Damien Hirst's skull / For the Love of God

Andy Warhol: Brillo Boxes

Andy Warhol's first retrospective was organized in 1968 by Pontus Hulton, esteemed director of the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm—and I'm not being snarky here. Hulten, who died in 2006, was indeed esteemed, for that exhibition and many others. In 1990, he organized another Warhol retrospective, for the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. As you might expect, it featured a batch of Brillo Boxes. The show would have been incomplete without them. The trouble was that the Boxes on view at the St. Petersburg museum were not products of the Warhol Factory. Hulten had them manufactured by Swedish carpenters.

If they were authentic, the Stockholm Boxes would be worth more than $75 million. But they're fakes. Not only that, they are flagrant fakes—a cinch to distinguish from Andy's Boxes, just as Andy's Boxes are a cinch to distinguish from the supermarket kind.
What to do, what to do? I mean, if we believe in a free and unencumbered art market, what sense does it make to deprive that market of $75 million worth of merchandise?
Here's my suggestion. Add Arthur Danto to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Why? Because Danto claims that there is no visible difference between a Warhol Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes manufactured by Purex Industries. From this silly claim follows Danto's “end-of-art” theory. The point for now is this: having said that he can't tell a Warhol Brillo Box from a real Brillo box, Danto should be willing to say that he can't tell a Stockholm fake from a real Warhol.

Andy Warhol

Duchamp interviews

The Fountain

Duchamp's first ready-made sculpture, shown in 1914, was an ordinary bottle-rack, which the artist had bought at a town-hall bazaar. Before it he had created a forerunner to Alexander Calder's mobiles by fastening a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. Duchamp called it a 'distraction'. With these works Duchamp provoked a debate about the definition of art and originality, which such Pop artist as Andy Warhol and Jasper John in the own way continued. Duchamp's aim, as he once explained, was to "carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions, more verbal." The pure ready-made did not have any artistic qualities; the artist raised it to the category of a work of art by the act of choice. Duchamp's ideas had a great influence on the Dadaists. Bicycle Wheel, which he had made in 1913, was partly born from his fascination with mechanical movement. He also experimented with film and sound. For his Anemic Cinema (1926) Duchamp made a series of motorized discs. Duchamp's optical projects were not a success. In 1935 he managed to sell only one of his Rotoreliefs, a relief obtained by rotation.
In 1913-14 Duchamp worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève. Finding the atmosphere in Paris intolerable, Duchamp went to New York, where his friend Francis Picabia joined him in 1915. They were welcomed as the most celebrated representatives of avant-garde. Picabia was born into a wealthy family; he was a restless person, who lived wild, took opium, and spread the ideas of avant-garde through his publications. An art dealer offered in 1916 Duchamp $10,000 a year for his "entire production". Duchamp refused the offer. He worked in New York for some time as a librarian at the French Institute. During his stay he became friends with Man Ray, the poet William Carlos Williams and the composer Edgard Varèse. With Ray Duchamp published an almanac entitled New York Dada. Walter and Louise Arensberg, art patrons, began to collect Duchamp's art. Duchamp did not take any part in Picabia's magazine 291, which published Apollinaire's 'idéogrammes' and other art and poetry of the time, but in 1917 he published pamphlets in the magazines The Blind Man and Rongwrong.

In 1917 Ducamp sent an urinal, his famous Fountain, to the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in which Duchamp himself was a founding member. However, the work was excluded and Duchamp resigned from the society. Later Duchamp recalled the incident as a turning point in his career: "So, that cooled me off so much that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free. I got job. I became a librarian... " (Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, 1987) The signature of Fountain, R.Mutt, referred to New York manufacturer of sanitary equipment, as if he were the creator of the work. "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance," Duchamp or Beatrice Wood explained in an anonymous article in The Blind Man, a magazine created by Duchamp and his friends. "He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object." After Fountain, the definition of art was nearly lost.

Monet's London

More than one hundred years ago, the French Impressionist Claude Monet exhibited his long-awaited series of London paintings, Vues de la Tamise (Views of the Thames). This series marked Monet's return to urban themes after a period of several decades, and it was his first attempt to paint London since he had been there as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71.
The London series resulted from three separate painting campaigns from 1899 to 1901. Monet stayed at the elegant, recently constructed Savoy Hotel, where he had a suite of rooms with a balcony view of the Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges on the Thames. While he concentrated on these two bridges during his first stay, he added the Houses of Parliament on his second trip, thanks to the American painter John Singer Sargent, who secured permission for him to paint them from the vantage point of St. Thomas' Hospital across the river. Staying a few months for each visit, Monet would return to his home in Giverny with his unfinished canvases. He then took an additional three years to complete the almost one hundred canvases in the series.


Nearly sixty years old when he began the series, Monet was already a successful and sought-after artist who nonetheless continued to search for new subjects that challenged his eye and his art. The London paintings embody the paradoxes of his work: the wish to record instantaneous notations of a transient effect while at the same time acknowledging the laborious process that was required to produce them. As he had once said about his series paintings: "I'm becoming so slow in my work that it makes me despair, but the further I go, the better I see that it takes a great deal of work to succeed in rendering what I want to render: 'instantaneity,' above all the enveloping atmosphere."




By the time he painted the London series, Monet was searching for qualities that allowed people to "live for longer" with his pictures, seeking to portray both the moment that was the starting point of the picture, and the idea of the subject, which evoked a completely different temporal sensibility. In a letter written during his second stay in London, he said he realized that some of his paintings, though he thought them almost finished, were "not London-like enough," and required "some bold brushstrokes" to bring them into line with his idea of London.
Monet used color with an increasing freedom in these later years. London as he saw it again at the beginning of the present century suggested chromatic richnesses far beyond any he had contemplated in 1871. This view of the Houses of Parliament in 1904 with the sun coming through fog departed from the Whistleriean silhouette of thirty-three years before to picture densities of purple and blue with a contrast of gold that already forecast André Derain's fauve paintings of the city.
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All of these paintings were done on identical sizes of canvas, from the same viewpoint overlooking the Thames from Monet's window. This series is the supreme expression of his conception of an "envelope" of interactive colored light. By providing a static subject under different light conditions, the series paintings illustrate how the changing "envelope" transforms what we perceive. This final painting of the series, however, differs from the first seven. It is titled without the additional clause used in the others to describe the momentary condition of the envelope, such as "...Sun Breaking Through the Fog" or "...Effect of Sunlight". In the earlier works, the buildings and river are inert, passively affected by the envelope of light Here they take center stage with fantastically dynamic form. The spiraling brushstrokes of the tower sweep it upward majestically, seeming to draw contrails of the envelope into its vortex. The river, too, takes on a more aggressive aspect, the highlighted wavecrests creating a groundswell at the base of the tower that contributes to the rising effect. As the tower stretches toward the bright sky at the very pinnacle of the canvas, Monet succeeds masterfully in expressing a dazzling sense of supreme aspiration.

Composition

Number nine?