Several works on view at “Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Image courtesy 1OF1. Photography by Anna Blubanana studio.
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THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: The art of magical thinking – theberkshireedge.com
End-of-year articles and newscasts often focus on those whom we have lost in the past year, and 2021 was no different. For some friends the loss of Sondheim was the most notable, but for me it was the loss of Joan Didion. Articles lauding her skills as a writer and observer call to mind her commentary on everyone from Ronald Reagan to Martha Stewart (it’s arguable whether two such subjects demonstrate range or only replication, but I will not digress), but what always intrigued me about Didion was her questioning nature. And how that informed me as a gardener. I have no idea if she had any horticultural interests beyond the frangipani leis that were placed over her head when she took one of her many trips to Hawaii, but her approach to life and to her art informs me on how I want to garden.
Didion’s writing begins with a question, and meanders forward as she seeks answers in the details and evidence around her. For her, observation was not a lead-in to writing but the work itself. Research did not end with the written word; the written word was the beginning that would spur more thought and observation. For me, this is the essence of gardening. Dig in, invest, observe. Repeat. Predetermined approaches and processes and canned thinking should be called into question. To paraphrase Didion on writing, I garden “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Notions of beauty and art evolve and are meant to do so. And the never-ending present in which we garden is at once of the moment and a part of a future where the current assumptions may not hold, where things may fall apart.
Didion poses a seemingly simple question in her memoir of coming of age in California: “Don’t you think people are formed by the landscape they grew up in?” Does she want us to believe it is as simple as that, or is she merely leading us to the question of how we allow setting, past and present, to define us? The landscape, not only from which we come but that which we create, certainly informs us and illumines a part of both who we are and who we have been.
That is true whether it is the mountains of California that her forbears crossed along with the Donner party or the interior settings with which we more often associate her or the characters she has profiled or created. Her forbears left the Donner party and, in an unknowing act of self-preservation, headed up through Oregon and missed out on the most tragic part of that trip. This survival trait is seen in Didion herself, who often skipped out on production meetings with the claim of a migraine or some other form of malaise, leaving her husband/co-screenwriter to deal with the present day cannibalizers known as studio executives. But it is not the past that is defining but rather it is action in the present.
The settings in which I picture Didion are not mountainscapes or gardens in California, but in her apartment, filled with items such as a framed teletype about Nixon’s resignation, that reveal some small aspect of what drives her. The things we collect, whether faded teletypes or young trees on their way to maturity, tell us about who we are. But they are not the complete story. I think we keep plants and things around us so, as Didion argues, we don’t lose touch with our past selves.
I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. … We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
Perhaps this is why I hold onto plants to which I no longer feel connected. They inform me of who I am and occasionally of the lessons they taught me and of mistakes I hope not to repeat in the garden.
I remember seeing Didion at a party in her honor at the Greenwich Village home of artist Jennifer Bartlett. The setting, replete with an indoor pool and a series of gardens which felt more like the enclosed gardens of Southern California than those of the typical Greenwich Village terrace, told me more about who our host and the guest of honor were, and had been. It reminded me of Didion’s statement that “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” This setting, like the art of these two California-born creators, was the crossover point between history and creation. It was a landscape based not on past realities but shaped by them, just as a good garden calls to mind the terrain from which it is derived while also having an identity all of its own.
The best gardens are artful and share this sense of biography and history, while inhabiting the present. They contain the plants and landforms that we have known in our lives. Like the work of Didion and Bartlett, they not only reflect the past but become more real than the past itself. Our memories are fleeting and often based as much on the shared stories of family and friends as on our own knowledge of such events. But as in the work of Didion, the verity of such memories is not as important as what we do with the emotions and ideas to which they connect us. A scarlet oak in our present-day garden may call to mind one outside a childhood bedroom window, but it is not so much that, as it is a connection to an eternal present and ever out-of-reach future. We garden not only to see who we were and from where we come, but more importantly, to see who we will be and what we can create from what was.
As I think back on Didion, walking through Bartlett’s Charles Street house on that warm, (September, perhaps?) day, I am not sure what I recall and what I have created for myself from this memory. And I hope that, someday, my garden will serve as a setting that informs someone else in the way such memories (and the works of art of another) have entered my own consciousness and sense of self.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
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Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
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In Venice, 1OF1 and Collector Ryan Zurrer Introduce Web3 Phenom Sam Spratt to the Art World – ARTnews
Digital artist Sam Spratt is living the artist’s dream. This week, he celebrated the opening of “The Monument Game,” his first-ever art show. But it wasn’t a group show in some DIY space in New York, where he is based, like so many artists typically start out, but a solo exhibition in Venice, during the art world’s biggest event of the year—the Venice Biennale. How did Spratt–a virtually unknown name in the art world–make such a tremendous leap? With a little help from his friends, of course, including Ryan Zurrer, the venture capitalist turned digital art champion.
“Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.”
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Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer is once again placing digitally native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple had large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is far earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game.
“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time just figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would get competitive, emotional.”
Spratt released his first three NFTs on the platform SuperRare in October 2021. The sale of those works, the first from his series LUCI, was accompanied by a giveaway of a free NFT to every person who put in a bid. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Birth of Luci). While Spratt said the derivative NFTs were basically worthless, he wanted to give something back to each bidder. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, called Skulls of Luci, became Sam’s dedicated collectors that now go by The Council of Luci. 47 editions were given out and Spratt held back three.
All the works from LUCI are on view at the Docks Cantiere Cucchini, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a rocking boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. Though NFTs typically bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on view depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 ditched screens in favor of prints mounted on lightboxes.
“We don’t want it to look like a Best Buy in here,” said Zurrer.
Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Though there’s no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story at play in which an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and he credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his art historical references harken to Renaissance and Baroque art, though the aesthetics—to my eye—seem to pull from commercial illustration and concept art. That isn’t too surprising given that this was the environment that Spratt started off in after graduating SCAD in 2010.
“After school I was confronted with the reality that for a digital artist the only path was commercial,” Spratt said.
He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge audience of fans who have followed him as he’s migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan-art on each platform. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness.
“I was a gun for hire. A mimic, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.
Spratt’s personal life blew up when he turned 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships with the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs seemed like a way out of commercial illustration and a way into an original art practice.
For his latest piece in the LUCI series, Spratt digitally painted a massive landscape set in this ape-human world titled The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another edition of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make an observation about the painting. The Council of Luci would vote on which three observations were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Skulls of Luci NFTs that Spratt held back. By creating these tiers of engagement, with his Council and player structure, Spratt pushes digital collectors to give the kind of care to his work that more traditional collectors do.
A work at “Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Image courtesy 1OF1. Photography by Anna Blubanana studio.
“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.”
The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously.
At the presentation of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by platform Nifty Gateway, sits in front of the mounted work. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write down their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first observation came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?
“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.
Art
Explore local comedy, art and music: Five things to do this weekend in Saskatoon, April 19-21 – Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
Take in improv comedy, art discussions and shows, locally-produced theatre and live instrumental or choral music.
Published Apr 19, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 2 minute read
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Unseasonable snow this week isn’t slowing the arts down; nor should it hamper the enjoyment of events around town. Get out and take in a variety of comedy shows, art exhibitions and theatre this weekend.
1 — Laugh along with the Soaps
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Saskatoon Soaps Improv Comedy presents We Love the ’90s. Return to the 1990s improv-style, complete with flannel, grunge and gangsta rap jokes coming faster than the old dial-up internet connection. The troupe performs live comedy based on audience suggestions, so be prepared with your classic references and ideas. The all-ages show is Friday at the Broadway Theatre at 8 p.m. Learn more at broadwaytheatre.ca.
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2 — Chat with a local artist and take in an exhibition
The Ukrainian Museum of Canada presents an artist talk by its second artist in residence, Amalie Atkins. The Saskatoon-based artist discusses her residency and how her creative expression resonates with the history of Ukrainian heritage. The free event is Saturday at the museum at 3 p.m. Atkins’s exhibition will be on display through May 18. Learn more at umcnational.ca.
GlassArt showcases glasswork by members of the Saskatoon Glassworkers Guild. The annual show features unique works made through a variety of processes and techniques. Artists are in attendance and there will be some demonstrations. The exhibition runs Friday through Sunday in the Galleria at Innovation Place. Learn more at saskatoonglassworkersguild.org.
3 — Experience live, local theatre
Live Five Independent Theatre presents Bat Brains (or let’s explore mental illness with vampires), a new comedy by Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett. Inspired by a months-long mental breakdown, the dark comedy follows Scud the vampire, who hasn’t left his house in 53 years. The arrival of an unexpected visitor launches Scud on a journey through his home, his mind and beyond. The show opens Friday and runs to April 28 at The Refinery. Learn more at ontheboards.ca.
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4 — Sing along with a local choir
The Saskatoon Men’s Chorus presents the spring concert, Meetin’ Here Tonight. Enjoy gospel and classic favourites with special guests: bassist Bruce Wilkinson, baritone Adam Brookman and the Outlook Men’s Chorus. Sunday at Zion Lutheran Church at 2:30 p.m. Learn more at saskatoonmenschorus.ca.
Cecilian Singers present their spring concert, Come Sing with Me. The singers are joined by three guests: soprano Kelsey Ronn, violinist Wagner Barbosa and percussionist Darrell Bueckert. The concert is Sunday at Grosvenor Park United Church at 3 p.m. Learn more at ceciliansingers.ca.
5 — Listen to historic instruments
The University of Saskatchewan presents Rawlins Piano Trio, the final concert of the season in the Discovering the Amatis series. The chamber music performance features violinist Ioana Galu and cellist Sonja Kraus from the piano trio. They are joined by flutist Joey Zhuang and violinist Véronique Mathieu. Showcasing the historic Amati string instruments, the concert is Sunday at 3 p.m. in Convocation Hall at the U of S. Learn more at leadership.usask.ca.
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