14 posts tagged “art”

Show us something you love but everyone else hates. 
Submitted by AKA Vasquez.  

Hey, it's my question. I knew it was a good one.

It would have to be this, which was acquired from the local Otterspool Animal Haven charity shop for £1:

Siamese Girl with Earring painting

Or possibly this, the plum lot in a fundraising auction I recently attended (NB ignore the green/pink "runner" on the table, which Emma actually quite likes):

Actual size baseball bat that's also a pepper grinder

For the Love of God

Damien Hirst

For the Love of God
2007
Platinum, diamonds and human teeth
17.1 x 12.7 x 19.1cm

Via White Cube Gallery

It's unlikely that anyone hasn't become accustomed to this over the past few days as it's been all over the UK media but I had to stick a picture on here. It's a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with over 8,000 diamonds. Damien Hirst made it for £14m and it's expected to sell for £50m - which isn't a bad return on investment.

The piece has been decribed as "without precedent in the history of art", which seems about right. I saw Hirst interviewed on Newsnight on Friday and it's pretty obvious he is the defining artist of the current era. He's also amazingly likeable for such a rich, clever bastard.

Whaam!

We're thinking of getting these two Roy Lichtenstein prints for the newly decorated dining room. I've found a place that will print them on to a made-to-order canvas and stretch them on to frames. It costs a bit but should look amazing on our nice white walls. And although they are arguably a bit blokey, Emma is a Lichtenstein fan and seems fully behind the idea, which is a miracle as we rarely agree on this kind of thing. The only downer is that they take six weeks to deliver. Damn.

Baseman 10" Dumb Luck figure

I've just discovered a new gallery and shop in Manchester's Northern Quarter which sells some cool stuff, such as this Gary Baseman 10-inch Dumb Luck figure (retails at £120, unfortunately. Damn). I found it on the web but I may go into town and have a snoop around this weekend.

It's called the Richard Goodall Gallery. Have a lewk.

State Britain

Wallinger has painstakingly assembled a 40m-long display of materials collected by Parliament Square anti-war protester Brian Haws, and has put them on show in the Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. Haws was banned from protesting in Parliament Square last year because of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA), which bans protest within a mile of Parliament. The materials were removed by 78 police officers in a night-time raid last May.

Wallinger's work, State Britain, confronts the issue of Freedom of Speech head-on by displaying Haw's banners, flags and messages within that one-mile boundary. The artist claims the boundary passes directly through the gallery and has put a line on the floor to illustrate. I'm not sure whether this is a spectacular coincidence or a bit of creative map reading but, anyway, on one side of the line it is legal to protest against Tony Blair and on the other, it isn't.

The piece illustrates the absurdity of the arbitrary "no protest" zone, while confronting the public's response to Haws' one-man protest, which began in 2001. Outside the gallery, in Parliament Square, the vast majority of the public regard Haws as, at best, a committed nutter. At worst, he is perceived as a nuisance, or totally ignored. By bringing his banners into a gallery, Wallinger has successfully made people go out of their way to engage with Haws' protest and to inspect the minutiae of the collection. Confrontational, political, thought-provoking, moving... and certainly not cold or mechanical. I like it.

More images here via Indymedia and the Sunday Times mangles the facts (how very unlike the Murdoch press).

Post script: Does Vox's spell checker actually work? Er, not unless "confontational" is a word...

Cardboy calendar

I made this yesterday. It was damn fiddly. It has a calendar in its head that you rotate monthly.

More here, via Vinyl Abuse

Cardboy web image