Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Sotheby’s traditional mid-season sale that coincided with the Armory Fair and ADAA has recently been re-christened Contemporary Curated, often using social figures and celebrities to generate interest in the works. This March 2nd, the auction house is taking another tack. Before the Contemporary Curated sale, Sotheby’s will hold a single-owner sale of the Ed Cohen and Victoria Shaw collection.
Here’s Sotheby’s release on the sale:Continue Reading
Adrian Searle has a take on John Currin’s new paintings. If you want to judge for yourself, the video above has Currin discussing his work at The DePaul Humanities Center in Chicago suggests that what Searle surmises about Currin’s intentions or fixation on the value of his work may be more Searle’s invention:Continue Reading
A.M. Homes has a hard-to-classify story on VanityFair.com. Written in the first person, for no apparent reason, it briefly retails some snippets from her visit to Currin’s loft. All of this is occasioned by his exhibitions in Montreal and the Netherlands and a new book of his paintings which is published by Rizzoli. This, according to Homes, constitutes Currin’s “living the dream.”
The dream, however, seems to involve growing up and losing one’s sense of humor:
What caused his humor to go? “Kids,” he says definitively. “When you have children, you’re thrust back into that feeling of being in church or at a funeral and thinking, What if I burped right now? All the funny things that come into my head are basically offensive to everyone around me and inappropriate and extreme. It was crucial for me to really become a man and stop being just a balding adolescent.”
The shift into a darker state of mind is evident as Currin goes into layered digressions on the works of his artistic heroes—he’s fixated on a Poussin painting he recently saw, “a crucifixion so complex, dense without being overworked. . . . I would like to make a painting as serious as that and give up some of my habits of joke-making.”
VF Portrait: John Currin (Vanity Fair)
Granted, it’s the Styles section of the New York Times. Nevertheless, isn’t it rather late in the cycle of contemporary art’s growth and financial success to trot out this canard?
Flouting the long-held, politically correct prohibitions against artists living amid the kind of ritzy indulgence their collectors do, Mr. Currin and Ms. Feinstein have not only mapped out a new place for the artist in society, they also hired a decorator to make it look fabulous.
And they’re not ashamed to admit it.
“Visual artists like to think of themselves as more serious — you can’t show off that you have good taste,” said Ms. Feinstein with an exasperated shake of her head, sitting at home in the couple’s SoHo loft. “We’re always getting insulted. We were at a party at Anna Wintour’s house, and all these people are giving John grief, telling him, ‘You’re not dressed like an artist, you’re dressed like a banker.’ And he’s like: ‘Give me a break, how is an artist supposed to dress, like Jackson Pollock? That was the ’50s!’ ”
Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Their Own Best Creations (New York Times)
