Thursday, May 20, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Appropriation
Salon 94 Richard Prince Hippie Punk...
Richard Prince
Agreed regarding the Prince works. His is the only show I'll be catching between now and the fall (other than the Picasso at the Met and a few other museums shows).
Prince is the current "heavy hitter darling." I have no doubt the current pieces in this show will fetch a nice price. his "nurse series" from just six-ish years ago had original gallery prices off $50-60K subsequently sold for multi-millions. One such painting went at auction a mere three weeks ago for 6 million.
At any rate... seen as the potentially most astute of the "appropriation artists" of the early 80s, it is his concentration on mass manipulative communication (i.e. advertising and the seductions employed by advertising) that is his on-going focus; and critics (accepting the uber-obvious as significance par excellence) bank on the cache that "he" is the first artist to realize how insidious advertising in combination with popular culture is in our lives, yadda yadda yadda.
Prince is considered to be the only contemporary artist to realize how insidious media exposure and over-saturation is. No less than the curator of photography at the Met, has written, "(Prince) is absolutely essential to what's going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It's not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives."
It is dominant only because it is constant. Thus, what else is constant? The text crawls at the bottom of the TV screen? The idolatry of near-hookerism in women's fashion? I.E.D. explosions? In terms of mining nostalgic images... it is always "what" to mine that is crucial. Let's see... the yellow plastic 45 rpm spindle adaptors have been done... it may require combining images... for example a Chatty Kathy doll riding a mini-bike... well you get the picture.
Agreed regarding the Prince works. His is the only show I'll be catching between now and the fall (other than the Picasso at the Met and a few other museums shows).
Prince is the current "heavy hitter darling." I have no doubt the current pieces in this show will fetch a nice price. his "nurse series" from just six-ish years ago had original gallery prices off $50-60K subsequently sold for multi-millions. One such painting went at auction a mere three weeks ago for 6 million.
At any rate... seen as the potentially most astute of the "appropriation artists" of the early 80s, it is his concentration on mass manipulative communication (i.e. advertising and the seductions employed by advertising) that is his on-going focus; and critics (accepting the uber-obvious as significance par excellence) bank on the cache that "he" is the first artist to realize how insidious advertising in combination with popular culture is in our lives, yadda yadda yadda.
Prince is considered to be the only contemporary artist to realize how insidious media exposure and over-saturation is. No less than the curator of photography at the Met, has written, "(Prince) is absolutely essential to what's going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It's not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives."
It is dominant only because it is constant. Thus, what else is constant? The text crawls at the bottom of the TV screen? The idolatry of near-hookerism in women's fashion? I.E.D. explosions? In terms of mining nostalgic images... it is always "what" to mine that is crucial. Let's see... the yellow plastic 45 rpm spindle adaptors have been done... it may require combining images... for example a Chatty Kathy doll riding a mini-bike... well you get the picture.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Painting
About Gerard Richter...
The overhead projector-aided traced oil paintings of photographs throughout his career are his more successful pieces (in my opinion)... insofar as the abstracts are paint phenomenon(s)... meaning "paint being paint" as opposed to "speaking through paint".... at any rate, this is my reading.
To the extent that he is at his core an optical visual artist... the carryover habit of the employment of pure optics involved in replicating photographs is evidenced in the abstracts and renders them handsome but almost exclusively as uncommunicative and impersonal mark-making.
Now, it goes without saying that purist mark marking is not negative. Eva Hesse is a positive example of that in early mid-60s paintings--see her 1962 Blind Swimmer (above), but Richter's abstractions smack a bit too much of DeKooning-like scale and feel to be digested as a new topic/perspective or emotion. Again... my opinion... see what you think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)