Normally I am not quite a fan of Phillip Starck’s designs, but in the most recent issue of DAMn magazine his ideas really grabbed me. Here is an excerpt for your reading pleasure:
“The intelligent part of human production always focuses on reducing materiality. the main lines tend towards dematerialisation, which in itself implies lightness and invisibility. The future is not the production of matter. Intelligence lies in the creation of ideas and actions. Think of computers. Initially they had very low capacities and were the size of an apartment building. But gradually they became so powerful that now they are the size of an envelope. And their capacity will continue to grow exponentially until a time in the near future when they will have completely disappeared and become virtual, like the iCloud…the less material an object is, the more intelligent it becomes.”
And on the topic of luxury:
“I’m not interested in the concept of luxury…if I were to talk about luxury, I would say that it is an entity that continuously shifts such that part of the population never has access to it. I think that’s the idea, because once you can afford luxury, it is no longer a luxury. Like caviar and smoked salmon. As soon as you could buy them in the supermarket, they were no longer a luxury. So you can see that it is all a mirage, a bit like smoke and mirrors. Something that is always shifting on the horizon and is never within reach…I would be inclined to say that there is a negative connotation. I would prefer to substitute intelligence and quality for the word luxury. And these two notions should absolutely be accessible. It is not a choice. It’s a duty to make these available to the greatest number of people. The only modern elegance is the multiplication of good ideas and quality.”
Mr. & Mrs. Frieze I saw the three of them eating lunch at the Wolseley and there was a palpable sense of tension: two proprietors of an art fair seemed to be facing off against an elder gallery owner like a police station interrogation. Almost an anomaly today, the dealer is a transparent, honorable, steady-as-a-rock character, decades on the scene, who had shown his support for the fair by continually participating in the early years when the event suffered hiccups from within and due to wider economic concerns. What I was later to discover was that they attempted to coerce him to shift to a new section of the fair that did not suit his program, and would have precluded participation of half the gallery stable. Oh, the capricious rules and players in the art world. What did the dealer do? What any self-respecting human would in the face of such groundless intransigence—walk. And then there was the young gallerist who had accomplished a rarity at the last iteration of the fair, namely curating a site specific installation in the booth that turned upside down and blurred the sense of inside and outside, public and private. It was a wonderful, hardly commercial gesture, surely more costly than any return that could have been anticipated (or hoped for). And, above all, it was great art for the sake of art; sadly, this is a foreign sentiment in many quarters of the commercial (and institutional) art world. It’s money, money, money, art stars, art stars, and art stars, same shit different fair. Even the critics aren’t immune from being seduced by the darlings of art and commerce. Was there any reward from such an adventurous undertaking by the young dealer? Yes, he was summarily dismissed from the coming year, as the last booth wasn’t considered up to snuff. During the brief but dark days of the art recession, when many galleries were teetering on going out of business, yet thinking of committing to fairs, low and behold Frieze offers up Frame to encourage less established galleries with more “challenging” art to participate. What was simply a factor of cold hard economic necessity was, for matters of PR, cloaked in words of altruistic do-goodism. There is such a stifling extent of homogeneity within the fair that it entails a huge effort geared towards making it stay that way. On one occasion the fair management went to great lengths to attempt to ensure that an architect’s sculptural seating elements were kept out of the event lest they dilute the purity of what the organizers (alone) narrowly define as art. This isn’t the only time I have disparaged the powerful pair and fair. After the first few articles we met and discussed admission criteria, which they admittedly said they shouldn’t be doing. They then went on to state that due to the fact that I exhibit Zaha Hadid one month, Vito Acconci the next and that the program was just too unpredictable (shouldn’t it be?) that I could never expect to be admitted; and, that they’d rather see more of the same names again and again, names that consistently and constantly appear on the biennial and fair circuit. How tedious. There was a benefit at a friend’s studio and Frieze presented, practically inaudibly and in a monotone. When patrons asked the owner to speak up, he replied that if the audience was quieter, perhaps they could hear. Such an arrogant lack of empathy is baffling; this is a service industry and Frieze is not an institution. I humbly tried to explain my position to his wife on an admittedly drunken night at a Swarovsky dinner and said something to the effect: “I have news for you, art fairs are trade shows, not museums or hospitals, created to communicate to the widest possible audience.” She may have stormed off the table, and I may have sent an apology letter. That lovely episode was followed by an Institute of Contemporary Art fundraising luncheon at which I was sat elbow to elbow with Frieze and we did not speak a single word from start to finish. But let’s face it, the notion of the general public is anathema to a VIP crazed art market, from 3-tier openings depending on who you are (or perceived to be) to the entire New York Soho gallery community that picked up sticks and moved to Chelsea to run from the hoi polloi. More effort goes into deciding who not to invite to the openings than to who gets the golden tickets. God knows there are too many fairs but the carnivorous fashion in which Frieze went hunting for the jugulars of both London’s Pavilion of Art & Design (by opening Frieze Masters) and New York’s Armory was a zero sum game of mercilessness. The cover of Fantastic Man Magazine, Spring and Summer 2012, features a Hollywood head shot (one among many posed portraits) of Mr. Frieze, and generously spread throughout the gushing palaver are some real gems. One such nugget was that thanks to Frieze, even cabbies could now appreciate contemporary art and see the roads as painted canvas. And best of all: “Coming from the critical perspective, I thought collectors were Idiots with money who fund the whole thing.” Coming from my perspective, some of the fairs are (the new) idiots with money. To reassure, this is not a mere unhealthy grudge, no more or less than any other I harbor from time to time. I very much acknowledge and respect the enormous commercial success the Frieze brand has become in a relatively short period of time, defining the epitome of the high-end boutique fair going experience. I am fully aware this is a commercial enterprise from the get go, my only beef being that the proprietors paint it as much more, when in reality it’s more about avarice and mean spiritedness then setting about changing perceptions of art. Last year the two Frieze principals were bestowed with OBE’s, namely Officers of the Order of the British Empire, which brings to mind another possibility for the acronym: Officers smelling of the Odor of the Boring Establishment.
Zhang Huan at Rockbund Museum, Featured on Designboom
“The installation was created by zhang in an attempt to address several seemingly insurmountable cultural questions—
‘faced with rapid economic and societal changes and energy and climate challenges, how can we achieve sustainable development? what responsibilities come along with china’s rise in international importance? where is the sense of spiritual belonging for contemporary chinese?’
A very good question. Is there any spirituality left or are temples only for souvenir-hawking and busloads of tourists? Has capitalism replaced introspection, cheap goods taken the place of mental and spiritual development? Are Chinese people ruled by $$$? All questions I ask when I’m in China.
“Money and culture have never been easily disentangled, nor would one want them to be, considering that culture is by no means cost efficient. But there are different forms of patronage and different kinds of entanglements. And culture is now in retreat before the brute force of money. Even the most easygoing commentators can see the writing on the wall, and some critics who might have been expected to be amused by the Cattelan retrospective have not enjoyed the show. Who knows? Maybe they’re tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don’t give a damn what critics—or for that matter museumgoers—say.”
“One of New York’s biggest dealers told Velthuis, the Dutch sociologist, that collectors “permanently have to explain to themselves why they spend so much money on art, sometimes up to 40 percent of their total net worth. So that they want to hear all day long that it makes sense what they do.”
