From April 4 through September 9, the Tate Modern will stage the first serious UK exhibition of major works by Damien Hirst, one of Britain’s most influential, controversial and wealthy artists. Many of his famous sculptures — including, of course, the famous/infamous shark suspended in formaldehyde — will be on display. It’s our job to get you better acquainted with the exhibit. So let’s have Damien Hirst, the artist himself, take you on a tour of the big affair. The program above, Damien Hirst — The First Look, originally aired on Channel 4 in the UK. You can also watch Hirst wander through the exhibition with curator Ann Gallagher right here. Finally, you might want to spend a few minutes with a review by Oliver Wallington, an artist who wonders whether the emperor of art “has no clothes.” Or scan the review at The Guardian, which quietly raises eyebrows of its own.
Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses
A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse. Back in the mid-1930s, George Macey, an American publisher, approached the celebrated painter and asked him how many etchings he could provide for $5,000. Although it’s widely believed that Matisse never read Joyce’s sprawling classic (despite being given a French translation of the text), he did come back with 26 full-page illustrations, all of them based on six themes from Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that Ulysses consciously plays upon. In 1935, an illustrated edition of Ulysses was printed. Matisse signed 1500 copies; Joyce only 250. And today a copy signed by both artists will run you a cool $37k. Buy, hey, the shipping is only $6.
Odysseus Blinding Polyphemus
Odysseus and Nausicaa
Odysseus’ Ship
Salvador Dali Gets Surreal with Mike Wallace (RIP) in 1958
This weekend, Mike Wallace died at the age of 93. As The New York Times observes in its obit, Wallace was “a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for 60 Minutes over four decades.” But before he became a fixture on 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace hosted his own short-lived TV show in the late 1950s, The Mike Wallace Interview, which let Americans get an up-close and personal view of some legendary figures — Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, Ayn Rand and Gloria Swanson.
Above, we’re bringing back Mike Wallace’s memorable interview with Salvador Dali in 1958. For the better part of a half hour, Wallace tried to demystify “the enigma that is Salvador Dali,” and it didn’t go terribly well. It turns out that surrealist painters give surreal answers to conventional interview questions too. Pretty quickly, Wallace capitulates and says, “I must confess, you lost me halfway through.” Happily for us, the video makes for some good viewing more than 50 years later.
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The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986
During his short lifetime, Jean-Michel Basquiat made a big impression on the art world. As the teenage son of a Haitian father and Puerto Rican-American mother, he began spray-painting graffiti on walls in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, and within a few years he emerged as a leading exponent of the Neo-Expressionism Movement that flourished in the 1980s.
When Basquiat was 19 he met the Pop artist Andy Warhol, and the two men formed a close connection. In Victor Bockris’s Warhol: A Biography, long-time Warhol assistant Ronny Cutrone describes the relationship:
It was like some crazy art-world marriage and they were the odd couple. The relationship was symbiotic. Jean-Michel thought he needed Andy’s fame, and Andy thought he needed Jean-Michel’s new blood. Jean-Michel gave Andy a rebellious image again.
In this scene from the British documentary series, State of the Art, we catch a glimpse of the two together in 1986, just a year before Warhol’s untimely death due to complications from surgery, and two year’s before Basquiet died of an overdose of heroin. He was only 27 years old.
Note: If you have problems hearing the sound, please turn your computer speakers up, and make sure the volume bar in the YouTube video (lower left) is cranked up.
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Vintage Footage of Picasso and Jackson Pollock Painting … Through Glass
via @JesseBDylan
Art for the One Percent: 60 Minutes on the Excess & Hubris of the International Art Market
In 1993, CBS 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer ruffled a few feathers in the art world with a piece called “Yes…But is it Art?” The program featured works made up of things like vacuum cleaners, empty canvases–even a can of human feces, which the artist had labeled “Merda d’artista.”
On Sunday, Safer returned with a report on the excess and hubris of the international art market. The segment (above) was taped in December at Art Basel Miami Beach, a gathering billed as “the most prestigious art show in the Americas,” where exhibitors pay $150,000 to show their wares to a clientele of millionaires and billionaires who fly in for the event on private jets.
Safer’s report, “Art Market,” is more an exercise in social criticism than art criticism. Naturally some people took it personally. “Now that Andy Rooney has gone up to that big grumpychamber in the sky,” wrote Stephanie Murg on the Media Bistro “UnBeige” blog, “Morley Safer has taken over the role of irascible clean-up hitter for the doddering team of Bad News Bears that is 60 Minutes.”
In a piece on the “Arts Beat” blog headlined “Safer Looks at Art but Only Hears the Cash Register,” critic Roberta Smith called Safer’s return visit to the art world “a relatively toothless, if still quite clueless, exercise”:
Moving down the aisles he uttered some dismissive phrases like “the cute, the kitsch and the clumsy” while the camera passed often inconsequential work that was left unidentified. Mention was made of performance and video art. Occasionally he mustered feeble attempts to be receptive. There was a respectful pause in the aspersions as the camera passed a canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, although her name was not mentioned. Kara Walker was referred to as a “truly talented artist.” At the Metro Pictures booth it was hard to know whether he liked the work of Cindy Sherman, but he noted that her photographs sold for $4 million (glossing over the fact that only one did).
At one point on Safer’s stroll there is a chilly encounter with art dealer Larry Gagosian, who has galleries on three continents.
“At least say hello,” says Safer.
“Hey Morley,” says Gagosian, without getting up from his chair or offering the 80-year-old man a seat. “You always look so dapper. I love that.”
Regardless of whether you love the art Gagosian sells at his galleries in Beverly Hills, Paris, Geneva and at least eight other cities around the world, you have wonder at the economic reality Safer’s report exposes. At a time when unemployment in America is still well above 8 percent, when more than one in five mortgage holders have negative equity in their homes, when the top one percent of the population is pocketing 93 percent of the gains from a glacial economic recovery, Safer’s piece does what a work of art should: it opens the eyes.
Safer’s 1993 report:
Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web
Last February, Google launched Art Project, which lets users take a virtual tour of 1,000 works of art from 17 great museums — from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, to the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Now comes news that Art Project has greatly expanded its coverage, giving users access to 30,000 high-resolution artworks appearing in 151 museums across 40 countries. The virtual tour includes paintings but also sculpture, street art and photographs. And you can now explore collections (see all) from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the Museu De Arte Moderna De São Paulo in Brazil, and the Tokyo National Museum. This is all part of Google’s effort to bring cultural artifacts to the broadest possible audience. Just last week, the folks at Googleplex helped launch the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive and, before that, a high resolution version of The Dead Sea Scrolls. All we can say is keep it coming!
via Google Blog
Andy Warhol Digitally Paints Debbie Harry with the Amiga 1000 Computer (1985)
Say what you will about mid-eighties American culture, but how many historical moments could bring together a world-famous visual artist and rock star over a genuinely innovative consumer product? Maybe Apple could orchestrate something similar today; after all, we endure no drought of celebrity enthusiasm for iPods, iPads, iMacs, and iPhones. But could they come up with participants to match the iconic gravity of Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry? In the clip above, both of them arrive at the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, and the silver-wigged one sits down to demonstrate the personal computer’s then-unparalleled graphical power by “painting” the Blondie frontwoman’s portrait. He tints it blue, clicks some red paint bucket here, clicks some yellow paint bucket there, and before we know it, we’re gazing upon a Warholian image ready for admiration, one we too could wield the digital power to create for a mere $1295 — in 1985 dollars.
To watch Warhol at the Amiga is to watch a man encounter a machine whose functions dovetail uncannily well with his own. The way he uses the computer casts a light on what people seem to find most brilliant and most infuriating about his work. “All he does is select fill and click on her hair and it turns yellow and its done?” types one YouTube commenter. “Her face is fucking blue.” Departing from the standard tone of YouTube discourse, another commenter tries to break it down: “As an artist myself, I find Andy Warhol a genius in making himself famous for art that anyone can do. I could take the same picture of Debra [sic] Harry and do the same thing in Photoshop. Andy Warhol was great at being Andy Warhol. His art was simply an extension of himself — simple and colorful.” Indeed, Warhol and Harry alike seem to understand that their work consists as much in the material they produce as in who they are, leaving no discernible boundary between the identity and value of the creator and the identity and value of the created.
Dedicated enthusiasts of Andy Warhol and/or the Commodore Amiga might also give his 1986 interview in Amiga World a look, despite its sketchy scan quality. It took place during the production of the MTV music- and talk-show Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, whose Amiga-enhanced promo spot (which features Debbie Harry) you can watch above. “Do you think [the Amiga] will push the artists?” Amiga World asks. “Do you think that people will be inclined to use all the different components of the art, music, video, etc.?” “That’s the best part about it,” Warhol replies. “An artist can really do the whole thing. Actually, he can make a film with everything on it, music and sound and art… everything.” “How do you feel about the fact that everyone’s work will now look like your own?” Amiga World asks. “But it doesn’t,” Warhol replies. Alas, Andy Warhol would not live to take advantage of the unprecedentedly rapid development of computer technology the nineties would bring, but that particular revolution has offered us all, in some sense, the chance to get Warholian.
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Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Nico, and More
Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss
Steven Spielberg Admits Swallowing a Transistor to Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Making Paper in L.A., Pianos in Paris: Old Craftsmen Hanging on in a Changing World
In a world of accelerating obsolescence, of plastic products and digital information, a few old-school craftsman are still hanging on. But they’re getting harder and harder to find. In this pair of short films we meet a few craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic who are stubbornly persisting while the world changes around them. Above is Ink & Paper by Ben Proudfoot, a student at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. It tells the story of the men who run the last surviving letterpress printing company in downtown Los Angeles, and the oldest paper company. Below is Le Mer de Pianos (The Sea of Pianos) by Tom Wrigglesworth and Mathieu Cuvelier, about the man who has spent 28 years (the last 15 as owner) running the oldest piano repair shop in Paris.
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