The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art

by Don Thompson

If I ever teach any sort of college class on more practical applications of art, this book would make the curriculum too.  It would be really interesting to do some kind of in-class re-creation of all these complexly interwoven interpersonal and economic relationships that create the strange animal that is the "art market".  Quite an eye opener.

Again much too complex to hone down into my typical entry.  This book delves into webs of different parties' competing and carefully balanced (though ever evolving) interests, strange stories of objects and people from an almost-foreign world--a different universe of value--and a number of densely math-y explanations for why these stories simultaneously make so much sense and none at all.  I have a feeling that what follows will do it no justice at all.

"Art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them." Peter Schjedahl, art critic 53

"Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!" Thomas Hoving, former Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art 53

"When the auction hammer falls, price becomes equated with value, and this is written into art history." 178

"...the 'hidden cost of rewards.' The theory says that rewarding highly motivated persons to undertake a task actually reduces their intrinsic motivation.  It suggests that rewards related to output--for example, selling a painting--motivate more output, while subsidies that simply reward effort may decrease output." 181 ...how Randian...

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey

Incidentally, one of the most densely packed things I've read in a while, and I'll probably be unpacking it for another while.  It's not one that I can easily break down into memorable sound bites--but on the other hand that probably affirms my initial thought that this may be the first book I've read that would make it into my theoretical post-secondary art syllabus.

On books, art, music: "In society, these objects were occasions for gossip--for the commerce of opinion where there is no truth.  In school, they were occasions for mastery where there is no truth--an even more dangerous proposition..." 14

"...what works of art might do in the world-how they might redeem isolation...by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are--not in any cult of class, race, region, or ideology--but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them..." 30

"There is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented." 47-8

"...there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity." 50

On democracy: Hickey relates a typical story of a friend visiting his Las Vegas home, commenting on how much more "authentically" beautiful the natural sunset is than the artificial neon lighting of the strip.  "The genuine rhinestone or...the imitation pearl".  He counters with the idea that if Vegas is artificial, then at least it is an artificiality with no artifice--a place where money is just money, with no undercurrent of accrued wealth commensurate to time it's been owned, no correlation with status.  Each person's money is no more than money when facing the odds at the machines.  This is particularly interesting to read after doing some research into fine art auctions, situations which in some ways mimic a casino. 52

On psychedelic art, language, and the reactionary: "So in general, we might say that these anti-academic styles prioritize complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic over Euclidean order.  They celebrate the idea of space over the idea of volume, the space before the object over the volume within it.  They elevate concepts of externalized consciousness over constructions of the alienated, interior self.  They are literally and figuratively "outside" styles. ...(but) for all their pretense of rebellion, these styles are only truly rebellious in their ebullient, pop-psychedelic appropriation." 94

"...it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table of phenomenal nature until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before--thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it." 95  .,..and how art (particularly in his opinion, psychedelic art) can serve as an "incandescent bridge", making something out of this nothing, filling it with possibility.

"The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and excited." 101  On the importance of human imperfection

"I have always associated the desire to make money with a profound lack of confidence in one's ability to make a living."  106

"When you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven't bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything.  You have translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another." 109

On Jackson Pollock and when drip painting went from being "okay" to being mandatory (in certain circles/schools), and the evolution of art as compared to that of basketball: "Henceforth it has always seemed to me that the tick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern." 157

"Thus, in modern painting, our comfort level with illusion is always a matter of how exquisitely we delay the illusion's taking hold..." 186

On the danger of assigning any moral value to art: "The sports world conducts and ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete.  The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things-or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out." 204

"If you catch their eye, their hearts and minds will follow" 209

Bird by Bird

By Anne Lamott

"We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here." 32

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor." 93

"There is ecstasy in paying attention" 100

"Perhaps we have the same problem with the word solution as we do with the word moral.  It sounds so fixative, and maybe we have gone beyond fixing.  Maybe all we can do is make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor." 107

"Sometimes I go about pitying myself.  And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky" 127

"I get up.  I walk. I fall down.  Meanwhile, I keep dancing." 130

The Spell of the Sensuous

Not nearly as racy as the title makes it sound (or maybe racier), this ethnography profiles mostly Aboriginal, Alaskan, and American Southwestern indigenous/oral peoples, and how their lack of a rigid, alphabetic language allows them to interact differently with the natural environment surrounding them.

Amazing that this book should come into my life as I'm looking to expand upon my original thesis on how humans' philosophy affects their interaction with their landscape--physically and visually.  Now I can play with cells, seeds, animism, and linguistics.  A dream park.

"...the traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer." 8  Healing as rebalancing

"His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations--songs, cries, gestures--of the larger, more-than-human field." 9 ...like stories, art

Change/rebalancing comes from the edge of cultures, the edge of civilization, existing on the periphery: "even there, moving along those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely--only, that is, if the margin he frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else." 29 Time and space and their constant relation and flux.

On embodiment in a perceptually shifting world: "It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world." 39 ...thus the sensuous.

A "primordial life-world" of our perceptions, our "immediate lived experience." 40

The correlation between reading and hunting--"reading traces", "hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other." 96 Again the power of interaction and edges to make meaning.  Perhaps why people of so many different varieties are drawn to the colossal land-sky-water edge which is the beach/ocean.

In an oral culture "To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one's closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one's mouth." 109 no alphabet=greater interpretive and connective power

"For only when a qualitative term is written down does it become ponderable as a fixed form independent of both the speakers and of situations." 111 rigidity of form and alphabet

"For the letters of the alphabet, like the Platonic Ideas, do not exist in the world of ordinary vision." 112  outside the life-world, the realm of human-to-nonhuman perception.

"Chiasm" is Greek for "crisscross", neurobiological idea of the interwoven optical fibers.  Also relevant to the interwoven, "reciprocal participation...between one's own flesh and the encompassing flesh of the world." 127-8

The "visual gaze explores the reflective surfaces of things, their outward color and contour...the ears, meanwhile, are more inward organs; they emerge from the depths of my skull like blossoms or funnels, and their participation tells me less about the outer surface than the interior substance of things." 128 Resonance and radiance...paired opposites?

The life taken on by reading the written word: "This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is an animism nonetheless--as mysterious as a talking stone." 131

"To spell...seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled.  Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses." 133

Apache oral culture and location-centered-ness: "a topographic place becomes the guarantor of corrected behavior, the visible presence that reminds one of past foibles and that ensures one's subsequent attentiveness." 159  Attentiveness!!

"We ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visible unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world." 163

On songlines: "The song is thus a kind of auditory route map through the land." 166 Again the pairing of visual and aural.  A set of directions, instructions, bringing order to chaos.  Concept of Ancestors going "back in" to the landscape, embodying the natural world--or it embodying them.

Dreamtime "is an ongoing process--the perpetual emerging of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into full, waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret depths of silence to articulate song and speech." 169

"An unsung land is a dead land." Bruce Chatwin 171  Humans and natural world both need this interaction.

"Stories hold, in their narrative layers, the sedimented knowledge accumulated by our progenitors." 181  Stories = Grand Canyon!

Curvature of time: Read Eliade's Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return

"The letters of the alphabet...begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves...short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land." 187 "reflection" as "loop"

Time = circular trajectory of moon and sun and stars, "demarcates and encloses a spatial field", like the horizon-- "the same shape as perceivable space." 189

"manifested" vs "manifesting" and the "power of human intention" to catalyze this process 192

"Eternity lies not in a separated heaven...but in the promise of a future reconciliation on earth." 197

Heidegger (Being and Time) time = not just "now points" but "ecstatic".  Fundamental realities, "opening us to what is outside ourselves", connecting different layers of existence and perception 205

"There belongs to each ecstasy a 'whither' to which one is carried...a particular 'horizon'." 209

Horizon = future, promise, receding, withheld.  underground = past, support, refused.  Both hidden from present moment/perceivable landscape. 214

Story of the Emergence, people "climbing up a reed or a tree, mimics the emergence from the soil of the corn and other plants...from the depths in search of sunlight." 218  humans = seeds, "gestation" periods, wombs

"the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself." the "mind" not as something inside us, but as something we are all, collectively, inside of. 227

Language as a "veil" 255

" 'the inner--what is it, if not intensified sky?' " 262

"Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself." 263

"To make sense is to enliven the senses." 265

Imagining Argentina

This was a magical, colorful book ostensibly about Argentinians' struggle against their oppressive government in the 1970s, but also about the power of the imagination, a story on story.

"A sympathetic vibration between the strings annihilates distance so that the future and the past rush into the present." 34  Relates to this continuity and cyclical nature of time I've been pondering a lot lately.

"I walk because I love the place, because it is always the same and always different." 67  Songlines, dreamtime--walking creating a place, walking creating you, everything creating each other

"Standing there, I had the distinct impression of people hiding within themselves, and I realized that my sense of the city's accessibility was false.  I had seen its gestures, heard its voices, but it kept much to itself and I did not want to know that part, the way you would rather not hear about a lover's past." 69  Maybe this is more true of places you are not native to? Or maybe the inaccessibility, at some level, of any one thing to another.  Or the illusion of separation between things, and people's wish to propagate it.

"He was not going anywhere in particular; rather, he was searching for something he could not even name, so the condition of his mind was necessarily different from ours--attuned to indistinct possibilities." 72  How I feel so often.

"It's not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance." 206  ...or is it?

Big Small Things

Some new imagery to add to the rest of the summer's art.
Got thinking about these when I saw a micro image of the AIDS virus in the Genome exhibit at the Smithsonian--and more importantly, thinking about how they might make some really interesting statements when combined with other themes like

-natural landscapes, specifically American Southwest, canyonlands
-portraits, images from news media, thinking of doing a more politicized series
-Hungarian woven patterning/any ornamental design

I'll be playing with the ideas of decoration as a source of pleasure and an end in itself, and how that focus on aesthetics contrasts (or maybe doesn't) with issues such as humans' relationship with the earth and with each other.  Are humans to the earth what microbes and bacteria are to humans? 

Stay tuned for how this relates to seeds too!

Celtic interwoven patterning of shapes

Macro-eye, filigree

passageways and doors, openings, bubbles surfacing, dancing on top

songlines, dreamtime, lace

Roger Dean dimensionality--this color scheme. Broccoli

this color combination and explosive outward movement

symbolism of central pairing

separate yet intertwined worlds

depth at center

central focal point, blurred haze surrounding

leaf, seed, radiation

glassy

more dancing

bees, honeycomb, storage, harvest, tiny city

Mist

This time-lapse video, aside from being visually gorgeous, got me thinking about what our movements might look like to things that move less.  Do we look like a fast-moving mist or fog to a tree? Do we move too quickly to be seen by rocks and earth at all? Are there other ways we all perceive each other?

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

"It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for.  We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage.  But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters--or mice." 62

"Is love space? Or is love something we use to fill space?  If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?" 93

"Certainly that sputterless little candeflame of the mediocre mind known as "common sense" has never produced anything worth celebrating." 123

"Don't be outraged, be outrageous!" 173

"It's like my life is sparkling in every direction, through all of space and all of time." 178

"There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for." 197

"In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order.  In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery." 201

"A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed." 208

"Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves.  And in their consistency, they contradict life." 224

"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic...illuminate its relationship with all other things...to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things." 241

"The people who see miracles are the people who look for miracles." 254

"For the person courageous enough to seek it out, disorientation always leads to love." 296

"Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, provided it goes wrong enough." 308

"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need." 330

"Maybe the human animal has contributed really nothing to the universe but kissing and comedy--but by God that's plenty." 340

"Playfulness ceases to serve a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously." 343

"Yes...everything is getting worse.  But everything is also getting better." 350

"Our brains are forever having fun with us by making us learn over and over what we've known from the beginning." 352

Trenton Ave Arts Festival

Ran into some local, beautiful, repeated-line-ish things this Saturday--a day of amoebas, which feeds in very much with some recent pondering on the primal purpose (or lack thereof) of pattern and decoration, and with a certain Tom Robbins book introduction.

First, Elizabeth Nentwig:

Then, The 50/50 Company (named so because they make and sell only 50 of each print, and unfortunately these are the best quality photos I can find of the work). 

Exciting Wilmington Things!

A 5500 square foot sailing mural, soon to be the largest in Wilmington! Making a dream of mine come true in the most amazing way!  Check it out, if you can see it, here, and like our page and follow our progress:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kalmar-Nyckel-Mural/122633837927442?fref=ts

It is a more than beautiful thing to be enjoying life this much!