DidYouKnow…ART

Public art projects are crafted for a variety of reasons: to beautify an otherwise glum or ugly space,  portray certain social or political ideals or reactions, commemorate a person or event, and so on… In any case, as its name implies, public art is almost always on display for anyone and everyone to see.

Last week “Aspire” by Sydney artist Warren Langley was installed beneath the Western Distributor at Ultimo – an ugly site below a freeway – in the artist’s Australian home city. “Aspire” is a glowing forest of illuminated trees, and is Sydney’s newest permanent artwork. Lord Mayor Clover Moore “switched on the lights” of the low-maintenance artwork on May 19th, publicly launching the public art project with the community.

“Aspire” has been a collaborative community art project 10 years in the making (with the first local workshops starting in 2000). Members of the community had direct involvement in developing briefs and selecting prominent public artists who had prepared concepts and tendered for the projects.

In addition to enlivening the unattractive area, the public art installation will improve public safety by illuminating the dark space. In doing so, “Aspire” will strengthen the pedestrian link between two communities, those of Pyrmont and Ultimo, providing a brighter and more engaging public space.

The internationally acclaimed Warren Langley is known for his light and landscape installations. He created “Aspire” to match the scale of the site and be visible to both pedestrians and traffic.  The artist carefully selected materials and light sources that promote economic and ecological sustainability.

In 1975 the late Alexander Calder painted a white BMW 3.0 CSL (image below), transforming the car into a colorfully dynamic piece of art – the first in a series of  BMW’s cars-turned-art project.

In continuing the series,  BMW officials joined artist Jeff Koons in Manhattan earlier this month and revealed the design theme for the next BMW art car. Koons intends to paint the 17th BMW art car, a m3 GT2, with a series of colorful streaks, or rods – suggesting the blur of speed (think sci-fi film imagery of spacecrafts going into hyperdrive) – see image below.

The theme is appropriate, as the Koons-designed car will actually compete on the racetrack. After it makes its public debut at the Pompidou Center in Paris on June 1st, the 500-horsepower engine M3 GT2 will run in the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 12th and 13th.

In a recent interview, Koons said he focused on the car as a thing of energy, “Like the wave of energy that wraps around its front.” The artist looked at the history of racecar graphics, including Nascar and Formula One. He actually rode in and drove fast cars at the Sebring International Raceway in Florida to get a sense of the rush of racing in order to understand how to apply the colorful pattern to the various spaces and wings of the car.

The White Plains Public Library in New York is commemorating the 106th birthday of the late Dr. Seuss – along with the 14th National “Read Across America” event by presenting “The Art of Dr. Seuss – A Retrospective,” on exhibit through June 23rd.

While most people know Dr. Seuss (whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel) as the writer and illustrator of dozens of children’s books, including most famously, “The Cat in the Hat,” “Horton Hears a Who!,” “The Lorax,” (my favorite) “Green Eggs and Ham,” and “Hop on Pop,” the retrospective will reveal more about the universally loved childhood author.

Dr. Seuss was an inventive writer, poet, educator, illustrator and artist. “The Art of Dr. Seuss”  includes paintings, illustrations and even sculptures from Geisel’s massive collection, most of which has been provided by Manhattan’s Animazing Gallery.

The multi-talented artist, who won Academy Awards for documentaries and animated cartoons, created a variety of unique paintings and sculptures throughout his busy career. The exhibition will allow viewers to see some of Dr. Seuss’most unusual work – including sculptures from his Unorthodox Taxidermy collection, limited edition works and book art.

Read more about “The Art of Dr. Seuss – A Retrospective”

Check out these child-friendly educational events going on in New York

According to recent art school graduate Troy Timpel, who spent two years at the elite Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, over the past 15 plus years there has been an influx of talented art school grads that’ve turned to the art of tattooing after graduation. These artists have brought about a renaissance of sorts, transforming tattooing into a fine art genre.

Professor Anna Friedman confirms this. She teaches a course on the history of tattooing at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago and states that before the 1950s about one in ten tattoo artists had a fine arts background. Today, that number reaches well over 50%.

Tattooing, which began at carnival side-shows and sailing ports, has traditionally been associated with traveling freak shows. Now, with the increase of well-educated middle-class grads turning to the field, an interesting mix of museum-esque / fine art inspired creations and carnival – era tattoos are popping up on decorated bodies around the US.

Student Troy Timpel, who organized the recent Third Annual Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention (which featured 250 vendors and several thousand attendees), comments,

“You’ll see traditional Japanese styles that are large and flow together into one design. There are photo-realistic portraits, and Impressionist watercolors.”

The increasingly upscale reputation of tattoo art and artists corresponds to easing laws against tattoo parlors and the fact that tattoo artists are among the few practicing artists with the potential to earn a living wage. (The hourly rate for getting a tattoo starts at $100, depending on the artist’s experience, and goes up from there).

Read more about the growing trend of art-school grads turned tattoo artists and the new era of body art HERE.

A recent article from the New York Times discusses how art will play a role at the 2010 Winter Olympics, innovatively combining themes of body and movement throughout  the city of Vancouver, the home of next month’s Winter Olympics.

The Vancouver Art Gallery will present a rare collection of Leonardo da Vinci‘s drawings of the human body. The exhibition, which runs from February 6th – May 2nd, will be free during the 17 days of the Olympic Games (February 12th – 28th). This exhibition will be the first time that da Vinci’s famed anatomical drawings, “Anatomical Manuscript A,” will be on view in their entirety since the artist created them during the early 16th century.

The drawings, which are on loan from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle,  feature da Vinci’s unique mirror-image script. The museum is offering free entry to various exhibitions during the Olympics, including a contemporary art show based on the human form and a survey of art from British Columbia. The Vancouver Art Gallery has also produced three major public art installations on view in downtown Vancouver.

Actor Hugh Grant confessed he was drunk when he purchased Andy Warhol‘s “Liz” at an auction sale several years ago. I’m aware that alcohol can make people do crazy things, but purchase a £2 million ($ 3.2 million) painting? I guess anything goes when your extremely wealthy, and as it turns out, Grant’s intoxicating impulse buy paid off (excuse my pun) as he made £11 million ($17.6 million) after later selling the painting.

Apparently, the whole thing started when the admittedly drunk actor ordered his assistant to bid on the painting at a Sotheby’s auction. The assistant purchased the Warhol painting on behalf of his boss for £2 million, and Grant sold it a few years later for £13 million ($20.7 million).

While discussions of money and art could go on and on and on… Grant’s drunken art purchase (and the subsequent profit he made after selling it) is a perfect example of the ever-changing nature of the 21st-century art market. Right after buying the painting (or at least the next day when the actor realized he had woken up with more than a hangover), I’m sure Grant got a little nervous, but after the painting’s value increased, he made a smart decision of selling it for a large profit. He probably celebrated with a bottle of champaign once the market collapsed, realizing he had sold his multi-million dollar drunken-impulse buy at just the right time.

Click here to read more about the above story.

Click here to check out current Andy Warhol exhibitions around the US

Because art is often created to express an artist’s view points, ideas and / or reactions, it’s no surprise that contemporary art often mirrors relevant modern-day issues. Likewise, as the world at large continues to recognize the increasingly devastating environmental problems facing our planet (and political leaders attempt to solve problems like climate change), there has been a substantial rise in climate change- related art.

In conjunction with this week’s international climate change summit in Copenhagen, a series of “climate change art” exhibitions have popped up throughout the city. The various exhibitions are informative in an ominous way, showing how dire the concerns plaguing the Earth truly are.

Tomas Saraceno's Biospheres

Argentinian architect-artist Tomas Saraceno‘s Biospheres at the Rethink exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark is turning heads. Large floating plastic bubbles hang 100 feet above the gallery, suspended from the venue’s walls. The point of the exhibit is to show what it would be like if generations to come are forced to live in a “city of bubbles” in order to avoid the contaminated Earth. The bubbles invite serious discussions about how scary the world could become if environmental problems continue and raises questions about mass mortality and destruction. 

Charlie Kronick, the senior climate change adviser at Greenpeace discusses the role of artists in the climate change realm,

The real role is not about using artists to leverage our message up the agenda … but for the artist to make this agenda their own. It is important they maintain their authenticity.” Campaign initiatives have made a big impact on a number of artists (Ian McEwan and Antony Gormley have spoken enthusiastically about their Cape Farewell experiences)…

To read more about the climate change related exhibitions on display around Copenhagen, artists’ opinions on climate change and art, and the rest of the article from the Guardian, click here.

Religion has played an important part in the creation of art since the beginning of time – i.e. several thousand years BCE Egyptian women carved small fertility statues devoted to the gods and of course, there are thousands of famous paintings and sculptures devoted to every theologic entity from Greek gods and goddesses, to Confucious, to Jesus and beyond. However, it is always interesting to learn about new ways art and religion are intertwined.

In the Western World, little is known about Jainism and Jain art – probably because most Jain art is mistakenly identified as Buddhist and because the last major American survey of Jain art was at the LACMA in 1994.

A Jain Sculpture on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC

However, two shows will be on display in New York through early 2010, giving art enthusiasts a unique look at the art of a religion whose followers number nearly five million in India.  Together “Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” at the Rubin Museum of Art and “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a detailed examination of the great tradition of Jain art.

As a recent article from the NY Times discusses,

For all its clear-cut ethical thinking, Jainism has a highly contradictory view of the world. On the one hand, it envisions the cosmos as a precision machine, with balanced realms of heaven and hell sandwiching a thin slice of earth, and time measured out in regular and recurrent epochs of bloom and decay.

Yet creatures living in those epochs experience tremendous uncertainty. This is particularly true in periods of disintegration, one of which, by Jain reckoning, we are in now, with no end yet in sight. Violence will continue to grow. Beast will turn on beast. Hell will outweigh heaven. Is there any sound reality to rely on?…

…The story these works tell begins with a prenatal mix-up: the future jina, though expected to be of royal birth, has been conceived by a nonroyal Brahman couple. The error is soon finessed by the miraculous transfer of the fetus to the womb of a Jain queen, an event depicted with wide-eyed, almost comical verve in a tiny 15th-century manuscript painting from western India, long a Jain stronghold.

In other illustrations we see the infant Mahavira born, bathed and coddled. Then, in a flash forward, he’s a bejeweled young sovereign being carried in procession to the edge of a forest. There he strips off his princely gear, plucks out his hair by the roots and, naked or near naked, sets out on a final earthly journey. In a culminating image he stands on the moon, a kind of superman, preaching truth to the cosmos.

To read more about Jainism click here.

To read the entire NY Times article about the Jain exhibitions click here.

… A Damien Hirst piece of art is now worth about 40 per cent less than a year ago.

… The show (Frieze) features more than 150 galleries from around the world

… Artist Monica Sosnowska withdrew her giant sculpture from the fair at the last minute

… There is a steel coffin for sale (at one of the booths at Frieze)

… Frieze typically sees more than 60,000 visitors per year

Did you know that….

-The largest art collection in the world may be in Iran?

-That a drawing may be the largest artwork in the world?

-The most expensive painting ever sold was for a mere $149.6 million for a Jackson Pollock?

- The State Hermitage Museum in Russia is the largest art gallery in the world?