A Francis Bacon, according to an ad from Artprice in ft.com on March 31, 2008, fetches more money than a Rothko.
Here is a Bacon entitled Study from the human body
Archives for art and economics
Human Form
Le Géranium
Please help characterizing the genius of Henri Matisse’s painting from 1910.
Le Géranium made news because of its high price at a Sotheby’s auction on May 7, 2008.
Saving my screenshot as ‘for Web and Devices’ made the colors more brilliant. Has anyone seen the original? How bright are the colors?
Support the Arts – Turn Off Your Television
I assume most of you have heard about the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike. I’m not sure how much attention it gets in other parts of the country (or the world, for that matter), but here in Los Angeles it’s a big story. This is after all an entertainment industry town, and the effects of the strike can be felt in every part of our local economy. My wife is a writer and a WGA member, as are many of our friends.
The strike has come about because of a disagreement between the corporations who own the movie and tv studios and the writers who create their content over how much, if at all, the writers should be compensated for their creative work. The writers contend that they should be getting a slightly larger share from the sale of DVDs of the movies they wrote. From the sale of a $28.95 DVD, the writer of the movie currently gets 4 cents, or as comedian Tim Kazurinsky points out, that ’s 4 cents out of 2,895 cents. The writers are asking for 8 cents.
But a bigger issue, and possibly the main one, is that the networks and studios want to pay the writers nothing, that’s ZERO $, for tv shows and movies that they (the corporations) post on their web sites. The corporations claim that these streaming videos are “promotional”, and that they shouldn’t have to compensate the writers for posting them. But these “promotional” shows have commercials, just like any regular tv show, and are a huge source of income for the studios. They just want to keep it all for themselves.
As Mark Harris notes in his Entertainment Weekly Online column, “Why the Striking Writers Are Right”:
“The problem with this position is that writers deserve a share of revenue for material they help to create. Not a share only if the revenue is really, really a lot. A share, period. If it turns out that streaming video is a goldmine, then both sides will get a lot of money. If it turns out not to be, they’ll get less. Corporations are fond of reminding their employees that they’re all a ”family” during tough times. But when families sit down to dinner, Dad doesn’t get to say, ”I’m gonna eat until I decide I’m full, and then we’ll see if there’s anything left for the rest of you.” The right of a writer to earn money from work that continues to generate revenue cannot be dependent on how comfy studio and network heads are with the fullness of their own coffers.”
The studios are responding to the strike by showing reruns, and more reality and talk shows. But many of the more popular talk shows themselves will have to be reruns, since people like David Letterman and Jay Leno don’t come up with all those clever lines off the tops of their heads. They are created by a staff of, you guessed it, writers. To their credit, both Leno and Letterman are supporting the writers’ position in this dispute.
For the personal reasons mentioned above, and also on principle, as an artist, I’m siding with the writers as well. It seems obvious to me that the people who profit from the success of a creative product should include the artists who actually created it, not just the executives who made the phone calls and brokered the deals. I don’t watch a whole lot of tv to begin with, but until this strike is over I’m not planning on watching any. I’m going to vote with my remote, and say no to corporate greed. I hope many other people do the same.
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Here are a couple of videos about the strike that you might find interesting:
Tim Kazurinsky on WGN
the writers of The Office
Clyfford Still’s Ultimate Joke?
The Arts section of today’s The New York Times examines the strange history and odd future of an artist considered to be one of the geniuses of the 20th Century and possibly the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists. Ironically, he remains–by design–virtually unknown to the general public and this despite the fact that he may have been even more prolific than Picasso.
For those of you unfamiliar with Clyfford Still, he is most certainly the ultimate manifestation of an artist’s contempt for commercialism, museums, galleries and collectors. He is famous for denouncing the galleries and museums of the art world as Nazi gas chambers. After a brief period of selling and displaying some of his work, Still retreated to a remote farm in Maryland and spent the remaining decades of his life painting furiously, cursing critics and the commercial art world and hiding his work. In a one page will he specified that his body of work could never be sold, never be separated, never be shown next to another artist’s work and could only be shown to the pubic in a Clyfford Still museum that would be built by an American city and would exclusively house his entire collection.
Art On-line Sales and Galleries
This past Tuesday I attended a lecture and discussion panel with three gallery owners who talked about how they got into the business, what they see their role and relationship to the artist is etc. Someone in the audience brought up Internet sales and did they work with artist who also sold their work on line.
If you are currently doing both, selling via your website and through a gallery, what are the agreements that you have in place with the gallery? Do you sell certain types of work on-line but not through the gallery?
What does it take to be a dealer?
Still life by Hanneke van Oosterhout, detail
Last Friday I helped Hanneke and Maurice set up the exhibition at Galerie de Provenier. While doing this, I started to ask myself, “What does it take to be an art dealer?”
Art and commerce
I have made my living with a camera for over 20 years. Photography has been at the center of my life for perhaps double that time. Having the day job also be my creative life has lots of interesting implications.
My father prides himself on the fact that he has never taken money for his photographs. He started photography as a teenager, headed the local camera club, and at 83 he is conversant with scanner settings and monitor profiles. He is in love with the creative act of making images, and has never wanted to be hemmed in by the requirements and dictates of doing it at someone else’s behest.
It is a common solution to the dilemma of “whose work is this anyway.” There is a kind of purity in the amateur’s approach to any medium, and it is to be respected. Creative activity is an important piece of a well rounded life for many of us.
I chose a different course, because I was a really intense kid, and because I wanted no barrier between who I was and what I did. That said, it took a long time to accept that my creative voice was something I could rely on to be at the core of my livelihood. There was about a ten year period of scratching at the margins, trying to get a foothold in the profession, before it finally took hold. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to be a “commercial success”, trying to fit into a mainstream image of what my work should look like, and instead pursued the photographic vision that was most compelling to me, did I finally begin to achieve a measure of professional success and security.
There is an inevitable, and useful, tension between being a commercial photographer and being an artist trying to push against boundaries. My success as a commercial shooter is contingent upon replication–I am hired to do the same thing over and over. My economic life is dependent upon regular praise for it. But without my alternate life as an artist, pushing at new ways of seeing, the commercial work would lose its edge and quickly become stale.
I have always had personal work that I did just because I had to. I have a continuous photographic trajectory I have followed in that vein, things and environments I work on, processes I master, print quality that I value. That specific work is not what built my commercial career however. Clients don’t hire me because I can manage chaotic complexity in landscape photographs. Nonetheless, because I have my particular attentiveness to a photographic sensibility, and a relationship to my surroundings because of my camerawork, I can bring that to bear when the job is to fulfill a client’s need. It has more juice behind it, even if what I am hired to photograph has no apparent bearing on my personal work.
It means I can be both very attached to the manner in which I make photographs, be completely engaged in the situation and the way the photographs come about, while having no attachment whatever to how the photography gets used in the end. That’s what they pay me for—to stay out of the room where those decisions are made. I have a blast on assignment. I love being completely engaged on a job. I may like seeing the finished product in print, but I never think of that as the “real” work. It pays the bills, and keeps me in equipment and in frequent flyer programs. But it’s not how I identify myself in the end.