art

Banksy might be the biggest of the big in the street art/vandalism game, but our new favorite is John Scott, reportedly the oldest tagger ever apprehended (in California at least). For more than half a year, the 73 year old had been slapping stickers everywhere in areas around Los Angeles which read simply, "Who is John Scott?" According to the few blogs we found mention of the sticker, prior to his arrest, most assumed it was some sort of marketing effort for a movie or a new album, given that the "Who is...?" ploy seems to have been thoroughly overused the past couple of years (e.g., in music, we've recently been asked who both Sasha Fierce and Jill Scott are, without receiving much of a worthwhile answer to either). But nope, turns out it's just an older guy who apparently wanted to spend some money on a bunch of stickers, hosting for a simple website, and a few t-shirts to sell on the street and online, all to hopefully make a buck or two and get people saying his name. But while we now know who John Scott is (here's a far more friendly photo than his mug shot), we'd like to hope that the question will survive. As he says himself on his site:

Who is John Scott? As soon ask yourself, Who am I? John Scott--world traveler, entrepreneur, producer, but, above all, mystery--an ordinary man with an extraordinary idea of himself. A real person with a real history, he is also you and me, the face in the window, the voice on the bus.

Poor Thomas Kinkade. All he wanted to do was paint light. Recently there were those mean people he had to pay $2.1 million to because they said he and his company scammed them. Now there are a bunch of San Franciscan artists who are poking fun at his well-lit artwork at recent show called "Kinkade Cannibalized! An Exhibition of Kinkade Paintings." The show, hosted by the collage artist and gallery owner Winston Smith, asked a handful of artists to take existing paintings by the "best selling artist of all time" and alter them in some way. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, while some ripped him apart, deciding to critique his perhaps overly-idealistic work, others decided that maybe it was just fancy pants elitists who had a problem with him, including Smith himself, as well as famous comic publisher Ron Turner:

Turner, who was one of the first publishers to feature the work of the now widely known illustrator R. Crumb, said he also has published a book on Kinkade's work.

"I'm not anti-Kinkade," Turner said. "I think he gets under everyone's skin because he glorifies the fairy tale. Kinkade is a master marketer, and I think the idealizing of the images is Kinkade's own inside joke."

Photos of the event and some of the pieces displayed can be found here.

Gallery hopping in Manhattan is a treat on most any Saturday, but The New Yorker's annual Passport to the Arts event adds a scavenger hunt twist, challenging participants to fill the creamy cardstock of their specially issued booklets with stamped versions of artworks (like the one at right, by Asuka Ohsawa) from each of the 28 participating galleries. While we were busy over at Sotheby's enumerating the ways that a Cecily Brown canvas is a (much) wiser investment than a new boat, we dispatched UnBeige designer correspondent Prescott Perez-Fox to take a walk on the fine art side. Here's his Passport report.

Last Saturday, I stepped out for the fifth annual Passport to the Arts, an open-house tour of galleries in SoHo and Chelsea. The day-long event and evening reception was sponsored chiefly by The New Yorker promotion department. Proceeds from ticket sales and the silent auction benefitted Friends of the High Line, the "non-profit conservancy that provides over 70 percent of the High Line's annual operating budget," so the endeavor offered an element of community outreach, and not simply another chance for the art community to do its thing.

It seems to be an appropriate symbiosis: the art community, now based in the post-industrial area of West Chelsea, benefits from new foot traffic brought by the High Line, while the High Line, of course, needs money to continue renovations and maintain the park for public use. With the chance to pick up some art at auction prices, patrons also may find this a winning scenario.

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As writer Judith H. Dobrzynski puts it "If you live in Britain, better hide that Picasso." She's referring to a recent study released by the Art Loss Register that ranks countries by the total amount of reported art thefts. We would have said that Brazil was near the top, given those high-profile thefts and crazy museum embarrassments from a while back, but turns out it's the UK and the US right there at the very top of the list (and the UK has more than double our thieving levels). We had no idea there were that many art thefts going on (roughly 6,000 pieces since 2006 in the US alone), so now we're either going to keep our eyes a little more peeled the next time we're at a galley or we're just going to get into the business of art theft ourselves. But before you start letting those rankings wreck your national pride, Dobrzynski mentions this:

Don't read too much into the list: it's likely that art theft is rampant in rich Asian countries, say, but it's just not reported to ALR, which is based in London and New York.

She does say, however, that the trends found by the Art Loss Register are important, however. And going back to Brazil, we find that we weren't totally wrong. Between 2000 and 2005, they had just 9 thefts. From 2006 to today, there have been 3,154.

Who knew that 2009 was going to be the year that modern art got high-profile political again? Just a few months back, we had Glenn Beck telling us about the evil communist indoctrination elements found within the exterior of Rockefeller Plaza and now we have the decision not to hang painter Alma Thomas' "Watusi (Hard Edge)" piece in Michelle Obama's office. Thomas' work had come under attack when it was mentioned that the First Lady would like to hang some of her work in the White House. According to the Washington Post, conservative sites started arguing that Thomas' work plagiarized Henri Matisse -- their point, we suppose, was that by hanging her work, Michelle Obama would therefor become pro-plagerism? Whatever the case, and not to exaggerate too much here, this is clearly the worst instance of pointless, partisan, arguing-just-to-argue ever in the history of universe. Unfortunately, the Post continues, the White House has decided to not hang the painting, claiming it just didn't work in the office after all, but perhaps they just wanted to quiet this absurdly focused pressure. And this apparently wasn't the only piece to catch heat. Does anyone have any info on obtaining Canadian citizenship? We're sick of this.

The most popular vandal in all the world, Banksy, keeps on getting a taste of his own medicine. Just this year, his work has been accidentally painted over and purposefully defaced during his big show in Bristol. But as we've also seen over the past couple of years, people have been defensive of Banksy's work, even receiving requests that he show up to tag in their towns (perhaps due to some correlation with how much his work goes for at auction?). Now the news comes that while neighborhood residents and officials were meeting to discuss what to do with a Banksy on one of their walls, whether they should keep it or not (the vote was an overwhelming yes), nogoodniks were graffiting all over Banksy's graffiti. So now, we're assuming, Banksy's piece, and all of this new street art will be removed. And if that hasn't already gotten too meta for you, here's a quote from one of the neighborhood voters about why they think the piece was defaced:

"The image actually criticised mindless graffiti so perhaps it isn't surprising that the sort of people who do that sort of thing should attack it."

As a lame adult now too old to go out to raucous parties, but young enough not to have kids yet, this writer's connection to Halloween has sadly become distanced. As such, he hasn't really been on the lookout for much spooky, seasonally-appropriate pieces to share with you here. Fortunately, our pals over at Chicago's iconic Art Institute have come through at the eleventh hour for us with their recent post to their Facebook page:

In honor of Halloween, we took an office poll: what's the scariest/creepiest/spookiest work in the collection? Here are some of our picks.

Therein you'll find ten decidedly scary pieces, like Francis Bacon's Figure with Mean (6 out of 10 on the creepy scale), Irving Penn's famous The Angel photograph (3 out of 10), and for those with a decidedly popular phobia, Bruce Nauman's video installation Clown Torture (8 of 10, regardless if you previously had a fear or not). A thanks to the Art Institute for bringing the high brow to a purposefully low brow holiday. We applaud whoever decided this would be a fun idea, because it most certainly is.

Just this past weekend, a friend was talking about Roger Hiorns' Turner Prize-shortlisted piece "Seizure." If you aren't familiar with it, the quick synopsis is that Hiorns dumped gallons and gallons of copper sulphate into a sealed, abandoned apartment, waited a few days, sucked all the liquid back out, and what was left were these beautiful, blue walls of crystals. So it's funny that piece should come up right before we'd heard about this project in Detroit starting to make the rounds here on the internet, which sort of sounds like the American version of "Seizure." It's Gregory Holm and Matthew Radune's plan to pump water into an abandoned house this winter and let it freeze, essentially creating a gigantic ice block around the structure. Throughout the process, Holm will be photographing the effects the ice has on the house, with the whole purpose of the project serving as a statement about Detroit's foreclosure plague over these past decades. The two are currently raising money for the project on their blog, so if you're feeling generous and dig the idea, drop them a few bucks.

We blame the frozen economy for keeping us from this year's Frieze Art Fair in London, but it didn't stop us from living vicariously through others. In addition to requesting various colleagues across the pond to send detailed updates from Regent's Park (sample text message: "Valentino is here. Very, very tan. Tempted to ask him to pose w/me in Ryan Gander's on-site photo studio."), we made invited one particularly indulgent associate to narrate—by cell phone—the whole of his experience at the just-opened Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Hayward. We're happy to report that Ruscha's paintings sound almost as good as they look. Meanwhile, Carol Vogel had a great round-up of Frieze in The New York Times, including this intriguing tidbit:

At Lehmann Maupin, the New York gallery, visitors can fill out questionnaires from the British artist Tracey Emin asking, for example, "Do you believe in God?" and "Is there any color that makes you violently sick?" From the answers, Ms. Emin will create a drawing and a neon piece. The first of her custom-made pieces was sold to Amy Phelan...four other buyers followed.

And fear not, stateside Emin fans! The bespoke fun comes to New York on November 5 with the opening of "Only God Knows I'm Good," an exhibition of new work by Emin at Lehmann Maupin's Chrystie Street gallery. Exploring the artist's favored themes of love, sex, and lust will be 53 works, including a large-scale film projection, never-before-seen neons and sculptures, a collection of embroideries and monoprints, and "NEON LIFE: A Portrait," the made-to-order project that debuted at Frieze.

Print may be dying, but paper endures, whether cut, burned, shredded, scribbled on, or sculpted into elaborate art installations. The Museum of Arts & Design tears into the topic with "Slash: Paper Under the Knife," the third exhibition in its Materials and Process series. On view through April 4 of next year, the exhibition explores the creative possibilities of paper through the works of paper-loving artists such as Olafur Eliasson, who in 2006 reproduced a cross-section of his house (at a scale of 85:1) on 900 sheets of laser-cut paper in a sort of anti-pop-up book, and Kara Walker, whose painstaking paper cut-outs explore themes of race, gender, and the shadier side of American history.

(Photos: Stefan Bagnoli)

Occupying one corner of the gallery is Pietro Ruffo's "Youth of the Hills" (2008), a six-foot-long tank that is studded with nails and covered in cut paper and Hebrew prayer script. More politically-charged paper sure to please the design crowd is the work of Sangeeta Sandrasegar, whose cut-outs insert war imagery into the distinctive shapes of iconic chairs designed by the likes of Marcel Breuer and Charles and Ray Eames. "The chair and image provoke constructs of looking/seeing: as bystander, spectator, onlooker, observer, and as such the range of power/powerlessness these positions convey," writes Sandrasegar on his blog. "Additionally, between the depicted image of war and the chair template lie other gulfs of of contrast: between first and third worlds, the safe worlds in which designer furniture exists, and the unsafe worlds in which bombs and raids exist, creation and destruction, wealth and poverty."

Previously on UnBeige:

Battered Books, Tattered Covers: The Photos of Cara Barer and Abelardo Morell