Boris Groys on the sick patient "Art"

"It is obvious that an individual artwork cannot assert its presence by itself, forcing the viewer to take a look at it. It lacks the vitality, energy, and health to do so. In its origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to it as visitors are brought to a bed-ridden patient by hospital staff."

Read further on e-flux

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/31

By the way friends, this is our 1001 post on this blog ! The first post on 20th December 2007 was this one 

As Boris Groys says: "Today, there is no longer any “ontological” difference between making art and displaying art."

we conclude, this blog is Art !

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A new century demands new ideas, but unfortunately, the art world continues to experience its endlessly repeating “Ground Hog Day.”

Henry Art Magazine starts a new series critizising POMO and search for new solutions

continue here

A critic on Art and Revolution

"What's the difference between a commissar's propaganda and a constructivist's poetics of production? Marco Deseriis reviews Gerald Raunig's Art and Revolution"

A must-read these days, Link to MUTE here

The cool story about

how TWITTER was born. Seems so easy to sit together in Tusheti and brainstorm a solution for the Arts ;-0 (of course there isn't any ;-))

The problem I see personally with Twitter, is that I automate the posts from here appearing on Twitter, but the huge mass of info via Twitter nobody can really follow. I hardly find the time to use Twitter for consuming news. But wait, there might be still a huge potential behind.

HenriArtMag: Finch Takes a stand

the discussion goes on, cool:

Finch Takes a Stand

Recommended reading for artists approaching the art power of 2009

Unsolicited advice

by Franklin Einspruch on Artblog.net

Great stuff, Franklin !

"Embrace technology. When I first started putting the Walter Darby Bannard Archive together, its subject, horrified at the thought of my having to turn all those scanned articles into text, suggested that I post them as jpegs. This misconception about what creates value on the Web (an entirely forgivable one, for someone born in 1934) would have seriously hampered the effectiveness of the archive had I put it into effect. Technology is just how things work now. I wouldn't send a new art student into the world these days without a basic understanding of HTML."  

read further here at Artblog.net

Some half-baked ideas on brand~style~individual artist~collective

based on questions by Mark from http://www.henrimag.com/

On artists/collectives/brand/style 1, originally uploaded by grijsz.

On artists/collectives/brand/style 2, originally uploaded by grijsz.

On artists/collectives/brand/style 3, originally uploaded by grijsz.

On artists/collectives/brand/style 4, originally uploaded by grijsz.

On artists/collectives/brand/style 5, originally uploaded by grijsz.

Any comments ?

I really, really

I really recommend this article (print it out) about the Middlebrow issue of todays art:

Popular Culture - The Middle Brow

by Henri Art Magazine

http://henrimag.com/blog1/?p=415

DDR 2.0 = G.D.R. 2.0

By the way, recent economic and political developments in Germany are now openly labeled 

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC 2.0

(from authors writing on a Market blog)

http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/200810281406/MM-News/DDR-2.0.html

A nice comment by Anonymous on Edward Winkleman's Art Blog

You find this comment between other interesting comments here:

http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2008/07/things-still-being-only-whispered.html

"I am an artist and I am tired of spectacle.

I am fed up with 2 million plus dollars sculpture 'made' (by assistants, engineers, young artists) by persons with ex-modeling careers.

I am vaguely amused but oh so bored with pretty-boy nightingales with wide-open end-eyes and all that homosexual fucking into artstardom.

I am an artist with an MA and I am fed up of MAs and MFAs. I am bloody hell tired of meeting artists who have summarized their so-called statements to sound like cultural theorists.

I am absolutely horrified with artists with full time jobs who like secretaries know the language of how to write a good proposal that a critic-jury will approve.

I am most fed up with the utilitarian mindset that plagues us even deeper today it seems than ever.

I am tired of curators and their fingering masturbatory hand in all these...oh how they finger and finger the thing so that it may speak --and only speak-- precisely the distortions eminent in their own fastidious rhetoric.

I am no anti-intellectual but oh, how weary am I of artists who, listening incestous to curators rush about pretending art was some matter for sociology and the artist therefore, the sociologist-cultural-theorist.

I make art one may called visual but I know too visual art is and will never be near the power of poetry, the art of music nor even that of the novel. I know visual art is an industry brewed from a mesh of moneyed conceit being peddled by anxious-for-fame conceits.


Having said all these, I hereby DECLARE WAR ON ART.

I ask artists to say no to empty spectacle and sheer materialism;
I urge a move towards the romantic;
I urge a REFUSAL of our life as it is: GIVE UP your banal worries, your high-end rents apartments, your shallow living and expenses!
BE BOLD and have the courage to live by the spirit of art and ideas!


Make art, make it, make it towards great, meet with like-minds, stay up all night with madness and with the fever, drink wine, read voraciously, live simple!

LIVE AS ONE WITH THE BOLDNESS AND COURAGE TO BE A HUMAN BEING "

anything to add ?

Eric Gelber

Eric Gelber is our newest member in the Art Club. He describes himself as Librarian/Art Critic/Artist/Musician and lives in New York.

Get in touch with Eric at http://artcritical.com/ or at his blog http://ericgelber.livejournal.com/

Eric, thanks for joining in !

and a small mentioning by Franklin on his blog http://artblog.net brought us yesterday 26 art loving visitors to this Club. Thank you

Mini Rally of The Art Club

acci3, originally uploaded by grijsz.

Hans Heiner Buhr, Nugzar Natenadze and Avto Meskhi having some art discussions with some wine

acci8nugzar, originally uploaded by grijsz.

acci6avto, originally uploaded by grijsz.

avto-paint-hans-opt, originally uploaded by grijsz.

acci5stillife, originally uploaded by grijsz.

What you do on a nice Saturday in January: Have some wine and talk about the great artists we adore... Cranach, Courbet, Mondrian, Malewitsch, Balthus and others

By the way, Nugzari got these days a nice studion in the Art Academy organized by Gia Bugadze. We will visit him there next week...

So !

Was ich seit langem vorausgesehen, und natürlich auch nur erhofft und phantasiert habe:

Deutsche Galeristen gehen nach Russland, neue Märkte, verwegene Künstler, andere Weltanschaungen und Gefühle, Entdeckungen von alten und neuen kulturellen Potenzialen, die Anziehungskraft alternativer Lebensweisen- all das und noch mehr mag sie bei Ihren Entschlüssen bestätigen.

Auf welche Sammler rechnen sie ? Auf Neue Russen, Georgische Milliardäre, Kasachen, Chinesen, aber auch auf den boomenden jungen Mittelstand in den Metropolen vielleicht ?

Welche Kunst suchen sie ? Kunst die brutaler ist, direkter und kraftvoller als im dekadenten, halbdebilen und verlogenen Kunstwesten (findet Ihr das übertrieben ??). Kunst mit Entwürfen und Visionen. Kunst mit Mut und Biss.

Ein erstes Leuchtfeuer dieser von mir herbeigewünschten Tendenz zeigt ART in einem Interview mit Volker Diehl hier:

http://www.art-magazin.de/kunstmarkt/3441/volker_diehl_schwerpunkt_russland

...und wenn wir gut sind, werden wir natürlich auch bald gekauft ;-(), aber haben wir dann auch gutes und stabiles Zeug auf Lager ? Kunst und ohne Verfallsdatum ?

...und weil wir hier gerade mal auf Deutsch schreiben...

eine tolle Webseite ist NewArtTV, wo kurze 2-10- minütige Künstlervideos gezeigt werden, Vernissagen, oder Einblicke in die Welt schwerreicher amerikanischer Sammler

zum Beispiel:

Wolf Kahn Teil1
Wolf Kahn Teil2

das Sammlerehepaar

Susan and Michael Hort 1
Susan and Michael Hort 2

oder ein mir bisher unbekannter Künstler wie

David Baskin

über den NewArtTV Newsletter kann man sich über Neuerscheinungen informieren lassen

NewArtTV

packhorses salt, originally uploaded by grijsz.

Packpferde Salz, Hans Heiner Buhr, 2007, Digital Collage mehr von der Horse-Thief-Series hier

und bitte

Schickt mir mehr Zeug, Skizzen, Grafiken, Bilder, Abfall, Fotos, Ideen... gute Sachen, ich will Euch mehr zeigen, hier !!!

Art Blogs and Discussions

I have quite a couple of Art Blogs in my Newsreader, but there are only a few art blogs around (as far as I know them) who pick up the really sharp issues. Maybe you heard about Edward Winkleman's blog http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/?

Edward picks up (and creates sometimes) amazing difficult art issues and the commentators doing their point to discuss the mostly wicked questions. As a non English Native speaker it is very hard to take part in the merciless discussions, where every word is to weigh.

If you like to read hot late night art discussions, then this blog is definitely a place for you. In the recent two posts it goes about taboos, responsibility and courage and the results. There is not made a real connection between the cases of Sooreh Hera and a Czech Arts Collective called Ztohoven, except that they are posted after each other, but the parallels are to me too obvious.

A good addition is the original Guardian blog post on Ztohoven "How art declared war on the media", together with the comments section, here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/01/how_art_declared_war_on_the_me.html

So are there still taboos for contemporary art or not ? Was it art at all ? Can/Should art be free of real world reactions and consequences ? But, first read the above posts and discussions.