What the what?

Thanks for the feedback folks. Keep it coming.
A couple of you gently pointed out that while you found my last post interesting you:
1. Were confused by the Warhol and Basquiat image;
2. Didn't know who the f*&^ I was talking about;
3. Felt that perhaps my assessment of Hirst was a bit harsh (re: not evolving "art") and was laden with judgment.  

Sorry about that. Lemmesplan...
1. The picture of Basquiat and Warhol is from a promotional poster for a collaboration between the two artists. In the early 1980s, Warhol and Basquiat began a series of collaborative paintings together.

 I thought this was a great image because I think the two of them pretty much embody the New York art scene in the 80s. The celebrity. The excess. The fabulous-ness of it.

2. Who the who? (Thank you wiki)
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist. He came to prominence as part of a group known as the Young British Artists in the early 1990s.  He is internationally renowned and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. He is most famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde.

Charles Saatchi is co-founder of Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world’s most well known global advertising firms. He is a well known art collector and patron and the founder of the Saatchi gallery (which he opened in 1985 to show off his contemporary art collection).  Saatchi is pretty much as close as you can get to a modern day Medici. 

Robert Hughes is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970 where he moved when he obtained the position of art critic for Time magazine. Hughes is notorious for his criticisms of artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel, whom he has described as being "to painting what Sly Stallone is to acting - a lurching display of oily pectorals - except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself." He also called Warhol, "One of the most boring people I ever met."
[ed: I would follow Hughes pretty to the ends of the earth]

Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. There are currently 11 art spaces under this gallery.  In the early 1980s Gagosian developed his business rapidly by exploiting the possibilities of reselling works of art by blue-chip modern and contemporary artists. After establishing a New York gallery in the mid-1980s Gagosian began to work with a stable of super collectors including David Geffen, Charles Saatchi and Samuel Newhouse Jr. Bidding on behalf of Newhouse in 1988, Gagosian paid over $17 million dollars for "False Start" by Jasper Johns a then-record price for a work by a living artist. That record was beaten in 2008, when Gagosian paid $23.5 million dollars at Sotheby's in November 2007 for Jeff Koon’s "Hanging Heart" (an artist who happens to belong to the Gagosian gallery's stable). There is a bunch of sketchy stuff about tax evasion, back room deals and questionable ethics but I don't want to get sued so we'll just leave that part out.

3. Am I judging
yes. I am.  you don't have to agree. I welcome the argument. You should start a blog and we can link to each other. that would be fun.

I have some exciting stuff to show you but it will have to wait until next week...

Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever been reading a book, and then suddenly you watch a movie on exactly the same thing and then a few days latter you hear a radio program on the very same topic.  I've often thought there should be a name this occurrence. When the universe seems hell bent on putting something in front of you. [ed: serendipity/serendipitous implies luck in making an unexpected discovery.]  It often happens to me when I learn a word and suddenly I hear it or read it all the time. I wonder, was it always around me, in my peripheral, but i had no context for it so I let it pass me by.

So here's how it went... a couple of weeks ago I finally got round to ready Steve Martin's book Object of Beauty. It's meh. I liked reading this to getting felt up for the entire night. Starts out fun.  It feels like it should be going somewhere fun and good but nope that's all there was. The backdrop to the story is the NY art scene in the 80s and 90s. And the business of art- specifically contemporary art. And that is ANYTHING but boring. The business of art didn't start in the 20th century but it was irreparably altered.

The Physical Impossibility of Death
in the Mind of Someone Living, Damien Hirst 1991

Reading the book propelled me to spend a Saturday gallery hopping in the city. The day yielded a few new finds (more on that later) and end with me emailing a friend who is a very successful artist. In the course of our exchange he recommended that I watch a BBC Documentary title Mona Lisa Curse. Brilliantly narrated by Robert Hughes, as polarizing as he can be, the film can't help but give one pause to wonder if in fact the value of art has become greater than its aesethetic. Or does it become more pleasing the more expensive it is. Would you really thing that a shark in a tank of formaldehyde is a work of art or do we give it consideration as art because Charles Saatchi commissioned it. (I know Hirst is a pedestrian example. forgive me. It all comes together at the end. I promise. Just hang in there).

A couple of weeks ago NYMagazine ran a piece about a Hirst retrospective of his spot paintings. He will take over all 11 of Gagosian's galleries - two in London, three in New York, one each in Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Athens, Geneva and Beverly Hills -and hold simultaneous shows. But the article wasn't really about the shows, or about the fact that Hirst doesn't even paint these pictures himself (he has his minions execute his "vision"), what really seems to be the focus was the value of Hirst's work and his title as one of the wealthiest contemporary artists in the world.  And there was the crux for me - so little of this is about the actual art. Hirst is not moving the needle of contemporary art as an art form. Now don't get all yelly and hand-wavey. I didn't suggest that he hasn't change contemporary art - he has. He has forever changed the business of art. He has made value so integral that people don't really understand what they "like" unless they know how much it costs. For me I'm pretty sure I saw the Spots when i was walking through the kids furniture at Ikea last weekend. But put a $1.2million dollar price tag beside it and even I wonder if maybe I'm missing something deep and profound. I'm not. Your not. Trust me. Hirst is a talented impresario. He is an entertainer. He is the Brittany Spears of art.