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How to Run an Efficient and Successful Studio with Adad Hannah
Notes from FREE SCHOOL at SAW Gallery, Ottawa
Saturday, March 13, 2PM – 5PM / Le samedi 13 mars de 14 h à 17 h
(see whole programme below)
It’s nice to think that successful artists are successful because they do certain practical things that anyone can do. It takes some of the mystique out of the art world and makes it all seem more possible. But when a successful artist talks about these things, it also quickly becomes apparent how good they are at doing things that many artists find very challenging. It’s not just in the concept and execution of their art; it’s in everything they do. Read the rest of this entry »
Site upgrade
Captacha is one of the new security features we’re adding to the site. Captcha is not merely a security feature that makes you type out two words shown in a picture, but by typing those words you are helping with the digitization of books by feeding back correct spellings of words that are not clear in their original digital scans. Every Captcha helps you help the world to be a tiny bit smarter.
Read the rest of this entry »
Book Publishers Responsible for Recession
It’s amazing what some people will say to get a little attention.
Lawrence Osborne‘s article, with its designed-to-provoke title Why Publishers Fail, on Forbes.com doesn’t exactly blame publishers for the whole of the recession. What he does suggest is that publishing is a paradigmatic industry, so arcanely enigmatic that no one, not even the people doing it, understands its sublimely mystical machinations. So it’s an example, or a canary in the coal mine: as publishing fares, so fares our culture. Read the rest of this entry »
The Failure of Art Criticism
Simon Cowell’s acerbic criticism may be surprising, and therefor entertaining, but really, it takes more talent, ingenuity and ego than any of these critics (or Idol performers) possess to drive the star machine.
But all this is to misunderstand what American Idol is about, which is neither fame nor art, but a mildly entertaining filler attracting advertising dollars to a moribund media corporation.
How Much is a Book Worth?
If the hardcover edition is out of print and the artist is famous, prices become astronomical. Take, for example, this catalog for a small 1999 exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s watercolors. Originally listed at US $60, the hard cover is sold out (out of print or OOP in the lingo) so in the Amazon an unblemished copy is worth a whopping $1,736, a marked up used copy $227. Even a new softcover version is listed at $240.
With a little digging I found you can get the softcover version from the museum that published it, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, for the cover price CHF 45, which with postage comes to CHF 74, $78 Canadian. Not too bad.
It’s terrific when museums keep a stock of their publications so that even 10+ years later, you can get a copy at the original cover price. And, as I found in this case, dealing with the museum directly by email or phone is lovely; super personal service.
But practically, you have to wonder whether museums are failing to take advantage of the market for older books as they become more rare. From a cost recovery perspective, the museum/publisher is subsidizing the market. Imagine the time and effort taken in sorting out my overseas order, exchange rates, postage, packaging and shipping. 
The book is the museum catalog from the 1999 exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur: Gerhard Richter Aquarelle / Watercolors 1964-1997 edited by Dieter Schwartz (Richter Verlag, 1999) ISBN 3-906664-24-4 (harcover) 3-933807-05-0 (softcover). The exhibition was a collaboration with the De Pont museum in The Netherlands. Read their exhibition press release.
It was distributed initially by D.A.P. which still lists it in its online store Artbook.com. Interestingly, D.A.P. lists all the shops it sells to here. A welcome degree of transparency for a distributor, and one imagines, with the links to the store websites, a useful selling tool.
Just how expensive has Richter’s work become? They’re asking $6000 for this tiny offset printed card with signature here.
Richter Watercolors book reviewed at Handprint.com.
Interview with Richter by Robert Storr from 2002.
Snippet view only available from Google Books.
You can borrow if from a library, albeit one 4100 miles from where you are located.
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Lions 3 Christians 0
so absurdly dangerous you might as well take a bunch of elite athletes and shoot
them out of cannons!
This guy might weigh a bit more, that one have a sleeker
body suit. One might open up too early for landing or another put an arm
out for balance, and those factors would decide the winners just as well as they do now
in luge, skeleton and downhill.
overtaking a lead.
In place of contests of strength and skill, what we have today are squadrons of elite athletes performing at equal levels of perfection, celebrated for how well they
survive the limitless terrors imagined by sports technology: ever more efficient equipment and more perilously perfect courses. No wonder they pump their bodies beyond proportion.
Artists and athletes equally suffer these perversions. Those who pursue pure physical sport rank with those who pursue pure creative work at the bottom of the economic food chain. As Silken Laumann said to Jian Ghomeshi on Q, just because you’re an Olympic athlete does not mean you’re okay financially. Athletes make huge sacrifices to pursue their gifts and passion and are extensively subsidized by their families, friends, local sports clubs, etc. etc. That the federal government might pay a paultry $117 million to “own the podium” is as economically preposterous as it is shameful in its self-aggrandisement.
Yet, despite the chronic privation, both art and sports have their “stars,” and no one can begrudge them their accomplishment. They have talent and drive beyond measure, but perhaps that’s where the problems start; it’s the unmeasurable that becomes the ne plus ultra of both artistic and sportive accomplishment.
Sarah Thornton’s chapter on Takashi Murakami in her book Seven Days in the Art World, [ISBN 978-0-393-33712-9] testifies to that artists’ troubled and troubling obsessiveness. Another one might be Jeff Koons. Both are elite-level artists reknowned for their perfectionism and for being temperamental to the point of abusive… impossibly demanding of the legions of artists and craftsman who realize their projects for them. “[T]he level of meticulous craftsmanship in Murakami’s work is, as one critic put it, “absurdly high,” Thornton notes. Murakami agrees, “Absurd? Yes, I think so… And painful.” have exceptional ability to cope with the intimidation of
competition and the risk to life and limb.
Do artists struggle with fear to the same extent? And have the parameters of that struggle shifted in art as in sport, from the overcoming the more or less normal fear of failure to a maniacal suspension of common sense in order to deal with the impossible challenges of technologies that know no limits?
Some distracting, and not particularly related, links about fear:
obstacle to the success of Canada’s Olympic hockey team is fear.
ironically, incapacitating:
–
And in the “does this mean you are kicking us out” department:
Intrawest resort at Whistler is to be auctioned off on Feb. 19th, right in the middle of the Olympics. Among the geniuses who came up with this plan is Lehman Bros.one of the lenders who seized Intrawest assets in default in loan payments in January. http://blog.taragana.com/sports/2010/01/20/intrawest-assets-seized-by-lenders-including-olympic-ski-resort-in-whistler-67399/
Why I Like the Canadian Olympic Pavillion
It’s very classically a shed. What could be more Canadian? It looks like you could buy it at Canadian Tire. In fact, one wonders why they didn’t go a small step further and invest the $9.2 it cost in actual sheds and duct tape them together. They could have bought 920 of these babies and after the games they could have distributed them to backyard gardeners across the country.
In an interview a few days before the Games opened, Heritage Minister James Moore said the pavilion “is going to be
a destination for people to come and enjoy the games, not to stand with
folded arms and have an architectural experience.” http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=2493144
Oookkkaaay, put down the architecture and back away slowly, and keep those hands where I can see ‘em.
But hey, you know this Olympic pavilion could still be usefully re-cycled. A new pavilion is desperately needed for the Venice Biennale.
Seriously though, what’s so bad about the utilitarian, industrial aesthetic? Remember the Woodworth’s Building circa 1973 in Winnipeg? Or check out the architecture of Microsoft or the pharmaceutical industry; these are folks who’ve got their denominators down, in a good way.
http://www.canada2010.gc.ca/pav-can-eng.cfm
http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Canada+Pavilion+just+ugly+also+illegal/2549408/story.html
The Art Instinct – book review
Denis Dutton got tired, as most of us do, of trying to find justifications for the arts. So he started looking for an explanation so basic that if enough people knew about it, none of us would ever again question the need for art. All that explaining and educating and begging could just stop. In The Art Instinct [ ISBN-13: 978-1596914018 ] Dutton argues that art is a fundamental evolved human trait. Read the rest of this entry »
Visual Arts Research – Three Books
(This post was written last April and has been sitting in the Drafts folder – time to let it go:)
Craig Leonard, Clive Robertson and Michael Maranda are all artists. In their practices, they share a love of print, text, publication. And they all have produced research that they did on their own steam as it were, more or less self-directed, yet with an ambition of participating in that institutional discourse of which research is one, important dialect.
As much as these artists share in common, their books are decidedly different. Leonard’s is a poker-faced reproduction of statistics provided by artist-run centres (these are non-profit exhibition spaces run by artists, usually funded by government) in Ontario about the artists who exhibited there on which dates. Maranda’s book reports findings from his ambitious survey of artists, exploring their demographic makeup, incomes, sources of income and expenses. Robertson’s book is theoretical and analytic, looking at how how arts policy and funding programs are developed and modified through the interactions of arts agencies, artists organizations and artists themselves.
Craig Leonard’s Artists in Artist-Run Centres: Ontario, 1971-2006 is described this way on the Art Metropole website where it can be purchased:
“A composite volume detailing the exhibiting histories of artist-run
centres in Ontario since 1970. The spreadsheet style pages are indexed
by artist and indicate the artist-run centre and exhibition or
performances by year. As a graphic illustration of the extensive
interconnectivity of artists and artist-run centres in Ontario this
publication is part of Leonard’s larger project exploring the progeny
of art-exhibiting institutions.”
Clive Robertson’s Policy Matters is described this way on the YYZ website where it can be purchased: 
“With the
emergence of policy attentions within cultural studies (a.k.a. cultural
policy studies) the question has arisen “In whose name are these stands
in the policy field being taken?” Such debates have created an opening
to re-visit the specific contributions of Canadian artists and critics
(particularly those engaged in artist-run culture) to policy matters,
to the ongoing questions of working with (but not for) government, for
thinking through the messy work of cultural politics and cultural
policy, for understanding the differences between lobbying and
negotiating, and the need for some equitable bargaining status for
cultural producers.”
Michael Maranda’s Waging Culture is described this way on the AGYU website where it can downloaded for free.
“The Art Gallery of York University has conducted the first national
survey of Canadian visual artists since Statistics Canada’s 1993
Cultural Labour Force survey. Unlike studies that use Census
statistics, this study analyses both the sources of revenue for artists
and their practice expenses. The bottom line for artists is dismal,
with the typical artist losing $556 in 2007 on their
practice. (Other income sources bring median total earnings to $20,000
– not starving, but certainly not affluent.)”
I’m not so much interested in the particular data or findings of these research projects as in what they tell us about research; what it is, what it can do for us. I’m also interested in the idea of “self-interested research,” whether the fact that all three authors are artists compromises their projects.
What do you think?
Power Play: Richard Attila Lukacs’ Polaroids as Presented by Michael Morris
No less sumptuous in its realization than the paintings for which he is known, this exhibition of polaroids taken by Richard Attila Lukacs as studies in preparation for painting, brings two very different kinds of visual, expressive power into alignment. Read the rest of this entry »
Open Space Blog (SFMOMA)
- Eight hours labor; Eight hours rest September 6, 2010[…]Suzanne
