Art as silence
I am not good at silence. I like being alone but to do things. I sat today attempting silence in stillness. Attempting to find silence in the spaces between the incessant demands of my own mind. The lists, the phone, the anxiety, the fear and the busy body’s demand to keep moving. In one chapter in “Healing Spaces – The science of place and well-being” Esther Sternberg reflects on the healthy benefits of meditation and walking a labyrinth where physical activity and silence create a harmony of spiritual newness and lower blood pressure. Stillness does arrive for me in the labyrinth. Arts practice [painting, drawing, printing, scultpure] is a labyrinthine activity. Artists are walking labyrinths with the rhythm of their drawings as much as reclusive monk Thomas Merton in his noiseless meditation journeys.
What is the value of art II ?
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When Jugglers had a silent auction on February 3 of 99 works donated by 60 emerging and mid career artists [including represented artists Anthony Lister, Nic Plowman and Jan van Dijk and internationals Sofles, Gimiks Born, Miso and Ghostpatrol] the value was layered. All of a sudden there was the hope of “having a lister” for less than $1000! The night itself, while not without its bidding wars and dreams of investment potential was good natured and fun. 400 punters raised more than $7000 in three hours. That all 60 artists had put in the hours and then delivered them to Jugglers in support of a program for unknown “outsider” artists who are companioned towards more life and artistic possibilities is testament to generosity. The “Paper Girl” idea [on the same night at White Canvas] resonates with the same value. Give your art away! Buck the collector investment paradigm driven by white middle class white males! Works on paper were taken down after their Friday show and handed out in Queen Street Mall on Saturday. A shift is happening. The reign of the elite might last a while more but when amazing art is given to make a difference and amazing art is handed out to enrich the receivers, then Andy Warhol and his mates might return to join in!
What is the value of art?
From “Occassional links and Commentary” by David F Ruccio
The Value[s]of Art by David F Ruccio
Paul Cézanne, “The Card Players” (c. 1890-92)—$250 million at auction
What is the value of art?
Felix Salmon, in arguing that art is not a good financial investment, analyses the current art market and presents a theory of the value of art:
The whole point of art is that it has no intrinsic value: that its financial value is a magical number which is some highly variable function of how much various incredibly rich people love and covet the work.
But she’s [meaning Sarah Thornton] right about this aspect of why the two big auction houses are doing so well these days:
Christie’s and Sotheby’s are superlative marketers who are getting better at funnelling demand for objects by a small group of well-tested artist brands.
The key word here is “brands”. CNBC’s Zac Bissonnette recently wrote to me saying that what he hates about contemporary art is the way in which “you can just put it there and all your friends will know what it is. People might as well hang a Nike swoosh over their couches.”
Zac’s exactly right about this: the one thing that pretty much all ultra-expensive art has in common is that it’s instantly recognizable as the work of a given artist. (And that goes for Cézanne as much as it does for Jeff Koons.) Fine art has become the billionaire’s-club equivalent of a Louis Vuitton bag, slathered in logos. It’s not connoisseurship which drives values, so much as recognizability. Which in turn helps to explain why the most prolific artists (Picasso, Warhol, Hirst) are also the most expensive: the more of their work there is, the more exposed to it people become, the more they’ll recognize it, and therefore the more desirable it is.
I do hold out some small hope that the Chinese art market will provide a correction to this syndrome — there, I’m told, the value of an art work is (at least sometimes) much less a function of its recognizability as the work of a certain artist, and much more a function of the way that it can fit itself into a long artistic tradition.
I want to make just three quick comments: First, art may not have an “intrinsic value” but which commodities do? Is Salmon invoking some kind of labor theory of value here? Second, precisely because paintings and other works of art are status or Veblen goods, their prices affect the desires of wealthy individuals to purchase them. And third, it is precisely because the art market is now governed by a different group of rich people, e.g., from China, the values of different kinds of art are changing and are likely to continue to change in coming years.
Yes, rich people around the world are buying famous paintings and other works of art, not because they’re a good financial investment or because of their intrinsic value but because they can own them and show to the world that they can and do own them.
David F. Ruccio | 9 February 2012 at 10:37 am
Tamawarra II
Tamawarra II Mixed media.
Getting ready to speak is not like an express train.
The art of writing a piece for spoken word performance of any kind is a long bang on an anvil with a steel hammer. Sometimes the sparks fly fast and furiously and then the slow “ting, ting” is on again. The joy of the smart phone is that an idea can be caught on the note pad or recorded. Makes banging easier. And then rewrites happen inevitably when the inspired idea sounded so good but with critique and reflection it ”falls off the anvil”. But the inspired idea and phrase still need putting down however many times they are burnt. We need others to work with us and give us reflective feedback to “co-construct the meaning.” Having never been a comedian, my observation of my son and other wonderful people I have met in Brisbane and Melbourne at the comedy festivals is that the feedback takes years but it can be the fire that the steel needs for the anvil to make an impression that delivers a work of art that get people saying: “That was bloody funny. How does he [she] do it?!”
God’s graffiti message.
On the way up the hill to the Mental Health Ward at RBWH I found some scrawled graffiti, old style. Stone on stone, scratched on the wall near the steps. Unmissable. “God [loves] everything”. Then last week the “everything” was scratched out. I love graffiti and this outsider artist conversation!
Decompos-ART
Cleanup behind one of the street art walls at Jugglers after 2 years of neglect and the January 2011 floods reveals the beauty of some kind of print process taking place naturally – no human intervention at all.
Tarrawarra
Mixed media on Paper – Linden Post Card Show.
2011 and the tale of the winding house.
ABC Radio National’s Saturday “By Design” show on Saturdays is one of my picks. I love architecture, space and place. In today’s show we were invited to join ” Alan Saunders and the By Design team for a highly unusual forum celebrating the architecture and urban design of one of our greatest cities. Unusual because the venue for our forum is that quintessential Melbourne mode of transport, a tram: The City Circle tram to be exact.” As radio gives space for our minds to imagine [as opposed to the dulling TV can do] I found myself at the same places they were talking about. Flinders Street Station, Fed Square, The Royal Exhibition Buildings [where I did my final RMIT exams in 1971] the Parliament Buildings. Melbourne is my home town, my heart town, my city of choice, my Paris! Paris did get a mention in the context of the 40 metre high exclusion zone in and around Flinders Street. It is in that zone that Melbourne is alive with alley ways and coffee shops and art studios. Paris and Berlin and other great cities have stood against the high rise and so have enriched their cities. Brisbane [where I live now] still has an undeveloped right brain when it comes to town planning, pulling down such icons as Festival Hall and now the Regent Theatre. Listening to Saunders and his erstwhile team led me to drag a book out of my library by Phillip Goad that I bought in 2004: “A guide to Melbourne Architecture.” Divided into eras of architecture in Melbourne’s development, I found reference to Snellman House near the Yarra River [Ivanhoe] close to where I use to live between 1958 and 1961. [This house was built in 1954] As a young kid growing up in Melbourne at East Ivanhoe State School, I got to know Dirk Snellman. We were in the same class and I used to go to this amazing house that curved down the hill towards the river and we would run down the hallway with rooms branching off and the big gum just outside that seemed to hold it all together. And we would grab bits of carboard and slide down the hill on the grass next to the house. Funny that this is my memory at this moment in time as we slip into one year out of the other. Architecture and buildings hold stories and revisiting them evokes memories. Even the odd ABC program or a book on architecture can trigger a rich memory.
Spreading the word
This Christmas I made a tree out of an old tree branch from the rubbish in our yard. There is a new fence now and to make a connection with the old discarded trees I chose a branch with long spindly branches. I pruned it and trimmed it and made it so it would fit in the house and in a pot of white stones. Then I chose an old bible that was falling apart as the covering, as the pages that would “contextualise” the tree. The bible was ripped and torn and I wrapped and glued page after page of Genesis and Luke and Micah around the branches. I would never rip the bible that I used to use as a one time preacher or the one my father had that is full of underscores and where I found a small page of drawn cartoons he did for me while we sat in church when I was about 9 months old. But somehow I could tear this other one that someone else had put together as their contribution to the “spreading of the word.” And this “contextualised tree” and the torn book became a metaphor for my imagination. When we keep the words that are precious to us or that are truth for us in a stuck state, in a covered library of museum pieces that are used to bludgeon or defend idealogoies then we miss the life that is in and around and always emerging from them.
