Phillips Update: Swoon Piece Withdrawn

Looks like lot 393 at tomorrow’s Phillips de Pury auction may have been withdrawn, as the Phillips’ website has removed the lot’s estimate within the past few hours. That lot number is the beautiful Swoon on Mylar that everybody has been talking about. The work had been listed with an extremely low estimate of only £2,000-£3,000 and no reserve. Can you say 11th hour? I guess we’ll know for sure tomorrow though.

Swoon

Phillips de Pury Auction – My 3 Picks

UPDATE: The Swoon mentioned in this post may have been withdrawn from the auction.

Tomorrow afternoon is the Phillips de Pury Saturday Sale. Along with toys, watches, and contemporary art, this auction has a good deal of street art. I went to the opening of this show on Tuesday, and while it maybe be the best urban art auction I’ve seen ever seen in London and there are only a handful of pieces that should not be there, three items really stood out for me.

Lot 170
Herakut
Herakut
You Sure?, 2009
Spraypaint, acrylic and charcoal on canvas.  100 x 100 cm. (39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in.)
Estimate: £3,000-4,000
My thoughts – There are three great Herakut paintings on display at Phillips (plus two “in progress” works). This is the only one that will be sold at the auction. It is being sold to raise money for War Child, a charity helping children in conflict areas. It’s a very powerful piece, and contains a good amount of work from but Hera and Akut.

Lot 392
OsG
Os Gêmeos
Two works: Untitled (Head Box), 2005
Mixed media on wooden construction.  123.2 x 124.5 x 124.5 cm. (48 1/2 x 49 x 49 in.)
Estimate: £4,000-6,000
My thoughts – Who doesn’t love Os Gêmeos? Like many of their sculptures, these have been decorated inside and out, and viewers can stick their own heads up a hole at the bottom of the pieces to see the insides. Almost like two works in one. These giant heads are in the no-reserve section with an unbelieveably low estimate. For comparison, this canvas from the Dreweatts Urban Art Auction in October 2008 sold for £24,000. Surely most people would rather have these heads than a canvas. Of course, displaying them could be a nightmare, and they will in all likelihood end up in storage until they are put in a museum (which is where they belong).

Lot 393
Swoon

Swoon
Untitled
, 2005
Hand-painted linoleum print on mylar.  Installation dimensions variable.
£2,000-3,000
My thoughts – Another highly underestimated item in the auction’s no-reserve section. I can’t even imagine this going for £3,000. As usual, Swoon’s work is beautiful, but the 3D installation aspect of this piece makes it unique. It might be hard to see from this photograph, but many of the birds are on separate pieces of mylar and are meant to be floating varying depths away from the way. This could be the deal of the decade.

What do you think? See any other particularly special pieces up for sale tomorrow? Leave a comment or shoot me an email (rj (a-t) vandalog.com).

The Sotheby’s Parlá

Those following urban art auctions closely have probably heard about the José Parlá original on board that was estimated by Sotheby’s at only $8,000-$12,000 (image can be found here). Nobody I spoke to could understand such a low estimate. The piece is quite big a 48 by 86 inches (about 1.2m x 2.2m), and it’s beautiful. It’s not like Parlá is the sort of Banksy derivative artist whose work is having a tough time selling in this market. I’m pretty sure that if Elms Lesters had another Parlá solo show next month lines would still be out the door.

Well, this evening lot 236 sold for $51,250 including Buyers Premium. I still don’t know how Sotheby’s could have have gotten the estimate so wrong, but I’m glad the rest of the world saw this gem and realized what it is actually worth.

Skewville’s Bushwick Project

Trust Art has been described as “a stock market for art projects” but it’s also about cultural renewal. The basic idea is that investors can fund projects proposed by artists and after a year the resulting artwork is auctioned off an the investors split the proceeds 50/50 with the artist. In the mean time, the art project not only produces art, but helps to build up a local community.

Skewville, the New York artists best known for throwing wooden shoes onto power lines, have propsed one of Trust Art’s inugural projects: The Street Art Urban Revitalization Program. Their project proposes to find 10 rundown and ill-maintained buildings in Bushwick that can be covered in murals by local artists. The project is meant to promote the local artists and make the local buildings look nicer, since right now there are a good number of abandoned or poorly maintained buildings in Bushwick.

At the end of the project, there will be work sold at auction, which is where the investors have the potential to make their money back.

Definitely a cool project. Hopefully Skewville can raise the $65,000 they are looking for.

Swoon Original Charity Raffle

Swoon Raffle

Swoon needs our help funding her latest Swimming Cities project, so she’s organized a raffle. I’ll definitely be buying a ticket (or two), and hope you will too.

From Black Rat Press and Swoon:

When we first worked with Swoon in 2007 she spoke vaguely of wanting to do a project in Venice involving floating cities – 2 years on and this ambitious project is taking shape. This project requires some assistance and as a part of the fundraising Swoon will be raffling a really beautiful work on wood. Tickets are $30 each and you got to be in it to win it. More details below about the project and the raffle. Buy one – make a hippy happy.
BRP

The Swimming Cities of Serenissima is a fleet of three intricately hand-crafted vessels that will navigate the Adriatic Sea from the Karst region of Slovenia to Venice, Italy in May of 2009. Designed by the artist SWOON, the floating sculptures are descendants of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (Hudson River, 2008) and the Miss Rockaway Armada (Mississippi River, 2006 and 2007). The Swimming Cities of Serenissima are built from salvaged materials, including modified Mercedes car motors with long-tail propellers. For Swimming Cities, SWOON will collaborate with 30 artists from the United States, including OBIE award-winning playwright Lisa D’Amour. As the Swimming Cities move toward Venice, the crew will collect and install keepsakes in an ark-like cabinet of wonders that will be on display on the boats when they arrive. Once in Venice, the boats and crew will offer intimate performances that incorporate music, shadow puppetry, and story. The project is produced with the assistance of Deitch Projects, Paper Monster, Black Rat Press, Build It Green, and a thousand other people.

Letter from SWOON:

Last year, with a team of about 75 friends, crew, and collaborators, I built a flotilla of rafts out of salvaged bits of New York City. Our precarious floating home traveled 140 miles south along the Hudson River. What left as the refuse of the city’s mega construction returned as six vessels trying to encompass a whole world (the seventh died along the way).

This year, with some of those same vessels, and some new, we begin the second leg of our journey. Our destination? It’s the city whose outrageous countenance, rising straight up out of the ocean like that was a fine sort of thing for a city to do, was our original inspiration. Yes ma’am, we’re headed across the Adriatic Sea toward our first love, Venice.

This year we are a crew of 35, all artists, musicians, crackerjack mechanics, and folks who specialize in big, impossible, ridiculous dreams. We will put on a performance and cobble together a cabinet of wonders. We will, in our form, be working on themes of recycling and reuse, considering the footprint of a human community on the planet, and on issues of climate change. We have not found a solution to floods and sinking cities or where to go next, but we know that it’s important to us to create art and community at the same time as we seek a different relationship to our world.

We are starting in the Karst region of Slovenia (a former forest barren to this day after its large trees were cut for pilings in Venice), and skirting the northern coast of the Adriatic. For fun and a little mischief, we will be crashing the Venice Biennale.

Since we are doing all of this in an otherwise collapsed economy we need lots of help. It’s a big project that we are trying to fund with the help of many small contributions from people who would like to be involved and help us get these crafts afloat — even if you just think we’re cheeky and want to see if we’ll sink. This raffle is just one of the many ways we’re trying to get back on the water.

www.swimmingcities.org

For information contact Heather Jones at hmacionus@gmail.com

Benefit Raffle for Swimming Cities of Serenissima
2/26-3/26/

To enter the raffle, purchase a ticket by going to www.swimmingcities.org and clicking on the RAFFLE button. Buy more tickets to increase your chances of winning. If we sell 100 tickets and you buy one, you’ll have a one percent chance of winning — if you buy 10, you’ll have a 10 percent chance. When your purchase is approved you’ll get a confirmation number. We’ll announce the winner on March 26.

Good lucky everybody!

Contemporary Art is a Fraud (not my words)

This article from The Independent should be read by anybody who has ever bought a Damien Hirst “spot” painting or even a crappy piece of street art by a Banksy rip-off stencil “artist.” Here’s a short excerpt:

One of the world’s leading art dealers this week launched an astonishing attack on the contemporary art market, condemning the millions charged for some works as “almost fraud”.

The comments from David Nahmad, a Monaco-based dealer who is possibly the biggest in the world, come as art buyers reel from the collapse of the contemporary market.

They echo remarks by the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who last week said that “stupid outrageous values” had become more important than the work itself.

Mr Nahmad, who is reputed to have a £2bn collection of some 5,000 paintings, including 300 Picassos, told The Independent on Sunday: “There are a lot of embarrassed people who bought art that is now not worth what they paid for it. For the past three or four years it’s been a very, very thin market, with just two or three buyers pushing up prices by bidding against each other.

Pretty interesting take. It is worth keeping in mind though that Nahmad’s collection focusses on work by artists like Picasso and Rothko, so he’s obviously got an interest in people realizing that Hirst is overpriced and then having them move back to collecting Bacon.

Another choice quote: “He added that he doesn’t think any artist since Francis Bacon had pushed art forward.”

Not that I agree with Nahmad that NOTHING has pushed art forward since Bacon, but I’d say that this does leave a lot of potential for street art (if it can avoid destroying itself by becoming derivative). Street art provides the chaos that might be needed to revitalize art. Or maybe I’m doing the same as Nahmad and just talking my book.

Thoughts?

KRUNK and The Wonderful World of Donny Miller

Remember Donny Miller? The guy who did the “Gas Signs Truth in Advertising” ad subversion project last fall? Well KRUNK, the team that put on Futura’s most recent show, have brought Donny Miller into their organization. I don’t know much about Donny Miller, but I trust the guys at KRUNK know what they’re doing, and the stuff on his website is pretty cool. I’m currently sitting in an apartment with my friends who are trying to nap, but I can’t stop sharing Donny Miller’s work with them.

Anyway’s here’s the press release, check below the jump for examples of Donny Miller’s work:

KRUNK Donny Miller Continue reading “KRUNK and The Wonderful World of Donny Miller”

Everything Shepard Fairey

It seems like Shepard Fairey is everywhere lately, so I thought I’d post a summary of all that’s been going on and the relevant links.

Shepard Fairey at the ICA Boston. Photo by christianrholland
Shepard Fairey at the ICA Boston. Photo by christianrholland
  • To start, Shepard Fairey was arrested on Friday as he entering a party for his show which opened last week at The ICA Boston. Warrents for his arrested dated as far back as 2000. Has Posterboy started a trend of police arresting street artists at their own shows? Maybe it’s time to go back to secret identities. The irony of the whole situation is that just hours previous to his arrest, Shepard Fairey was unveiling a mural outside of Boston’s city hall and shaking the mayor’s hand. Odd that the cops didn’t show up to that event… Though Shepard Fairey is has questioned the “motivation and timing” of his arrest, I’d say with all that Fairey knows about advertising, it’s just as likely he called up the police himself and left an anonymous tip of his whereabouts. After all, this news even hit The Guardian here in London. Sounds like great publicity to me. Oh, and apparently he’s pled “not guilty!” I guess he can always claim that his poster crews did the pasting, which is probably the case for most of the work he’s in trouble for.
  • The Associated Press is complaining about copyright infringement because Fairey used a photograph of theirs as the basis for his “Hope” poster (be aware, the article linked to is actually written by the AP).
  • Fairey is preempting a lawsuit from the AP by instead suing them himself and asking a judge to just admit that his Obama posters are transformative and “fair use.” (some interesting and well articulated thoughts on the reprecutions of these two stories at Just Seeds)
  • And this leads us to the whole “is Fairey a legit artist or just a thieving sell-out” debate. I wrote about this last week in a post called “Is Shepard Fairey a Plagiarizing Half-Wit?” and asked readers to respond with their own opinions. Well I got plenty of responses both on the blog and on Twitter. I’d encourage you to read the comment thread, but here are a few highlights:
    * “The bigger you get the more people want to take you out. It is what it is….who’s going to be remembered? Shepard or the critic?” – Astrogirl
    * “this idea that he is subverting consumerism with the OBEY series somewhat falls on its face when the images end up creating an OBEY brand or being sold as bags and T-shirts purely because they feature the logo. If it ever was a subversive act, the OBEY stuff has now clearly become a brand displayed (and of course marketed) for its own sake.” – Spoons
    * “I consider Fairey’s work to be along the lines of early Hip Hop producers. ‘Sampling is not a crime’.” – Facet
  • Various people, commenter Rolf Harris and Just Seeds in particular, have sent me new links on the top of criticism of Fairey’s work:
    * More on Fairey’s supposed plagarism, perhaps a more fair appraisal
    * Supertouch, a blog which Fairey is associated with, defends him against claims of plagiarism
    * It seems that last year, Fairey almost sued another artist for making parodies of Fairey’s images.
    * As briefly mentioned in my last post on Fairey, he’s recently designed an advertising campaign for Saks 5th Avenue called “Want It!”. Seem a bit at odds with his public persona, but I guess it’s too late for anybody in the art establishment to care…

Photo from christianrholland