Takashi Murakami at Versailles

VERSAILLES, France—There was a striking abundance of smiles at the famed Château de Versailles for the opening of a show that detractors have denounced as speculative neo-vandalism, pornographic provocation, and a blight on France’s prized heritage. The sculpted manga-like resin characters smiled. The face-endowed flowers, peering across prints and carpets, smiled. Takashi Murakami, the guest of honor, smiled. As did Jean Jacques Aillagon, the embattled president of the Château de Versailles, assailed for inviting the provocative likes of Jeff Koons and French artist Xavier Veilhan into rooms formerly reserved for the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, the ill-fated Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette.

"Takashi Murakami’s works are joyous and Versailles is a palace destined for happiness, joy, and merriment," proclaimed Aillagon.

The Murakami exhibition officially opens September 14, but tourists already posed for pictures in front of the Japanese contemporary artist’s ‘Tongari-Kun’ in the Salon d’Hercule and milled around the ‘Flower Matango’ in the Galerie des Glaces. "I think we are not here for Takashi Murakami," urged one tour guide, reminding his group that the centuries-old French castle had other, more storied attractions. There were further hints that dissent over the Murakami show had permeated the gilded walls. "There are so many other places where they could exhibit this sort of thing," lamented another guide.

"All of this stems from misunderstanding," Murakami said of the opposition to the show. "Let’s take baseball or soccer. When one team scores, there are always people who are unhappy, get angry, and voice this. I respect that, but my task is entirely different. I wouldn’t make even the slightest change to my creations. This is not a time for bowing and trying to please everyone. Mine is a work of confrontation between the old and the new."

Aillagon found the parallels, noting that the much-loved Louis XIV can be found in the guise of Hercules, Apollo, or Alexander across the hallways at Versailles and that Pop and contemporary art have similarly seized cultural icons to explore and critique. "Artworks must not be locked into ghettos, or mutually exclusive categories," he mused.

Murakami revealed that, even in Japan, criticism had come to the point of "unabashed Murakami-bashing," mainly on social networking Web sites. "This is probably the most complicated show I’ve done, due to the location," the artist said.

Aillagon has mounted a strong defense of his reign at Versailles, dismissing criticism as right-wing and conservative ranting and suggesting that his successor would follow closely in his footsteps. He noted that controversy had also followed Marc Chagall’s commission to adorn the ceiling of the Paris Opera and the windows of the Reims Cathedral with his work.

"I find it very pleasant when an exhibition sparks debate, but not when it turns to controversy," Aillagon said. "Debate is grounded in intelligence and reason, controversy is grounded in excessive passion, prejudice, and contempt. I find it sad when you criticize a show before seeing it, even before the first artwork has arrived. It’s scandalous when people don’t like an artist or a show and therefore want to have it banned. That is unacceptable social censorship."

Murakami said he had made several visits to Versailles as the project advanced. "I discovered the Sun King’s emblematic presence everywhere, through the golden coloring. I wanted this to echo into my work, which is why certain pieces are covered in golden leaves, among them the 'Oval Buddha' in the garden." Murakami had wanted to install three outdoor sculptures but settled for one.

Notably (though unsurprisingly) absent from the Versailles show are Murakami’s most controversial works, "My Lonesome Cowboy" and "Hiropon," along with their novel depictions of semen and breast milk. The raunchiest piece is the long-legged "Miss Ko2," in the Salon de la guerre.

The artist referred to his two notorious works as "big breasts" and "big penis man." He said, "My main theme is that of the social monster. It so happens that this monster could take on an erotic appearance. But I don’t want my authorship of those works to lock me into an 'erotica' category. I’m just a very normal artist," Murakami said. "Lonesome Cowboy" could have caused some trouble, admitted Aillagon, adding that "it’s best not to unnecessarily provoke scandal or give fodder to those who say we deliberately put on shows for shock value."

Rest assured, there is still nudity in the show. "Sculptures such as 'Tongari-Kun' (with the tongue-in-cheek alias, 'Mr Pointy'), 'Oval Buddha,' and 'The Emperor’s New Clothes' are all male,” said Murakami. "Of course, the 'weenies' are so small that you would think they weren’t even there. But I invite you to take a closer look.”

"Takashi is a bit of a prude," joked the show’s curator, Laurent Le Bon, who is also director of the Centre Pompidou’s new venture in Metz. "This exhibition effectively holds the tiniest micro-penis in the world."

The Murakami show can be enjoyed at the Château de Versailles until December 12. 

 VERSAILLES

source: Nicolai Hartvig for Artinfo

With a Revolutionary White Chair, the Rijksmuseum Eases into 20th Century Design

AMSTERDAM— Marking a sea change in its mission, the venerated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, famed for its masterpieces by Vermeer and Rubens, has jumped to the 20th century with a major acquisition of Dutch-made design icon Gerrit Rietveld’s White Chair. Acquired for an undisclosed sum from Leigh Keno, the storied American furniture specialist (and familiar face on the Antiques Roadshow), the rare monochrome chair, designed in 1918 and hand-made by Rietveld in 1923 as a commission from avant-garde writer and De Stijl art-movement aficionado Til Brugman, is already on view at the museum (through October 4), along with another recent acquisition, a 1963 Zero Group abstract relief by Jan Schoonhoven.
Keno, an avid collector of European Modernist furniture, including works by Arne Jacobsen and Carlo Mollino, acquired the chair at Christie’s Amsterdam in May 2007, paying a record €264,000 ($355,724; est. €50-80,000), and kept it in his Manhattan apartment until the fall of last year, when the Rijksmuseum approached him.
"I saw it in an ad from Christie’s," said Keno in a phone interview, "and I just decided to buy it." In Keno’s view, the chair, with its rectilinear frame, which is as much a work of painted sculpture as a piece of furniture, "changed the way people think about furniture" and is "the quintessential 20th century chair."
What is most remarkable about the chair and its allure is the Brugman provenance, including the piece's appearance in a 1923 photograph of the writer’s music room in The Hague, which Vilmos Huszar, the de Stijl artist and co-founder of the movement, re-designed to form a striking "space-color composition" in gray, black, and white.
Brugman was a close friend of Piet Mondrian, the star of the de Stijl movement, and was close with other Dutch avant-garde artists and architects of the 1920s. She also had an affair with German Dada artist Hannah Hoch. When it was sold at Christie’s, the catalogue entry described the chair as a "White-lacquered Red-Blue Chair," referring to the decidedly more common and still mass-produced Rietveld chair painted in those primary colors.
"There is no such thing as a 'red-blue chair,'" said Ludo van Halem, the Rijksmuseum curator of 20th century art who initiated the acquisition. "The easy chair that Rietveld made could be ordered in different kinds of wood and any desired color." According to the curator, the use of the more familiar name for Rietveld’s creation came about because, "there is no other 'red-blue' easy-chair which has this well-documented link to the international avant-garde. It’s a chair many of the star artists of the 1920s sat upon."
In van Halem’s estimation, there are about 25 known and documented Rietveld chairs executed prior to 1940 and only three or four can be exactly dated. One resides in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a second is in the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, and the third is now in the Rijksmuseum.
"This is by far the best-documented chair I’ve ever come across of Rietveld’s," said Marcel Brouwer, a specialist at Amsterdam’s Gavelers auction house who handled the negotiations on behalf of the museum, and coincidentally took in the consignment of the White Chair when it sold in 2007 at Christie’s. "It embodies the de Stijl Movement."
Unlike its better-known, brightly painted cousin, the White Chair has a rather spartan and decidedly unadorned look to it. Leigh Keno joked that "anyone who would have come into my place to rob it, they would have taken the $10 stereo and stepped on the chair to get to it."
But Keno was dead serious about proving its importance. Before a group of Rijksmuseum curators and conservators came to Keno’s Manhattan gallery — now the new headquarters for Keno Auctions — last fall to inspect the chair (at the same time the museum’s famed Vermeer "Milkmaid" painting opened at the Metropolitan Museum in a rare loan), Keno already had the paint tested at Winterthur in Delaware by Jennifer Mass, its chief scientist. The tests confirmed its age and identified a second coat of paint had been applied in the 1940’s.
"Everything came out with flying colors," said Keno of the sophisticated testing. The dealer declined to say what price he sold the chair for, though he noted, "I didn’t get rich and that wasn’t the intention. I’m just happy it went to the museum because I’ve always felt this chair is a national treasure." By price comparison to other Rietveld chairs that have sold at auction, the White Chair reigns supreme. A Dutch oak ZigZag chair by Rietfield, dated 1932-40, sold at Christie’s Amsterdam in March for €43,000 ($58,122; est. €10-15,000). Asked if the museum would continue its acquisitions of 20th century design, van Halem said, "this is our first Rietveld chair, but certainly not the last."

source: Artinfo, article by Judd Tully

We like: They All Hung Out at Max's

Like the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent swallowing its own tail in an eternal circle of self-consumption, the cultural imagination of New York continues to feed on its chattier, noisier, messier, more creatively jostling past, the present being too priced out and tamped down. The Algonquin Round Table, the Stork Club, Cedar Tavern, Studio 54—each has been given its permanent wing in the memory museum, and now it’s Max’s Kansas City’s retrospective moment. A restaurant and nightclub on Park Avenue South whose name had little to do with Max and even less to do with Kansas City, this magnet for artists, actors, musicians, poets, and fame moochers was opened in 1965 by Mickey Ruskin, one of those beneficent fairy god-fathers with a light, guiding hand, who seeded a “scene” and then let it flower until a downtown hangout became a star-strewn house party. The mottled glory that was Max’s is a two-part saga. From the mid-60s to the early 70s, it was thronged with painters, sculptors, and Zeus-browed critics, its in-crowd back room becoming the banquet spot for Andy Warhol and his apostles from the Factory. (Warhol’s flagship band, the Velvet Underground, recorded a live album there.) This gave way to the thundering hooves of glitter-rockers such as the New York Dolls in their platform wedges and lipstick pouts, bringing down the curtain on Act I. Max’s closed in 1974 and reopened in 1975 under new management and became the North Pole of the punk/New Wave movement to CBGB’s southern pole on the Bowery. Complementing Max’s two-part story (the club closed in 1981) is a two-pronged commemorative celebration this fall of its legacy: a lavishly illustrated coffee-table keepsake published by Abrams Image (with words by, among others, Lou Reed and Danny Fields) and a corresponding art exhibition at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery featuring vintage photos, paintings, and big-ass sculptures. Prepare to get Max-ed out!

source: Vanity Fair

We Like: Made in Heaven revisited

NEW YORK, NY.- When first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the paintings, sculptures and installations of Jeff Koons’ “Made in Heaven” series captured the public's imagination to such an extent that a solo show of the works at Sonnabend Gallery in New York the following year generated lines around the block. With “Made in Heaven,” Koons celebrated, in explicit sexual terms, his union with wife Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina. Depicting the pair as a contemporary Adam and Eve, works with such titles as Dirty Ejaculation and Ilonaʼs Asshole generated immediate controversy that overshadowed their complex dialogue with the history of art and provocative, and Koons’ exploration of the established values of traditional painting and photography. To this day, “Made in Heaven” remains the most debated work in the career of this celebrated artist.

On October 6th, and in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the original Venice presentation of this landmark series, Luxembourg & Dayan will unveil “Jeff Koons: Made in Heaven Paintings,” an exhibition of nine major canvases and one glass sculpture from the artist’s most renowned body of work. The exhibition will remain on view at the gallery through January 21, 2011.

“Jeff Koons: Made in Heaven Paintings” will be accompanied by a new book featuring an essay from curator and critic Alison M. Gingeras, as well as an extensive interview by artist Francesco Vezzoli with Riccardo Schicchi, the Italian photographer and pornographic film producer who collaborated with Staller in the 1980s and is widely credited with shaping her signature Heidi-like persona of La Cicciolina.

If Jeff Koons’ work over the past four decades has been devoted to the aestheticization of contemporary desire, “Made in Heaven” represents a moment of apotheosis. The paintings of the series reference art from the Baroque and Rococo periods – Bernini’s expressions of physical ecstasy as portal to the realm of the sublime, and the carefully staged, allusive love scenes of Fragonard and Boucher that titillated audiences of the day – and also draw upon the breakthroughs of such early modern painters as Courbet and Manet.

We Like: Alexander Gronsky at Foam

On 27 August Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents a new exhibition by Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky (b. Tallin, 1980). Gronsky is the winner of the 2010 Foam Paul Huf Award. This prize is organised by Foam and awarded each year to a young, promising international photographer under 35. Part of the prize is a show at Foam. Gronsky received the prize for his photographs of the post-Soviet landscape that he took between 2007 and 2010. The presentation features work from the series Less Than One and The Edge.Less than One is about regions in Russia’s vast hinterland where the average population density is less than one per square kilometre. The series looks at the evidence of human habitation in this oppressive, monotone Russian landscape. For The Edge, Gronsky looked closer to home. Here he examines the outskirts of Moscow. And while he explores the city’s periphery, Gronsky also tests the boundaries of photography. All the photos were taken during the long winter months and are dominated to a large extent by the whiteness of the snow, giving them an abstract, graphic appearance. Gronsky considers himself primarily a landscape photographer, although he manages to breathe new life into the genre in surprising ways. The Paul Huf Award jury hailed Gronsky as ‘a new docugraphic photographer who imbues his work with a narrative expressing an intimate distance; long off yet not far away, opening up a whole new world using an apparently traditional technique.’ In his photos of the immense Russian landscape, Gronsky investigates the impact of the surroundings on the emotions and behaviour of the individual. He comments that looking at his photography should evoke emotions similar to that of “thoughtless staring with a vague sense of unease at an undefined point somewhere in space”. Gronsky started photographing at the age of eighteen and has since won numerous prizes and honourable mentions. In 2003, he was chosen as finalist for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Master Class. In 2006, he was nominated for the Ian Parry Award and in 2008 for the Kadinsky Award. In 2009 he won the Linhof Young Photographer Award and the Aperture Portfolio Prize. That year also saw Gronsky’s portfolio appear in the annual Talent edition of Foam Magazine. His work has been published in numerous international magazines. Gronsky has been attached to Photographer.ru agency since2005

Seven Tips for Beginning Art Collectors

NEW YORK—Starting an art collection can be intimidating for a number of reasons: financial constraints, lack of a formal art background, or the attitude beginning collectors can be greeted with at certain galleries, a standard of customer service W.M. Hunt of the (friendly) Hasted Hunt Gallery describes as: “You could be set on fire and no one would give you a glass of water.” Last week, Hunt moderated a panel at Aperture Foundation’s gallery about the first steps to creating a photography collection. In principle, the advice applies to other sorts of art as well, though Hunt said, "Photography seems like a smaller field of dealers and auction houses. As overwhelming as it is, it's easier to negotiate and, at least in the past, the financial consequences weren't so huge." At the panel, Hunt talked to beginning collector Gael Zafrany, who works at Charles Schwartz Ltd., preserving and creating museum and personal collections; longtime collector David Kronn; Modern Art Obsession blogger Michael Hoeh; and designer Todd Oldham about their experiences as fledgling collectors. We gleaned the following pieces of advice on amassing pieces of art:

1. Focus on the future - Oldham forewent food for a week, he recounted, when he bought a pair of Cindy Sherman film stills from a Houston gallery before both either he or she was famous. “I knew that it would be worth it, and I had to have it,” he says, and was right: “In 1980 it was worth $500, and now it’s worth at least two—almost three—zeros more at the end of that.”

2. Be selfish - Hoeh, who works in finance in New York City, focused early in his collecting career on pieces that reflected his interests: industry and the city. Kronn amassed 11 photos by his “early obsession,” Irving Penn. The panelists agreed: A personal collection is for personal enjoyment, and collectors should buy what appeals to them, not what’s in fashion.

3. Do your homework - Although some collectors buy impulsively, Hoeh called purchasing “a methodical process,” especially for collectors with limited financial resources who need to be selective. Kronn said he has a collection of art books that rivals his collection of actual art; he also advised potential buyers to “look at as much work as possible.”

4. Have patience - Kronn suggested collectors develop a list of works and artists that interest them so they’ll be poised to acquire when opportunities present themselves. Oldham suggested to “show up wherever you can” (auctions, galleries, or anywhere else art is sold) and noted that the interesting works at Art Basel Miami Beach were not, in fact, in the convention center but at the satellite fairs.

5. Avoid the “gallerinas” - Those “glorified shopgirls,”, those snobby and stuck up ladies, as Oldham jokingly called them, are notoriously intimidating. Many of the panelists avoided them by buying their first pieces at benefit auctions, where, Zafrany said, museums donate works by under-the-radar artists to increase their exposure. Or buy from passionate and knowledgeable dealers.

6. Get bang for your buck - “I can’t collect what I really love because I can’t afford it,” Zafrany said, but her young collection is edgy and noteworthy nonetheless. She bought one of Thomas Allen’s pop-up pulp fiction pieces long before Aperture published a book about them. Another find was a New York City streetscape by Walker Evans that isn’t representative of his work but that Zafrany characterizes as a sweet, simple photo of the city she loves.

7. Haggle - While Hoeh said negotiating at galleries was uncommon even until the recent past, Oldham divulged that bargaining a sticker price down 10 percent is now “pretty standard.” Either way, there are other ways to manage price points: Kronn bought an Edward Weston on eBay; collectors can put down deposits over time; and it never hurts to have friends in the art world (and access to their insider discounts!). In the end, though, the most important thing to do when buying art is to "commit, commit, commit! Look at the hair on the back of your hands, listen to your heart, figure out if you can afford it, and then commit!"

source: Caroline Kinneberg, Artinfo.com

En Vogue: Fashion Photography

From Richard Avedon and Horst P. Horst to Mario Testino - the image of fashion photography was continuously and often surprisingly redefined in the course of the past century. Now these pictures are emerging as coveted collectors' items

The American fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) had a gift for staging his pictures in unusual settings: In 1955 he had an elegant young lady pose between two dancing circus elephants to offset an evening dress by Dior. The model seems to relate perfectly to the gentle giants. the Hamburg-based fashion photographer F.C. Gundlach, 81, who is now one of the world's leading collectors of fashion photographs, took a picture of two models in Open Art bathing caps against the background of the pyramids of Giza in 1966. However the times in which fashion photography served the purely illustrative purpose of capturing an elegant model in a breathtaking setting, completely void of any irony, are long since gone. Since the beginning of the 1990s, trendy glossy magazines have carried advertising campaigns aimed at transporting an image and an aura, of relating stories, making use of the wealth of material found in art history and popular culture. Photographers often work with codes that only insiders can understand, with the product appearing only on the sidelines if at all. The definition of Beauty has undergone radical changes too: Models are no longer perfectly made up. Instead they slide around on the floor looking bedraggled, are pictured as a reflection of life lived to the extreme or presented as surreal cyborgs.

SUPERFICIAL AND EVER-CHANGING

Being at the point where contractual work, commerce, marketing and artistic ambition meet, fashion photography has always had to live with the image as a superficial genre with an admittedly visual appeal but of extremely brief validity. Here today, gone tomorrow - nothing ages as fast as last season's fashion collection. But perhaps that's not always the case. for Oscar Wilde it was quite clear: "It's only the superficial qualities that last." From this point of view, the Versace campaign by the London-based German photographer Jurgen Teller, 43, can be seen as the perfect example of the subversive style of fashion photography, so typical of the 90's that brushed aside all conventions. In 1996 Teller photographed Kirsten McMenamy naked, seemingly having just got up, a lit cigarette in her mouth, her appendix scar clearly showing, and with a Versace heart badly drawn in lipstick on her breast. The aura of the Venus-like unblemished beauty, cultivated by the classic photographers of this genre has been replaced by the image of the authentic girl next door, warts and all. The expensive luxury product has been removed completely. As Teller explained:"Clothes don't interest me" The succes that he enjoyed as one of the most sought-after photographers in the 90's , who knew how to transport stories and images like no other, proves him to be right. The ascetic heroin chic a la Teller has longe since been replaced by a new preference for opulent stage setting. Elaborate set designs, bizarre backgrounds, symbolic props and the merging of seemingly incomparable poles typify modern day pictures taken by star photographers. One of the most highly revered Vogue photographers, the American Steven Meisel, has a penchant for settings inspired by rococo paintings and bars of dubious repute from the 1920s. His collegue David LaChapelle places his famous faces against dramatically over-the-top backgrounds, while British photographer TIm Walker creates absurddly humourous and ironic situations. And almost as an after-thought, items of clothing and accessories may also appear somewhere in the picture.

PORNOGRAPHY NOT POLITICS

The discussion as to whether fashion photography, with it's effects and superficial consumerism can be called art or not, is more topical than ever. From Jurgen Teller:"My pictures are namely photographs, and as such neither clearly fashion, nor clearly art. It has certainly become difficult to put them in any category." Fashion photography has always been labeled a practical work, a commission to serve the consumer world. Critical and content related statements take second place to an often brash hit-you-in-the-face aestetic form: Glamour or pornographic comments (as in the work of Mario Testino or Terry Richardson) Rather than political discussion.

A PLACE IN THE PANTHEON

Gradually however these borders are becoming indistinguishable. "For some time 'fashion' was like a four letter word in the art world, "Joshua Holdeman, director of the Photographs department at Christie's New York was quoted as saying. Yet today, as Holdeman went on to add, the time span to the earliest examples of this genre is big enough for us to recognise that these are valuable cultural objects that indeed belong in the pantheon of Art History.

Source: Nicole Busing & Heiko Klaas, ARTINVESTOR No.02/2008