Clone torture

Another actor is going to take on our favourite art icon Andy Warhol. Many years ago we listed some of the films that had featured Warhol and the actors who portrayed him. This time up it’s Jared Leto. Now that feels like a stretch although (#spooky) he is the second Jared to take on the role. The film itself is adapted from Victor Bockis’s 1990 book The life and death of Andy Warhol so this time it looks like it will be a bio pic. When you add Leto (who has just come off playing The Joker in Suicide Squad) to Terence Winter (who is adapting the book and is well known for his work on The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street) we can probably expect something a long way North of standard. Still, as Warhol said himself, ‘Art is what you can get away with.’

Images: top, sorry Jared. Bottom left to right, Guy Pearce, David Bowie and Jared Harris

By the numbers: over there edition

3       the number in millions of people who visit MoMA a year

6.4     the percentage increase (reaching a total of 2,473) in billionaires in the world over the last year

7        the percentage of art sold online globally last year

31      the percentage drop in sales value of art sold through Sotheby’s auction house last year

70      the percentage of operating art museums in the world that were founded after 2000

190    the amount in thousands of dollars that the movie star Alec Baldwin paid for a painting by Ross Bleckner he didn’t want

800    the number of Andy Warhol paintings owned by the New York based Mugrabi family art collection

1,000  the number of portraits David Hockney claims he will paint of ‘his friends, family plus art world movers and shakers’

1,114  the amount in dollars paid per square centimeter for Jean Michael Basquiat’s 1.8 x 2.13 meter painting Dustheads making a total of $67 million

1,575  the number of art museums in the United States

Trumped

Andy Warhol knew everyone in NYC so it’s kind of inevitable that he encountered Donald Trump. ‘Had to meet Donald Trump at the office (cab $5.50)’, Warhol writes in his diary on 22 April 1981. Marc Balet (ex Interview magazine) was designing catalogues for Trump Towers and had suggested that Trump get Warhol to make a painting of the Towers, ‘to hang over the entrance to the residential part.’ He called it a portrait of course. Trump turned up to the meeting and Warhol had a typical Warhol reaction: he thought Trump was ’really good-looking’ and also how strange it was that ‘these people are so rich.’ The entry ends, ‘He’s a butch guy. 

Nothing was settled, but I’m going to do some paintings anyway and show them to him.’ Three months later Trump comes back with his wife (Ivana at the time) to check the paintings out but Warhol thinks the show-and-tell goes badly. ‘It was a mistake to do so many, I think it confused them. Mr Trump was very upset that it wasn’t colour coordinated.’ And later, ‘I think Trump’s sort of cheap.’ The commission never came off.

PS: After thinking ourselves so super smart finding this story via our copy of the Warhol Diaries we found that the Warhol Museum had already done it on their blog. You can read their version here.

Image: Andy Warhol, drawing for Trump Towers painting, 1981
Source: Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett

Radio with pictures

Here to get you through Thursday are five music videos directed by artists.

Blur’s In the country was directed by Damien Hirst in 1995. He was at art school with members of the band and at one stage he gives a nod, literally, to the music video Queen made for Bohemian Rhapsody.
 
William Wegman made New Order’s music video for Blue Monday 88 in 1983. A combo of dog stuff and hand drawn animation, the video includes Wegman’s most famous Weimaraner Fay Ray with animation by Robert Breer, an old school American avant-garde filmmaker.
 
Doug Aiken turned up with a moody black and white film when asked to direct Interpol’s 2003 music video for Say Hello to the Angels/'NYC.

Kanye West with a bunch of ballet dancers in black tutus is presented to you for Runaway with the art direction of Vanessa Beecroft.
 
Andy Warhol directs (and appears in) The Cars' video for Hello Again from 1984. You want to watch Andy Warhol sing a song by The Cars? This is the one to go for.

Image: Kanye West on the dance floor

LA story

So we’re having coffee in Starbucks (it happens) and the guy next to us sees we have copy of  Erling Kagge’s book A poor collector’s guide to buying great art and asks if he can tell us a story. OK. “I used to work in advertising, for Young & Rubicam”, he tells us. “We had the Life Saver Corporation account (true enough, that’s what it was called, we checked), and I was asked to come up with a campaign for them. I decided to do a lithograph of a Life Saver pack with a smart tag line, and that’s what I did. A few days later I get a knock on the door - this is in 1956 or maybe 1957 - and it’s a guy called Andy Warhol who I’d seen around in the ad business. He tells me he’s heard of the campaign and could he see the litho. So I say ok, but ask him to keep it to himself you know ‘cause we aren’t showing it to the client for a couple of weeks. Then, years later, I see the same ad as a Warhol print and it’s selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Art and advertising, what can you say?”
Image: Andy Warhol print from the portfolio Ads 1985

A flip and some twisters

Too late for the spoiler alert as you'll already have seen one of the pop up surprises in Judy Millar’s book Swell with Trish Gribben and paper design by Phillip Fickling. Of all the things you might expect to pop up in a kid's book La Maddalena (a neo classical church in Venice and the site of Millar’s Venice Biennale outing in 2009 and Michael Stevenson's Trekka installation in 2003) is probably not high on anyone’s list. But it certainly lets Millar give her work the ultimate indoor-outdoor flow.

The first 3D pop up books as we know them today were probably first produced in the 1930s but the precedent for an artist book like Millar’s is probably Andy Warhol’s 1967 book Index (there 's a copy in the Auckland Art Gallery library from memory) with it’s pop up can of tomato paste.

Swell is also a testament to Boosted which raised enough funding to cover the printing and then some. Swell has been published by Lopdell House Gallery and  you can get a copy here.

Images: Top, Swell by Judy Millar showing the pop up for Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, Middle, Judy Millar’s studio via OTNSTUDIO and bottom, Andy Warhol Index book

Kids

“The art market is such a mysterious organism. I will readily admit that seeing Andy achieve such high prices is somewhat exhilarating, a bit like watching your kid perform well in a sport.” 
Eric Shiner, Director Warhol Museum

Uncool copycat

In the land of lookalike is there anything more creepy than John Malkovich and Sandro Miller’s efforts to recreate famous photographs? Photographer Miller wanted to honour the men and women whose photographs had helped shape his [Miller's] career so who to call but actor John Malkovich. Miller received the Saatchi & Saatchi Best New Director Award and was voted one of the top 200 advertising photographers in the world. His work certainly shows why Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine are so highly regarded. (Thanks for the tip P)
Images: top to bottom, John Malkovich and Sandro Miller do Diane Arbus, Dorothea Laing and Andy Warhol

Before and after

As long time fans of Andy Warhol you won’t be surprised to hear we dragged ourselves out to Queens to see an exhibition based on his controversial commission for the 1964 World's Fair. One of a number of commissions Warhol's did not last long and was quickly painted over (with silver paint).  Thirteen of the most wanted criminals in the US surveying the Fair was just too much especially with the preponderance of Italian criminals and an overtly gay theme. The anniversary exhibition at the Queens Art Museum includes some of Warhol's subsequent Most wanted paintings as well as other works of the time (flowers, electric chair, Jackie Kennedy) plus documentation covering the commissioning by architect Philip Johnson and his dissembling over who was responsible (not me).

Stepping out from the museum and across a small park the New York pavilion that Warhol’s work had been made for is still there. Despite a few additions and a sense of being very much at the back of the building, it is still recognisable.  And so we took an 'after' pic.

Images: The American pavilion, then (1964) and bottom, now.

Just for the record

We’ve always been big fans of Andy Warhol and always enjoyed his pre Warhol design days. So a treat to see a full range of Warhol’s mid fifties designs for record covers here on Dangerous Minds.

Once only offur

The staff of OTN have been putting intense pressure on senior management to get some cat pictures on the blog. Cats drive up page views and repeat visit statistics. So here for your Saturday morning entertainment is a classic OTN lookalike featuring the famous Andy Warhol Esquire cover AND A CAT.

By the numbers: International edition

0      the number of dollars it will cost you to visit the Eli Broad museum of contemporary art currently being built in LA

1      the number in billions spent on art per year by the royal family of Qatar

6.6  the cost in millions of dollars paid for the townhouse in New York where Warhol lived from 1959 to 1974

8       the estimated number in billions of dollars of the size of the annual global auction market
 
15     the number of curators it took to curate the current Texas Biennial

15     the number in thousands of masters degrees in the visual and performing arts awarded each year in the United States
 
15.3  the amount in millions of dollars slashed off the value of a Peter Doig painting offered for auction when Peter Doig announced he didn’t do it

43     the percentage representing the amount of contemporary art sold in the current art market

93     the number in thousands of new bachelor degrees in the visual and performing arts awarded each year in the United States

137   the number in millions of dollars paid for the work of Andy Warhol in the first half of 2013
 
425   the number of gondolier available for hire in Venice to get you to the Bill Culbert exhibition at the Venice Biennale
 
4000 the number of counterfeit tickets to the Louvre found concealed in a parcel from China by Belgian customs officials

Needy

Just so you don’t lose the faith and think there is no point in going on here is Marina Abramovic and Andy Warhol sculpted in Wonder Bread by Milena Korolczuk.
Via artsy

Te party

It’s been four years since Te Papa last had an Impressionist exhibition from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That was Monet and the Impressionists an exhibition that stumped up 140,000 visits according to the 2009 annual report or around 1,500 a day for its three month run. 

The new show slated to open on Friday hasn’t got quite the same sting in its title. Colour & Light: Impressionism from France & America sounds a bit like one of those lectures you skipped in Art History (well we did anyway) but Te Papa will have high hopes for it. A crowd pleaser could give a significant kick start to the next financial year‘s attendance figures and this time they're playing the long game: 183 days (it’s more of a long-term loan) as opposed to 92 days for the last Boston effort. 

As we have mentioned before, the Boston Museum of Fine Art uses extensive loans from its collection as a major revenue stream. In an odd mirroring of Te Papa the Bellagio Gallery, located in the eponymous casino in Las Vegas, has just closed Claude Monet: Impressions of Light on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and opened Warhol out West from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Andy and 99 in 66

As Warhol hits Wellington here is an all but forgotten Warhol commercial job from the mid sixties that combines the Te Papa show’s interest in personalities, (Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in the TV comedy Get Smart was a huge star) with popular culture. Felden’s clothes were designed by Gayle Kirpatrick and the photographs were taken by Roger Prigent. Even in the mid sixties and in spite of his growing fame and sales Warhol was convinced he had to keep the commercial work going. Thanks to assemblyplantmarietta for leading the way.

Take your pic

When Te Papa opens its Andy Warhol exhibition in June watch for its rules about whether or not visitors can take photographs. Of all the artists in the world Warhol must surely be the one who would have least objection to people copying his images seeing as how so many of them were copied in the first place. OK, we're being ingenuous. We've just visited a Warhol exhibition (in the Pittsburgh Museum which will supply the work for the Te Papa exhibition) and they absolutely forbid photography. A small army of student guards has been enlisted and they follow you round like lost puppies carefully positioning themselves to cover all works at all times. This seems particularly pointless given the integration of the phone camera into everyday life. When we visited there were a number of people (ourselves included) taking sneak pics whenever they could. We like to think we were all encouraged by one of the wall texts in the exhibition: “Warhol’s spirit of radical innovation and the notion of the artist as a savvy consumer of images have been an ongoing source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artist.” They may just have well added "and everyone else in the digital era."

Image: a photo we took at the Andy Warhol Museum showing Warhol’s 1964 paintings of Jackie Kennedy. The imagery for the painting came via a newspaper photograph that was converted into silk screens to create this serial portrait.

Sitting ducks

Anyone who is a regular at art openings will have been to at least one after show dinner. At worst you’re trudging the streets in a pack of twenty looking for a restaurant (“no, we won’t have to book, there’s plenty of places") or the place has been pre-booked ("there’s 30 of us now and we're two hours late, can you manage?”). Even if you get inside the doors though, you'll still be left with the biggest question of all: where do I sit? Or, even more importantly, who will I end up sitting next to?

Fortunately help is at hand thanks to some brain time by Alex Cornell. He points out that “as the diameter of the table increases so does the importance of who you sit next to.” Safest are four person round or square tables where at least one of the three should be good company and is easily available from every sitting position.

A room with two tables of any size? As Mr Cornell says, “You’re fucked.“ He explains. “Whenever you make your choice of where to sit you will always choose too soon. You can only lament as the other table’s attendance crystallizes into what is clearly the superior group. Sometimes it’s best to visit the bathroom while seats are chosen, so any seating disasters are the result of chance, and not your own miscalculation.” You can read Cornell’s comments on other table arrangements and important concepts like diagonals, quiet spaces and lonely end-seats here.

And if you want a reminder of just how bad these dinners can be, try watching the ultimate glad-I-wasn’t-there after opening party in this clip from Julian Schnabel’s movie Basquiat.

Image: 'Andy' and Co. at the diner from hell in Basquiat

Googling on: paint by numbers

In its exhibition WHIZZ BANG POP the Auckland Art Gallery is showing the Damien Hirst multiple Paint by Numbers (edition of 175). Lowering its market value at a stroke, they have taken the title literally and made themselves a ‘Hirst’ by following the paint-by-number instructions (it’s a bit like eating one of Paul McCarthy’s Chocolate Santas). More typically this work would be displayed as it is sold with the canvas untouched revealing its paint-by-number markings for the 90 spots. NOTE: The Auckland Art Gallery has since told us that when the work was purchased the edition had already been opened and the 'Hirst' painted presumably by its first owner. Word is that, perhaps inspired by this professional do-it-yourself spirit, a recent visitor prised open the paint box on display, took out one of the brushes, dipped it into one of the 90 pots of paint and had a go. Presumably their efforts to follow Hirst’s instructions will be conserved out.

Of course Hirst isn’t the first PBN artist. Warhol made a few back in 1962 as Do it yourself paintings (shop here) although now the worm has turned again and you can buy a PBN version of Warhol Campbell’s Soup can. The original Paint by numbers concept goes back to 1950 when the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit came up with the idea. Overall this kind of PBN has had bad press in the art world. It is seen as the painting equivalent of Truman Capote’s great sniff at Jack Kerouac's work, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Still, if you can muster up some irony you can buy sets here.

SFW

As Te Papa prepares its own Andy Warhol exhibition it will be aware of the controversy over the censoring of Warhol’s work in Asia. The latest bout started when his portraits of Mao Tse Tung were excluded from the exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 minutes eternal shows in Beijing by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. More weirdly the Singapore Government also put the skids under the Mao pics in the same exhibition for a very specific reason. It does not allow political leaders to be represented in works of art. At all. While not a great moment for audiences or curatorial independence, before we get too carried away let's acknowledge our own well developed mode of censorship - self-censorship.

The self-censorship by curators and museums has ensured that virtually nothing has been seen of Warhol’s homoerotic work of the seventies: not his best work, doesn’t fit the curatorial theme, wrong dates etc. etc. The definitive MoMA retrospective had only three mild examples as opposed to 10 images of Mick Jagger. Needless to say examples of this work won't be seen touring Asia any time soon. The pages illustrating this post show the absurdity of where this can all lead. Here's what Frankfurt’s very reputable Kunsthalle did to Jeff Koons’s Made in heaven series in their catalogue for a recent Koons painting show and made itself look ridiculous in the process. Which of course is what censorship is good at.

Image: The Kunsthalle Frankfurt catalogue featuring a carefully trimmed ‘detail’ of Glass dildo by Jeff Koons. Yes, that it is Cicciolina's high-heeled foot you can see.

The Warhol effect

Te Papa announced late last year that it will host a Warhol exhibition in June 2013 selected by its curator of contemporary art and acting senior curator Sarah Farrar. Metaphor aside, nine months is not much time to pull off what the museum must be hoping will be one of those if-we-show-him-they-will-come blockbusters. The works will be selected from the collection of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum (plus some local and Australian ring-ins one assumes) but having just seen the bloated three hundred work exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 minutes eternal touring Asia and also from the Andy Warhol Museum, it’s not going to be easy to get a great show.

Museums manage their collections on the principle of that airline safety instruction video - ‘Secure your own mask first before helping others.’ Institutions with iconic collections like the Andy Warhol Museum can't afford to disappoint their own audiences with anything less than the best possible sampling of Warhol’s work. The problem for borrowers then is that what tends to be left is the smaller, lesser known, less popular examples (often on paper rather than canvas and in the Asian show occasionally in facsimile rather than original). This situation made 15 Minutes Eternal a pretty drab affair. To make up the numbers far too many average works were included and this quantity over quality perspective was aggravated by an absence of curatorial point of view.

The challenge for Te Papa is satisfying the drive for a strongly marketed blockbuster against a smart show with a point of view. Warhol is not seen in New Zealand often. The last time was the highly focused show The Warhol look in 1998 at the Auckland Art Gallery which only managed to draw in less than half its projected audience of 50,000 and lost around $90,000.  Warhol is not an audience slam dunk but working with what’s available after the Asian vacuum cleaner has been through and making some other institutional loans (the country code for Australia is +64) let's hope for a sharp, focused exhibition of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Whether that will be enough to draw the crowds and turnaround Te Papa’s declining attendance figures is another thing altogether.

Image: Diminishing returns. Top Andy Warhol boxes in the studio. Bottom left at the Andy Warhol Museum and right, in a tragically blurry photo taken against all odds, the slim pickings exhibited at the 15 minutes eternal exhibition