«I LIKE EVERYBODY'S ART»

ARTWORK BY CARAVAGGIO

PUBLISH OR PERISH

In the last 30 years the college humanities departments went from publish or perish to...publish AND perish! Good job!

«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

By Simon Doonan

Freud said the goals of the artist are fame, money, and beautiful lovers. Based on my artist acquaintances, I would say this holds true today. What have changed, however, are the goals of the art itself. Do any exist?

How did the art world become such a vapid hell-hole of investment-crazed pretentiousness? How did it become, as Camille Paglia has recently described it, a place where “too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber”? (More from her in a moment.)

There are sundry problems bedeviling the contemporary art scene. :

1. Art Basel Miami.

It’s baaa-ack, and I, for one, will not be attending. The overblown art fair in Miami—an offshoot of the original, held in Basel, Switzerland—has become a promo-party cheese-fest. All that craven socializing and trendy posing epitomize the worst aspects of today’s scene, provoking in me a strong desire to start a Thomas Kinkade collection. Whenever some hapless individual innocently asks me if I will be attending Art Basel—even though the shenanigans don’t start for another two weeks, I am already getting e-vites for pre-Basel parties—I invariably respond in Tourette’s mode:
“No. In fact, I would rather jump in a river of boiling snot, which is ironic since that could very well be the title of a faux-conceptual installation one might expect to see at Art Basel. Have you seen Svetlana’s new piece? It’s a river of boiling snot. No, I’m not kidding. And, guess what, Charles Saatchi wants to buy it and is duking it out with some Russian One Percent-er.”

2. Blood, poo, sacrilege, and porn.

Old-school ’70s punk shock tactics are so widespread in today’s art world that they have lost any resonance. As a result, twee paintings like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy andConstable’s Hay Wain now appear mesmerizing, mysterious, and wildly transgressive. And, as Camille Paglia brilliantly argues in her must-read new book, Glittering Images, this torrent of penises, elephant dung, and smut has not served the broader interests of art. By providing fuel for the Rush Limbaugh-ish prejudice that the art world is full of people who are shoving yams up their bums and doing horrid things to the Virgin Mary, art has, quoting Camille again, “allowed itself to be defined in the public eye as an arrogant, insular fraternity with frivolous tastes and debased standards.” As a result, the funding of school and civic arts programs has screeched to a halt and “American schoolchildren are paying the price for the art world’s delusional sense of entitlement.” Thanks a bunch, Karen Finley, Chris Ofili, Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, and the rest of you naughty pranksters!

Slate Nov 29 2012

«SHOPPING IS MORE AMERICAN THAN THINKING»

«When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums»

-Andy Warhol

THE SECRET OF THE ART MARKET REVEALED!

He was the last of the speakers at the TEFAF art market symposium last week, a diminutive young man with a heavy French accent who wasted no time introducing himself with flourish. “We have analyzed millions of data,” he announced, “and we have discovered the secret of the art market.”

Seated towards the front of the audience, I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms, dropping my pen into my lap. This was not going to be worth taking notes about, I thought. The guy’s a pompous idiot.

The speaker, however, not noticing me, continued, eager to announce his extraordinary findings.

“Prices,” he said, “go up.

“And down.”

The audience laughed. They also knew that he was right.

-Forbes

March 26 2012

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Si Dieu existe, tout est permis.

«MUSCLES ARE GREAT: EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST ONE THAT THEY CAN SHOW OFF»

»THE BEAUTY OBSESSION»

Every person has beauty at some point in their lifetime. Usually in different degrees. Sometimes they have the looks when they're a baby and they don't have it when they're grown up, but then they could get it back again when they're older. Or they might be fat but have a beautiful face. Or have bow-legs but a beautiful body. Or be the number one female beauty and have no tits. Or be the number one male beauty and have a small you-know-what.

Some people think it's easier for beauties, but actually it can work out a lot of different ways. If you're beautiful you might have a pea-brain. If you're not beautiful you might not have a pea-brain, so it depends on the pea-brain and the beauty. The size of the beauty. And the pea-brain.

«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

Damien Hirst art made between 2003 and 2008 now worth 30% less. Time to buy!

«I THINK FLIRTING IS THE MOST EXCITING THING»

WARHOLIAN QUOTE OF THE DAY

«I don't do drugs. I am drugs.»  -Salvador Dali

«ART IS A SPIRITUAL QUEST» -CAMILLE PAGLIA

«Le but c'est l'impossible. Il faut que ce but reste toujours dans l'esprit. Autrement on est fichu»

-Max Ernst.

IT'S USELESS TO BE YOUNG WITHOUT BEING BEAUTIFUL AND VICE VERSA

CE QU'ÉTAIT VRAIMENT ANDY WARHOL

Ce à quoi une personne de bon goût ou un soi-disant intellectuel ne doit pas normalement s'intéresser pour être bien vu, ce que un artiste dit sérieux ne doit pas normalement aimer, je vais vous montrer que c'est en fait ce que vous aimez. Je ne ferai pas semblant d'aimer ce que j'aime. J'aime vraiment ce que j'aime. Et encore mieux que cela, je deviendrai riche et célèbre en vous le vendant....

«ANDY THOUGHT ABOUT JEWS A LOT» -BOB COLACELLO

In the future an american artist will pay tribute to Gertrude Stein by doing a painting called «a jew is a jew is a jew».

COMMENT PARLER AVEC UN BEL ACCENT SYMPA...

(Andy Warhol with Jodie Foster)

AW: How did you get the great frog accent?

JF: Mon Dieu! I don't know. I go to a french lycée. It's great, man. All the teachers are like 21 or 22
     and have long hair and beards and everything. Being in this school, you don't have to do anything»


 Interview magazine
 January 1977 p.6

«I THINK THE YOUTH OF TODAY ARE TERRIFIC»

LOVE IT!

Art mavens like to describe the auction market for so-called important Canadian art as “blue-chip” – but perhaps, almost a half-century after Sotheby’s hosted its first live sale of such art in this country, the more apt descriptive is “immature.”

Certainly it’s immature compared to the markets in, say, the United States and Britain, where it’s common (and has been for years) for work, often challenging work by still-living (or relatively recently deceased artists) like Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Francis Bacon to rival and occasionally surpass the sums fetched by a van Gogh, Titian or Picasso. In Canada it seems you have be one very dead white guy buried, preferably, under a huge mound of snow or crimson maple leaves to receive that sort of approbation.

-The Globe & Mail

Nov 25 2012

ANDY WARHOL IN INTERVIEW WITH SANDY

AW: Can he bark some more?

Sandy: woof, woof, woof, WOOF!

AW: make him talk some more

-Interview magazine
 July 1977 p.2

«I NEVER READ. I JUST LOOK AT PICTURES.»

PHILOSOPHY 101 FOR THE YOUNG AND DUMB

«Keep true to the dreams of your youth.»

-Schiller

POST WARHOL PREDICTION: JEWISH MAG: IS CHINA SILENCE ABOUT GAZA GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

YOUTH IS MADE TO SHOW OFF

«THERE IS NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD THAT LIKES RIGHT NOW LIKE AMERICA DOES»

Madonna New York apartment on sale for 24 millions.

-Next!

«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

Phillips followed two stellar evening sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s earlier this week at which buyers spent a total of $787 million on postwar and contemporary art. The top lot at Phillips, “Mao” (1973) by Warhol, sold for $13.5 million. It was one of 14 lots whose sellers had been guaranteed an undisclosed minimum price financed by the auction house, third parties or a combination thereof.Coupled with their day sales, the three auction houses sold more than $1 billion of postwar and contemporary this week. Estimated at $12 million to $18 million, it drew a sole bidder and was sold to that “gentleman in the room,” as he was described by auctioneer Simon de Pury. Another guaranteed lot, Basquiat’s 1982 canvas “Humidity,” was estimated at $12 million to $18 million. It drew a sole telephone bid to bring $10.2 million.

-Bloomberg
 Nov 16 2012

«PERSONALLY I LOVED PORNO AND I USED TO BUY LOTS OF IT ALL THE TIME»

WARHOLIAN QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The greatest lesson that I've ever learned in my life was to realize that I can have an effect, that I can change things that maybe need to be changed."

-Keith Haring

GRACE JONES

AW: then you went to Europe and you just became very big there

GJ: I took the same look that I was pounding the streets with. I mean, I would come on my motorbike»

-Interview magazine
 October 1984 p.58

YOUTH WITHOUT COCKINESS IS NO YOUTH AT ALL

WARHOLIAN QUOTE OF THE DAY

«I'm crazy, and I don't pretend to be anything else»

-Calvin Klein 

POST WARHOL PREDICTION: CELEB MAG: ANGELINA'S TWINS FIRST CUTEST WORDS: “ (AD SPACE FOR SALE)”

«EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL»

LA DANSE BY MATISSE

«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

“Great artists, they always go up to a peak, and then they go down to a very low low,” says collector Alberto Mugrabi. “I feel that Damien is one of the most influential artists of our time.” Hirst may care little about critics, but he knows collectors have great power. Advertising executive Charles Saatchi was an early patron, and in recent years, Mugrabi and his family have played a crucial supporting role. Mugrabi isn’t merely an art lover; he’s called his family “market makers.” His father, Jose, who made a fortune in the Colombian garment business, started collecting Warhols soon after the artist’s death, when his most expensive work commanded six figures. He continued buying them on the cheap through the downturn of the 1990s, and the Mugrabis now own the largest Warhol trove in private hands. They’ve followed a similar strategy with Hirst, amassing more than 100 pieces.

-Business Week
 Nov 21 2012

POST WARHOL PREDICTION: JEWISH MAG: IS GLENN BECK UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT OF ISRAEL GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

«I NEVER READ. I JUST LOOK AT PICTURES»

«THERE IS NO COUNTRY IN THE WOLRD THAT LIKES RIGHT NOW LIKE AMERICA DOES»

Rihanna disappoint her fans.

-Next!

EDUCATION 101 FOR THE YOUNG AND DUMB

“Culture in the developed world is now largely defined by all-pervasive mass media and slavishly monitored personal electronic devices. The exhilarating expansion of instant global communication has liberated a host of individual voices but paradoxically threatened to overwhelm individuality itself.”

-Camille Paglia

«I'M SO SPOILED FROM GOING AROUND WITH 19 YEAR OLD»

INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD LUCIE SMITH: 1981

Edward Smith: Would you like to see your pictures on as many walls as possible, then?
Andy Warhol: Uh, no, I like them in closets.
Edward Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one?
Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that.
Edward Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting?
Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music.
Edward Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music?
Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah.


Edward Smith: What do you think is the characteristic of a really nice person? Some people you obviously do like more than others.
Andy Warhol: Ummm, well, if they talk a lot.
Edward Smith: What, and don't make you talk?
Andy Warhol: Yeah, yes, that's a really nice person.
Edward Smith: Thank you, Andy.

«I THINK THE YOUTH OF TODAY ARE TERRIFIC»

«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

La barre désormais, pour un Franz Kline – Untitled, une toile abstraite peinte en 1957 –, est de 40,4 millions de dollars (31,5 millions d'euros), record du monde pour l'artiste. Pour un Jeff Koons – Tulips, une sculpture monumentale en acier poli puis laqué exécutée en 2004 –, il faut compter 33,6 millions de dollars (26,2 millions d'euros), record aussi. Pour Basquiat – Untitled, un tableau très coloré de 1981 –, 26,4 millions de dollars, record toujours. Ils sont huit ainsi à avoir vuexploser leur côte mercredi soir.

-Le Monde

 15 Nov 2012

QUERELLE

«We went over to where Fassbinder was filming this movie called «Querelle» by Genet. Brad Davis is the star of it. I got my picture taken with Brad and I got his autograph on an ashtray for Jon. Met Fassbinder and he was wearing outrageous clothes, the leopard-skin jodhpurs, and one of the guys standing there said he thought Fassbinder had dressed up like that just for me because he usually wears just plain black leather. He looked like a circus trainer. And Brad Davis looks so strange, so delicate-looking. Much better than he did on the cover of Interview».


-Andy Warhol Diaries
March 2 1982

LANDSCAPE.....

“I′m having boys come and model for the new paintings I′m doing. But I shouldn′t call them nude. It should be something more artistic. Like Lanscapes...Landscapes″.

-Andy Warhol

«THERE IS NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD THAT LIKES RIGHT NOW LIKE AMERICA DOES»

Rihanna duo with Chris Brown now online

-Next!

«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

Quelle est votre position sur le mariage homosexuel ?

Je ne suis même pas contre. Je refuse de m’occuper de ça, cela me semble du plus parfait ridicule. Je pense que cela ne mérite même pas que l’on soit contre, je suis indifférent à cette question. Cela me semble un peu obscène de soulever une question aussi absurde et ridicule dans une situation telle que la nôtre, où la France est en train de changer de peuple, de changer de civilisation, ce qui me semble être le phénomène historique le plus important qui soit survenu depuis quinze siècles. S’occuper du mariage gay me semble dérisoire. Je refuse de m’en occuper, même pour lutter contre… Il est tellement évident que le gouvernement s’occupe de cela parce que c’est l’un des rares domaines où il peut faire quelque chose, alors que dans tous les autres il ne peut rien faire ! Accessoirement, étant homosexuel moi-même, j’ai une autre idée de l’homosexualité que cette image dérisoire d’imitation kitsch de l’hétérosexualité… Pour moi, le plus important, c’est l’évolution de la civilisation, ce que j’ai appelé la déculturation et la décimalisation.

-Renaud camus

«MUSCLES ARE GREAT: EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST ONE THAT THEY CAN SHOW OFF»

«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

“A perfect storm between supply and demand” is how Nicholas Maclean of London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean described the roof-raising sales of postwar and contemporary art in New York this week. The action started at Sotheby’s on Tuesday with a rollicking $375m, the highest total the firm has ever racked up.

Leading the pack of winners was Rothko’s “No.1 (Royal Red and Blue)” (1954), which made $75.1m, well over its upper estimate of $50m (pre-sale estimates don’t include commission; results do). A perfect little Pollock “drip” painting, “Number 4, 1951” (1951), set a new world record for the painter at $40.4m. The major winners were Warhol, pop art and abstract expressionist works, with names such as Kline, De Kooning and Bacon being hotly contested.

-Financial Times

 November 16 2012

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY: ARTISTE

Un artiste c'est quelqu'un qui trouve irritant pour l'oeil l'agencement des couleurs dans un fast food mais
plutôt joli si ces mêmes couleurs sont agencées pour un look vestimentaire. Un non artiste, c'est le contraire.

«I LIKE EVERYBODY'S ART»

DUMB AND DUMBER

Fifty year old average looking no fucking brain faggot with attitude. If you can find something dumber and more pathetic than that, you win! I cannot....

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY: CONFLIT

Le vrai conflit de civilisation n'est pas Jihad contre Big Mac. C'est l'interdiction de représenter le visage de Dieu d'un côté, versus la décadence Occidentale ou les scènes porno sont ponctuées de «Yeah, Yeah, Oh My God, it's so fucking good, Yeah, Oh my fucking God, yeah»....

«I NEVER READ. I JUST LOOK AT PICTURES»

«SHOPPING IS MORE AMERICAN THAN THINKING»

«Oh, I ran into a boy whose job is to go shopping for John and Yoko Ono, to buy them clothes and things. I asked him if they'd ever made him bring anything back and he said just once. I asked him if they'd ever wore any of the clothes they bought since they don't go out, and he said; «They're going to make a comeback. They've been wearing them to the studio.»

The Andy Warhol Diaries
Oct 21 1980

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY: GEOPOLITICS

The two most important trends in geopolitics now are jewish inspired.  First, China's strongly nationalistic affirmation of chinese ethnic Han majority, matching jewish ethnic solidarity worldwide. Second muslim identity increasingly defined as religious and ethnic, similar in that to jewish identity.  

«I JUST THINK ENTERTAINMENT IS THE BEST MESSAGE»

WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T SEE ABOUT WARHOL

CP: Warhol had an enormous impact on me as a college student in upstate New York in the 1960s. I have proudly called myself a “Warholite” ever since. It is baffling how Warhol could ever be called “bourgeois” because he was the product of a poor immigrant family in industrial Pittsburgh, and he boldly brought the dissident sexual underground into then-stuffy major museums in both Manhattan and Philadelphia. He surrounded himself with male hustlers, drug addicts, drag queens, and decadent, androgynous socialites. Warhol was openly gay long before the birth of the gay liberation movement. He was contemptuously ostracized as “swish” by closeted gay artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York.

Neither would I accept the term “blasé” about Warhol, since that implies a far more sophisticated and affectedly fatigued persona than the one he projected. A colleague said that Warhol pretended to be “the village idiot” — that is, a dysfunctional, marginalized, passive observer of society. Warhol’s primary response to anything that interested him was “Wow” — the exact opposite of blasé. He was a voyeur who voraciously consumed mass media and who identified himself with the popular audience. Many of his early large-scale pictures were blow-ups of tabloid newspaper photos of automobile or airplane accidents. What he was demonstrating was the saturation of society by the sensationalistic visuals of modern media — a return to a primitive form of consciousness that pre-dated literacy.

To continue with the adjectives you have proposed, I see nothing “irreverent” in Warhol either. On the contrary, he transferred the religiosity of his youth in Eastern Rite Catholicism to his passionate reverence for Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, whom he turned into shimmering saints in an updated Byzantine style. “Marilyn Diptych”, the subject of a chapter in my book, is really a giant icon screen like the one in Warhol’s baptismal church in Pittsburgh. Similarly, those who see irony in Warhol’s acrylic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans are simply imposing their own contemporary preconceptions backwards onto him. Warhol, who began his career as a commercial illustrator, loved brand-name logos and saw them as modern heraldry. Campbell’s soup cans were beautiful to him — exactly as they were to me as a child growing up in the sooty factory town of Endicott, New York. I used to cut out colorful logos from magazine ads and play with them like paper dolls.

Camille Paglia

Huffington Post

November 7 2012

WARHOLIAN QUOTE OF THE DAY

«Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind».

-Mick Jagger

«MUSCLES ARE GREAT: EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST ONE THAT THEY CAN SHOW OFF»

«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

«The dealer's only edge is the vanity of wealth»

-Leo Castelli

«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

In the audience sat the men of the Mugrabi family — the patriarch Jose and his sons, Alberto and David — New York art dealers for whom the evening was not so much a transitional moment as simply another high-stakes day at the office. The Mugrabis own what is believed to be one of the largest and most valuable private collections of art in the world. By their estimate, it includes more than 3,000 works. They have built the collection over the past 25 years, since Jose, an Israeli-born fabric merchant who raised the family in Colombia, moved his wife, Mary, and their two sons to America and got into the art business full time.

The core of their collection is a staggering 800 works by Andy Warhol — “easily the biggest Warhol collection in the world after ours,” says Tom Sokolowski, the director of the vast Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh — and roughly 100 each by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tom Wesselmann and George Condo. At 69, Jose remains largely interested in artists with connections to the Pop movement.

New York Times
Feb 27 2009

WOMEN IN REVOLT

MARCEL DUCHAMP

«Warhol met and talked with Duchamp and thereafter knew him socially in New York and even made a three minutes film of him in 1966....In general terms Warhol was attracted to the way Duchamp took ideas and treated them in whatever way he felt most suitable».


-Andy Warhol 
Self Portraits
Hatje Cantz

«EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL»

L'objet le plus poétique qui soit: un escalier qui ne mène nulle part.

«I NEVER READ. I JUST LOOK AT PICTURES»

WARHOLIAN QUOTE OF THE DAY

«Think before you speak. Read before you think»

-Fran Lebowitz

POST WARHOL PREDICTION: LE LANGAGE FUTUR DES VENTES D'OEUVRES D'ART

«Ce tableau de Warhol exécuté en 1962  lors de sa meilleure période garantira à son éventuel
acheteur le look «old money» tant recherché. À ce titre il serait tout à fait approprié pour un quelconque nouveau riche chinois ou originaire du Moyen Orient, de s'en porter acquéreur. Notons également que ce tableau est à la fois moderne sans être exagérément «faggy» pour les salons de Park Avenue dans la tradition de Brooke Astor. Le coiffeur gay de votre nouvelle maîtresse trente ans plus jeune que vous saura par ailleurs l'apprécier, vous conférant ainsi instantanément une aura de bon goût, de même que la perception par vos pairs chez votre banque d'investissement, que vous avez une attitude vachement «in», compensant largement pour la vulgarité de votre nouveau yacht»

«THE WORLD FASCINATES ME»

«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

Among individual items, mid twentieth century American art produced some winners such as Roy Lichtenstein's I Can See the Whole Room . . . and There's Nobody in It!, making more than $40m for its seller, who bought it for $2m in 1988. Andy Warhol's Dollar Signwas true to its name - it sold for $698,500 in 2011 - a having been bought for $27,000 23 years earlier. 

-Mindful Money
 January 9 2012

«IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE»

Picasso painting sold for 41.5 millions at Sotheby's.

-Next!

«MUSCLES ARE GREAT: EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST ONE THAT THEY CAN SHOW OFF»

«MORE THAN ANYTHING PEOPLE JUST WANT STARS»

«I need to be famous so I can talk about religion. I can talk about God. It's an expensive price that I have to pay to be the most famous man on the Earth and do it with pleasure only for God»

-Muhammad Ali
 Interview magazine
 August 1977 p. 10

STUDIO 54 CROWD

«Then along came a white guy and a black girl in a car who offred us a ride anywhere we wanted to go, and we took it. They said that Stevie wouldn't let them in to Studio 54 because they didn't look right, but they looked okay to me-I mean, he looked like a fairy and she looked like a drag queen, it was the Studio 54 look».

The Andy Warhol Diaries
Jan 21 1978

«PERSONNALLY I LOVED PORNO AND I USED TO BUY LOTS OF IT ALL THE TIME»

KEITH HARING ON MADONNA

«I knew Madonna from before. We were in that scene in the lower East Village at the same time. She was just starting. She used to go out with Jellybean [Benitez, now a record producer], and I'd see her sing at the Fun House, where he was the OJ. Bur I met the others through Andy. He had a way of sort of making things happen around him. I don't go to those parties much anymore; I'm not leading the same glamorous life. I don't miss it a lot, but when it started happening, I was young and naive, and it was really exciting. It was like incredible to go, you know, to meet Michael Jackson backstage with Andy. When he brought me to Yoko' s apartment the first time, it was incredible. You can't believe that you're there. The ultimate one was a dinner at Yoko's. I brought Madonna and the artist Martin Burgoyne. Andy was already there. Bob Dylan was there. David Bowie was there. And Iggy Pop. Just sort of in the kitchen. At first you are more in awe of things like that, but you adapt really quickly.»

-Keith Haring