow geometric lines), in a painting that crystallizes on the support as a pearl from the Bergsonian time series, fragments of a ‘continuum’ that is not broken, but caught in part.

The intricate filaments of felt, the entanglement of soft materials unite the strength of the emergence of primary deep energies (Freud’s Es, tout court) to the substantial subsistence of real matter that claims a primary place, as pulsating as the etheric energies of mind and emotions.

Emotional impulses mean this, literally: moving out, becoming incarnated on the surface and bringing the artist and the spectator to the surface.

Graduated also in Sociology, the relationship between men and between man and the environment is the thematic focus of the artistic research of Barbara Matera: even when she remains on the canvas, without creating installations or performances or video art that she has often dealt with, the connection with the space out there, with the real world, with the environment that we live is around the corner, beyond the visual field and beyond the bidimensionality of the canvas.

For the artist, Art can and must cause awareness, change and put people and things in relation.

Matter, as in Arte Povera, is the first step to speak to the heart of man and to evoke, bring to the surface, cause ‘belonging’. The support is handmade paper with carded wool or linen and the felt with lacustrine, marine and sidereal colors leans on the surface bringing to light Rothkian memories, but also the ‘here and now’ of a daily aesthetic made of rags, ropes, sacks or, just simply, felt.

We are looking for an Art that goes to the origin of Life, of the energies that govern it and of the deep ego that determines emotions and actions behind the scenes.

For this reason it is an Art that enters under the skin, which is touched, that has thickness but also that ‘touches us’, opening the mind to infinite connections with the ‘Oltre’, made of sea depths, lake sludge, skies, in a word of Infinity. Nature and the memories and relationships that man has with her, in all its facets, are the vanishing point to which these works tend, with an intense vibration of energy in every knot, in every tangle, in every curve or straight ahead of our gaze.

RG

 

We often ask ourselves: is this art? There is no art without Aura.ART CONSULTANT ITALY

The aura is the charisma of the artist, depositary of an idea, beyond the role of  technè, a Greek definition of art, still valid but not sufficient.

Technique, but – above all – Art is an idea.

In ‘Theory of Art’, Josè Jimenez explains well how the Idea, the Noesis, the mental process is the basis of most of the twentieth century art, is the real revolution, even more than the abolition of perspective and the creation of Abstract art.

Writes Andy Warhol (guru of Pop and emblem of the risk, according to Arthur Danto, of the end of the Art, with his ‘Brillo Box’, a supermarket box, exhibited in a Museum), in The philosophy of Andy Warhol:

“Some companies were interested in buying my Aura. They did not want my products, they kept telling me: We want your Aura” …ART CONSULTANT ITALY

“I could never understand what they wanted, but they would have been willing to pay a bunch of dollars for it. I thought then that if someone was willing to pay so much, I would have to try to imagine WHAT  IT WAS “.

No, Art did not die with the “Brillo box” on display and the Aura not even, Danto retracted years later in another book, stating that it transforms itself, like a mutant, but does not die. Warhol himself speaks of this mystery of the artist’s Aura. Desecrating, ironic and iconic.

 

Iconic, a key adjective. The Aura, this ineffable essence of an artist, à la Man Ray or à la Piero Manzoni (that was the artist’s breath, but always …a charismatic breath), is certainly Iconic. An artist fixes the charismatic image of artistic creativity in an idea: The Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, the mustache of his Gioconda, the Iron with nails (a menacingly erotic object but also daily useless and dangerous) of Man Ray, to make only few famous examples.

Also the nail planted in the middle of the canvas of George Braque “Vase  and Violin” in  1909-10 was an Idea. It was, first,  a real object, part of a two-dimensional canvas . Second, indeed, it was  an IDEA, with its indisputable iconic Aura.

The examples could be endless, up to the current Damien Hirst with its iconic provocations from the beginning of his work, Jeff Koons with his Puppies and so on…

Alessandro dal Lago writes, in his illuminating text “Mercanti d’Aura”, that the aura is alive and sells well.CONSULTANT ITALY

Museums buy it, collectors want it, the public remains sometimes dismayed, sometimes attracted. It sells.

For us , “wishing machines”, it is the object of desire, a material possession that hides and reveals an immaterial possession thousand times more powerful, because iconic, almost divine in its idea of ​​beauty.

Walter Benjamin opened the gap on the theme of the Aura’s ability to survive the era of artistic technical reproduction in his famous text so far.

The aura of uniqueness that enveloped the classical or traditional work was no longer matched in contemporary art. Today, the Aura defines the aptitude of a work of art to produce a given effect on the public in terms similar to what precisely in philosophy or sociology (see Max Weber) is defined CHARISMA.

Movements such as Dada, Futurism, Cubism were affecting every claim of hieraticity of art, with objects stuck on canvases, poems like SALAD OF WORDS, de-sacralization of the image and so on.

Three major themes can be affirmed according to Del Lago on the loss of the dreaded aura in the twentieth century:ART CONSULTANT ITALY

1-art is de-sacralized, also because of an ever larger public starting from the nineteenth century;

2-this sort of de-sacralization is enhanced by the mechanical reproduction of images;

3-the Avant – gardes, finally, determine almost the funeral of the aura, with their research of materials and languages ​​that come from everyday life. It is  the exact opposite of what Art  had done up to that moment, sacralizing, creating timeless and non – temporal altars. It now tolerates the “transeunte”(passer-by).

The Aura does not die, just as Art does not die; it does not disappear but  itchanges, transforms, evolves.

The Aura of a work is the effect it produces, an effect that changes with the type of work and the type of audience.

Aura and Simulacrum are two terms that can be approached in contemporary art.

The Simulacrum derives from the Latin simulare, meaning statue. In reality, the Simulacrum goes far beyond this.

It is an entity that, although not exclusively for use, goes beyond an idea.

Art, with its charismatic aura, whether classical or contemporary, has always created simulacra. Monna Lisa, for example, the famous Gioconda, is neither the true lady of Florence nor her idea, even if it is both . But it goes beyond: beyond reality and beyond the idea, united to us through that charismatic thing  called Aura.

We must add a typical fact of art today: its tendency, like everything in economics, to become BRAND. A ‘branded’ simulacrum, sponsored, promoted wisely, but no less powerful. Today it is the brand itself that wants to be Art, acutely analyzes Dal Lago.

Foucault, to close this quick excursus on the charisma of the idea in contemporary art,  has well understood what this Simulacrum is.

It was  Pop Art the emblematic Art   of our time,  as Arthur Danto wrote.

After the Idea in the techniques of the historical avant-gardes, Pop Art is the most powerful thing that represented the art of this time, an art capable of rendering the role of images in our cultural imaginary at best.

The world seen as a giant collection of Simulacra, all the same because they are objects of a universal exchange and all different because life is constantly changing, a sort of supermarket and  superfetation of art.

We are, today more than ever (even more than in the time of Warhol, in our time enhanced with Instagram, Pinterest and  various social platforms) condemned to images, to live of them, while remaining, for now, it seems, the possibility to choose between them .

The Aura survives because Art becomes so over time, ever more mutating, but as an Art, it remains.

As the charisma is immaterial, what remains is the idea, the values ​​it transmits to us, not the object itself.

Art creates civilization, always.

ART CONSULTANT ITALY

https://www.thearttime.com/it/art-contemporary-reviews-and-interviews/

 

 

The 2018 edition of the Basel fair has just been closed; art,  style, market blended together with the highest levels of turnout, attention and tendency.

Four days of artistry, creativity, imagination, vip collectors and worldliness. Art DeLuxe version.

Some highlights of artistic highlights were:

– Lee-Perrotin: the exhibition of the French Bernard Frize in the twinning space Simon Lee + Galerie Perrotin; an adjoining and suggestive space placed on two different floors has hosted the airy and abstract colors of the evocative painter

– History of the art at its climax: tribute to Robert Indiana (and its iconic Love Pop) and double tribute to Sebastian Matta and Marcel Duchamp for the Swiss gallery Gmurszynska, also based in New York,

– 20th century in the foreground: a tribute to the development of trends that marked the twentieth century (Mirò, Picasso, Calder among others) wanted by the London gallery Helly Nahmad

– Picasso superstar: in conjunction with the blockbuster show  at the Tate Modern dedicated to the iconic artist, Basel also celebrates Picasso and his women with the Fondation Beyeler: a bronze of lover Dora Maar, three masterpieces and other faceted faces of the Thirties, that literally saw his triumph with legendary female paintings;

– Ruinart and Liu Bolin: the Chinese artist, known as The Invisible Man, was the partner artist of the champagne house for the Basel 2018 edition

– NetJets and street art: after 17 years of partnership between NetJets and Art Basel, the airline collaborates with Oli-B, street artist, painter and illustrator of Brussels; at the NetJets vip lounge of Art Basel collectors lounge, Oli-B has positioned an innovative installation on various surfaces (canvas, paper, wood and wall) with multiple techniques, including sprays, acrylic paints and digital printing techniques

Some comments on the market:

– Numerous influx of European, Chinese and Korean collectors;

– The buyers came from a hundred different countries and four hundred museums and nearly a hundred thousand visitors in terms of public; 239 were the galleries and 4000 artists present

– The sales went well, despite having been flocking for two weeks at New York auctions; Michael Findley, director of the famous NYC Aquavella gallery, told ArtEconomy24 that “Buyers compare prices and want to negotiate, they are informed, they are not interested in arriving first, but in buying works to be preserved over time“.

– Among the historicized artists, the sales records belong to the American Joan Mitchell (Levy Gorvy of New York sold a 1959 Untitled – oil on canvas – for 14 million dollars, Hauser & Wirth a canvas of 1959 for the same amount; Zwirner, a piece from 1959 to 7.5 million dollars ).In view of two important institutional exhibitions in the US in 2019, Mitchell’s prices are destined to rise. Also Louise Bourgeois from Hauser & Wirth was one of the artists who reached a higher value: The Three Graces of 1947 reached 4.75 million dollars; Andy Warhol from Pace with a portrait of the Garland was sold at a price not unveiled.

– Brilliant and ‘social’ young artists in the contemporary section: from Esther Schipper in Berlin there was a great work by Anri Sala created together with refugee children, each of whom the artist asked to bite an apple and observe the traces of the bite. A reflection on one’s own identity, but also on the process of registering refugees. The photographs of the fruits, retouched by brush, were hung at different heights to reproduce the notes on the score of the German national anthem (the price is not prevented).

– The very young Frenchman Jean Marie Appriou (from Eva Presenhuber) pointed out, starting from fiction bases to create figurative sculptures (heads) in traditional materials.

– It was also noted a magnificent Kounellis: with a “untitled” of 1966, a large black rose (selling price 5.5 million dollars). Provenance unknown. (*)

Art Basel is not a fair, it is a symbol – a central event in the art system, so iconic that it even dominates its own content. It is brand, fashion, system, culture and, of course, business.

(*) The sun 24 hours, 24 June 2018, for the quotations of the works; S.A.Barillà.

INTRO

For an art consultant, one the most exciting subject is art market change.

Among the most interesting articles read on the art market, the one in June’s The Art Newspaper stands out ; here,  Melanie Gerlis deals with the theme of the global economy in relation to the chance of art to prosper and sell.

Because Art, in order to continue to create ideas, must sell. Ça va sans dire. And this is a fundamental concept for an art consultant.

The first staple of his analysis is that the millenials do not seem to show the same gene as the previous generation in terms of collecting.

“Nobody wants to own anything anymore. It is about experiencing things, sharing them and being-in-the-moment. From the digital revolution, algorithms prevail over the physical world “.

POSSESSION OR EXPERIENCE

The statement is not weightless. From a certain point of view, this is a wonderful thing that has helped to flourish crowdsourcing and re-use of material to produce new objects, for example. According to another, it is not good news: the art market relies on the cult of possession. A collector who does not want to own is not a collector.

This shift from ownership to a sort of shared economy, in which companies such as Uber and Airbnb work for example, is on the agenda of important issues for market leaders.

Will the art of the future be more an object of experience? Mark Spiegler, general manager of Art Basel, the most important and trendy fair in the world, says that we should not overestimate this trend of the times that also comes in the art market, but should certainly be taken into account.

There are some positive effects for the art in all this: if on the one hand the ‘fetishization’ of the “single piece” could be decreasing, the works in multiple editions, such as photography, prints and ceramics, are more and more popular and help to expand the attractiveness of the art market.

Furthermore, some Museums invite visitors to share the exhibited works on Instagram, which is once again a sign of democratization of the potential audience for the Arts.

Even the forms of Patronage are changing. If collectors have historically supported artists by acquiring their jobs in the primary market, they are now investing in production directly.

Sharing and supporting becomes more interesting than the acquisition or investment aimed at speculation, as Alain Servais, a member of FRIENDS OF LISTE, says, a brilliant program that reduced the expenses for the gallery exhibitions of the galleries of the Liste art fair of this year.

CONCLUSIONS

 

Art intermediaries are experimenting with ways of monetizing experiences (there are people who pay up to $ 50 a day for the experience of seeing dealers selling art in Basel during Art Basel).

The point is perhaps to try to quantify how exactly this macroeconomic change will change the art market. It’s a market niche and a handful of good buyers are enough to keep up appearances. 

Still, therefore, explains Spiegler, “the galleries and artists who can make buying and possessing art an experience, have a guaranteed natural future”. *

The  Jimi Hendrix’s phrase “have you been experienced?” belongs more than ever to the current niche of the economic-artistic universe. 

 

* in Fair Dailies, www.theartnewspaper.com