Glass half empty

A column in Art World Salon has sobering news for artists (culled from a new book by Don Thompson named The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Art and Auction Houses)

Some of the more interesting albeit dreary and downshifting points of note were as follows (of course, a lot of these could just be hearsay, but somehow for me it seems to resonate appropriately – maybe it is all those rejection letters that I routinely get):

• Eight of ten works purchased directly from an artist and half the works purchased at auction will never again resell at their purchase price.
• Only one artist in 200 – and that is 200 established artists – will reach a point where her work is ever offered at Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions.
• There are approximately 40,000 artists resident in London, and about the same number in New York. Of the total 80,000, seventy-five are superstar artists with a seven-figure income
• Fewer than half of the modern and contemporary artists listed in a Christie’s or a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction catalogue twenty-five years ago are still offered at any major auction.

Full article with commenting here.

Geometries

The Chelsea based Robert Miller Gallery has a simple, neat show. The show asks one to simply look at lines, shadows, curves, surfaces and other geometric forms in an artistic light. Geometry used as a language and subject by contemporary artists is relatively new and this collection is a good representation of the possibilities. Some of the works were purely minimalist whilst others bordered on being contrived. Most were somewhere in between. The show is on till the end of July.

Joel Shapiro works on iterations of rectangular volumes

Keith Sonnier uses neon light to describe volume in space

Kjell Varvin combines objects in space with two dimensional drawings

Kenneth Snelson uses aluminum and steel held in tension by cables

John Duff uses steel and plaster to work dimensionality

Another one of Joel Shapiro's works

John Pai welds well to depict volumes

John Pai's works: Installation view

Al Held uses drawing to meld surface and space

Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky works in the intersection between digital and textual worlds

Nils Folke Anderson created nine large scale polystyrene inter-locking squares that was riveting to look at. This piece logically tied the show and was displayed over at the gallery entrance. I noticed many people on the street stopping to look at this structure and intrigued by the resulting geometric vision, stepping into the gallery space.