adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Art

What Nobody Wants to Admit About Investing in Art – Bloomberg

Published

 on



Updated on October 2, 5:30 AM EDT

What You Need To Know

Everyone stuck at home is tired of looking at the same stuff.

Online art sales, it turns out, have surged during the pandemic. Auction house Sotheby’s sold $285 million worth of fine art and decorative objects this year through July 31 — triple the value for all of 2019. In that time, 13,000 lots sold compared with 4,000 during the same period the year before. The online portal for art and furniture dealers, 1stdibs, says that between March 1 and Aug. 31 it facilitated the sale of a staggering 8,000 artworks, a 65% jump year over year.

300x250x1

Here’s hoping these new art collectors love whatever they bought. Just how far their money goes comes down to a combination of taste, financial priorities and personal preference. If they try to resell their new acquisitions, they’ll soon discover that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but value is in the hands of someone else.

Key Coverage

By The Numbers

  • 40.5 million Estimated number of total art transactions in 2019.
  • $10,000 Estimated median price of an artwork sold by dealers last year.
  • 310,810 The approximate number of businesses selling art and antiques worldwide.

Why It Matters

If the value of a piece of art ever goes up, it usually does so through a small number of traditional, surprisingly predictable channels: art dealers who persuade their wealthy clients to spend more; auction houses that entice wealthy collectors to bid higher; wealthy collectors themselves buying and selling art to each another; and finally through an ecosystem of curators, scholars, critics and tastemakers who contribute, in whatever elliptical way, to perceptions of worth.

The rest of us are left to buy art that will almost certainly lose value — and never gain it back — the second we hang it on the wall.

In other words, don’t stress out about buying art as an investment, because it’s generally a bad one. That said, there are approaches you can take to art buying. You can consider the acquisition as you would a chair or lamp, something to be used and enjoyed but not resold. Or you can approach it as a financial decision, after first acknowledging that even the best-laid plans still don’t guarantee a return on investment.

Either way, you can use the following as a guide. And remember! If you don’t want to live with it, it’s not worth buying at any price.

1. There Are Hundreds of Art Markets

Just because one artwork costs less than another doesn’t mean it’s a good deal. It could be that one work is subject to very different market forces than the other. The demand for Ming vases, for instance, is not the same as the market for mid-century sculpture, and the ways in which value is created in the Old Masters market is worlds apart from that of French Impressionism. So before you look at an object and decide it’s a “deal,” make sure you’re basing that assumption on the sales of other, similar objects.

In general, new collectors tend to gravitate toward paintings, for the simple reason that they’re the most obvious, accessible choice. But you shouldn’t overlook excellent photographs, prints, watercolors and etchings, too. Similarly, galleries tend to focus on 20th and 21st century artworks. The reality is you can choose from a 7,000-year span of art history.

2. For Once, Put Faith in Middlemen

Art galleries take a cut of about 50% on each sale. It’s reasonable, then, to wonder whether you can save money by buying direct from the artist. But you have to remember that when a gallery adds an artist to its “stable,” it’s often committing to partner with that artist, fronting her money to make artworks, investing heavily to promote her shows, and even helping pay to get her work shown in museums. The artist, in turn, is often committed to that gallery for the same reasons. If she has a good relationship with her dealers, she probably won’t be open to the idea of selling behind her dealer’s back.

The good news is that if the dealer has an established reputation and a vested interest in the artist she’s selling — and better yet, has a proven record of buying and reselling work after she’s sold it the first time — there’s a much higher likelihood you’ll be able to eventually resell your own art, too. Small galleries like James Fuentes on New York’s Lower East Side, to mid-size galleries like Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, to mega international galleries like Hauser & Wirth are all, at least in theory, places where you can go to both buy and sell artworks. In sum, dealers are an artwork’s ambassador and advocate, and when it comes to sustaining (or increasing!) value, you’ll often need their clout to make it happen.

3. Think of the Cost of Labor

When you buy a freshly made artwork, chances are it was created by a person who’s doing their best to live off the proceeds of their art. As a result, the cost of that creator’s quality of life (not to mention cost of materials) is baked into the price, which is why even paintings on coffee shop walls can have thousand-dollar price tags.

The easy way around it? Buy a painting that has been bought and sold before, eliminating at least some of the markup. Look at smaller auction houses, which you can find through sites like Invaluable.com and LiveAuctioneers.com; you’ll still be paying a buyer’s premium, but the art itself will often be comparatively cheap.

4. Look for the Blind Spots

The art market has biases that have nothing to do with pure artistic merit. Paintings by Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens can sell for tens of millions; his drawings often sell for a fraction of that. A bronze sculpture by 20th century Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti sold for more than $140 million, whereas his paintings sell for much less. Last year a portrait of his brother Diego, for contrast, sold for $1.6 million. Chump change!

What’s important to remember is that those biases are not set in stone and often change as quickly as fashion. So if an artist’s early work is currently selling at a premium, consider her later work instead; more broadly, if a certain artistic period is suddenly undesirable (I wrote that Victorian paintings were out of style three years ago, and that’s still the case), there’s a good chance they might come back in vogue in a few years.

Also, just because something is very old doesn’t mean it’s out of reach. A 2,600-year-old Etruscan figure of a lion sold for 10,000 British pounds ($12,700) at an auction at Sotheby’s last year. In the same sale, a 2,300-year-old gold torque (a stiff necklace) sold for 11,250 pounds, or about $1,000 less than a new 18 karat gold “Maker’s” chain necklace at Tiffany’s. A gold figurine that’s thousands of years old sometimes costs less than it would if it were melted down and sold as an ingot.

5. Art Never Comes With A Guarantee

Even art-world insiders strike out just as often as they strike gold. No artist, whatever their buzz, is a sure thing. Not if their work is in a prestigious collector’s living room, not if it’s in all the best museum collections, not if there’s a stack of glowing reviews.

Have you heard of Robert Yarber, whose work the late New York Times critic John Russell called “undeniably compelling,” and whose art is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum? Would you have been able to predict that Ferdinand Botero — the second most successful living artist at auction in 1993 — would soon be eclipsed by Jeff Koons? Or that Jeff Koons’s market would subsequently stall out too?

6. Then There’s Fractional Art Investing

Recently, a new way to buy art has emerged in the form of “fractional investing.” The basic premise is that very expensive artworks appreciate more (and faster) than cheap artworks, and when a lot of people pool their money, they can participate in these outsize returns. Aside from that highly dubious logic (see above) there are some unavoidable downsides to fractional art investing, the most important of which is that investors never take physical possession of the art. That alone obviates the primary draw of art collecting, namely looking at, and enjoying, the thing you own.

    Just figure out what sells for peanuts today and will command a fortune in 30 years or so.

    Timeline


    Let’s block ads! (Why?)

    728x90x4

    Source link

    Continue Reading

    Art

    Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

    Published

     on


    Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

    Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

    Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

    300x250x1

    We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

    Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

    We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

    It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

    We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

    Liv smiles.

    “I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

    “A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

    We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

    “Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

    Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

    Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

    Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

    Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

    He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

    Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

    Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

    Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

    He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

    Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

    Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

    Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

    He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

    He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

    He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

    Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

    “Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

    Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

    He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

    Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

    The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

    Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

    Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

    Adblock test (Why?)

    728x90x4

    Source link

    Continue Reading

    Art

    Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

    Published

     on


    Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

    Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

    If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

    300x250x1
    End of carousel

    I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

    As such, it carries an inherent threat.

    Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

    A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

    But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

    Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

    “One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

    Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

    The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

    Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

    The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

    Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

    They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

    Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

    Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

    It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

    Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

    Adblock test (Why?)

    728x90x4

    Source link

    Continue Reading

    Art

    For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. – The New York Times

    Published

     on


    When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

    We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty. Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.

    “We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said. Which was Serra’s bottom line — in his case, nudging sculpture into new territory. Why else be an artist? This was how he thought. Old-school. Old Testament. For him, art was all or nothing.

    300x250x1

    Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.

    That said, not many artists accomplished what he set out to do, in the process seeing public perception of his work flip 180 degrees.

    All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.

    “I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble,” he said.

    It was now two decades later and thousands of his adoring fans filled an auditorium in Brazil. He and I had flown to Rio to do a public talk. The audience had come to hear the lion roar. By then, he and his voice had softened. But not his message.

    He compared art with science. You don’t advance science by public consensus, he said. Then he described the time he had splashed molten lead against the wall and adjoining sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so appalled uptight Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.

    He was thumbing his nose at the stuffy sanctity of the museum, he explained, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture, and at the same time swapping industrial materials like lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, like marble, pedestals and clay.

    Around the same time, he lifted up the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber scavenged from a warehouse in Lower Manhattan, making a kind of tent, balanced just so — a topography, implying action. He wasn’t trying to make something crowd-pleasing or familiar or beautiful, he recalled. It wasn’t beautiful. It was an experiment.

    Was it art?

    That was the question.

    It was the same question Pollock raised when he painted “Autumn Rhythm.” Pollock had also stalked the canvas, as it lay on the floor of his Long Island studio. He prowled its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint. Lines in the picture recorded his choreography.

    “Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, depthless, describing only itself, not an image of anything else — a floating field of wild, exquisite tracery that viewers would need to navigate and decipher for themselves. Even Pollock wasn’t sure what it signified.

    Pollock “had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements,” Serra said. “After all, he didn’t know where he would end up when he started.”

    Serra had started his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet whiff of a faded Polaroid. It was a cobblestone and cast-iron version of Russia in the 1910s, driven by ego and revolution. Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves without running water that cost about $75 a month and he fell into a community of ingenious and groundbreaking composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer. The list goes on. Cheap rent, available real estate and restlessness. The cocktail of urban creativity and change.

    “There was a clear understanding among us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.

    By then, a global public had come to adore his elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits. They were democratic adventures, depending on what you brought to them. A moviemaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of an unspooling film, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending. A writer on the Holocaust once likened their high walls to pens.

    I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings. When Serra was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked sunbathers reclining on the ground inside “Torqued Ellipse IV,” which occupied a patch of the museum’s garden.

    So what changed over the years to bring the public around?

    I’m not sure it was Serra, who stuck to his guns. There is a work by him called “1-1-1-1,” from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held erect by a pole resting on top of them, itself stabilized by a fourth plate teetering on its end. It looks scary and precarious, but the balancing act can also remind you of Buster Keaton.

    It used to be described as obdurate and menacing. But that is not, I don’t think, how Serra ever saw his work. After the MoMA retrospective, I passed a late summer afternoon in Italy, watching Serra patiently, quietly accompany my older son, who was still in grade school, around the ancient temples at Paestum. Serra spoke, as if to an adult, about the swell of the weathered columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of one another and held each other up. For him, sculpture distilled to its essential qualities — mass, gravity, weight, volume — was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions over the centuries.

    “I don’t know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did,” he told me back in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.” “And that was, what, almost half a century ago?”

    It’s hard to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.

    Adblock test (Why?)

    728x90x4

    Source link

    Continue Reading

    Trending