Fine Art News

Killer's artwork removed from auction

2009-04-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

ART HISTORY/CANADA - The prison artwork of a Canadian killer up for auction on an American website is going, going, gone.

Federal officials have stopped Roch Theriault's art from leaving Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick, drying up the supply to MurderAuction.com, which specializes in so-called murderabilia.

Correctional Service of Canada has imposed "restrictions on the dissemination and distribution of artwork and hobbycraft items as well as written materials such as memoirs, bibliographies and-or public communications," says an internal document.

"The restrictions are to reduce public notoriety primarily to prevent negative consequences for victims and their families as well as to decrease risk to personal security in the institution and to facilitate eventual reintegration."

Records related to the controversy were obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The freeze has had the desired effect: just one Theriault painting remains on MurderAuction.com, an abstract titled "Chutes d'automne," painted in 2003. It had already left the prison before the freeze was imposed.

"Not allowed to send or make anymore art," says the posting by an anonymous Canadian dealer, identified only as Redrum's Autographs.

At least seven pieces had been available for online auction a year ago, most of them believed to have been taken out of Dorchester by a Moncton, N.B.-area woman described as Theriault's current wife.

Auction items have included Theriault's signed poems, and all pieces were of inoffensive subjects, such as flowers.

Theriault is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder committed while he led a bizarre cult at Burnt River, Ont., between 1977 and 1989. He killed his wife through disembowelling, and chopped off the hand of a concubine.

Senior officials in the prison service had been alerted as far back as August 2007 that Theriault's art was appearing on MurderAuction.com, which promotes criminals as celebrities.

But no action was taken until The Canadian Press reported on the controversy last year – and a senior cabinet minister took notice.

"I would appreciate if you could look into this matter and ensure that such practices are not continued," then Public Safety minister Stockwell Day wrote to then head of corrections, Keith Coulter, the day the story appeared.

"Under no circumstances should any offender be permitted to be affiliated with any individual or group that glorifies their crime."

Day added he was "disturbed ... that an offender, rather than his victims, may be benefiting from proceeds of work which is done in prison."

One of those victims, Gabrielle Lavallee, 59 – who lost her hand in a vicious attack by Theriault – also said she was hurt by the online auctions.

"I am victimized by a legal system that seems to give more importance about criminal rights than the victims' right," she said at the time.

The prison service received a legal opinion in the fall of 2007 warning there were legal obstacles to interfering with the auctions.

"Any decision to impose limits on the production, or selling, of artwork by an offender can be grieved and challenged in court," Coulter advised the minister last year.

The heavily censored documents do not spell out the specific legal basis for the current ban, but indicate the new policy applies only to the Theriault case, not to all offenders.

A spokeswoman for the prison service declined to provide any details of restrictions placed on Theriault, citing protections to personal information under the Privacy Act.

Lynn Brunette said only that "measures have been put in place to address this issue."

Material connected with notorious child-killer Clifford Olson continues to appear on the auction website, though it's unclear whether Canadian prison officials have also cut the flow in that case. Olson is serving a life term in a Quebec facility.

Also offered for auction are documents alleged to contain original signatures of infamous dictators, including Saddam Hussein and Benito Mussolini.

Artwork inspired by Bush shoe attack

2009-01-30T17:11:00.000-08:00

ART HISTORY - A sculpture of an enormous bronze-coloured shoe has been erected in Iraq to honour the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush.

The sofa-sized artwork was formally unveiled in Tikrit, hometown of dead Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.

Artist Laith al-Amari insisted it was not a political work, but a "source of pride for all Iraqis".

George W. Bush, who launched an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, managed to dodge the shoes. The young journalist who threw the shoes, Muntadar al-Zaidi, was arrested and still awaits trial. As he pulled off his shoes, al-Zaidi, now 30, shouted: "This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq." and "This is a farewell kiss, you dog!"

About 400 Iraqis gathered on Thursday to see the monument unveiled - a shoe on a white pedestal, about 3m (10ft) high, with a poem praising the journalist al-Zaidi at its base and a bush growing out of the shoe.

The sculpture stands in the gardens of an Iraqi foundation that looks after children whose parents died in the violence following the US-led invasion.

Following his arrest, al-Zaidi was beaten nearly to death while in custody, suffering a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding.

He has been charged with aggression against a foreign head of state, and faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted. Many Iraqis deny he has done anything wrong since throwing shoes is a traditional Arab insult. Iraqi politicians can't agree what to do about the shoe thrower.

See Also:
The Shoe Thrown Around the World
Iraqi Artists

Top 10 Most Expensive Paintings

2008-11-25T15:12:00.000-08:00

10. Vincent Van Gogh - "Portrait de 'artiste sans barbe", 1889
Price paid: $90.7 Million

9. Gustav Klimt - "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Baur II", 1912
Price paid: $93.1 Million

8. Pablo Picasso - "Dora Maar au Chat", 1941
Price paid: $100.8 Million

7. Vincent Van Gogh - "Irises", 1889
Price Paid: $102.3 Million

6. Pablo Picasso - "Garcon a la pipe", 1905
Price paid: $114.8 Million

5. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - "Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmarte", 1876
Price paid: $128.8 Million

4. Vincent Van Gogh - "Portrait of Dr. Gachet", 1890
Price paid: $136.1 million

3. Gustav Klimt - "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", 1907
Price paid: $143.5 Million

2. Williem do Kooning - "Woman III", 1953
Price paid: $145.7 Million

1. Jackson Pollock - "No. 5, 1948", 1948
Price paid: $147.8 Million

Recession hits Art Market

2008-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

The world wide art market is being hard hit by the American recession and global economic slowdown. How? Artworks at auction are going unsold.

Where just a year ago we were seeing record prices for Andy Warhol's and Vincent Van Gogh's, now paintings and sculptures are sitting on the auction block with no bids whatsoever.

The Canadian art auction market for example celebrated 12 years of growth, eclipsing $71 million in sales over 2007-2008, its largest ever.

At the end of 2008 however the money has dried up. The collapse of the housing sector, the financial markets, the automotive sector and other industries has caused investors to grip their money more firmly. Invest in art? Ha!

In London and New York, fall auctions have severely underperformed, leaving major works unsold or greatly underpriced that American collector Eli Broad even jokingly called it a "half-price sale."

At the modern and impressionist art auctions in New York on November 3rd and 4th works from Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Warhol and Rothko, were left unsold. Sotheby's had estimated a low of $338 million (U.S.) in sales, but had only $223.8 million.

So what does this mean for living artists and private art galleries? Well if the art investors are tightening their belts, it suggests that regular art buyers will do the same too and art sales will plummet. We can expect to see quite a few privately owned art galleries lose their collective shirts and close.

Its hard enough for art galleries to survive as is. Its not exactly a business known for profits.

Jackson Pollock for sale in Toronto

2008-11-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

Abstract Expressionism - It was a thrift-shop find for $5 and now it's being put up for sale in Toronto with a price tag of $50 million.

A painting by Jackson Pollock will be on display this month at a small, east-end gallery, with its American owner, Teri Horton, seeking a Canadian buyer.

The retired trucker, who found the painting some 15 years ago in San Bernardino, California, says she's been so badly treated by the U.S. art market - which has refused to acknowledge its forensic authentication (Jackson Pollock's fingerprints in the paint) - that she wants a Canadian to buy the colourful abstract canvas.

"For a long time I'd been wanting this painting out of the U.S.A. because they don't deserve the painting," Horton said Tuesday.

"This is the 21st century - the century of science.... They don't want science into art authentication because it's going to expose all the corruption within the U.S.A. art market."

Horton has entrusted the Pollock painting, measuring 1.7-by-1.2 metres and featuring navy, off-white, black, red and yellow paint, to Gallery Delisle in eastern Toronto.

Owner Michelle Delisle says she reached out to Horton after seeing the documentary, "Who the $%& is Jackson Pollock?" in which the gravel-voiced Horton discovers she may have a masterwork on her hands, but comes up against an established art market that refuses to acknowledge evidence provided by a Montreal forensic expert.

Believing the painting to be a real Pollock, Delisle contacted Horton last month and now the painting will be on display at the gallery for two weeks beginning Nov. 13, with private viewings available by appointment from Nov. 1.

"The person that buys this painting is laughing after this because as soon as it's purchased it'll be validated," said Delisle.

"A painting's value is the last price paid, so if this person was to then turn around five years later and bring it to Christie's or Sotheby's (they could do well). The last Pollock that came up to market went for $140 million...and this is a little bit smaller but not a lot. A $50-million price tag is very fair. It's very fair."

Horton says she's had offers to buy the painting in the past, but at $2 million and $9 million bids, they fell far below what she feels it's worth. Bidders with even higher offers were ultimately scared off by New York art advisers who consistently counseled against the purchase, she adds.

Canadian art observers doubt Horton will get her price in Canada, given that serious collectors in Canada tend to favour homegrown artists and that few have the bankroll to meet the steep asking price.

Tory government scraps Portrait Gallery

2008-11-07T19:08:00.000-08:00

CANADA - After seven years of planning and several million dollars of public investment, the Conservative government has scrapped a project to open a national portrait gallery, Heritage Minister James Moore said late Friday.

"In this time of global economic instability, it is important that the federal government continue to manage its own affairs prudently and pragmatically," he said in a press release.

Moore, who was appointed to the Heritage Ministry last month, also blamed the cancellation on a dearth of feasible submissions made by developers.

(Right and Below: Portraits by Canadian artist Charles Moffat)

"A number of developers submitted proposals to house the public programming and exhibitions of the Portrait Gallery of Canada," he said.

"Unfortunately, none of these proposals met the government's requirements, and we are therefore terminating the selection process."

The cancellation comes a day after Moore, 32, told reporters that he hoped to "build bridges" with the arts community in his new posting.

Relations with Canada's arts groups were strained after the Harper government announced $45 million in culture cuts earlier this year.

In 2001, the Liberal government announced it would open the Portrait Gallery of Canada by 2005, however, the project has hit several snags.

Initially, the gallery - which was to feature 20,000 paintings and prints along with millions of photos and other examples of Canadian art history - was to open in the former American embassy, which sits across from Parliament in Ottawa.

In fact, the government has already spent more than $10 million in repairing that building in preparation for the gallery.

The entire projected cost was initially $22 million, but that number later swelled to $45 million, and the opening was pushed back to 2007.

Meanwhile, the Conservative government reviewed the project after it came into power in 2006.

A year ago, the Conservatives announced that several major Canadian cities should bid for the gallery - a move which was slammed by critics who wanted the gallery in Ottawa.

After last May's deadline for submissions, three cities were in the running: Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa.

Alberta's government had even promised to pump $40 in provincial cash into a bid.

The government, meanwhile, stated that the portrait collection, which is stored in special facility in Gatineau, Que., "will continue to be available for viewing by Canadians through travelling exhibitions and other public programs."

Artists Remember the names of Canada's Fallen

2008-11-03T11:04:00.000-08:00

ART HISTORY - When the sun sets over the British capital tomorrow night, an ambitious act of remembrance begins when the first name is projected against the walls of Canada House in Trafalgar Square. One after another, the names of each Canadian to fall in World War I will follow.

As the sun moves westward to Canada, the names will go with it, projected against buildings in six cities, including Toronto City Hall. The sequence continues with 9,700 names per night spread across 13-hour, sunset-to-sunrise vigils until the last name appears at the break of dawn on Nov. 11.

Three years in the making, Vigil: 1914-1918 is the brainchild of Canadian actor/director R.H. Thomson and his co-creator, lighting designer Martin Conboy, a labour of deep respect that has taken on a life of its own.

The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, moved by the poignancy of the idea, now have confirmed their attendance at tomorrow's London launch. Public vigils are also to take place in Fredericton, Halifax, Regina and Edmonton, besides the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

As an aid to remembrance, a searchable website has been created – www.1914-1918.ca – to enable the families of Canada's war dead to mark the precise moment of their ancestor's turn in the passage of names, 90 years after the devastating war was brought to an end.

"This was the war that cost Europe its reputation as civilized. The war where Canadian families were forbidden from repatriating the bodies of their war dead, however much they wanted to," Thomson told the Star.

"So what we want to say to people is, `Watch. Watch these names move. This is the final march. The final roll.' "

For Thomson, it is personal. He lost seven great-uncles to war, including four of five brothers who fought with the Canadian Expeditionary Force under British and Allied command in WWI. That toll formed the basis for Thomson's 2001 solo show, The Lost Boys.

Growing up in the shadows of such loss, Thomson says he has always been mindful of the "unearthed stories in the attics of so many Canadian families."

Thomson knew his own stories: how two of the brothers fell in the battlefields of Europe and how two more made it home, only to die in a sanatorium from the effects of gas poisoning. And how the fifth brother – "Uncle Art"– wandered through a subsequent life of adventure, from Africa to Egypt to northern Ontario, occasionally showing up at Christmas to teach his great-nephew how to play poker.

For a span of three years, Thomson and his collaborator Conboy have been amassing stories from other Canadian families to better understand what Thomson calls "the enduring slipstream of war."

"As artists, we are trying to present Vigil as a piece of social history. To say directly to Canadian families that we understand that when there is war it doesn't just stop at a certain date. There is this turbulence that goes on for generations," said Thomson.

"I spoke to hundreds of families, hearing stories of men screaming in their beds in the middle of the night, still fighting the war for years after the fact.

"I spoke to a man in his 90s who broke down and cried to me on the phone – cried to a complete stranger– as he told of his father's war. Another man told me that every time his father swore, he spoke out his service number from the war."

Thomson recognizes that where art intersects with remembrance the terrain can sometimes be tricky. At tomorrow's ceremony in London, for example, the Queen will meet a number of Canadian veterans, including some recently returned from Afghanistan.

"What we are doing is not anti-war statement nor a pro-war statement. For me, I have no difficulty thinking about these things in dimension; one can look skeptically at military action as a means of diplomacy and at the same time have complete and total respect for the men and women who are actually there," he said.

"I'm doing this more as a Canadian, rather than as an artist," says Thomson.

"What really struck us in preparing for this is how many families hold the last pieces of this war in their memories. But the memory is fading as people near the ends of their lives.

"So what happens after that? What happens in that moment in our country's history when the memory fades forever? My response would be: mark it. Do something unique, so that you will always remember that moment when it evaporated."

Rotting Onions = Art

2008-11-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

ART HISTORY - One man's stink is another man's major art project.

A piece by Belgian conceptual artist Jan Fabre at the Antwerp's Muhka contemporary art museum is challenging the nose as well as the eyes.

The installation "Spring is on its way" consists of onions and potatoes hung from the ceiling in condoms. And the vegetables are, well, spoiling.

"Like many of his works, it is about transformation and metamorphosis," Muhka's Kathleen Weyts said of Fabre, who had a solo show at the Paris Louvre earlier this year.

Weyts claimed that one museum worker complained. Local media reported that plenty of visitors and museum guards were protesting. By Monday, the smelly, rotting onions and potatoes were the talk of the town.

"Protest Against Fabre's Stink Art," headlined Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.

"Fabre's stinking work raises tempers," the VRT television network said on its website.

Some shoots have broken through the condoms and other condoms have crashed to the ground from the weight of the vegetables.

"It smells of onions but I would not call it a stink," Muhka director Bart De Baere told VRT.

The museum has no plans to remove Fabre's installation, which runs until the start of spring 2009, but it is removing any vegetables that hit the ground.

Eight years ago, Fabre covered some university pillars in Ghent in ham. Sure enough, after a while, the complaints came.

"Fabre always says that art must be a bit smelly," said Weyts.

Daphne Odjig Honoured in Canada

2008-10-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

Daphne Odjig `one of Canada's finest living artists,' and her life's work is now on display in Kleinburg

At 89, with a retrospective of her work on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Daphne Odjig is not bothered by lofty descriptions of her art as having Cubist and Surrealist influences.

"It doesn't bother me. If that's what they (art critics) want to write about, that's fine. I still go ahead and do my own thing," said Odjig, whose exhibit at the Kleinburg gallery is on display until Jan. 4.

The native artist does admit to being a little surprised by all the fuss, which includes an Order of Canada, seven honorary doctorates and a 2007 Governor General's Award in Visual Arts.

"I am (surprised) because I didn't have the encouragement or the promotion years ago because they (critics) said it was ethno-graphic. But I didn't give a damn, I just kept painting the way I wanted to," Daphne Odjig added.

McMichael executive director and CEO Tom Smart called Daphne Odjig "one of Canada's finest living artists."

"She is able to also tell her stories and uses a particular, unique style. She also brings in European modes of representation, particularly Cubism. So she marries different styles and different modes and different traditions," Smart said.

As a child growing up in the village of Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island, Odjig's interest in art was sparked by her grandfather, Jonas, a tombstone carver who also liked to sketch.

"My companion was my grandfather so I followed him around. I was just like a little shadow. I mimicked everything he did. So I would sit with him on the porch and sketch. And it all starts from there," she said.

With no formal training – "I never went to art school" – Odjig said she has gotten her inspiration over the many decades from visiting art galleries, from people she's met, from omnipresent nature and from extensive travel. "All artists should travel. I love being with people and I love the environment. You draw your inspiration from anything, from everywhere, from many people," she said.

Daphne Odjig said her native background is also a major influence on her work, despite a childhood in which her Ojibway heritage was suppressed.

"I grew up not being able to dance or to know the sweetgrass ceremony and other things because that was forbidden by the church at the time. It was still underground," she said.

But Odjig is optimistic that native culture is alive and well and in no danger of disappearing in a Western-dominated society.

"The native psyche is very strong and we'll always be here. A native person, if he's given the chance, he can prove himself. I don't think our culture will be lost," she said.

Odjig, who lives in Penticton, B.C., said nature is so important to her she takes a break from her art during the summer.

"I love birds. I love my swallows. In the summertime, I don't paint, I'm too busy learning about nature, all about nature. I'm feeding my birds," Odjig said.

As an ardent environmentalist, Daphne Odjig said she is dismayed to see the effects of man-made activity that have "upset the whole balance of nature."

Smart said Odjig's concern for the environment and her representation of it through her drawings and paintings makes her exhibit "a very timely and contemporary story."

New technique for seeing hidden paintings

2008-07-31T11:11:00.001-07:00

A team of European scientists unveiled a new method for extracting images hidden under Old Masters' paintings yesterday, re-creating a colour portrait of a woman's face unseen since Vincent van Gogh painted over it in 1887.

For years, art historians have been using X-rays to probe artworks hidden under other paintings, a technique resulting in a fuzzy, black-and-white image. But Joris Dik, a materials scientist from Delft University, and Koen Janssens, a chemist from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, combined science and art to engineer a new method of visualizing hidden paintings, using high-intensity X-rays and an intimate knowledge of old pigments.

The pair used the new approach on Patch of Grass, a small oil study of a field that van Gogh painted in Paris while living with his brother Theo, who supported him.

While not exact in every detail, the image produced is a woman's head that may be the same model van Gogh painted in a series of portraits leading up to the 1885 masterpiece The Potato Eaters.

The new method will allow art historians to obtain higher quality and more detailed images underlying old masterpieces. In Van Gogh's case, it could reveal details of works that were painted over. For other works, it could provide new insights into the studies that the artist built a painting on.

Painting by Winston Churchill for auction

2008-04-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

I like Winston Churchill. He was overall my kind of leader. But apparently he also painted, and wasn't bad at either. A painting by Winston Churchill of a Moroccan sunset – a view he loved so much that he invited President Franklin D. Roosevelt to see it years later – is going on the auction block next week.

Sunset Over the Atlas Mountains, a vibrant landscape painted in 1935 from Churchill's balcony at the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech, is expected to bring at least $600,000 (dollar figures U.S.) at Bonhams New York on April 23.

Churchill invited Roosevelt to travel with him to Marrakech after a conference in Casablanca in 1943 so he could experience the beautiful view for himself.

After Churchill's death in 1965, the 20-by-24-inch oil went to a daughter, Lady Sarah Audley, who sold it to a private collector in Texas, who in turn sold it in 1992 to the family of the current San Francisco owner, whose name Bonhams did not disclose.

Malcolm Walker, European paintings specialist at Bonhams, said the value of Churchill's paintings has skyrocketed in the past year and a half. "He was as good as an amateur artist will get," he said.

Churchill, who began painting for relaxation and loved working in brilliant colors, often did not sign his work so as not to influence judges, Walker said. Sunset Over the Atlas Mountains is not signed.

Walker said Churchill loved Morocco, which he visited often.

Marrakech, a work depicting the city's gates against the backdrop of the Atlas mountains, was painted by Churchill in 1948 and presented to President Truman in 1951. It sold at auction for $949,918 in December 2007. Earlier that year his painting Chartwell Landscape with Sheep sold for $2.06 million – a record for the artist & politician.

Killer's art for auction

2008-03-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

The prison artwork of a notorious Canadian killer is being offered for sale on an American website that promotes criminals as celebrities.

More than half a dozen items produced by cult killer Roch Theriault at the Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick are up for auction on MurderAuction.com, which specializes in so-called "murderabilia."

Collectors can bid for oil paintings, pastels, signed handprints and even short poems written out and coloured by Theriault, who's serving a life sentence after being convicted of a brutal murder in 1993.

The charismatic leader of a tiny religious group near Burnt River, Ont., between 1977 and 1989, Theriault chopped off the hand of one of his concubines and killed his wife by disembowelling her.

A television movie about his bizarre cult, which was modelled on Old Testament themes and attracted up to a dozen adult followers, was titled Savage Messiah. It was broadcast in 2002, the same year the National Parole Board turned down his first bid for day parole.

"Cult leader Roch Theriault is one of the craziest and sickest criminal(s) in Canadian history," the anonymous Canadian-based seller of the artwork – identified only as Redrum's Autographs – declares on the website.

"Theriault's artwork is extremely rare as he doesn't write to anyone but family."

The art being auctioned is abstract or contains inoffensive images such as flowers, and dates from October and November 2007. Minimum bids range from $20 to $500 (U.S.).

The three-year-old website is one of the earliest to create a specialized marketplace for crime memorabilia, which has generally been banned from mainstream sites such as eBay.

MurderAuction.com founder Tod Bohannon makes no apologies, saying it's merely a branch of the well-established hobby of collecting celebrity autographs.

Bohannon, 30, began collecting criminals' signatures at age 13, when he first wrote to notorious prisoners. His large collection now includes a few choice Theriault pieces, as well as some prison memorabilia from Canadian child-murderer Clifford Olsen.

"More than anything, it's about getting to know someone who's looking for a friend," Bohannon said in an interview from his home in Cornelia, Ga., where he teaches kindergarten by day.

His advice for crime victims who might object to the website? ``If my site's hurting you, just don't go to it."

So-called "Son of Sam" laws in the United States, designed to prevent criminals from profiting from their notoriety through big film and book deals, have been challenged on constitutional grounds and in any case do not target crime memorabilia.

A bill was introduced in the U.S. Congress last fall to try to curtail the trade in crime memorabilia, although observers say it's unlikely to have much impact even if it's passed.

A spokesman for Corrections Canada said there appear to be no similar laws in this country preventing the trade in ``murderabilia."

"I don't believe there's any legislation in Canada that goes to that effect," Guy Campeau said in an interview.

Corrections Canada does have the legal authority to forbid a prisoner from producing works that are obscene or offensive, constitute hate literature, or pose a risk to safety or security.

"We're aware of the website, but it's not within our mandate or jurisdiction to deal with these issues," Campeau said. "After it's out in the public, well obviously the Correctional Service doesn't have any mandate or jurisdiction to intervene on this."

Campeau added that the department is nevertheless reviewing the case.

Theriault is still visited regularly by some of his former cult ``wives," who have moved to New Brunswick to be close to him and have borne him more children following conjugal visits.

One of Theriault's best-known victims, Gabrielle Lavallee, was not immediately available for comment. Lavallee, who had her hand chopped off by a meat cleaver, wrote a best-selling French-language account of her time with Theriault, L'alliance de la brebis, or The Alliance of Sheep, in which she denounces him as an incurable, sadistic psychopath.

Theriault's poems for sale are brief and in French, such as Le regret, c'est de ne plus jamais recommence (Regret is to never be able to do it again), dated last October.

Bohannon's website says Theriault, who believed himself to be a reincarnation of Moses, was in a coma for a month last fall. Campeau said he is restricted by law from providing any personal information on individual inmates.

MurderAuction.com also offers a signed prison letter from Clifford Olsen. Bohannon said his personal collection includes some awards Olsen received in prison for winning 100-metre and 500-metre races.

90DayJane - Can Suicide be Performance Art?

2008-02-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

90DayJane, who claims her suicide countdown blog is art, provokes a huge and often harsh reaction.

90DayJane is an online persona launched Feb. 5 as a countdown blog for a woman, apparently from Los Angeles, claiming she would commit suicide in 90 days – May 5. No good reason was offered. She appears to be young.

If the young, anonymous woman is to be believed, threatening suicide online constitutes art. Others disagree with making the act a performance.

With up to 4,000 Canadians a year committing suicide and more than 100,000 calls being made to distress centres in Toronto, Hill says he puts more of his focus on those truly in trouble than on the suicide countdowns he's seen appear on the Internet from time to time.

"My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3," Jane says in the entry launching 90dayjane.com. "So, if I feel like saying `game over,' why can't I?"

The question generated thousands of responses before the blog was shut down last Tuesday evening, only to re-emerge the next day with a mea culpa and a promise to close for good within days.

"90DayJane is a personal art piece about me," Jane wrote in her Day 83 posting, saying she began the blog "for me and (what I ignorantly thought would be) a small number of people who might find it on Blogspot."

She said the site was meant to be a modern take on the story of Christine Chubbuck, whose on-air suicide at a Florida television station inspired the 1976 movie Network.

"Her story both inspired and terrified me because I can truly empathize with her rage and even her isolation. I wondered how Christine's life and subsequent suicide would play out in our time," Jane wrote.

She has declined media interviews, and posted a request she received from a "huge" TV network to meet with its executives. The network asked: "Can we make this happen very soon?" in the email Jane posted to the site.

"Wow, and people think I'm morbid," says Jane.

Real or not, the performance of a woman saying she would commit suicide is what makes it art, says Joanne Tod, a painter who teaches at the University of Toronto.

"I'm not saying it's good art," Tod adds quickly, labelling the site "narcissistic and exhibitionist."

Tod also doubts the veracity of the art claim, saying a true artist would identify herself. Without that, she says, it's possible someone just claimed the site was art as a way to justify something that very quickly got out of control.

"It gives art a bad name, if that's what she's doing."

The site attracted some 160,000 hits, half in its final 24 hours, and thousands of comments from visitors in its first week. Several egged her on, offering gruesome suggestions on how she might kill herself. Others lashed out, calling her an "attention-seeking whore." Few showed any sympathy.

"I like your idea for sharing your final 90 days. I think you're about to become a little more famous than you expected," someone identifying as Fawkes wrote. "Good luck with offing yourself."

Others told her not to wait.

"Normally I would be adamantly opposed to anyone committing suicide, but in your case I will make an exception," Wizeguyinpa wrote. "Off yourself immediately and quit counting how many people visit your site."

The blog horrified suicide experts. Dr. John Draper of the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline posted a message on the site warning that the blog could encourage others to emulate her.

"She is suggesting that suicide is a reasonable method for those questioning life's meaning, which is just absurd," Draper told the New York Daily News.

He did not think much of the site's artistic merits. "I'm not an art critic but I do wish the student's attempts at learning were more socially responsible," he said.

Throughout, there was speculation the site was a viral marketing tool for a movie or video game, something industry expert Carmi Levy said would likely backfire.

"At some point, a line is crossed," says Levy, a consultant with AR Communications. "Using suicide would likely be seen as going too far."

Tod said the same would likely apply to art.

Within days of the site being launched, other bloggers began linking to it and opening their own discussions about it.

Once something begins to take off on the Internet, Levy says, others jump on board to generate traffic to their own sites as a way to boost revenue.

"There's a self-serving aspect to a lot of the comments, the forum post and the blog posts," he says.

In her post admitting her suicide threat was not real, Jane wrote that she did not want all the attention she received, and expressed "great disappointment with my generation" over the responses.

Swiss art heist, 2 paintings found in car

2008-02-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

ZURICH, Switzerland – Two Impressionist paintings stolen in one of Europe's largest art thefts have been recovered in an abandoned car, police said today. The gallery may have paid a ransom to have them returned.

The pictures by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet were among four paintings worth $163 million that were stolen from a private museum in a Feb. 10 armed robbery.

The two other paintings taken from the E.G. Buehrle Collection – one by Edgar Degas and the other by Paul Cezanne – remain missing, Philipp Hotzenkoecherle, commandant of the Zurich city police, told reporters.

The recovered paintings – Monet's "Poppy field at Vetheuil" and van Gogh's "Blooming Chestnut Branches" – were discovered in a parking lot in front of a Zurich mental hospital on Monday. It was unknown how long the white sedan in which the paintings were found had been parked there, Hotzenkoecherle said.

The pictures, worth a combined $64 million, were in good condition and were still under the glass behind which they were displayed in the museum, he said.

They were identified by museum director Lukas Gloor after a thorough inspection.

Zurich police spokesman Marco Cortesi said he did not know whether a ransom had been paid to recover the paintings.

Gloor, standing next to him, said: "I can't give any information on that."

Gloor said the two paintings still missing included "our collection's landmark "Boy in the Red Waistcoat."

That painting, by Cezanne, alone is worth $91 million. The other painting is Degas' "Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter."

Local radio station Radio 24, citing an unidentified witness, reported that the building supervisor at the hospital found the paintings in an unlocked car.

The hospital is only a few hundred metres from the museum.

Police sealed off the hospital grounds and forensic experts went over the vehicle meticulously before it was towed away.

Police initially said the vehicle may have been used by the three robbers when they made their escape with the four paintings from the museum.

Thomson painting sells for nearly $1.5M at auction

2007-11-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

November 21, 2007.

A small Tom Thomson panel the artist painted a few months before his mysterious death sold for a record-breaking $1.46 million at a Toronto auction Tuesday.

Spring Thaw, a novel-sized 13 x 18-centimetre oil sketch Thomson painted in the spring of 1917, soared to a sale price of $1,463,500 (including buyer's premium) Tuesday night during Joyner Waddington's fall auction of important Canadian art.

Featured on the cover of the fall Joyner Waddington catalogue and described as a "blue chip" work by director and auctioneer Rob Cowley, Spring Thaw more than tripled its high pre-sale estimate of $400,000 Tuesday night.

Bidding for the panel rose in increments of first $50,000 and then $100,000 during a spirited bidding session before a standing-room-only crowd. It sold to an unnamed telephone bidder.

Thomson presented Spring Thaw to his sister, Minnie Thomson Henry, as a gift in 1917, and it remained in their family until the early 1970s, when it was acquired by a private collector.

Tuesday night's auction also saw a West Coast buyer score the Jean McEwen canvas Arc-En-Ciel Rouge for $97,750 — more than triple its $30,000 estimate.

China's Red Hot Art Market

2007-10-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

SHANGHAI - Like everything else in China these days, the contemporary art market is red hot and everyone wants a piece of it.

So when a small group of people arrive at her airy gallery in trendy Moganshan Lu, co-director Elisabeth de Brabant breaks off an interview to show them around.

The men and women look and dress like American tourists. They probably are American tourists. They are also prospective buyers, and de Brabant equips them with an overview of the latest on the Chinese arts scene and a bag full of catalogues featuring young hopefuls from the Art Scene Warehouse stable.

International buyers account for about 90 per cent of the current interest and investment in mainland Chinese art, creating a market worth about $36 billion a year, when everything from ceramics to modern pop art is taken into account, the country's cultural ministry estimates.

Some buyers are outrageously savvy like British collector, gallery owner and star-maker Charles Saatchi.

Others are just exuberant amateurs, hoping perhaps to discover a new Damien Hirst and buy up his entire inventory before anyone else hears about him.

At the very top end of China's contemporary art market -- considered nose-bleed territory for living artists -- is figurative painter Liu Xiaodong, who came up through Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of the three major arts schools in China. Last November, Liu sold a painting for $2.75 million.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of other young Chinese artists who are winning prizes and snagging shows at home, in Europe and in North America. In short, they are doing everything possible to grab the attention of collectors looking for the next new thing.

"The Chinese contemporary arts scene is very young," de Brabant explains. Galleries scout the countryside looking for artists. "We're talking to artists, asking about their friends, talking to profs."

She describes the scene as fresh but in some ways immature. "There's nothing aggressive or sensational yet, like in North American or Europe."

But there is a Wild West aspect to contemporary art in China that you don't see too often in developed markets. The scene is so new and so unregulated that stars can emerge overnight, and burn out just as quickly.

De Brabant, who arrived in Shanghai via New York City, comes from "an art family." She describes them as "collectors and involved in museums."

It all seems very upper crust until the petite blond demonstrates there's still some Powell River, B.C., lumberjack left in her MacMillan(-Bloedel) blood.

"The Chinese have a very commercial side," she begins, benignly enough, describing some of the murkier aspects of the Chinese art market. But in the next breath she adds: "There's a lot of crap out there."

De Brabant talks of copycat artists and formula painters. But she seems most offended when she tells of galleries that exist for no other reason than to artificially drive up the value of an artist's works with phoney sales so they can put the paintings up for outside auction and cash in on the inflated market they've created.

In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping opened China to market forces, the light shone in on an art scene that

hadn't changed much in the four decades or so since Mao's Long March. Art was executed in traditional inks, watercolours and oils, and the themes were patriotic, political and social.

Predictably, there had to be healing before anything really new could emerge and work produced in the early 1980s is often referred to as the "art of the wounded," because of its grim depictions of the harm done by the Cultural Revolution.

By the mid-1980s, however, art became more experimental and politically edgy. Change was in the air in China and a group of artists that became known as the 85 Movement was in the vanguard. Unfortunately, their brush with freedom of expression ended abruptly in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Nothing close to it has emerged since.

When China's artistic life re-emerged a half-dozen years later, a new school of art duly surfaced. It's been called "cynical realism" or "political pop" by some, and dismissed by many as just too transparently consumer-oriented.

Canadian Sami Wafa was among the contemporary art pioneers when he moved his four-year-old Art Scene gallery from Hong Kong to Shanghai in 2001.

Then, when he opened Art Scene Warehouse in 2003, he led the way to the little arts colony that has since developed along the banks of Suzhou Creek. About 20 galleries have joined him there in the past two years.

This kind of frenzied growth is happening everywhere in the Chinese art market and is, understandably, leading to talk of a bubble.

A bubble that could burst.

De Brabant doesn't dismiss the idea, but she's generally optimistic about contemporary Chinese art.

"Of course there is a bubble (but) ...

I don't see it bursting as much as I see it maturing and settling down a bit. There is a lot of talent coming through. There is definitely fluff, too, but I see that falling away."

Other, far bigger players are also betting that the Chinese art market is worth long-term consideration and commitment.

It was the art world's equivalent of a papal blessing when the head of Paris's prestigious Pompidou Centre confirmed last week that plans remain afoot to open a Pompidou gallery in Shanghai, despite bureaucratic setbacks that many thought had nixed the project.

"We are not in a hurry," Alain Seban told reporters pressing for the kind of firm dates that are often difficult to come by in China. He said, however, that the Pompidou remains "very interested by China, and Shanghai in particular."

Ken Danby dies at age 67

2007-10-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

Ken Danby:

Recognized as one of the world’s foremost realist artists and best-known in Canada for his iconic hockey painting, At The Crease, Ken Danby has died at the age of 67 while canoeing in Algonquin Park.

Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Danby’s vast portfolio includes everything from portraits of famous Canadians to athletes in mid-play and landscape paintings so crystalline that at first glance they resemble photographs.

“He aspired to be — and in many ways achieved — the status of Canada’s storyteller,” Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, said in an interview today.

“He wanted to be an artist who painted Canada in its heroic moments and in its everyday moments . . . he wanted to tell people through his art that you could paint realistically and capture great emotion and generate great feeling, and he did.”

Ken McGee, manager of the Danby Studio in Guelph, called his friend a Canadian treasure.

“He’s been called a national icon and that’s basically what he was,” McGee said today.

The prolific artist was said to have known from a young age that he wanted to paint, and enrolled in the Ontario College of Art in 1958.

Danby’s first one-man show in 1964 sold out, an occurrence that would become commonplace as his work proved popular with private, corporate and museum collectors.

When asked to identify his favourite work, the prolific Danby frequently replied: “My next one.”

His 1972 painting of a masked hockey goalie hunched in the crease is considered by many to be a Canadian national symbol and is sometimes mistakenly thought to be a portrait of legendary netminder Ken Dryden.

Lacing Up, another hockey painting of someone tying his skates in a locker room, is almost equally iconic.

On his website, Danby recalled an encounter about At The Crease.

“One day, a woman complimented me on my painting At the Crease, which she referred to as ‘that painting you did of the goalie, Ken Dryden,”’ he recalled.

“She said that she had long had a print of it in her home and really enjoyed it. I thanked her, but also explained that, ‘It isn’t an image of Ken Dryden.’

“Looking puzzled, she replied, ‘Yes it is.’ I responded, ’No it isn’t.’ After a long pause, she loudly exclaimed, ’Yes it is!’ I quickly apologized, with the sudden realization that she was right. It’s really whomever one wants it to be.”

The goalie painting is Danby’s most successful but there’s a lot more to his portfolio, McGee said.

“It’s a worldwide image now. Over the years we have sold literally hundreds of thousands of those images — anybody who knows hockey knows that image and therefore knows Ken Danby,” he said.

“But his reputation seemed to be, from the public point of view, that of a sports artist and he was certainly much, much, much more than that. His works ranged from sports images and panoramic landscapes to huge oils and figurative works and just some stunning works. Particularly in the last few years, his work has expanded both in size and imagery.”

In the 1980s, Danby prepared a series of watercolours on the Americas Cup and the Canadian athletes at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

He also served on the governing board of the Canada Council and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Canada.

McGee said that Danby, who continued to paint avidly, was on the lookout for new inspiration while canoeing with his wife, Gillian, in Ontario’s pristine Algonquin Park on Sunday.

“He died gathering information for more paintings,” said McGee, who remembered his friend as “amenable, friendly, approachable, kind and generous.”

Danby was also touched by admirers of his work.

“When my painting, Acapulco, was first exhibited, I happened to be in the gallery one day and observed a gentleman standing in front of it for the longest time, seemingly lost in thought,” he once recalled.

“Suddenly and quite unconsciously, I’m sure, he concluded his absorption by rising up on tip-toes, as if by doing so he just might be able to see behind the diving board. What a compliment!”

Danby was a big supporter of the arts, and frequently railed against the lack of arts education in the public school system.

“The arts are just as important as math and science in education, and just as important as any other endeavour in our lives,” he said.

“Art is a necessity. Art is an absolutely essential part of our enlightenment process. We cannot, as a species, as a civilized society, regard ourselves as being enlightened without the arts.”

In 1975, Danby was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was also a recipient of the Jessie Dow Prize, the 125th Anniversary Commemorative Medal of Canada, the City of Sault Ste. Marie’s Award of Merit and both the Queen’s Silver and Golden Jubilee Medals.

In 2001, he was vested in both the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.

Ontario provincial police say Danby collapsed while canoeing on North Tea Lake. He was transported by air ambulance to North Bay General Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

He leaves behind his wife and three sons.

Zeke's Gallery Shut Down

2007-08-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

Fellow art blog site http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/ has been shut down by a law suit claiming that he is guilty of libel.

Here is the contents of his August 2006 blog. To see more just visit the Web Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060830024342/http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Interesting Note

Howdy!

Pretty cool if it is true, but according to this binking website, for the first time ever, one of Moishe Safdie's buildings are going to be torn down.

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Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Paul Butler needs a dictionary. (or what do you think the word 'solo means?)

Howdy!

Last I heard, the word solo meant 'alone,' 'by one's self,' 'without others.'

Last I heard, the word party meant 'a group of people gathered together for pleasure.'

So why does Paul Butler have his collage parties listed in the Solo Exhibitions and Installations part of his CV? Does this mean that the other people are superfluous? or is it that Mr. Butler is taking credit for their work? Or is that he doesn't expect anyone reading his CV to go beyond the Solo Exhibition section and he figured he needed to get it in at the beginning? Or is it something else?

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Val Ross and Gertrude Kearns together!

Howdy!

Last week I was bashing Ms. Ross, this week I come to compliment her. There's a very nice article from yesterday's Globe and Mail about Gertrude Kearns. I've written about Ms. Kearns before.

What I want to know is, if "Negotiations are under way to install them in Ottawa, possibly at the Canadian War Museum or the Department of National Defence." Then how much more than the $50,000 for two paintings that I estimated she had received 16 months ago will she be getting now? And if she does end up getting more money for her paintings would this not be considered a postive side effect of the Canadian war effort in Afghanistan?

Secondly (and this is a very small nit to pick) the only reason "Kearns has become one of Canada's best-known war artists since the Second World War" is because Canada pretty much hasn't been in a war since the Second World War and it is really tough to be a "war artist" if their ain't any wars happening.

I'm undecided as to whether I think what Ms. Kearns is doing is a good thing or a bad thing. Are her paintings subject to the same censorship as those of a photographer embedded with the Canadian Forces would be? And how much is she personally benefiting from suffering of others?

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Michael Toke or West Side Lofts?

Howdy!

The Globe and Mail writes a flattering article about Michael Toke and his response to this (funny how no one thought to ask if any of the developers were Czech). For whatever reason, no one thought to mention how the developers of the West Side Lofts were supposedly artist friendly, but still building condos, and if Mr. Toke had been one of the artists whose art was purchased.

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Kirsten Johnson blogs, sorta for the National Post

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They started it yesterday and this is Monday's entry, and this is Tuesday's entry, but I won't be reading Wednesday's entry because I do not see any real difference between what Kirsten Johnson writes in the National Post and Deneen's blog called Yarns and Musings. Why they think it is newsworthy is beyond me.

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Monday, August 28, 2006

$1,000 airfare + $3.14/kg

Howdy!

An interesting article in yesterday's Boston Globe on how things work in Cape Dorset. Basically, the sculptor makes 25% of the price you pay for a soap stone sculpture. There also is this article from earlier in the summer in the Globe & Mail that has some different facts, but is remarkably similar.

If you don't feel like spending that sort of cash, or prefer to see a larger percentage of the money going to the artists, there's always, the ItuKiagâtta! and the Robert Davidson, and the Brian Jungen exhibits.

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$5 million gets you what?

Howdy!

On Friday the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal announced that $5 million will be added to the budget of Placements Culture. Dollars to doughnuts it goes to organizations like the OSM, the GBC, and Pointe a Calliere. Or in other words them that already have.

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A waste of $60,000

Howdy!

Apparently the city of Richmond has some money to burn. They are hiring a consultant so that they can find artists. If anybody reading this is on the west coast, I guarantee that I could find artists for the city of Richmond for under $40,000.

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Friday, August 25, 2006

Chris Hand interviews Nancy Nisbet, filmed by Scott Lutes

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If you'd like to download the video, click here [77 MB, 23:21, Quicktime]. Back in June, Ms. Nisbet rolled into town. We took advantage of her stay to interview her about her art project.

Scott Lutes, made a short documentary film about her project, which you have already seen if you are a regular reader of this blog. Feel free to watch it again, because it is a very nicely done film, if I do say so myself. And I'd be less than honest, if I didn't say that I was disappointed that Ms. Nisbet, thought that giving credit to Priya Ramu was more important than giving credit to Mr. Lutes (scroll down to the bottom to see what I mean).

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Fall's coming, it is getting nippy

Howdy!

In the shameless self promotion department, if you buy your sweetie a Zeke's Gallery Hoodie like this one

Zeke's Gallery gets $5, and your sweetie gets warm. If your sweetie doesn't like hoodie, there are lots of other items as well.

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Thursday, August 24, 2006

Maria Puente also needs some help with research

Howdy!

A feel good and make nice article from USA Today on artists who blog. Unfortunately, Ms. Puente and her editors decided that lines like "The result: More people are making a living as artists, more people are buying art, and more art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices" must be the truth because Ms. Puente wrote them. In fact if more people are making a living as artists I would suggest it is because there are more people alive now then there have ever been before, not because of blogging. There are also more people making a living as firefighters, and more people making a living as nuclear scientists, and we all know how popular those firefighter and nuclear scientist blogs are. Ditto for the more people buying art.

The reason art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices now has absolutely nothing to do with blogs. The spectrum of prices has become larger because there are people named Ronald Lauder who are spending more and more money on art. Ten years ago the spectrum of prices for art went from $0 to about $80 million. Today the spectrum of prices for art goes from $0 to $135 million. Bloggers had absolutely nothing to do with the spectrum becoming 68% larger, unless someone out there knows the URL for Ronald Lauder's blog.

Ms. Puente then goes on and quotes the guy who runs this gallery as saying 'The bloggers are just "a little blip in the art world, something that will fill a niche for those people who want to buy something real and not just a poster."' Which given the art he stocks and the types of painting he sells is the equivalent of surry maker (you know with a fringe on top) what he thinks of those new fangled aut-o-mo-bile makers. Heck! I betcha dollars to doughnuts Howard Rehs, co-owner of Rehs Galleries in New York doesn't like anything made after 1960, and still uses a rotary phone.

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Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Val Ross needs to learn how to do research

Howdy!

While the Globe & Mail tries really hard to position itself as 'the paper of record' for Canada, as long as Val Ross keeps writing shoddy articles like this one about The Rooms in St. John's it ain't likely to happen.

Ms. Ross somehow thinks that Rick Mercer is a taxi driver, she writes 'One taxi driver described the building as "the box that the Basilica came in."' Unfortunately for her, in this article from June 2005 they quote Mr. Mercer as saying '"Once you see this from the inside, I can guarantee no one is ever again going to say this is the box the Basilica came in," said Mercer, referring both to the geometric design of The Rooms and the home of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese across Bonaventure Avenue.'

Then, or should I say additionally, Ms. Ross wrote 'The New York Times raved about the architecture and the views...' In fact what was written in the travel section of the New York Times on July 28 of this year was 'It’s hard to miss the Rooms (9 Bonaventure Avenue, 709-757-8000; www.therooms.ca), a huge museum and art gallery that towers above the city from its hilltop perch. Opened last year and designed to resemble traditional Newfoundland fishing rooms where families processed their catch, the Rooms combines the Provincial Museum, the Provincial Art Gallery and the Provincial Archives under one roof. The spotlight is on artists from Newfoundland and Labrador and from throughout Canada. Unofficially, among its the best displays is the view of the harbor’s meeting the Atlantic at Signal Hill.'

I'm not certain in which language the word 'huge' is synonymous with 'raving.' Nor am I certain why 92 words written by a freelance writer based in Yardley, PA are considered authoritative. And lastly, it is a pity that I can't easily find a copy of the book by Wayne Johnston called The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, given Ms. Ross' liberal use of Ellipsises (Ellipsi?) I wouldn't be surprised if the three parts of the quote he uses to start her article came from three entirely different parts of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Needless to say, after discovering these mistakes, I stopped reading the article.

[Update 25 Aug: I received an email from Ms. Ross with the entire quote: 'The Basilica of St John the Baptist loomed up from the cluster of the buildings on the hill. I could not believe that the city and the ice were of one world. The city looked so reasonable, so plausible, a site in which atrocities not only did not take place, but which also somehow prevented them from taking place elsewhere." As a consequence of the email (which had some other stuff as well) I have revised this post.]

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Six of one, half a dozen of another

Howdy!

I'm betwixt and between after reading this news about Château Dufresne. While I recognize the absolute need to have art and cultural things in the most economically depressed neighborhood in Montreal, I do not like it when the government throws $65,000 willy-nilly at something under the guise of 'development.' Especially when the organization receiving the $65,000 thinks it is worth 87.5% of the Musee d'Art Contemporain (or even worse, apparently the fine folk at the Château Dufresne think they are worth 150% of the MACM if you are a student. Betcha if they dropped their admission prices attendance would skyrocket, and they wouldn't this extra special government handout to survive).

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Go Rene Lemay! go!!

Howdy!

This is a story I like. Montreal artist, Rene Lemay not only has a show in Vietnam at a gallery called Viet Fine Arts, but he's getting it publicized in newspapers as well.

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Can I get a definition, please?

Howdy!

Elektra, a digital arts festival (which has a site that is inaccesible to anyone running Linux, like me. So much for them being cutting edge...) is touting itself as 'the largest event of its genre in North America.' Unfortunately, I would argue that it isn't even the largest event of its genre in Montreal. Someone forgot to point out Mutek to the fine folk who write for the NY Arts Magazine.

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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Way more important than Nazi looted art

Howdy!

While it is fine and dandy for the National Gallery and every other museum and museum-like organization in this fine country of ours to spend money, time and other precious resources doing provenance research on the objects in their collections that were created before 1946 and that were acquired after 1932, that underwent a change of ownership between 1932 and 1946, and that were or might reasonably be thought to have been in continental Europe between those dates. So that they can then remove them from the public and make some other people wealthy.

I would actually like to see the National Gallery and every other museum and museum-like organization in this fine country of ours to spend money, time and all the other resources they can amass doing provenance research into the aboriginal art that they own. It is far more likely, and hundreds of times more important that situations like this one be proactively avoided, rather than relying on anonymous phone calls to band councils.

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The things I learn...

Howdy!

I take back a tiny bit of the nastiness I showed to the Ministry of Heritage Canada yesterday. Because I discovered that they are giving The Robert McLaughlin Gallery $5,100 in order to pay the Musee des beaux Arts du Quebec to exhibit 43 paintings and drawings by Antoine Plamondon.

I initially thought that it was going to replace the Rita Letendre exhibit (scroll down slightly) that they had been showing for the past year. But as it is only going to be hanging around Oshawa for a couple of months, it is obviously replacing something else. But this is a long drawn out means to say that I downloaded the catalog for the Rita Letendre show [pdf alert], and in it there is a picture of her, and all I can say is; "Yes, her paintings are wicked cool, but I didn't know how babe-alicious she was." If anybody feels like introducing me to her, I would be forever grateful.

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Monday, August 21, 2006

Wonderful & Amazing!! Although I am slow and dense

Howdy!

I just was told by Paul Litherland himself, that there was an article in last week's Globe & Mail about his show 'Absolutely Fabulous.' I must've been asleep at the switch, brain dead, and suffering from a general case of blindness to miss it the first time around. Besides being friends with Paul (hence him telling me) Christine Redfern (the writer) is someone I know as well.

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Le Devoir ain't Sherlock Holmes when it comes to art

Howdy!

I don't know if you've been under a rock, but just about everybody and their mother has picked up on the story of the National Gallery of Canada returning a painting by Vuillard in oder to make a French family wealthier (ok, that last little bit was my commentary).

Well as you can see, the press release got sent out on Friday the 18th of August. Apparently around noon. Well on Saturday the 19th of August, Le Devoir published a article about a guy who does the research to 'return' paintings stolen by the Nazis to the poor and destitute offspring who are still alive. No mention, not even once of Vuillard or the National Gallery (not even the 'galerie nationale'). And while I've heard rumor that Le Devoir has an early deadline, I refuse to believe that it is before noon the day previous.

The situation was made even worse, when the sidebar article about Montreal art that had been looted by the Nazis failed to mention Vuillard or the National Gallery either.

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Knowledge Exchange my elbow

Howdy!

I just discovered this thing called the CHIN Knowledge Exchange which looks to be something using my tax dollars to teach museum professionals how to leverage technolgoy.

Can you say "Not?"

Four clicks to discover that an interview with Stephen Downes, according to them a "Canadian expert on online learning" is only available as a Windows Media File. And somehow they've only been able to transcribe 10:36 minutes of the interview. (Or if you'd like it spelled out for you - an expert is allowing his name to be used with something that is unaccesible to more than 15% of the people viewing, and they haven't been able to complete the job.)

If this ridiculous and rebrehensible use of taxpayer money cost more than $1.50, I'd strongly suggest firing everyone involved. I'm doing more, and better for less. If anyone would like some help in how to leverage technology, feel free to ask me - I'm certain I can show you for cheaper.

And I hope that I don't have to remind you about The interviews and catalogs of Canadian Artists and people in the Arts, aka the Zeke's Gallery Podcasts, that have been digitized. I just wish I had 10% of their budget.

Bertrand Lavoie Catalogue, Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery May 1998.
Kelly Backs Catalogue, Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery November 1999.
Philip Bottenberg, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery April 2004.
Toly Kouroumalis, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery June 2004.
Dominique Blain, Montreal Artist interviewed August 2004.
Michel Hellman, Art Critic for Le Devoir interviewed August 2004.
Eduardo Kac, Chicago Artist interviewed October 2004.
Chris Dyer, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery September 2004
Marc Mayer, Director of Musée d'art contemporain interviewed October 2004.
Jean-François Lacombe, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery November 2004.
Eric Waugh, Montreal Artist interviewed February 2005 part one, part two Audio
Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth, Montreal Artist, interviewed February 2005 Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. Audio
Chris Lloyd, Halifax Artist interviewed March 2005.
Zev Tiefenbach, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery August 2005 part one, part two Audio
Wil Murray, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery October 2005 part one, part two, part three Audio
Face-Off, the public debate between myself and Marc Mayer, October 2005 part one, part two. Audio
Mise au jeu, the public debate in French between myself and Marc Mayer, November 2005, part one, part two. Audio
Tricia McDaid, Interviewed & Exhibited at Zeke's Gallery May 2006. Video
The Missive, a film about Zeke's Gallery by Jarred Coxford Video
Nancy Nisbett's Exchange Project, Interviewed outside of Zeke's Gallery June 2006. Video
Stephane Aquin, curator of Sound + Vision, Interviewed at the Musee des Beaux Arts July 2006. Video

And there are more to come...

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Art Classes all over the place

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On Friday The New York Times wrote about life drawing classes, on Sunday,
Le Soleil in Quebec City wrote about life drawing classes, and then if you're not in Quebec City or New York, there are always these Drawing lessons.

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Sunday, August 20, 2006

Stéphane Aquin interviewed about Sound + Vision

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[note: I made significant additions, and so I bumped this back up to the top]

Click here if you'd like to download the film [80MB Quicktime File]. Last Thursday, Scott and I went over to the Musée des beaux-arts to interview Stéphane Aquin, the contemporary art curator there, and the person most responsible for Sound + Vision. If you'd like to watch the film without downloading, click on the appropriate button below.

If you'd like to see the exhibit, it is up on the walls of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until October 22.

Then, if you would like more information, The Voir review, by he who shall remain nameless - goes for the kneejerk criticism of not enough Quebecois artists, and then shows how incompetent he is as a tourist, since he admits that 'sometimes he can't find contemporary art when he travels.' (My best guess is he thinks the MOMA is a 'contemporary' art museum - it ain't.)

The La Presse review, by he who alternates between being offensive and not admiting to making mistakes. Ignoring for the moment, the personal differences between what he likes and what I can't stand - the one piece that I find absolutely horrible, he adores. He states that the only artist missing is Janet Cardiff, except that he doesn't realize that the AGO only has one Cardiff piece that is extremely large and extremely fragile, and the two pieces that the National Gallery owns are even larger, and more fragile, or in other words they don't travel. He also forgets about Tom Dean, Jana Sterbak, Nelson Henricks, and Jan Peacock, all of whom have work that is collected by the three museums that is not fragile.

The Gazette review by Henry Lehmann, a reasonable review, except he lets the MBAM off the hook, with regards to artists from the Maritimes, because he did not realize that three quarters of the exhibit comes from the National Gallery, And he mistakes the sand (ie 'sands of time') in Rheinmetal/Victoria 8 as snow.

And the Le Devoir review by Stéphane Baillargeon, where he too, for the most part gets it right (for some reason he thinks the Kevin Schmidt piece is good as well, and uses it as the foundation for his review).

[note to Jennifer McMackon, I would consider this post more like a lambast.]

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The Rubberbandance Group makes the New York Times

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As you might suspect, I always get a big kick when anything from Montreal, such as the Rubberbandance Group gets written up in the New York Times.

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Frédérique Doyon is getting sloppy

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On Friday Ms. Doyon wrote this article about the Guggenheim scoring $1 million. She basically, translated this entry from Artdaily.com, which unfortunately is this Press Release from the Guggenheim Museum.

While it is all fine and dandy for Artdaily.com to republish press releases - and is the primary reason why I never, ever read what they publish, I find it a little worisome when Le Devoir decides to use what little space they have to republish PR flack from a museum in a foreign country.

At least if they are going to give over their space to communication departments of museums, they should give it over to museums in this country, don'tcha think?

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Thursday, August 17, 2006

Quebec in the New Yorker, kinda, sorta, maybe

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Back when I was merely a blogette, and had written only a couple of thousand words, Alex Ross' blog, The Rest is Noise was daily reading. As I wrote more and more words, it got relegated to once/week status, and then once/month status. Nothing wrong with the blog, or Mr. Ross, more due to changes in my priorities. So I found it wicked cool when I was reading The Rest Is Noise this month (which is made very easy, because Mr Ross is sprinting to finish his book, so the blog is, shall we say, sparse). And he linked to what he called an "5) Amazing YouTube video of Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer." So I clicked. And boy oh boy was I surprised to find out that in fact it was a performance by Maxime Rioux that had been videotaped by César Saez, or in slightly plainer language two local Montreal artists. Mad props and shout outs to both of them for blipping on the radar of one of the best writers out there.

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Ben Hammond Live at Zeke's Gallery, from back in June

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If you'd like to download this video, click here [26 MB, Quicktime, 7:42]

It took a while but I finally was able to post Ben Hammond performing his songs 'No History,' and 'Lemme Know' here at Zeke's Gallery in Montreal on June 29, 2006. If you'd like to hear the entire show, click on these: Set One, Set Two & the Theremin Interlude

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Cool Call (or $20 gets you $113)

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The Varley Art Gallery has a call out for artists who have lived in Canada for less than 10 years. They want to have a show on and about immigrant art, and they pay CARFAC fees as well.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Not a good weekend for Montreal artists

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And I just discovered that Stanley Lewis died on Monday. If you'd like to see an example of his work, try this. My condolences to his family and friends. Yuck. And double yuck.

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The Halifax Chronicle Herald should know better

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There's this very silly article written by Paul Pickrem, where he states at the beginning of his article, "Internationally renowned painter and sculptor Rita Torlen has found a little piece of paradise right here in Nova Scotia."

Mr. Pickrem, a) Exhibiting in one's place of residence, even if it is in Mexico, does not make an artist internationally renowned. b) I don't know how far Paradise, Nova Scotia is from Halifax, however, if you are looking for an Internationally Renowned Sculptor, I suggest you give a call to this person, I'm fairly certain Digby, Nova Scotia could be considered on your beat as well.

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The Arts Report, getting better

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I quite like getting scooped, and especially by Joe Cummings of the CBC Radio program The Arts Report, because there have been many times when I have busted on his chops, and I always knew he could do good work.

I was extremely saddened to hear, that Philip Iverson died over the weekend. No cause of death was given, and it worries me that he was only 41. If you'd like to see reproductions of some of his work, his website is here. My condolences to his family and friends.

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A Very Slow News Day - Boats & Art

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Some woman named Lita Solis-Cohen rehashes the pipe dreams of David Lester. I found pretty much the same article in The Art Newspaper from February, back when it might have been news, and a slight variation from back in May. I also came across another article about a previous pipe dream of David Lester.

Personally, if you're going to write an article about boats and art, I think you should choose to write it about artists and art that is actually in the freakin' water already. And if you happen to be reading this and within spitting distance of the Mississippi River, The Miss Rockaway Armada could use some Cookies, chocolate and ice cream.

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Know how to draw?

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Get a job here

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Still More Pix from Mark Garland's Vernissage

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I think this was the whole reason behind the show. The piece is called The Evolving Spine (Laid to Waste) .(Man it is so nice when it is spelled out for me!)

And then there are the pictures that show how much fun was had by all.

Mark Garland.

Me

If you would like more information about Mark Garland's art, click here. And Once again all the pictures were taken by Donna Diraddo.

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More Pix from Mark Garland's Vernissage

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Back in June or July (my memory is a little fuzzy on this one) we hauled out to the Dorval Cultural Centre to see a show of Mark Garland's kick-ass creations. He graciously sent me some pictures that were taken by Donna Diraddo during the party. A fun and fabulous time was had by all, and I strongly reccmmend that you get your butt to the Sarto Desnoyers Community Centre this weekend to see Mr. Garland in action. Then for those of you hoping for a review, because Mr. Garland is a friend of mine, I can't. Sorry.

I wish I knew the names of the pieces, but I don't.

Now I feel just really dumb.

And dumber.

If you would like more information about Mark Garland's art, click here.

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Pix from Mark Garland's Vernissage

Howdy!

Back in June or July (my memory is a little fuzzy on this one) we hauled out to the Dorval Cultural Centre to see a show of Mark Garland's kick-ass creations. He graciously sent me some pictures that were taken by Donna Diraddo during the party. A fun and fabulous time was had by all, and I strongly reccmmend that you get your butt to the Sarto Desnoyers Community Centre this weekend to see Mr. Garland in action. Then for those of you hoping for a review, because Mr. Garland is a friend of mine, I can't.

Everyone having a grand old time, can't you tell?

Me, trying to explain to Mark the interationality inherent and self-evident in the emotional movement of his sculptures.

Mark pointing out the naughty bits in his sculpture.

Cool, eh?

Everyone still having a grand old time, can't you tell?

If you would like more information about Mark Garland's art, click here.

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Monday, August 14, 2006

Greg Curnoe is pedalling ferociously in his grave

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Peter Goddard, the normally well informed and very good art writer at the Toronto Star strikes out swinging with This article about a Bike sculpture built for 300. He pans it by writing "Toronto's Bike Arch isn't likely to enter the pantheon of bike-related art-objects..." after having mentioned Marcel Duchamp, and Claes Oldenburg (where he gets the name of the piece wrong, and forgets about this one).

But what really gets my goat, is that he should know better, and have at least mentioned Greg Curnoe. There aren't many opportunities to get Mr. Curnoe's name in print these days, and missing one as self-evident as this is a pity.

Then if you'd like to see the arch,

Originally uploaded by chesh2000pro.

Originally uploaded by alfredw.

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Wicked Good News - Mad Props to Marcel Tremblay as well

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If Sterling Downey wants to become a politician, he'd get my vote. He invited M. Tremblay to Under Pressure, and M. Tremblay took him up on the invitation. So yesterday they talked. Talking is good, don'tcha think?

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Vancouver taking over the world

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Currently here in Montreal, there are three exhibits that are being toured by Vancouver museums and galleries, now I find out that Rachel Harrison & Scott Lyall's show called When Hangover Becomes Form is at some place called Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Which because of this article in the LA Times made me think it was LACMA. So maybe I should just redo the headline to something like "Vancouver, moving south."

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And people thought I was nasty!

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Heck! At least I sign my name to everything I write. This article about this exhibit pulls no punches. Unfortunately, I don't quite understand why "Paul Clerkin, an Irish web developer" would go to Winnipeg in order to see the show, which leads me to think all sorts of conspiracy type of things about whomever really did see the show and write the article.

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Nothing Canadian

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I saw this article about this artist, and said to myself, 'wow! pretty gosh darn cool!'

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More on how bad the CBC is

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There's this article which attempts to show how "Marc Galipeau's paintings will be displayed at the prestigious Caroussel of the Louvre during a show this December." Except that the Caroussel of the Louvre is not prestigous, because it is a shopping mall. I wonder if TV5 calls an exhibition at the Galeries d'Anjou 'prestigious?"

[update 3:30 pm: I am guilty of a mistake as well, the Carousel du Louvre is not a shopping mall, it is in fact a convention center. And as far as I can tell, Marie-France-Lou Lemay wrote an article for La Voix de la Est that was completely correct, it got picked up by Presse Canadienne because it is a slow news day, which then got translated by Canadian Press (badly) which led to the CBC article embellished as only the CBC can do, and then broadcast nationally as part of the Arts Report.]

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Sunday, August 13, 2006

"You will never get hecklers in Montreal."

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Submitted without comment from this article.

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Another waste of $20,300

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I saw this press release annonoucing that the Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre in Southampton, Ontario just scored $20,300 to "digitize its military collection and make it available online through a specially developed Web collections portal." On top of this waste of money (because the digitization can be done for about $20,000 less) they show how badly they understand digital culture when the press release states "(This news release is available on the Internet at www.canadianheritage.gc.ca under Media Room.)" If you go to www.canadianheritage.gc.ca they don't have any links to anything that even approaches 'Media Room."

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There's no dancing, and it looks like everyone is illiterate in Hamilton

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Or maybe it is just a case of me waking up on the wrong side of the bed and not being aas happy-go-lucky as I normally am.

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Mad Props to Sterling Downey

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Mighty nice article in yesterday's Gazette about Mr. Downey's response to Marcel Tremblay's idea about banning spray paint sales to people under the age of 18.

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Patience is a virtue

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Now this looks like a grant that all art bloggers should apply for. Mark September 17th in your calendar ('cuz that's the day before the deadline). Unfortunately 100% Canadians aren't eligible, but I will entertain offers for marriage if anyone is interested in applying...

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A week later Istvan Kantor gets some ink

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Thank goodness for Linda Dawn Hammond, she writes a pretty colorful account of what went down at the AGO last Friday. Still nothing in the Globe & MAil.

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Nazis, Indians, what's the diff?

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Now this is news I like to read, according to the article Kansas University "has returned a sacred mask to a tribe in Ontario, Canada." I'd like to know the details, but so far no dice. Combine that with Wednesday's release by the Association of Art Museum Directors of their report on Sacred Objects and we can at least see some movement in a good direction. Now, I would like to know of all the aboriginal art in museums in Canada, how much of it has had its provenance checked?

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Got Clay?

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Someone wants a Potter.

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25 € gets you 60.000 €

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I'm never a big fan of competitions where you have to pay to enter. But this one looks sufficiently large that I'm willing to reserve judgement. On top of it, if you make it out of the first round Franz Ackermann, Barry Schwabsky, and Karen Wright all are guaranteed to at least have a glance at your work.

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Thursday, August 10, 2006

Go Edward Katz Go!

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Mr. Katz wrote a very entertaining letter to the editors of the Gazette about Marcel Tremblay's suggestions on how to stop graffiti.

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Wanna give Katherine Crum $350?

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She organizing something called The Directors Forum. Basically it looks to me, like a bunch of medium sized museum administrators get to use their expense accounts to visit New York City, and call it work. Last I heard there weren't many medium sized museums who had all that much excess cash. Add in $200/night hotels, $100/day to eat, and we're talking a minimum of $1,250. All for the opportunity to listen to a woman who advertises for exhibits on the internet talk about increasing the size of an audience. (I've also just written to them asking what annual attendance has been for the past four years - if I get a response, I'll post it here). Personally I still think that this conference is the one to be at.

[update, 3:00 PM: I just heard from Amy Kleinert, SBRMA Marketing Manager that attendance is "Approx. 50,000 annually." So it doesn't sound like it is increasing, I wonder what they are going to talk about.]

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Wanna work in Delaware?

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Out of work? Wanna curate but can't find an organization? Try the University of Delaware! they're looking for something they call a Curator of Exhibits!

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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Shirley Reiff Howarth is a nice person

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Over a year ago I discovered that I missed a lecture in May, 2005, and then in looking around the website, I realized that Ms. Howarth knows her stuff.

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A tale of two conferences

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First off there's something called City Art Technology co-hosted by Champ Libre and Parachute magazine, it costs $75, and of the 13 speakers worthy of receiving a bio, 46% of them are locals. I'm not so certain I would agree with them that it was an international symposium, but whatever... Second off the Symposium on Contemporary Canadian Art. 50% of the speakers are from out of town, %50% are from other parts of Canada (notice how there is no 'international' in any part of the title) and it only costs $25.

Don't even get me started on the titles of the talks... the Champ Libre/Parachute one has something called The Sensitive City, but somehow they forgot that the CCA has been running, for a full year an exhibit called "Sense of the City" and it appears that no one from the CCA was invited. The MBAM on the other hand has a talk called "Moving into the 21st Century: Curating and Collecting Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada" and it will be given by Kitty Scott, Curator of Contemporary Art, The National Gallery of Canada.

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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

MuseumBlogs.org

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I recently signed up to MuseumBlogs.org and discovered that this here blog is pretty gosh darn old in comparison to other museum blogs. I then went through the list ('cuz there are 60+ blogs listed) and some of them are 'museum related' and realized that there still aren't all that many blogs from real live museums with buildings, non-profit status, and art exhibitions. By my count, not even a dozen, including this one.

American University Museum at the Katzen
Museums Australia Education Group
Victoria and Albert Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Goldwell Open Air Museum
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art
Mendel Art Gallery
National Museums Liverpool
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts/Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
The Walker Art Center

Although my favorite of the 'related' has got to be this one.

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Can you touch your toes?

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Because you need to be flexible to apply for this job teaching art.

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Monday, August 07, 2006

A question of priorities

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I don't understand the Globe & Mail or Sarah Milroy. They are acting like TASS instead of a newspaper that used to be run by Canada's most whatever art collector. In today's Globe & Mail Ms. Milroy writes about an artist, who as she writes "discourages... the giving of explanations to the press." So, if the artist doesn't want any press or publicity, why is she not respecting Mr. Sehgal's wishes? Or does she think she's bigger and more important than any artist? Especially since on Thursday she and her newspaper have been deliberately spiking an art story [spiking for those not familiar with the newspaper business means not publishing a story]. And what I find even weirder, is that I just found out that one week before Istvan Kantor got down and dirty with the AGO the Globe & Mail published three articles (one and two and three) about his desire to donate blood to the reconstruction of the AGO. So it ain't like it's not newsworthy. Maybe they just never follow up on an article? Whatever, it just looks like sloppy, shoddy and irresponsible journalism from what used to be generally thought of as the best newspaper in Canada.

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Looks like New Zealand Artists are going to be the next big thing

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I read this reprint of a press release about something called the Walters Prize which sounds vaguely similar to the Sobey Prize, the Governor General's prize, the Pierre Ayot prize, or any number of ther prizes offered in art. But the thing that caught my eye were these lines: "She published the first monograph on the work of South African artist William Kentridge" and "the first monograph on Canadian artist Janet Cardiff." Or in other words it does appear that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the judge for the Walters Prize (and the reason for the press release) could be called a king maker. I'll try to remember to check out who wins the prize.

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Sunday, August 06, 2006

Sometimes good things come from bad things

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I've mentioned before that I really like the idea of audio guides by cell phones, and how it is not expensive at all to set up. Well, according to this article in today's New York Times the Guggenheim Museum (an institution that I am not particularly fond of) is doing the exact opposite and leveraging extremely old school technology, something called conversation. They have trained their guides to be guards or their guards to be guides. Strangely enough it sounds pretty much like what I do here when people walk in the door. Cool!

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Clint Burnham can write a good story

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I'd never heard about Joe Average before I read the article about him written by Mr. Burnham, good thing, too. 'Cuz if I had merely seen the Joe Averaqe website I would not have given Mr. Average the time of day.

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Interesting, but...

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Interesting thing this Movement Movement, except for one small point. Last I heard the idea was to slow down, look at, and try to appreciate the art, not run right by it. And I wonder if they would apply for funding from the Dance division or the visual arts division of the Canada Council? More here as well.

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Friday, August 04, 2006

Horay for bloging culture!

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And specific and humongous props and shout outs to Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter at Torontoist. If he hadn't written this post about Istvan Kantor's latest feat, I never would have known about it. There are four English language newspapers that publish daily in Toronto, The Globe & Mail has nothing, The Toronto Star has nothing, The National Post has a 135 word space filler about it, which somehow fails to mention that Mr. Kantor won the Governor General's Award for Visual arts in 2004. It got reprinted in the Ottawa Citizen as well, still without mention of the Governor General's Award (and Paul Gessell should know better). And finally, as expected there is nothing in the Toronto Sun (although come to think of it, with blood and nudity it should have). So what exactly were Sarah Milroy, Gary Michael Dault, Peter Goddard, whoever replaced Julia Dault, or for that matter any of the numerous people who call themselves journalists who work at those fine publications doing before during and after Mr. Kantor's performance? Last I heard getting busted by the police pretty much was the classic definition of news. And while I'm at it, isn't there this cliche about newspapers 'if it bleeds, it leads?'

So is it political, and there is some unwritten rule that no one will write about Mr. Kantor's performance or do they all have their heads up their asses?

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Thursday, August 03, 2006

Stuff Seen - Pascal Grandmaison

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C+

Back in June I went to the Musee d'Art Contemporain to see Pascal Grandmaison's start turn. I wasn't impressed. It wasn't horrifically bad, nor was it mind boggling great. It was just sort of there. For the most part some fairly large, fairly plain pictures (does anyone know what a “light jet print” is?). The catalog has a bunch of pictures and some big words – I haven't read it yet, because I prefer to write what I think about the show before I contaminate my memory with someone else's thoughts.

Three videos, 18 pictures, all for the most part dealing with an edge. Unfortunately they aren't edgy, more like a statement of fact, you know those vaguely modernist or minimalist picture frames (Ikea RIBBA) that are designed just to make you glom onto the idea that the picture has finshed.

As with most of the museum exhibitions here in town, the sound reverberated much further from the piece (in this case videos) than I felt it should, I can't quite understand. A throbbing bass line emanating from that sorry ass excuse for a tricked out car which then causes all the parked cars' alarms to ring out is at least comprehensible when you see that the driver is some 18-year old begging for attention. I've already committed to paying attention when I walk in the freakin' museum, I don't need individual pieces screaming out at me when I am no longer in eyeshot.

For whatever reason let's start with his video Diamond. 8 minutes and 40 seconds designed to make the viewer go away faster than 8 minutes and 39 seconds. There are long black scenes – what are you supposed to do when there is nothing on the screen? You sorta wander off to see the next piece, right? Especially when the way it is presented is as something you're supposed to only glimpse while passing. If they (the artist, the curator, the museum, whoever) want you to watch the entire video, then the entry and exit from the place to see the video should have whatever you're supposed to sit on in between. If you make the path from the entry to the exit a straight line, and then present a video that has long stretches of nothing on the screen don't be surprised if people walk right by it. I wrote in my notes “Longest 8:40 I've ever seen.”

Furthering my idea that M. Grandmaison doesn't give two hoots about his audience or the people who go look at his work is that in the second video, called My Shadow, he makes a motion with his arm that is dangerously close to the Umbrella Gesture. Although I don't know how many people in his audience are Italian. On the positive side I got something written down that says “nice shirt.”

Then we get to the third video, called Air (although in reality there are a whole whack of pictures you gotta look at to get to the third video). As with all his videos, the background music or soundtrack is not done as well as it could be. I don't know if this is a museum technical problem (sorry we just don't have the equipment) or if this is an artist technical problem (I want this equipment, and will accept no substitutes). Most likely it is a little bit of both, but if you're going to add sound to an art video you should pay attention to how it is played back.

While everyone and everything says that in the video Air, it is M. Grandmaison's chest that is going up and down, it looks to me more like his arm. Whatever. Basically there's a bunch of sort of black (more like a hairy gray) stuff that moves up and down against a white background. The hairy gray never quite makes it all the way to the bottom and off the screen, nor does it ever make it to the top. What you follow as you watch is the edge between the hairy gray and the white. That edge can also be interpreted as a wall, you know one of those things that makes neighbors good? I'm certain that there is a specific reason why he stuck in the eye and face, but I can't figure out anyone that makes sense to me. I would've cut them out (or not filmed them) and called the whole sucker an endless loop.

Now what do you do with an artist who deliberately makes it real tough (or impossible) to approach the work they make? If you're 18 years old and alienated, and someone has said “it's cool” you soak it up like a sponge, wait 20 years and then tell everyone you know you were there then. I guess I'm going to have to go back and see M. Grandmaison's show once more to see if there are a disproportionate number of alienated 18 years olds spending inordinate amounts of time watching his videos. Somehow I don't think so.

Now that we got the videos out of the way (besides myself, how many other people do you think have watched all 28 minutes and 18 seconds of M. Grandmaison's videos?) we can go onto the pictures.

The Glass series of pictures (currently showing at the Musee des beaux arts, Marche Bonsecours, and Cafe Cherier as well as the MACM) furthers the idea that M. Grandmaison wants to distance and alienate his audience. Normally if you're taking a picture of someone, a portrait if you will, you do not put a barrier in between them and the camera. Even if that barrier is transparent, it still pushes the audience further away than they need to be. I'm not quite certain why M. Grandmaison wants to push his viewers away, but he sure as shootin' doesn't want them getting close.

In the Ouverture series he continues on this theme by photographing the back of everyone's head, and then futzing around with the contrast settings so that each of the pictures is a silouette on a gray-ish brown background. Once again that edge that puts up a barier so that the viewer cannot get anywhere near the image.

In the Manner and Upside Land series of pix, M. Gransmaison stops with the pictures of people, and goes for inanimate objects, specifically shoes and drum heads. I was going to try and concoct a story about the drum heads (the Manner series) where I would be able to prove by his choice of skins that M. Grandmaison had, earlier in his life been a drummer in a Loverboy tribute band. However, by the time I was halfway through the story, I realized I had made a mistake and in fact it was Chilliwack and not Loverboy who had performed the song “My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)” which would have tied together nicely as M. Grandmaison seems to be pushing everything away. No such luck.

Which leaves us with the sneakers... the less said the better.

PS: After the fact, I just finished reading the catalog. I'm confused as to why Reid Shier did not refer to a single piece that was in the exhibit. And I'm not altogether too happy to discover that under the title of "textes dans catalogues et livres' the catalog for this here show takes up three lines, because there are three different authors. I also don't quite understand how they could have missed him taking part in Sound + Vision at the Musee des Beaux Arts, and not included it in his CV, and finally I am also quite excited to be listed in forthcoming Pascal Grandmaison CVs since he decides to list this 574 word article by by Nicolas Mavrikakis in his CV (which in fact uses six words to deal with his work) and at last count, I was somewhere up around 1,200 words, all dealing with his art.

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Wanna write about art?

Howdy!

Julia Dault, the art critic for the National Post wrote her last column today. I imagine that despite my headline, that in fact they have already found someone to replace her. But you never can tell.

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Wanna be a curator?

Howdy!

The Barbican in London, England is looking fo rBhire a new curator. $72,000/year at current exchange rates, not bad. Although what impressed me most about the job offer, was how it clearly laid out exactly what a curator of contemporary art does. For the most part, it is not that transparent.

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Canadian in LA

Howdy!

According to this post at art.blogging.la Paul Butler is having a grand ole time on the left-coast.

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The Canada Council is not doing its job

Howdy!

I just discovered that SweaterLodge is being sponsored by Aeroplan for more than $50,000. SweaterLodge is Canada's represientative to the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. According to the press release "the sponsorship agreement is fundamental to the success of the Canadian exhibit, providing travel for the SweaterLodge design and installation team and shipping of the exhibit." Which then leads me to ask, why didn't Greg Bellerby, Commissioner of the Canadian Pavilion and Pechet and Robb Studio of Vancouver apply for a travel grant?

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Are you available at 4:45 this afternoon?

Howdy!

You can learn about the art world from inside the belly of the beast. Sotheby's is holding a conference call to discuss the $72.4 million they made from April to June this year.

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James Adams falls for it hook line and sinker

Howdy!

Yesterday, Mr. Adams wrote an article about the ongoing court battles between Andrew Federer, his siblings and the East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice. In the article Mr. Adams writes '"It's not a terribly valuable painting," Federer observed, "so the deal probably was, 'Let's throw them a bone, give them that one back.' " (A Czech news agency placed its value in 2004 at $15,000.)' Unfortunately he forgets to do the math, 20 times $15,000 does become an awful lot of money. And then on top of it, Mr. Adams forgets to ask Mr. Federer what he wants to do with the 21 paintings he claims are his. My guess would be, since he is an 'investment banker,' that he wants to sell them. Personally I think having paintings in a museum, where they are and where they can be seen by the public is a really good idea. Ripping them out of a musem in order to sell them so that they can hang on someone's living room wall is not such a hot idea.

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Congratulations Sheila Heti cool honor but...

Howdy!

Ms. Heti just got something that honours Toronto's cultural mavericks, I'm not entirely certain if she gets a medal, a plaque or anything other than being mentioned on the pretty website. What I do know, is that 'funding for "face the arts" has been provided by the City of Toronto, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund and the Government of Canada through the Cultural Capital of Canada program. Toronto Life is a presenting sponsor of this program.' Which leads me to believe that there is something more than $10,000 going to the people who run the pretty website. I hope that Ms. Heti was able to score some of it.

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Terry Graff meet Lawrence L. Reger

Howdy!

The Mendel Art Gallery and the Heritage Health Index probablt have a lot in common even if hurricanes don't make it to Saskatchewan all that often. For folk who want an easy explanation without having to click on the links, Mr. Graff is the director of the Mendel Art Gallery. Mr. Reger is president of the Heritage Preservation. Mr. Graff is trying to figure out ways to separate people from their money in order to preserve a fancy painting he is responsible for from cracking further. Mr. Reger runs an organization that explains how to separate people from their money in order to prevent paintings from cracking.

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Wanna job?

Howdy!

Get your CV's in order because the Power Plant is seeking a Curator. It's probably a nice enough job, but I wouldn't want to live in Toronto.

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Where are the Riopelle Paintings?

Howdy!

I assume that they are still at the Hermitage, but as the Hermitage was robbed over the weekend, and the BBC only writes 'jewellery and precious enamels were amongst items stolen' and do not list the 200+ things that were stolen, I'm not 100% certain.

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1,151!! The video statistics for the month of July

Howdy!

Well it seems to be working, if you haven't noticed, with the amazing help (ie the photography, the editing, the directing, and the putting up with me) of Scott Lutes, I have been able to post videos of things that have happened here at Zeke's Gallery, such as The Exchange Project, a film by Scott Lutes. They have been posted to a bunch of different places such as Google Video, iFilm, Ourmedia.org, Blip.tv, MySpace, and YouTube.

If you are at all interested, according to these various websites, the six videos that have been posted have beeen viewed a total of 1,151 times! For an average of 165 views of each one. Not bad for some fairly esoteric material, if I can say so myself. The breakdown is below:

The Missive, a film by Jarred Coxford - viewed 358 times
GorePuter Live at Zeke's Gallery - 195
Michael V. Smith reading at Zeke's Gallery - 178
Jennica Harper reading at Zeke's Gallery - 149
Tricia McDaid, A Heart Full of Buckshot, the interviews - 118
Elizabeth Bachinsky reading at Zeke's Gallery - 112
Nancy Nisbet's Exchange Project a film by Scott Lutes - 41 (in three days, looks like we have another winner)

Thanks to everyone who has seen them already, and by all means, please tell anyone you think might be interested that they should watch them too!

Raphael portrait to be auctioned for $30M

2007-05-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

A rare work by Renaissance painter Raphael will be put on the block and is expected to fetch up to $30 million US, according to auction house Christie's.

Christie's officials say the portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino and ruler of Florence from 1513 to 1519, will be sold in London July 5 and could set a record price for a work by Raphael. The current record stands at $10.4 million US for a black crayon drawing sold in 1996.

The portrait has not been seen in public for almost 40 years after New York art dealer Ira Spanierman bought it at auction for an unknown amount in 1968.

"We are excited to offer this remarkable work by Raphael, one of the most renowned and accomplished of European artists," said Richard Knight, international director of Christie's Old Master Department.

"The importance of the artist and the sitter, together with the provenance and the historical context behind this painting's creation, make it one of the most significant old master pictures to be offered at auction for a generation."

Painting was an introduction to future wife

The work, measuring 97 by 79 centimetres, dates to 1518 and shows Medici posing slightly to the left against a forest background. The duke is clothed in a gold-embroidered costume with red puffy sleeves. In his right hand, he holds a miniature portrait of a woman — likely his future wife.

Pope Leo X commissioned the painting after he arranged a marriage between his nephew, Medici, and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a cousin of Francois I, king of France.

The couple had never met, so the painting is a kind of introduction.

"It's designed to impress … to show the power, the importance and good looks of the sitter," said Paul Raison, an Old Master expert at Christie's.

They married in 1518 and had a daughter, Catherine de' Medici, who went on to marry King Henry II of France.

Raphael, born Raphael Sanzio in 1483, became a celebrated architect and painter known for his delicate and graceful style.

He began working for the Vatican at the age of 25, painting rooms and designing buildings for each successive pope as well as portraits of high-ranking officials and people.

The artist, who never married, died at age 37.

Thieves snatch Rembrandt from Chicago gallery

2007-05-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Chicago police are searching for a couple who walked into a private gallery and stole a 17th-century Rembrandt etching from the wall.

The etching, called Adam and Eve, shows Adam holding out an apple to Eve in the Garden of Eden while a serpent looks on.

The couple, described as middle-aged, spent about five minutes in the Hilligoss Gallery Sunday afternoon before disappearing. After they had left the gallery, the etching by Rembrandt van Rijn was discovered to be missing.

Gallery owner Tom Hilligoss estimates the value of the etching at $60,000 US.

He was selling the etching on consignment as part of an estate sale.

The thieves, who had been seen before in the gallery, may have targeted the etching after finding a buyer, he said.

"They went straight for it," Hilligoss said of the thieves, who were not caught on security cameras.

Japan to honour manga artists abroad

2007-05-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Japanese government has announced a new award some consider the "Nobel Prize" of manga.

The International Manga Award is the brainchild of Japan's Foreign Minister Tara Aso, who is an avid fan of manga, the term used to describe Japanese comics and print cartoons.

"Manga and anime [Japanese animated films and TV series] have been spreading overseas and are selling quite well," Aso said.

"I want to further boost the communicative power of these so-called pieces of pop culture."

Presented to an artist working abroad, the new award will honour the winner's contribution to the spread of manga around the world, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

While the award will carry no cash prize, organizers are in the process of creating a trophy and will host the winner and three runners-up at an awards ceremony in Japan.

Both the winner and the three other finalists will also be invited to spend 10 days in Japan meeting with local comic book artists and publishers.

The inaugural winner will be announced July 2.

Aso began proposing the establishment of a manga award last year, calling for the honour to be the equivalent of the prestigious Nobel Prize.

He has often promoted manga — which encompasses topics from cute stories for children to science fiction and fantasy to complex, realistic tales with adult themes and artwork — as a valuable Japanese cultural export.

Touted Riopelle fails to sell at auction

2007-05-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

A large Jean-Paul Riopelle canvas from the Quebec artist's most celebrated period — one of the highlights of Sotheby's spring sale of Canadian art — failed to sell at auction in Toronto Monday.

The 1955 painting La Forêt Ardente, which features Riopelle's distinctive palette-knife style, drew spirited bidding, but only reached $1.7 million — short of the reserve price set for the masterwork, which Sotheby's had expected would sell for between $2 million and $2.5 million.

The auction house had forecast strong international interest in the work because of the popularity of Riopelle's pieces abroad.

Other major works that have failed to sell at auction have often sold soon afterward, and Sotheby's Canada president David Silcox said he expects to receive offers for La Forêt Ardente from private collectors in the next few days.

Overall, the sale moved $11.3 million worth of art by perennial favourites, such as members of the Group of Seven, as well as works by Quebec's Automatistes and post-war Canadian artists such as Jack Shadbolt, Christopher Pratt and Attila Richard Lukacs.

Some of the artworks sold include:

The Paul-Émile Borduas works Pierres Angulaires and Composition, which sold for $402,500 and $520,000, respectively (all prices include buyer's premium). The sales set a new record high price for the artist.
An untitled Riopelle that sold for $750,000.
The Lawren Harris canvas Abstract Painting, which sold for $548,750 (and is the sister painting to Figure with Rays of Light that Sotheby's sold a year ago for $1.095 million).
Jean Paul Lemieux's Rencontre, which sold for $462,500 and is a new record price for the Quebec artist.

Vancouver-based auction house Heffel kicked off the spring auction season in Canada last week, ultimately selling a record-setting $22.8 million worth of art, including a Harris work entitled Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II for $2.875 million (including the 15 per cent buyer's premium).

The season continues Tuesday, with the first half of a two-day Joyner-Waddington's sale in Toronto.

German artist Jorg Immendorff dies

2007-05-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Contemporary German artist Jorg Immendorff, best known for his Café Deutschland series of paintings, has died at the age of 61.

Immendorff, who suffered from the neurodegenerative disease ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), died Monday after he went into cardiac arrest at home in Duesseldorf.

Immendorff won fame in the late 1970s and through the 1980s for his Café Deutschland series. The vibrant, busy paintings depicted scenes from an imaginary nightclub on the border between the former East and West Germany and dealt with the partition of Germany and its post-Second World War problems.

The northern Germany-born artist was a student of Joseph Beuys at the Duesseldorf Art Academy during the 1960s.

During his years as a student activist, he rejected traditional paintings and was kicked out of the school for staging a series of political and neo-dadaist performance-art "happenings."

During the 1970s, he and other students formed a neo-expressionist artists group called the Neue Wilde. Later, Immendorff spent about a dozen years teaching art to high school students.

In 1996, the artist returned to his Duesseldorf alma mater as a professor.

More recently, Immendorff's eye turned inward, with his paintings reflecting more personal issues and demonstrating more of a surrealist style.

Later in his life, Immendorff became a friend and supporter of former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. He unveiled a portrait of Schroeder, destined for display at the German Federal Chancellery, earlier this year.

Elizabeth Taylor gets to keep Vincent Van Gogh painting

2007-05-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

An US appeals court has decided in favour of actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor, who was entangled in a legal battle with a Jewish family over the possession of a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

The three-judge panel ruled on Friday that the Orkin family, which claimed that the Nazis had stolen the original painting from them, waited too long to move the court for its return.

While suing Taylor in 2004, the family contended that Nazi soldiers had illegally seized the painter's 1889 piece View of the Asylum Chapel at Saint-Remy from their aunt's home, during the holocaust.

They demanded that the valuable artwork be returned to them under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

Earlier, a lower court had also ruled that the Orkins waited too long to claim the painting, which Taylor bought at a London auction in 1963.

Upholding the lower court's ruling, the appeals court said that the family must have come to know about the whereabouts of the painting through its high-profile purchase, and a subsequent international auction in 1990, and they should have acted quicker.

"It is apparent that Ms Taylor's acquisition of the painting was certainly discoverable at least by 1990," Contactmusic quoted Judge Sidney Thomas, one of the three judges on the court panel, as saying.

Vimy Ridge: A monumental labour of love

2007-04-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

The greatest art restoration project in Canadian history is a memorial dedicated to one of the most important events in that history. 'We were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers,' the lead architect says.

For 70 years, the gleaming white monument on the crest of Vimy Ridge has cast its spell on Canadians, stirring our memories, summoning the nation never to forget the horror and sacrifice of an ever distant war.

But almost no one alive today has been so touched by the monument's power as those who laboured on its restoration for the past five years.

Today, Easter Monday, thousands are to gather on the grass below the monument in France, to remember the 90th anniversary of Canada's most famous wartime triumph, and to witness the rededication of the monument following a long and arduous reconstruction.

The rebuilding of the Vimy memorial - the greatest art restoration project in Canadian history - is a story of passion and devotion, and proof that a country that so often ignores its past has kept its solemn promise to the 11,000 Canadians who died in France in the First World War in unknown graves, whose names are inscribed on Vimy's walls.

"The importance of these names is that for these men, this is the only memorial, the only marker anywhere that keeps their identity alive, that allows them to be known by future generations," said Julian Smith, the Ottawa architect who, with a Parisian colleague, oversaw the restoration for the federal government.

Smith is an experienced heritage conservator. He helped restore the Ontario legislature buildings 15 years ago. But he said working at Vimy Ridge was an awakening like no other.

Not only is the monument an artistic masterpiece - Canada's largest piece of installation art outside the country - it is also a sacred place, where the soil still holds the bones of men who died there nearly a century ago.

This became vividly apparent to the restoration workers in the spring of 2005, when the remains of two German soldiers were unearthed during the excavation of a temporary parking lot next to the monument.

"It brought home the fact that we were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers," Smith said.

"Certainly it made it very real for everyone who worked on the project. Even the Belgian contractor said his crew of stone masons - who had worked on many old cathedrals and other cultural sites - never had the kind of emotional involvement as they had at Vimy."

In 2001, the departments of Veterans Affairs and Public Works announced, after a period of alarm and agitation in the media, a $30-million program to restore Canada's 13 First World War memorials in Europe, including eight Canadian sites and five sites honouring soldiers from the then Dominion of Newfoundland.

Two-thirds of the budget was earmarked for Vimy, where decades of wind and rain had eroded many of the names inscribed on the monument, and left its limestone walls cracked and crumbling.

Much of this aging was because of a serious error in the original building of the monument in the 1920s and '30s. Walter Allward, the Toronto sculptor who designed the memorial and poured his heart into its construction, chose to embed the memorial's veneer limestone blocks directly onto the concrete substructure, in accordance with the prevailing technology of the time.

SoCal TV show host pleads guilty in $20M bogus art scam

2007-04-11T11:47:00.001-07:00

A satellite TV show host pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges stemming from an investigation into bogus artwork sold through televised auctions that defrauded customers of more than $20 million.

Kristine Eubanks, 49, of La Canada Flintridge pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy and tax evasion. She will face up to 10 years in prison when she is sentenced Sept. 24, prosecutors said.

Eubanks' husband, Gerald Sullivan, 51, pleaded guilty April 2 to one count each of conspiracy and failing to file tax returns. He will face up to six years in prison when he, too, is sentenced in September.

Eubanks' attorney Donald Randolph said outside court that his client "acknowledged her guilt in these actions today."

Authorities said the couple, in their plea agreements, acknowledged duping more than 10,000 customers through their "Fine Art Treasures Gallery" show, which aired Friday and Saturday nights on DirecTV and The Dish Network.

The couple also said they rigged auctions by creating false and inflated bids for art and jewelry sold during the live auctions, prosecutors said.

Authorities believe buyers lost more than $20 million in the scam. Nearly $4 million and various pieces of artwork were seized when Eubanks and Sullivan were arrested during a raid last year.

Learning to love modern art

2007-03-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- "You really like that modern stuff? It's so cold and intellectual. Who can even understand what those kinds of artists say?" For an absurdly long time -- the better part of 100 years, now -- lovers of the modern have had to mount a rear-guard action against those kinds of questions. Even Ikea still has to seed its modern displays with spindles and chintz.

But a show that opened this week at the Corcoran Gallery of Art ought to convert even the die-hard detractors. "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939," on tour from the great Victoria and Albert Museum in London, includes more than 400 stunning images and objects that make the argument themselves: Except perhaps for the time around 1500 in Renaissance Italy, no moment in Western art has had the breadth and depth and simple world-changing greatness of modernism.

A skeptic doesn't have to take an expert's word on this. Just looking at the objects at the Corcoran should do the trick.

I dare anyone to walk into the Corcoran lobby and resist the luscious, aerodynamic sweep of the modernist car that fills it, dubbed the "77A" and made in Czechoslovakia by the Tatra company in 1938. It shows how modernism, born just before World War I as a radical movement in fine art, transformed the way the world around us has looked since. A sleek Acura coupe couldn't exist at all without precedents like the 77A.

Behind the car, marching up both sides of the Corcoran's grand staircase, are a dozen copies of Gerrit Rietveld's "Red Blue" chair, which was perfected around 1923 and is now one of the great icons of modern design.

The Dutchman's chairs register as superb sculpture: They define space using a bare few uprights and horizontals in black, then breach it with slender diagonals -- the slanting chair seat and its back -- in two primal, primary colors. But for all its sculptural impact, anyone who has lived with the "Red Blue" can vouch for its surprising comfort. (I know one amateur woodworker who has copied the chair in every size to seat grandkids of all ages, as well as full size, in pressure-treated lumber, to guarantee the comfort of her garden furniture.) Like all the best of modern design, the Red Blue wants to inspire, but it also wants to work.

Most importantly, even eight decades after its birth, the Red Blue can still energize a space that's as imposing as the Corcoran's neoclassical atrium. A great modernist chair doesn't just fill the room it's in, as decoration, the way most earlier furniture does; even after all these years of familiarity, the Red Blue still has the impact to compete with architecture and change the way any room feels. If it came out tomorrow, the Red Blue would still win big play in the design press.

At the top of that chair-lined staircase, the Corcoran's lovely rotunda has been reserved for a very few of modernism's greatest creations, picked out with spotlights.

There is a room-size model of Vladimir Tatlin's 1920 "Monument to the Third International," which, had it been built, would have been 100 stories tall. Again we see art and design in perfect balance. The Russian's model works as an exciting piece of modernist sculpture: It has an amazing distillation of upward, sideways and spiral thrusts, like nothing ever done before. As an idea for a building, it profoundly rethinks the relationship between a supporting skeleton and the spaces such a skeleton can hold.

In a show on modernism, a movement whose tentacles reached everywhere, even an object as modest as a vase can get big play. Alvar Aalto's 1936 "Savoy" vase, mold-blown in Finland of undulating glass, clearly deserves its spotlighted place in the Corcoran rotunda: It's been in production almost since its birth, and now lives on mantels all around the world. Rather than quoting directly from nature, as the leaves and fronds decorating so many earlier designs had done, Aalto's vase evokes the look and principles of nature, in the abstract. The gently rippled sides of his vessel recall natural processes and forms -- the surf, erosion and tide-washed sand as well as cellular growth and aquatic plants -- without citing any single one of nature's creations.

The themes introduced in the Corcoran's atrium and rotunda play out across the rest of this massive show, which takes up very nearly the entire museum.

After a kind of "antechamber" that highlights the role cubism played in launching the modern movement, we're swept into spacious galleries that set out the full sweep of modernism.

There are rooms devoted to most of the great movements, moments and makers in modernism -- Russian constructivism, Italian futurism, Germany's great Bauhaus school and others.

The show also includes sections devoted to how modernism played out under the political systems of different countries: Swedish socialism, Italian fascism, German Nazism, Soviet communism and American capitalism.

Then there are themed displays, on subjects such as "The Machine, Sitting on Air" (a thrilling wall covered floor to ceiling in experiments in cantilevered seating), "Modernism and Nature" and "Mass Market Modernism."

Anyone who spends the time this show deserves will leave feeling a deep connection with modernism, and a renewed love for it. They may also feel a new affection for the Corcoran, a museum that's been languishing for years. Those who've doubted that new director Paul Greenhalgh could pull this survey off -- this critic was among them -- will have to eat their hats.

And still the show isn't anything like comprehensive. Especially in the fine arts, there's more great modernism out there than any single exhibition could present.

The exhibition makes the standard argument that modernism is really about imagining utopia, then using new design to get us there. That's got some problems. There's the fact that cubism, the home ground of modernism, was hardly a utopian movement -- or no more than any artistic movement that believes it has advanced from what was done before. And that some of Europe's very first minimal, modern abstractions were by dadaists Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp, who were more interested in anarchy and the absurd than in forging a promising future for mankind.

More crucially, it's not clear that such social and political ideas are enough to cause any particular kind of art or design. After all, is bent chrome more inherently utopian than a bunch of floral decoration, straight out of the Garden of Eden? The hand-carving of the Arts and Crafts movement was built on the same utopian ideals as machine-age modernism.

A cause that can have almost any outcome doesn't explain much.

The sheer variety of ideas and warring "-isms" on display in this show reveal that modernism can't be tied down to any one or two or 10 of them. In fact the glory of modernism, like the glory of many watersheds in art, is that it produced a single set of potent forms that could be used to do so very many different things.

That's what this show proves.

Modernism provides a powerful toolbox of possibilities, helping us say and mean a thousand different things.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier once said that a great modern house ought to be considered a "machine for living." The modernism that informs it should be thought of as a great "machine for thinking" -- one of the greatest that we've ever built.

The Corcoran's new show lets us hear it whir.

No nude drawings, no art credit

2007-03-26T21:17:00.001-07:00

Muslim student's refusal uncovers debate

Aruba Mahmud, 22, an honours visual arts student at London's University of Western Ontario, drew her friends clothed rather than remain in the classroom with her professor and fellow students who were sketching nude models.

Ms. Mahmud, a practising Muslim who wears a hijab, was allowed to draw her friends clothed as an alternative project to nude-model drawing -- she did stay once in the classroom with a nude model and found it very uncomfortable -- but only in early level courses.

At higher levels of instruction in painting and drawing, the university administration enunciated a clear policy: Draw nudes or don't take the course. Refuse to draw nudes once you're in the course and you fail.

Ms. Mahmud brought a letter from the university's Muslim chaplain stating that prolonged exposure to the nude body of a person who was not one's marital partner was contrary to Islamic teaching. She was willing to take a zero for the part of the course that involved nude drawing.

But the university stood firm.

"That's what really got me," Ms. Mahmud said.

"It seems so very all-or-nothing."

She recalled becoming emotional and starting to cry as she pleaded with her professor and chair of the department to be allowed to take the course without drawing nudes.

In any event, she graduates this spring without nude drawing in her résumé. "I don't think it's such an essential part of the work," she said.

A report on discrimination against Muslim students made public this week by the Canadian Federation of Students calls it "one of the most egregious stories" of a university refusing to accommodate diversity.

Kathleen Okruhlik, UWO's dean of arts and humanities, sees it differently, and takes issue with the accuracy of aspects of the student federation's report. In the past, she said, it has been conservative Christians asking for exemption from certain instruction. Now it is Muslims.

The issue touches on a heated controversy in Quebec under the heading of accommodement raisonnable, or reasonable accommodation, for religious minorities. Premier Jean Charest has created a public inquiry to examine how far the majority should go in a liberal pluralistic democracy to accommodate minorities.

Ms. Okruhlik said the university allows students to do substitute life drawing projects in introductory courses because it is recognized that, if they don't get through the introductory course, they will be barred from going further.

"But for advanced courses for drawing and painting, we decided we couldn't alter the curriculum for Muslim students or anybody else. It doesn't keep anybody out of visual arts. It will keep some people later on out of specific drawing and painting courses. In those courses, drawing from life models is absolutely critical. It's such an important part of the tradition to be able to represent the human body."

Ms. Okruhlik said she and her academic colleagues have dealt with Christian students who don't want to read Henry Miller (who wrote detailed accounts of sexual experiences) or literature that portrays homosexuality favourably.

"And we say to those students, 'No, we value diversity and plurality, but we also value academic freedom. So if you want to take this course, you have to read the assigned reading,' she said.

"It's hard for us to see how equal treatment means we can say to some students, 'No, I'm sorry you have to read that novel that portrays homosexuality in a favourable light -- but, no, you don't have to do that drawing.' "

Art students learn to draw from the human form

2007-03-26T21:16:00.001-07:00

A line of charcoal on paper mirrored the curve of Cheri Ewing's bare back. She sat still and naked at the front of the class as art students sketched her.

She felt perfectly comfortable there in her own skin, aside from the tingling sensation she began to get in her foot from sitting on it too long.

It's not about being nude, said Ewing, a Merced native. It's about art. And sometimes the hardest part is just sitting still.

Some people initially react to the idea of nude models with surprise or embarrassment. But local artists and teachers say they are an essential part of learning to portray the human form.

"Artists don't think of it as a sexual thing," said Freda Rasmussen, Merced College arts division secretary. "It's about the beauty of the human body. It's something artists throughout the ages have been doing."

Why do it?

For about 10 years, Ewing has worked as a live, nude model for various art classes in the area, including Merced College, the Merced Multicultural Arts Center and Modesto Junior College.

She began the job while attending Merced College. A photography teacher told her about the school's need for figure drawing class models.

The pay now is about $14 an hour.

"I was slightly hesitant, but not too much because I had been at the other end of the easel," she said.

Ewing also creates her own landscapes and portraits.

Not a particularly self-conscious person, the slim 40-something understood artists' need to see the human form without hindrance.

"Clothing bunches and is not as nice to draw," said Elizabeth Glass, 22, a student who sketched Ewing in Merced College's figure drawing class. "If the model is nude there is more of a sense of the dimensions."

Who can do it?

There is no age or body-type requirement for this kind of work, said Lori diMuro, an artist who teaches the college class to a range of skill levels.

Each week her students sketch a live model, which diMuro says is an essential part of the learning process.

"The most fashionable figure is not necessarily the most interesting to draw," she said. "The more curves, age, makes for an interesting drawing."

But the model must be able to sit or stand in poses for extended periods of time -- from about 30 seconds to 20 minutes -- which can be a lot harder than it looks.

"Most people who try any kind of modeling are surprised by how difficult it really is," said Jamie Brzezinski, the college's arts division chair. "When you start that pose, there might be a slight bit of discomfort, then a raging cramp."

Corina Brazil, 79, has known this for many decades. She began modeling nude for classes at California State University, Stanislaus, around 1964.

"I saw an ad in the art department and I got real brave one day and I went in," said Brazil, a Gustine native now living in Merced. "At first I was nervous, especially when I saw people I knew. But I've never been very self-conscious."

She got paid $4 an hour back then.

She continues to model nude occasionally for classes at the Multicultural Arts Center.

"My son was kind of shocked," she said. "My grandchildren didn't want to see the (pictures) ... but my family is OK with it now."

Modeling became more strenuous for Brazil as she aged, so she does it less than she used to. But she is still comfortable posing nude and believes it to be an important part of art.

"The thing about the human body is that there are so many textures," she said. "It's not like you automatically know how to draw it."

She tries to keep her mind busy while she is posing.

"Sometimes I pray," Brazil said. "Sometimes I plan out my house. A song will go through my head. You don't want to start thinking unpleasant thoughts."

Not just for the ladies

Although women are often seen more in nude paintings than men, it is important to learn how to draw both, diMuro said.

"Men's bodies are obviously different," she said. "It's nice to have a wide variety."

Dave Hill, 46, began modeling while attending college at Washington University. A teacher asked him to pose for a drawing class.

"It sounded like an easy job," he said. "When I got done filling out the paperwork she said, 'You're going to have to go ahead and get undressed.' I didn't know what I thought about that but I did it. It was fun."

Hill, a Hayward resident, continues to model about two times a week for Bay Area art groups, and occasionally at Merced College.

He got over his embarrassment quickly and now considers modeling a relaxing activity, as long as the poses aren't too difficult.

"I think there are three views of male nude models," he said. "One is 'that's really cool.' Second, there are people who are uncomfortable seeing you as an object."

Then there are people who wonder why anyone would do it.

"If you like to be nude, it's a good job," Hill said.

Comfort on both sides of easel

Of course, taking off your clothes for a class can take a lot of courage, say art teachers and models. But people get over their nervousness.

"Apparently they do because no one bolts for the door," diMuro said. "Some don't have any problems with it, some are shy. The atmosphere of the class is very professional -- nothing unseemly is tolerated."

The college is currently looking for more people to pose for the figure drawing class. Regulars still come in, but it's not unusual for a new potential model to sign up and then back out before class.

Ewing is one of Merced College's regular models.

She said taking vocal lessons was a great way to prepare for posing nude.

"When you sing, it's like standing there naked in front of everyone," she said. "You are baring your soul. It's almost more intimidating."

However, student artists often get self-conscious as well, she added. They are also put on the spot when someone else examines their work.

"Some (of the pictures) are flattering, some make me want to go home and work out," Ewing said.

After about 20 students drew her with charcoal or conte crayon, their work sat on easels around the center of the classroom for all to see.

Kerrie Curtis, 21, an art major, said that while it might seem awkward to have the model look at her artwork, it didn't bother her.

None of the students said they were particularly surprised or uneasy about the nudity in class.

After all, it is a figure drawing class and artists sign up to better learn the lines of the human form, Glass said.

Before student David Carrillo, 20, saw a live, nude model in art class, he thought it might be uncomfortable.

"But it was cool and I just went with the flow," he said. "It made me see how other people's figures are all different."

Want to model?

The art of feminism

2007-03-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

What is feminist art?

Is it a photo of a Hasidic man fondling his very real — and very naked — female breast?

How about a photo of a two silver-haired women dancing on an ice-covered lake?

Is it a studio-apartment-sized, 48-foot-long dinner table laid with place settings for 1,038 historically significant women?

Or is it just an excuse to bring some new art to town?

The question has gained a new resonance as the Brooklyn Museum opens its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, an 8,300-square-foot exhibition space and education center that will bring Judy Chicago’s gargantuan piece, “The Dinner Party,” together with Oreet Ashery’s controversial gender-bending photo of a breast-holding Hasid and Milena Dopitova’s wintery ode to aging womanhood.

A landmark event for the art world, the center is the first of its kind. But why is it needed?

“Feminism is something that we still live and breathe, even though women today might not be conscious of it,” chief curator Dr. Maura Reilly told GO Brooklyn.

“The Dinner Party,” created by Chicago in 1979, is the feather in the cap of the new center — and its original inspiration.

Chicago’s iconic piece — a larger-than-life play on the historic exclusion of women from the “table” of culture and the significant role they have played, regardless — has shaped much of the last two decades of conversation about feminist art.

In that respect, it is fitting that the massive table serves as a foundation for the rest of the center’s programming, allowing for a rotating exhibition focusing on women “seated” at it.

Remaining gallery space will highlight larger themes, the first being “Global Feminisms.”

This inaugural show, curated by Reilly and her mentor, famed feminist art critic Linda Nochlin, brings together the work of contemporary women — all born after 1960 — from 49 countries, including artists who openly identify as feminists and others who are torn about the label.

Ashery is the controversial British-Israeli multi-media artist behind three of the center’s most overtly political images, including the shot of herself dressed as Hasidic man looking down at her obviously female breast. (See the controversial photo.)

“I grew up in Jerusalem,” she told GO Brooklyn. “I would visit Orthodox neighborhoods with my Dad and be attracted to the lifestyle, but at the same time realize that I would be excluded.”

By dressing in the traditional garb of Orthodox men, she said she is challenging that community’s strict gender codes and encouraging “dialogue.”

But already, there are signs that starting that dialogue won’t be quite so quiet. In a vague reminder of the museum’s controversial 2000 show “Sensation” — which featured a painting of the Virgin Mary peppered with butterflies cut out of a porno magazine — religious believers are already complaining about the Sackler’s take on feminism.

In the Orthodox neighborhood just one subway stop from the Brooklyn Museum, some Hasidic men singled out the Ashery photo.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” said Yakov Edelman.

Another Orthodox Crown Heights resident who identified himself only as Aaron called Ashery’s breast-and-pais portrait “vulgar.”

“It’s like putting a knife in a beautiful painting of a rose,” he said. “Both sides of it could be beautiful, but both are ruined by putting them together.”

Even inside the feminist art world there have been some objections to the new center.

Jenni Sorkin, a columnist for “Frieze Art,” feared that without a permanent acquisition program — though Reilly assured us that one is in the works — the center will have trouble attracting artists.

“Maybe [artists like] Lisa Yusavage or Elizabeth Peyton will surprise me and agree to be in a group show at the Sackler Center,” she wrote recently. “But given the option, I suspect it will be artists of a lesser stature.”

Another feminist artist raised questions about the lack of age diversity at the center (see “Sacklash,” above).

And still another critic pointed out that Elizabeth Sackler, for whom the gallery is named, is a prominent collector of feminist art — making the new gallery a great showroom for pieces that she hopes will increase in value, just as “Sensation” did for the Charles Saatchi–owned pieces it spotlighted.

Chicago, however, believes that critics will be pleasantly surprised by what they find at the new Center.

“The Brooklyn Museum is looking at how to make a more diverse, welcoming institution that reflects the multiplicity of points of view,” she told GO Brooklyn.

Sackler also believes that there is no better time to incite this shift in the perception of feminist art and of the women’s movement as a whole.

“Now is an exciting time to be a woman,” she says. “For the first time, we might vote for a female president. A woman is Speaker of the House. I think we are right on target.”

Seattle Erotic Art Festival gets nude awakening

2007-03-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

The big art show that celebrates human sexuality and carnal expression is back in the flesh.

Now in its fifth year, the Seattle Erotic Art Festival has grown in popularity, attracting more than 3,000 patrons at the peak of its run.

The show has become a welcome part of a Pacific Northwest community known for its open and liberal embrace -- or so the festival organizers thought.

Then they tried to print 1,000 program catalogs for the 2007 show -- and got a nude awakening.

A dozen or so printing companies across the region refused to do the job.

"It really surprised us," said Anna Hurwitz, the festival's producer.

A couple of years ago, festival organizers got e-mails from people who suggested that the art was "blasphemous" and "sinful." But they say they've never had a real emergency surrounding the show's content or catalogs -- until now.

The printing companies -- festival organizers are withholding names -- have every right to refuse business.

That the companies shied away, though, goes to show that the Northwest has a liberal patina that covers up a reactionary streak -- especially when it comes to sex and nudity.

Some people wig out at the slightest whiff of erotica or bare flesh.

A recap of recent episodes from Sex and the Emerald City:

Seattle officials cracked down on "dirty dancing" in strip clubs, invoking 4-foot rules to keep daylight between dancers and patrons, even though a sane majority of Seattle voters didn't want such restrictions.

In Fremont, the longtime epicenter of Seattle counterculture, not everyone loves the nude cyclists who ride in the annual Solstice Parade. Some would prefer that the bicyclists in the buff put on Speedos -- or something.

It was just a matter of time before the erotic art festival felt a chill.

Organizers first reached out to a print shop in Portland. That shop was too small to handle the size of the job and decided to outsource it. But when it reached out to other companies they said no, pointing to some of the racy images.

The Portland shop suggested that the Seattle organizers look closer to home.

They did -- with the same result. At least one Seattle-area print shop said nope because of a tight deadline. At another shop some employees were so turned off by the material that they threatened to walk if he company printed the 48-page catalog, said Larie Smoyer, who is on the festival organizing committee.

Eventually, a Seattle company agreed to do the job.

The catalogs were shipped out and arrived just in time at The Fenix, the Sodo site of the festival.

I dropped by the hall on First Avenue South this week to see what all the fuss was about. As soon as I walked in, I was greeted by a hanging chandelier of green bananas and leaves.

The glass, fashioned as fruit, was part of a handsome light piece. Dale Chihuly popped into mind -- that is, until my sex festival escort explained the bananas were, ah, symbolic.

Walls in the exhibition hall were adorned with beautiful and provocative art, including one photograph, "Of the Deep," showing a topless woman whose torso was draped by a real octopus.

Yes, there was other stuff on display -- stuff that could make a guy go, "Yikes!" Stuff I cannot mention in a family paper. Stuff featured in the catalog.

Such button-pushing creations make one empathize with folks at the skittish printing companies -- but only to a point. Not all the art in the catalog or in the exhibit is guaranteed to offend, unless you think of the unclothed human body that way.

Taking in the display as a whole made me think: Isn't the goal of artistic expression to provoke thought and spark dialogue, even if some of the art makes some people uncomfortable?

Festival organizers call the display art.

Critics may think of it as porn.

To me, the only obscene thing in full view is the degree to which some people get in a twist over anything remotely sexual.

Before I left the building, I had one question: Which brave Seattle company dared to print the catalogs? Lips remain sealed -- and with good reason.

It turns out the company wants to be anonymous because it has ties to big bread-and-butter, conservative clients, including church groups that might take offense.

Say amen to the company for at least stepping up wholly.

MARILYN MANSON: Florida Art Exhibition Scheduled For April - Mar. 6, 2007

2007-03-22T16:03:00.002-07:00

Marilyn Manson is exhibiting his latest paintings at Space 39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida from April 2 to April 17. A private reception will be held March 31.

Austin Scaggs of Rolling Stone magazine's "Smoking Section" recently got a preview of MARILYN MANSON's new album, "Eat Me, Drink Me", at a Los Angeles-area recording studio. Scaggs writes that he was "blown away" by the CD, which includes a six-minute epic, "If I Was Your Vampire", with the lyric "The hole is where the heart is." "If anyone thought Manson was down for the count, think again," raves Scaggs.

"Eat Me, Drink Me" is tentatively due for release this spring and will follow up 2003's "The Golden Age of Grotesque". Manson told MTV.com in the fall of 2005 that he expected his next record to be "something above and beyond and different — sonically, emotionally — than anything I've done."

Manson recently asked the court to block any future claim for spousal support by his estranged wife, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese. According to TMZ.com, which obtained court documents, Manson has also requested that Teese pay for her own lawyers in the couple's divorce proceedings. Also in the documents, Manson claims that he and Von Teese split up on Halloween, while Von Teese maintains that they separated on Christmas Eve. Both have cited "irreconcilable differences" as the reason for the breakup of the marriage.

Artist traslates hope into vibrant exhibit

2007-03-22T16:03:00.001-07:00

Thursday, March 22, 2007

She remembers the huge mouse she drew, along with tiny footprints that trailed behind it, representing that in the library, you have to be as quiet as a mouse.

Since that contest, Rasmussen was hooked on art.

For her, it was a talent that came naturally. Her mother was a commercial artist who never worked for money, always doing work for church or schools. When she had work to get done, she often sat her seven children in front of pieces of white cardboard and markers in order to keep them occupied.

The ability to express themselves through works of art ran through her family, she said, as each one of her siblings was blessed with their own gifts; one is very good at caligraphy, another is great with pottery, some are great cooks and others are very crafty.

As evident in herself and her siblings, Rasmussen says that she believes everyone has their own way of expressing themselves, but it comes out in different ways.

For her, it's always been about art.

In high school, she made it her goal to take as many art classes as she could, often ending up with extra credits just so she could fit it in every semester.

In college she shifted her focus slightly, majoring in fine arts and graphic design, but also taking many drawing classes. After graduation, she scored a job designing brochures for an engineering firm and then moved to upstate New York and found herself designing T-shirts for a T-shirt factory.

But when life as a graphic designer wasn't working out as she expected, she went back to college and got her master's in elementary education, all the while maintaining an active interest in art.

Growing up, Rasmussen said she learned many things from her mother, but "also learned many things not to do from her."

She recalls her mother's nickname of "the gypsy" for her vibrant outfits and believes that's where her love of color came from.

"People who see my work always comment on the colors," she says, boasting canvas after canvas of bright tropical flowers and bold cityscapes painted in mostly pastels or watercolors.

Those vibrant pastels and watercolors can be seen now through April 26 at Gallery -30- in the Sewickley Herald office during an exhibit appropriately entitled, "Long Road Back."

Rasmussen admits that she's been in a "state of transition that has lasted a few years."

Over these last few years, she became a single parent and in order to create more income for herself and her daughter, she opened a coffee shop and art gallery on the first floor of her Carnegie home and across the street from a friend's gallery, the Third Street Gallery.

However, only four months after she opened her business, disaster struck -- the remnants of Hurricane Ivan.

She remembers standing on her front porch watching water spilling over from the creek. She ran over to her friend's gallery across the street to help pull artwork from the walls to save them from being ruined, but when she went back to her shop to get sandbags from the basement in an effort to keep water out, she noticed that she, too, had been a victim.

Three feet of water invaded her first floor.

That night, she recalls sitting in her daughter's upstairs bedroom watching from a window as cars were lifted by the rising water. Her daughter, she says, was with her father at the time.

"It never occurred to me that the building could collapse and I could die," she says. "It was so surreal."

Rasmussen ended up losing 20 paintings in the flood and spent three months cleaning the first floor.

Although the water receded and she was able to get the shop and gallery back up and running, the effects of Ivan remained.

Many of the businesses closed as a result of the flooding and in turn, many people simply didn't venture to Carnegie anymore. Hurricane Ivan changed the face of the town.

Because she wasn't busy, Ras-mussen, however, was able to rebuild some of the inventory she had lost in the flood.

But with business still down and following the death of her friend from the gallery across the street, she decided to close the gallery and shop last January.

Since then, she has taken on many jobs to support herself and six-year-old Mirra, including teaching classes at Sweetwater Center for the Arts, where she is able to forge both her love of art and her love for teaching.

Ceramic Artist Fong Choo Visits, Lectures

2007-03-22T16:01:00.002-07:00

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 22, 2007) − The University of Kentucky Department of Art will welcome ceramic artist Fong Choo to campus this Friday as its next artist/speaker in this year's Visiting Artists and Scholars Series. During his residence, Choo will visit and work with UK art students, faculty and staff, and address the public and art department majors at a free lecture scheduled for noon Friday, March 23, in Room 118 of the Whitehall Classroom Building.

Choo, a native of Singapore, earned his bachelor's degree in business at Warren Wilson College and his master's degree in ceramics at the University of Louisville. He has been a resident artist and adjunct faculty at Bellarmine University since 1990. His emphasis is tightly focused on miniature teapots, and his decade of work on these pieces shows his evolution in color, design and form.

Choo's work has been featured in various publications and group and solo shows across the U.S. at galleries like New York City's Aaron Faber Gallery and Philadelphia's Works Gallery.

Over the past 10 years, the artist has received numerous awards at such shows as the Smithsonian Craft Show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show and the American Craft Exposition. In 2006 alone, he earned Best in Show nods at the Peoria Fine Art Fair and the American Craft Exposition, as well as a first place award at the St. Louis Art Fair.

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune describes Choo as "a force, both professionally and personally," noting international recognition for the artist's miniature teapots reminiscent of the Yixing style of pottery dating to the 14th Century.

The Department of Art in the UK College of Fine Arts sponsors the Visiting Artists and Scholars Series, which brings nationally and internationally known artists to UK to lecture in weeklong residencies.

While at UK, Choo will visit with art students and faculty, participate in classes, as well as provide critiques to students. Choo's residency includes Friday's free public lecture, which will detail his life's work and conclude with a question and answer session following his presentation.