Needy

Just so you don’t lose the faith and think there is no point in going on here is Marina Abramovic and Andy Warhol sculpted in Wonder Bread by Milena Korolczuk.
Via artsy

Te party

It’s been four years since Te Papa last had an Impressionist exhibition from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That was Monet and the Impressionists an exhibition that stumped up 140,000 visits according to the 2009 annual report or around 1,500 a day for its three month run. 

The new show slated to open on Friday hasn’t got quite the same sting in its title. Colour & Light: Impressionism from France & America sounds a bit like one of those lectures you skipped in Art History (well we did anyway) but Te Papa will have high hopes for it. A crowd pleaser could give a significant kick start to the next financial year‘s attendance figures and this time they're playing the long game: 183 days (it’s more of a long-term loan) as opposed to 92 days for the last Boston effort. 

As we have mentioned before, the Boston Museum of Fine Art uses extensive loans from its collection as a major revenue stream. In an odd mirroring of Te Papa the Bellagio Gallery, located in the eponymous casino in Las Vegas, has just closed Claude Monet: Impressions of Light on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and opened Warhol out West from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Andy and 99 in 66

As Warhol hits Wellington here is an all but forgotten Warhol commercial job from the mid sixties that combines the Te Papa show’s interest in personalities, (Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in the TV comedy Get Smart was a huge star) with popular culture. Felden’s clothes were designed by Gayle Kirpatrick and the photographs were taken by Roger Prigent. Even in the mid sixties and in spite of his growing fame and sales Warhol was convinced he had to keep the commercial work going. Thanks to assemblyplantmarietta for leading the way.

Take your pic

When Te Papa opens its Andy Warhol exhibition in June watch for its rules about whether or not visitors can take photographs. Of all the artists in the world Warhol must surely be the one who would have least objection to people copying his images seeing as how so many of them were copied in the first place. OK, we're being ingenuous. We've just visited a Warhol exhibition (in the Pittsburgh Museum which will supply the work for the Te Papa exhibition) and they absolutely forbid photography. A small army of student guards has been enlisted and they follow you round like lost puppies carefully positioning themselves to cover all works at all times. This seems particularly pointless given the integration of the phone camera into everyday life. When we visited there were a number of people (ourselves included) taking sneak pics whenever they could. We like to think we were all encouraged by one of the wall texts in the exhibition: “Warhol’s spirit of radical innovation and the notion of the artist as a savvy consumer of images have been an ongoing source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artist.” They may just have well added "and everyone else in the digital era."

Image: a photo we took at the Andy Warhol Museum showing Warhol’s 1964 paintings of Jackie Kennedy. The imagery for the painting came via a newspaper photograph that was converted into silk screens to create this serial portrait.

Sitting ducks

Anyone who is a regular at art openings will have been to at least one after show dinner. At worst you’re trudging the streets in a pack of twenty looking for a restaurant (“no, we won’t have to book, there’s plenty of places") or the place has been pre-booked ("there’s 30 of us now and we're two hours late, can you manage?”). Even if you get inside the doors though, you'll still be left with the biggest question of all: where do I sit? Or, even more importantly, who will I end up sitting next to?

Fortunately help is at hand thanks to some brain time by Alex Cornell. He points out that “as the diameter of the table increases so does the importance of who you sit next to.” Safest are four person round or square tables where at least one of the three should be good company and is easily available from every sitting position.

A room with two tables of any size? As Mr Cornell says, “You’re fucked.“ He explains. “Whenever you make your choice of where to sit you will always choose too soon. You can only lament as the other table’s attendance crystallizes into what is clearly the superior group. Sometimes it’s best to visit the bathroom while seats are chosen, so any seating disasters are the result of chance, and not your own miscalculation.” You can read Cornell’s comments on other table arrangements and important concepts like diagonals, quiet spaces and lonely end-seats here.

And if you want a reminder of just how bad these dinners can be, try watching the ultimate glad-I-wasn’t-there after opening party in this clip from Julian Schnabel’s movie Basquiat.

Image: 'Andy' and Co. at the diner from hell in Basquiat

Googling on: paint by numbers

In its exhibition WHIZZ BANG POP the Auckland Art Gallery is showing the Damien Hirst multiple Paint by Numbers (edition of 175). Lowering its market value at a stroke, they have taken the title literally and made themselves a ‘Hirst’ by following the paint-by-number instructions (it’s a bit like eating one of Paul McCarthy’s Chocolate Santas). More typically this work would be displayed as it is sold with the canvas untouched revealing its paint-by-number markings for the 90 spots. NOTE: The Auckland Art Gallery has since told us that when the work was purchased the edition had already been opened and the 'Hirst' painted presumably by its first owner. Word is that, perhaps inspired by this professional do-it-yourself spirit, a recent visitor prised open the paint box on display, took out one of the brushes, dipped it into one of the 90 pots of paint and had a go. Presumably their efforts to follow Hirst’s instructions will be conserved out.

Of course Hirst isn’t the first PBN artist. Warhol made a few back in 1962 as Do it yourselfpaintings (shop here) although now the worm has turned again and you can buy a PBN versionof Warhol Campbell’s Soup can. The original Paint by numbers concept goes back to 1950 when the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit came up with the idea. Overall this kind of PBN has had bad press in the art world. It is seen as the painting equivalent of Truman Capote’s great sniff at Jack Kerouac'swork, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Still, if you can muster up some irony you can buy sets here.

SFW

As Te Papa prepares its own Andy Warhol exhibition it will be aware of the controversy over the censoring of Warhol’s work in Asia. The latest bout started when his portraits of Mao Tse Tung were excluded from the exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 minutes eternal shows in Beijing by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. More weirdly the Singapore Government also put the skids under the Mao pics in the same exhibition for a very specific reason. It does not allow political leaders to be represented in works of art. At all. While not a great moment for audiences or curatorial independence, before we get too carried away let's acknowledge our own well developed mode of censorship - self-censorship.

The self-censorship by curators and museums has ensured that virtually nothing has been seen of Warhol’s homoerotic work of the seventies: not his best work, doesn’t fit the curatorial theme, wrong dates etc. etc. The definitive MoMA retrospective had only three mild examples as opposed to 10 images of Mick Jagger. Needless to say examples of this work won't be seen touring Asia any time soon. The pages illustrating this post show the absurdity of where this can all lead. Here's what Frankfurt’s very reputable Kunsthalle did to Jeff Koons’s Made in heaven series in their catalogue for a recent Koons painting show and made itself look ridiculous in the process. Which of course is what censorship is good at.

Image: The Kunsthalle Frankfurt catalogue featuring a carefully trimmed ‘detail’ of Glass dildo by Jeff Koons. Yes, that it is Cicciolina's high-heeled foot you can see.

The Warhol effect

Te Papa announced late last year that it will host a Warhol exhibition in June 2013 selected by its curator of contemporary art and acting senior curator Sarah Farrar. Metaphor aside, nine months is not much time to pull off what the museum must be hoping will be one of those if-we-show-him-they-will-come blockbusters. The works will be selected from the collection of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum (plus some local and Australian ring-ins one assumes) but having just seen the bloated three hundred work exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 minutes eternal touring Asia and also from the Andy Warhol Museum, it’s not going to be easy to get a great show.

Museums manage their collections on the principle of that airline safety instruction video - ‘Secure your own mask first before helping others.’ Institutions with iconic collections like the Andy Warhol Museum can't afford to disappoint their own audiences with anything less than the best possible sampling of Warhol’s work. The problem for borrowers then is that what tends to be left is the smaller, lesser known, less popular examples (often on paper rather than canvas and in the Asian show occasionally in facsimile rather than original). This situation made 15 Minutes Eternal a pretty drab affair. To make up the numbers far too many average works were included and this quantity over quality perspective was aggravated by an absence of curatorial point of view.

The challenge for Te Papa is satisfying the drive for a strongly marketed blockbuster against a smart show with a point of view. Warhol is not seen in New Zealand often. The last time was the highly focused show The Warhol look in 1998 at the Auckland Art Gallery which only managed to draw in less than half its projected audience of 50,000 and lost around $90,000.  Warhol is not an audience slam dunk but working with what’s available after the Asian vacuum cleaner has been through and making some other institutional loans (the country code for Australia is +64) let's hope for a sharp, focused exhibition of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Whether that will be enough to draw the crowds and turnaround Te Papa’s declining attendance figures is another thing altogether.

Image: Diminishing returns. Top Andy Warhol boxes in the studio. Bottom left at the Andy Warhol Museum and right, in a tragically blurry photo taken against all odds, the slim pickings exhibited at the 15 minutes eternal exhibition

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A getting-to-the-heart-of-things billboard by Geoff Hargadon an American financial planner and part-time artist. More here.

Limited

Much has changed in the six years OTN has been publishing. Back in 2006 the idea of a serious artist who wasn’t Andy Warhol putting his or her name on a product was unusual whereas now artist brands fill every corner of the what-will-we-buy-someone-who-has-everything (i.e. super-rich) market. 

Still, we couldn't let this one pass without mention. Yes, a limited edition Tequila with Gabriel Orozco’s signature and signature patterned skull going for $2,250 a bottle. If you think half a dozen or so of these will help fill your Christmas gift needs you'd better get going. Orozco's tequila is in the inevitable ‘limited edition’, this one of 400 signed bottles.

Style section

Because we want you to look good either carrying your laptop or giving the gift. Warhol case here for $US59.99

Having a cow

“It’s ridiculous—they have a great product, and they’re pushing it out into the market like cattle.”

Alberto Mugrabi, a New York dealer and owner of the largest collection of Warhol's work commenting on the Warhol Foundation putting the remainder of its holdings of  20,000 Warhol paintings, prints and photographs to auction.

Image: Warhol Cow wallpaper (detail)