Art World Economics Part Three
I’m heading into quicksand. A few of you readers have already expressed your ire at all this talk about money on an art site. So this one isn’t for everyone, and if you’re so rich you can afford not to sell, you can stop reading right now. In another blog, I’ll talk about creativity, where my inspiration comes from, and my own color theories. So close your eyes, click your mouse, and go away until then.
On this site, what gets readers to respond? Is there a formula to get people to write in and comment on a blog you’ve written? Are there buttons you can push to provoke responses, and things you shouldn’t write about that will deny you responses?
I think there are. One of the things writers can and often do, is to avoid difficult concepts, which require careful analysis before responding, rather than just knee jerk approval or contestation. Another tried and true provocation technique is to verbalize what you know many people already feel, and wish to express, but maybe aren’t eloquent enough to put into words. Give a few examples that will provide people with the opportunity, and they’ll add their own examples to a growing list of what everybody already agrees on.
Andrew Wielawski on 08.31.05 @ 12:29 PM EST [more..]
You sure know Henri Matisse.
I’ve been on the road for 10 days now delivering a large painting to a client in El Paso TX. I then spent three nights in Tucson with my son’s family. I spent a night in the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in western New Mexico where I wanted to see the pueblos in the cliffs and do some watercolors. I took some photos of pictographs painted on a cliff face around the time that the renaissance was beginning in what is now Italy some 700 years ago (there were also some petro-glyphs that may go back to AD 100). I began wondering why they did that? From a contemporary artist’s point of view there were no collectors to buy their artwork. Selling one’s art seems to be a huge topic on the Absolutearts forum. So in that sense what was the point? There was no trade value in a painting on a cliff face that couldn’t be transported to another canyon or traded for hides or flint or copper. I suppose they could charge admission like the Parks Service does today but I can’t imagine that the Indian Artist who painted it had much of a national reputation at that point in time. There wasn’t that much of an art scene in America yet. Besides, they also made pottery which in fact they did trade to other tribes. You could say the pottery was their more commercial endeavor while the cliff paintings were more personal expressions.
107 paintings – that was the figure on the bill-of-lading when we shipped our things out of Borneo two months ago headed for Lisbon where we are set to stay for the next four years. To see it written out was a bit of a surprise and it felt awkward somehow to have more paintings than anything else on that bill-of-lading. They weren’t all mine of course. My wife and I had bought two paintings from our good friend and fellow artist David Kelly, we had commissioned a portrait of our daughters from Chinese-Australian artist Shan Terry who had also joined in the Brunei Art Forum adventure before she left the enclave. While I was helping in the direction of a gallery I bought two works by my favourite Bruneian artist Zakaria Bin Omar entitled ‘The Wedding’ – one was of the bride, the other of the groom – and yet another by a Singaporean artist whose work I liked, Chew Lean Im. Then there was a canvas we found in a gallery in Alice Springs by Australian artist Tracie Morton (don’t know if she’s big or not, doesn’t really matter, the piece from a sugar-plum-dreaming series was what we wanted after wandering around the red centre during a trip down under) and the three small dot paintings we were unable to resist and bought off a wandering artist somewhere on the road between Darwin and Uluru (was he genuine? Again, does it really matter?)
For those of you who can afford a trip to Tuscany, this show is worth seeing. And, for those of you who aren’t going to be able to, here’s my synopsis of what is there. Sandro Chia belongs to a group of artists called ‘trans avanguardia’ which one can find information about easily by using a search engine. It’s a movement that captured the spotlight, and still has a big piece of it, in the art market around the world. There’s a huge pair of public Chias in New York City, and he has to be considered one of the most famous artists in the world. Still alive and looking very fit at around sixty, he speaks humbly and clearly about his art, and candidly about where he gets his ideas. He says he goes to museums to ‘steal ideas’, and that when he goes, he usually looks at only one piece. I find this a very sane way to approach art, which museum administrators don’t encourage by costly admissions tickets. It would be hard to imagine going to the Uffizi in Florence, waiting three hours on line after making an appointment, and being hustled through in a pre-determined amount of time, if you were going just to study one piece. Chia has enough clout, and enough money, for that not to be a problem. A native Florentine, he owns a vineyard in Montalcino, producing many thousands of sixty dollar and up bottles of Brunello, one of the most prestigious wines in the world.
For The Preservation of Art, Desert and Human Nature: I just spent a couple of hours at The Creativity Making Your Mark(tm) Institute working on an Art work that I believe will be my ultimate act of creativity and the culmination of all the artistic endeavors of my 50 year career. Nothing could have led me to believe that my greatest creativity would be expressed in film and a conceptual Earthwork in Progress. We have dedicated 5.5. acres of a site we own that is surrounded by 1000 Government protected acres and is in the center of a vortex surrounded by four mountain ranges including Joshua Tree National Park's Pinto Mountains.
