Charles Saatchi set up the British advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, the firm hired by the Conservative party in 1978 to catapult Margaret Thatcher to power. By the late 1980’s Saatchi was one of the most powerful figures in the art world, and he used his millions to create a personal stable of postmodernist young Turks, the so-called Brit Art…
The “pioneering conceptual artist” Chris Burden has built a prosperous career for himself based on controversy and the limitless gullibility of the official art world. In 1971 Burden arranged a stunt at the F Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California, and called it art. His exploit, titled Shoot, consisted of being shot in the right arm at close range by an…
I first became aware of the works of Christo in 1972 while reading, Towards Revolutionary Art (TRA), a small left-wing arts journal from San Francisco. TRA had published a caustic attack upon Christo for his Valley Curtain project (pictured above), a huge barrier of orange nylon fabric hung in Rifle Gap, Colorado. TRA’s fierce diatribe savaged Christo for his “$700,000…
It is a sin and a shame when fellow artists and others who should know better, say that “painting is dead.” The first artistic impulse of Paleolithic humans was to paint realistic images of animals on cave walls. There are such paintings in Lascaux France believed to be over 17,000 years old, and up to the very present humans continue…
Bourgeois art circles are buzzing with the news that the pickled shark by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an unnamed American collector for around 12 million dollars. Suspended in a vat of formaldehyde and titled, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the marinated 14-foot shark launched Hirst’s lucrative art career in 1992. Now…
Jeremy Deller has won Britain’s most prestigious art award for his short film about Texas, Memory Bucket. The movie documents his travels through the US state, featuring encounters with locals and a visit to George W. Bush’s favorite burger bar near the “Western White House.” The Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize honors Deller’s knack for filmmaking by bestowing upon him a…
On December 6th the British Tate Gallery will be announcing its winners for this years celebrated Turner Award. Of the artists on the short list to fame and monetary reward (around $48,000 US), not a single painter appears. Most of the postmodern conceptualists in the running have entered video installations. We’re told that politics abounds in the entries… as with…
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp called a porcelain urinal art and entered it in a New York exhibit. He signed his “ready made” artwork, R. Mutt (a pun using the German word for poverty, “armut”). Eighty seven years later Duchamp is acknowledged as the spiritual father of today’s postmodern conceptualist artists… with one important distinction. Duchamp loathed the bourgeois art establishment…
