Andy Warhol - Skull

REF:>http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-

Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London
Truly, madly deeply shallow

Reviewed by Michael Glover
Wednesday, 30 September 2009

This is a deeply superficial show, full of glitz and gloss, blingy as Moscow, neon-besmattered as the buildings of central Tokyo, noisy as a hypermarket. Everywhere you go there's racket of one kind or another – rap in the Keith Haring room, Japanese pop in Murakami's gallery – and a sense of crowd and bustle. At its centre stands the figure of Andy Warhol, the dull, hyper-energetic narcissist who proclaimed that art needed to get out into the world and amongst the people. Perhaps Warhol had never noticed that art had been in public spaces, out among the people, for centuries. No, Warhol was really about the self-advancement of Warhol, by every possible means he could contrive. The curators of this show argue that it was Warhol who brought art and commerce together – perhaps Warhol thought no one had ever paid for a painting before 1960 – and several galleries at the beginning of the show give us a tour of his ever-crazier antics as he aged: more and more images of himself (they cover the walls of one gallery, top to bottom, like wallpaper); chasing stars almost as big as himself ever more frenetically. Making mindless pronouncements on TV. There is much, always too much, Warhol art here, but equally important to the show's curators, there are innumerable magazines and newspapers which demonstrate how he managed to persuade the media to hang upon his every move.

And after Warhol? This show exists to document what happened to some artists – not all, thank goodness – after his death. How artists learnt from him to promote themselves as brands; to manipulate the media; to be ever busier at the extremely serious business of making huge amounts of money.

One of them, Elaine Sturtevant, even occupied herself re-painting Warhol's own images, as if his own hadn't been tedious enough. How sad.

Much of this show consists of reconstructions, or partial reconstructions, of room-size installations. Keith Haring's "Pop Shop" is a remake of a New York art space that he created in 1986. The walls are covered with Haring's squirmy, calligraphy-like black graffiti. A cheerful neon sign winks at us, and Haring T-shirts are suspended around us on hangers. A miserable-looking man sits at a booth cut into the gallery's wall, waiting for us to buy one; or perhaps we'd prefer a little Haring medal for our lapel.

Jeff Koons's room – one of several extremely raunchy interludes – consists of a giant, gross, plastic sculpture of Koons humping La Cicciolina, his sometime porn bride. Various photographic blows-ups around the walls show him licking and lapping at her where it counts.

Next up are the YBAs, of course, who knew a fair bit about self-promotion and harnessing the media to their own ends. Here is a strew of scruffy items from Sarah and Tracey's "Shop" in Bethnal Green – painted cardboard signs, for example. This experiment in commerce lasted just six months.

Sooner or later, of course, we were bound to come across at least a few bits and pieces from "Beautiful Inside my Head Forever", Damien Hirst's big sale-room spectacle of 2008, where he was said to have made in excess of £100m over two days of feverish buying – and just at that very moment when Lehman Brothers was keeling over. A few of the pieces from that show are on display here: a calf in formaldehyde with gorgeous gold hooves; gem-studded butterflies; whole rows of diamonds on shelves. It's just like a discreet corner of Swarovski's, isn't it, Natasha darling?

At show's end we are treated to an entire gallery in celebration of Japan's king of pop commerce, Takashi Murakami. More dancing. More singing. More brash, unadulterated, in-your-face pop trash.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI ... INOCHI 2004

REF> english.kaikaikiki.co.

REF: Damien Hirst, 2008: Untitled image from on-line auction ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’

REF;>http://images.google.com/

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2009
REF:.artsandconsciousness.blogspot.com

An EXCERPT from : Post-Modernism, Economic Collapse and the Search for Value in Art

" ...... Everything was questioned and all foundations of meaning were challenged. Ironic self-deprecation replaced idealism and revolutionary zeal as the central theme of contemporary art. Breaking the rules became a central requirement for ‘good’ art. But as all the old rules of art were broken into smithereens, the avant-garde was forced to increasingly esoteric and obscure philosophical assertions in order to justify its own existence. These obscure sources of artistic content became increasingly inaccessible to the public but concomitantly attractive to wealthy collectors and art world insiders who desired membership in ‘the cultural elite’. By the late 20th Century, the art world had fully embraced art that asserted the premise that meaninglessness and absurdity were the only appropriate responses to a culture which had lost all connection to its own sources of meaning and authenticity . 'Soup 1', Andy Warhol 1968

Damien Hirst, a British artist in his mid-40’s recently held an on-line auction of a wide variety of his own artworks that fetched a record smashing $200 million. The auction was intended as an artwork in itself. Even more significant than this extraordinarily high price, is Hirst’s assertion that the value of an artwork is an integral aspect of its artistic content, since this signifies the work’s relevance to the art world. Hence, collectors and art dealers become intentional collaborators in the artist’s work. The inflation rate for the art world’s ‘super-stars’ had become astronomical by the early part of the 21st Century, with even relatively obscure artists who were in favor selling artworks for over a million dollars. Collectors and dealers like the infamous Larry Gagosian began to view themselves as collaborators and participants in conceptual artwork which was explicitly about absurdly inlflated prices mediocre artworks and the manipulation and control of a cynical and bored art-collecting 'elite'. By the early 21st century, the art world had come to embody all that was worst about late capitalism - greed, arrogance, manipulation and excess in all things.

The underlying issue seems to be a larger questioning of the nature of ‘value’ itself. The express intent of artists like Hirst, Jeff Koons, Lisa Yukusavge and Chris Ofili is precisely this. Why would Ofili’s elephant dung paintings be deemed to be valued in the millions? The cynical answer is clearly that wealth and power has believed that it has the ability to arbitrarily assign value to valueless-ness. It is, perhaps, a debatable point but current economic events suggest that this presumption may have been disproven. The reasons for the trend towards absurd over-valuation of art seem to be closely linked to the reasons for the recent international financial calamity that has in recent months sent stock prices plunging and un-employment rates through the roof. The art world’s over-reliance on financial capital as a signifier of meaning, paralleled the attitudes and actions of world financial markets in their tendency to grossly over-value inherently worthless investments. The world of finance, like the art world, fell into the catastrophic belief that any investment is a good one if enough capital is thrown at it. In both cases, money was invested in demonstrably unsound products – think, Damien Hirst = sub-prime mortgages.

One of post-modernism’s main themes is the de-construction of ‘meaning’ (and therefore value) as an artifact of unreliable ‘structures’ such as language, symbols or ritual. The basic thread of Post-Modernist thinking is something like this: If meaning is based on culture, and culture is based on language, and language is intrinsically unreliable and always controlled and manipulated by a greedy and corrupt power structures, then culture, meaning and value all become illusions – infinitely manipulable artifacts of the power structure’s on-going demand for control. The art world’s ceaseless desire for a new and marketable concept requires new art-stars in increasingly spectacular settings made more conspicuous by astronomical prices paid for their work in order to assure the power structure that it still has control – that money is everything after all!

Some cotemporary artists are now examining a new kind of value – value that is related to interconnectedness, happiness, wisdom and health. This is the central; theme of numerous writings about the ‘end of art’ from relatively recent art world apostates such as Donald Kuspit, Suzi Gablik, Lynn Gamwell and Arthur Danto. As the world’s economic crisis undermines the foundations of the ‘old’ power structure, we can look to new directions in art as a pathway to expanded cultural consciousness and a return to value and abundance based on new and more positive cultural assumptions like inter-connectedness and sustainability.

The current situation in the art world, the economic world and the world political scene seems to be one of profound change – the long hoped-for ‘paradigm shift’. We may have seen it ushered in by the presidential inauguration on January 20th. When the recovery from the current crisis occurs, it seems possible that the world will re-discover the value of art as an essential part of culture – not as a coveted object but as living and breathing part of everyday life. The economic and political worlds seem to have little choice but to re-construct their structures based on a more sustainable and longer-term vision that includes human well-being and environmental awareness as key tenets for the future. In a sense not only America but the whole world voted for these changes in the symbolic form of the new American President. The emergent cultural vision seeks an integration of art, wellness and sustainability that is counter to former assumptions about value and power. In short, the power structure seems to be changing. The 20th Century ‘s emphasis on religion, nationalism, militarism and material wealth are yielding quickly to new cultural imperatives – the environment, social and economic inter-dependence, human rights and the individual search for meaning and happiness outside of culturally proscribed institutions. The emergent vision seems to understand that real value is based on connection and embodiment rather than military strength and coercion. We are all at a unique historical moment – the moment that the ebb of modernist materialism is replaced by a new flood of broadened cultural and spiritual awareness – a new era of expanded consciousness. To refer to this new consciousness as ‘spiritual’ is perhaps too limiting. In Holistic Studies we use the term frequently, but we as a culture are on the brink of a wholesale return to something more all encompassing than ‘spirituality’ per se. Perhaps the world is discovering that spirit cannot be separated from the physical or emotional dimensions of existence of identity.

The current re-emergence of ‘spirituality’ in art is based on direct experience rather than religious ideology. The new art exemplified by artists such as Andy Goldsworthy Kiki Smith, and Bill Viola (all of whose artwork also sells for astronomical amounts) is connected to a direct experience of nature and embodiment – an intrinsic value which other artists of the current generation may admire but still reject as unexciting and sentimental. We must all choose for ourselves which is the more desirable motif in art. There is a lot to discover in the contemporary art world.

In Arts & Consciousness we are developing a new pedagogy – a way of teaching artists to discover meaning and connection through the creative process. By examining the ideas of modernism and post-modernism our students find their own new ideas and new ways of offering relevance and value to a culture starved for authenticity and humanity. We hope they will discover abundance as a natural consequence of finding relevance and value in their own artwork. The on-going exploration the nature of value and meaning is an important part of contemporary art. Often misunderstood as opportunism, the excesses of the contemporary art world have laid the groundwork for a new revolution in art and the re-discovery of a deeper and more enduring value for the entire culture. We have reason for celebration and hope in the face of adversity and can find beauty and wisdom in a myriad of new images and ideas that are re-shaping art and culture.