The Times profiles Michael Craig-Martin on the occasion of the opening of a large public art project in a Docklands Light Railway station. At 67, Craig-Martin is on stride:

At Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s Craig-Martin taught and counselled Hirst and a clutch of other students who would become the stars of Brit Art. But they weren’t influenced only by his avuncular advice. Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, consisting of a glass of water standing on a shelf next to a text claiming it is such a tree, has been described by Hirst as “the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture”.

Now Craig-Martin, who no longer teaches, is disgorging work at a furious rate and later this month will reveal the results of his first foray into ceramics, a two-storey mural in a stairwell at the new Docklands Light Railway station at Woolwich Arsenal. Street Life features giant images of everyday objects such as keys, a book, a drink can, in the artist’s trademark vivid colours. [ . . . ]

For decades he has been working with these objects and these colours. He keeps a database of 200 or so everyday objects that he has drawn. Sometimes he adds a new drawing, but this is his essential artistic “vocabulary” that he deploys for many of his pieces. “We construct our whole lives out of a very, very small vocabulary and I think what I am doing is quite similar. I am taking these images and I play with them and each time I make another sentence, a new phrase, but the words are the same.”

Craig-Martin is even better on what influence the generation of artists who came to prominence under his guidance:

I had this wonderful thing happen: after all these years of teaching I had a period in which a great many of the students I had taught had quite remarkable success. If you have been teaching, what greater reward can there be?”He was struck that having so many talents at one time was unusual. “Partly through my own efforts they connected with each other and they became curious and interested in each other’s work and they also became jealous of each other in the most healthy, ruthlessly ambitious way.”

The God of Small and Ordinary Things (The Times of London)

The National, the UAE’s English-language paper, looks at Iranian art after the fall and finds Dubai galleries do lots of business at lower prices. Here the writer, Effie-Michelle Metallidis, talks to gallerist Amir-Hosein Etemad:

Etemad has managed to circumvent the financial hit that many of the world’s art markets have taken, particularly within the contemporary art scene. [ . . . ]

Yet oddly, Iran has remained somewhat sheltered from the financial storm. Etemad and other gallery owners in Tehran are experiencing a curious after-effect of the global recession: that interest in the domestic Iranian art market is going up as prices drop to more realistic levels. “I’m relieved that the recession stopped the bubble,” he enthuses. “Now, prices are finally going back to normal.”

The bubble began to grow in Dubai about three years ago as an abundance of young buyers, particularly in the financial sector, channelled their excess income into Middle Eastern and Iranian art, fuelling speculation that drove prices through the roof.

“When I did my first show five years ago, I didn’t sell a thing,” says Isabelle van den Eynde, the owner of B21 Gallery in Dubai.” Frequently travelling to Iran in order to find artists, hers was one of the first to promote Iranian artists in Dubai. “Now,” she says, “people are fighting to buy these pieces.” [ . . . ]

Now that collectors are less willing to splash out, many are travelling to Iran in search of bargains. “There are a lot of new collectors coming,” says Etemad. “London, Switzerland, Dubai, France – even from Beijing and New Zealand. This is new. This has never happened before.”

Why the big interest? “It’s cheaper,” he says matter-of-factly, and interest is still high. “We have always been selling at normal prices, and I’m glad the market reflects that now. People are seeing that they can come here to invest in good art. Before, it was speculation, and people were paying millions for work. Now, because art is sold in a more acceptable range, it is affordable for more collectors.”

According to one interested party, Dubai plays a crucial role:

“While Dubai is something like a rite of passage for many artists who have previously had no representation in the art world, we really want to now get them involved in the international art scene. It doesn’t make any sense if you want your artists to have a career to keep selling in the same community.”In a sense, the Dubai art market has helped to create a platform for many Iranian artists and will continue to act as conduit of Iranian art for those collectors not intrepid enough to make the trek to Iran. “We believe that Dubai is a kind of bridge to Iran to make it international, especially in the art field,” says Raoufi.

Canvassing Anew (The National)

Carol Vogel surveys the auction houses and her favorite sources for a recap of the state of the auction market. You already know the tune but some of lyrics have changed:

“We knew from 1990 that when the market cools, it happens very suddenly, in the course of two weeks,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America. “What we didn’t know is if it was going to happen last May or last month. Now we’re in a period of assessment as we try to figure where we go from here.”

Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer mentions Beuys and Polke as possible names he’ll focus on going forward and he makes a few predictions about what won’t show up at auction any time soon:

Such results present difficult choices for experts putting together the next big round of auctions. “Nobody’s going to be selling a Jeff Koons or a Bacon or a Lichtenstein any time soon,” said Tobias Meyer, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department. “Why would they, since they missed the boat?”

Philippe Ségalot reminds Vogel that Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Gober had particularly fertile periods during the slump of the early 1990s (though it isn’t clear how that would be relevant to the auction market for their works that only came to life nearly a decade later.) But he likes Michael Day Jackson.

Who Will Laugh Last? The Press or the Artist?

With the collapse of markets everywhere since the Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy. it comes as no surprise that press is fixating on the market for Damien Hirst’s artwork. After all, the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale defied all expectations even with the turmoil and uncertainty of Lehman’s collapse earlier that week. Ever since, Hirst’s success has been trotted out as a symbol of irrationality and excess even in extremis.

Three months later the financial world is a very different place. Under the tabloid rules of emotional journalism, there must be punishment for excess. So Bloomberg and Portfolio have trotted out their stories on the “collapse” of the Hirst market:

Three months after Hirst sold more than 200 of his works for 111.5 million pounds ($199 million) at Sotheby’s in London, his market has contracted dramatically. At the bellwether November sales in New York, 11 out of 17 Hirst lots failed to find buyers at three auction houses. On the resale, or secondary market, dealers said demand has dried up, especially for works above $1 million.

(A broader analysis of the Hirst market after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »

Sotheby’s has a short film on its site that allows the Contemporary art department to speak directly to collectors. The message is clear: there’s stability in art market and Sotheby’s has a role in maintaining an orderly market going forward. The film recaps November’s sales; makes a case for the return of collectors; and tries to establish the foundation for many prices.

Toward the end, Tobias Meyer, who heads the Contemporary department, makes a case for there being a long-standing market for Contemporary art with a history; it being a collector’s market now; and Sotheby’s desier to “provide that market with good material that is well-estimated and then sells–thus providing confidence to the market.” [Slightly paraphrased.]

Sotheby’s Private View (Sothebys.com)

It would seem that the Japanese are just as curious about India as everybody else is:

“When you talk about India,” says Miki Akiko, chief curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, “people think of the technological boom on one side and the spiritual side on the other; or on one side, the rich, and the other side, the poor. But there are a lot of people living just like us, having similar problems, similar hopes and dreams.”

Miki is curator of “Chalo! India,” a new exhibition at the Mori Art Museum that focuses on contemporary art from the country. “There is a lack of information about contemporary Indian culture,” she says. “The idea is for visitors to the show to get an idea of today’s India, its society and people, through the artworks. The exhibition aims to give people a different perspective, a different vision.”

With “Chalo! India,” the Mori continues to introduce the contemporary art of often overlooked regions of the world to Japanese audiences — a theme established with previous exhibitions such as 2006’s “Africa Remix,” and “The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia” in 2005. Like these shows, “Chalo! India” faces the challenge of finding a way to present the art of people of varied backgrounds, languages, religions and lifestyles. [ . . . ]

over the last seven or eight years, with the emergence of a younger generation of artists, and also with the economic situation, the whole art scene in India has become more diversified. We thought it was important to present the artistic scene of India at this moment, and it was possible to do it on a large scale.

The Subcontinent Shows Its Heart (Japan Times)

Kimberly Brooks is a painter who occasionally writes for the Huffington Post. Here she’s back from Art Basel Miami brimming with excitement:

For most artists, the fair hovers around our consciousness like a distant moon or planet that we know is there but that we don’t actually visit. My paintings have attended for a few years with my gallery, but I myself had never gone in person. That said, I hear more and more galleries suffering from fair fatigue and given the economy, I fear the degree to which these fairs will carry on with the gusto they have in the past will diminish. In fact, I met many people who said, “you shoulda seen it last year — there were twice as many Basquiat’s and Warhols…. Clearly the dealers were holding back their best stuff”. That may have been true, but it was still pretty spectacular. [ . . . ]

The people might not eclipse the art entirely but they sure come close. The opening night at the main fair is called “The Vernissage” which technically means “varnishing” in French but in this case means private preview. Living in Los Angeles, I can tell you that I have attended my share of fancy parties, but nothing can compare to the chic and sex appeal of an international crowd speaking many languages at this event. Where women in America often dress like grown up version of their teen-age daughers, the European women, escorted by their handsome men in tailored shirts and a scarf casually draped around their neck, slink in the lanes like Catherine Deneuve of every age was put through a cloning machine. It’s fashion/people watching heaven.

Miami Basel Reflections (Huffington Post)

More on the Marlene Dumas MoMA Show

Art critics seem to have a fascinating relationship toward Marlene Dumas and her painting. It’s neither approving, nor hostile. But there’s a longing to get to the bottom of it–one way or another. Peter Schjeldahl has a fascinating and wonderfully written take on the painter’s New York MoMA show in the New Yorker:

Dumas matters as one of a number of now middle-age painters who dealt with the apparent dead end of painting after modernism. A central figure, for her and for others, is Gerhard Richter, whose mournful and sarcastic work in many styles communicates two things: first, the dizziness of a freedom from ideas of historical necessity in art (when you can do whatever you like, why do anything?), and, second, the humiliation of a formerly exalted art by ever more proficient photographic mediums (why muck around with paint to express yourself, when clean machines stand ready?). Like Richter, Dumas confronts the problems head on by hewing, in paint, to the arbitrary givens of a photograph; in her case, photographs that she has found or has taken herself (usually Polaroids of people close to her). “Secondhand images,” she has said, can generate “firsthand emotions.” Painting for her, as for others of her generation, becomes a parasitic enterprise feeding on a world that is fat with fascinating and estranging visual information. Her creative act is part tribute to that profusion, part protest, and entirely corrective: in place of how something appears, she depicts how it appears to her.

Unpretty Pictures (New Yorker)

The LA Times has a fairly comprehensive story on LA MoCA and how it rolled the dice on a risky strategy of growing out of its deficit spending ways. But instead of hitting the jackpot, director Jeremy Strick may have put the board members in legal jeopardy as they used funds with strict controls for other purposes. Faced with competition and fueled by ambition, the museum was leveraging its reputation toward growth.

Former trustee Susan Bay-Nimoy described it thus: “The exhibitions became more grandiose, more expensive, to try to capture the imagination” of the public, she said. “But they put the institution in financial jeopardy.”

After percolating for weeks in other venues, this story gives the first full overview of LA MoCA’s runaway train.

Museum of Contemporary Art: Bigger, Bolder and Poorer (Los Angeles Times)

Contemporary Chinese: No

In London there are somewhat dueling exhibitions of hot collecting categories, Contemporar Indian and Chinese art. The Evening Standard’s Ben Lewis takes the coincidence as an opportunity to validate Indian art:

The global contemporary art boom of the past decade has produced substantial contemporary art scenes in the swiftly growing economies of India and China, and you can see survey shows of both these worlds in London at the moment — one at the Serpentine and one at the Saatchi Gallery. But what a difference a bit of curating can make! Everything that Saatchi gets wrong in his Chinese show, the Serpentine gets right in its Indian one. While the Duke of York’s Barracks show is a chart of the cheesiest Chinese auction-house hits, the Serpentine is a treasure trove of subtlety and surprise. [ . . . ]

The Serpentine show takes a careful look at the Indian contemporary art scene, and instead of attempting an overarching survey, presents an essayistic tour of a handful of contrasting artists. [ . . . ]

Lewis falls hard for Subodh Gupta’s Indian courtroom re-assembled at the Serpentine gallery. He finds it a refreshing contrast to Gupta’s increasingly iconic stainless steek cookware paintings and sculpture:

I had become rather disillusioned by all the repetitive pots-and-pans pieces I’d see by Gupta over the past few years, and I loathe the terrible spin-off photorealist paintings of the same kitchenware which have been on show in every auction preview. The new work shows what resources this artist can tap as long as he doesn’t pander to the tastes of his dimwitted market of millionaire collectors.

New Stars in Indian Highway (This is London)