The Mona Lisa Curse: Do High Prices Ruin the Art World?

by Editor | 1 Comment

This is a 12-part film on YouTube called The Mona Lisa Curse by art critic Robert Hughes. The film is fascinating for its overview of the art scene in New York since the 1960s. Hughes, the art critic for Time Magazine, goes on an extended diatribe against the fast-paced and overpriced world of art collectors and auctions that he says have debased recent art. He hates Damien Hirst because, according to him, the work does not merit the inflated prices. He hates Andy Warhol and thinks he was stupid and stole ideas from Robert Rauschenberg.  He thinks wealthy collectors have become simple investors without a thought in their heads about why the art is important.

But I think Mr. Hughes is a giant bore.  He walks around with a comical scowl on his block-like face.  He lumbers into a collector’s home to question him about why he would want to own 800 Andy Warhol pieces.  The collector gives him decent and somewhat thoughtful answers that are soundly rejected by the ogre in the room because he thinks Warhol was ‘one of the stupidest people he ever met in his life.’  Why?  ‘Because he had nothing to say.’

Nothing to say.  First of all, if you are waiting for someone to say something, you are going to waste half of your life doing so.  Warhol never said a damn thing that I can recall reading anywhere except that when asked why another artist was so good he said that it was because he made good lunches.  But Mr. Hughes is looking for something else.  Warhol had nothing to say.  In fact, I met him at a bookstore in Manhattan once and he just said, ‘Hi.’  It fit the occasion quite nicely in fact.  There’s your answer, Mr. Hughes.  The quietest voice in the museum must be Andy Warhol’s.

But if Hughes insists on asking some uninspired collector about what made Warhol so good, he is only going to get an answer culled from some brochure.  He needs a real answer.  Here’s mine.  Andy Warhol was great because he tried to destroy meaning.

Hughes’ most scathing remarks are saved for the wheeler dealer art auctioneers and representatives in New York.  They run around selecting high-priced art for their clients and hold bidding wars at places like Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  This pushes art prices up into the stratosphere, making every artist want to earn the big bucks.

So what?  Who cares?

The money people are having much more fun than tiresome old Mr. Hughes.  This guy should live under a bridge.  Who cares if a painter does something that costs $400 one day and $40,000,000 the next?  Where’s the problem?  It’s fun to trade money for art.  The more expensive it is the more well cared for it will be.  If you don’t want to spend large sums on art you don’t have to.  There are plenty of fine artists selling for a few hundred dollars.

I like Mr. Hughes’ film, but I don’t accept his views.

For instance, he despises this huge sculpture by Damien Hirst:

Why?  It’s an astounding statue.  Reminds me of ancient Egypt.  Look at the feet.  And those cut off fingers!  Look at what that face is doing.  It’s a face!  I would jam this thing into my backyard if I could unseat it from its pedestal.

But watch the film all the way through.  It’s very unusual and I have to love Mr. Hughes for making it and for being so willing to be so cranky.  Cranks are always fun.  I say stupid things just to make them mad.

Go here for part 2 and you’ll find the other 10 parts as well.

I Think BP is Faking its Spill Fix

by Editor

Fake. It should be obvious. Any twelve year old child can look at the volcano of oil and tell you that it will never fit inside a narrow pipe. This is just public relations for the sake of the video feed. President Obama should get into a military posture immediately and remove BP from the Gulf. It is time to start arresting BP employees. This is terrorism. The ideas and execution on display from BP make no logical sense and therefore must represent something beyond what we are being made aware of. Obama needs to ask Congress to convene specifically to authorize a takeover of all BP assets and physical property worldwide by the United States. They need to basically declare a state of war against a multi-national corporation. And if they refuse, then Obama needs to move without them. I’m dead serious in my opinion on this. This is one of the worst attacks ever perpetrated against the United States. The reason I call it an attack is because what started as an accident has changed now into an ongoing effort to confuse observers of the situation and mislead them into thinking that BP is trying to stop the leak. What are other BP people doing around the world right now? What is going on in their banks? Where are they moving their money? Obama is missing the big red ball here and he’s never going to recover. I think it would be wise to very quickly and quietly remove all BP personnel from any offshore oil rigs near the U.S. and shut those rigs down asap. NASA engineers need to be pulled into this emergency and the military must provide logistics and hauling support for the effort to shut the gusher down.

The entire southern and eastern coasts of the U.S. are at severe risk and the volume of oil in the Gulf is far beyond what BP or the government have stated.  This company has absolutely no concern whatsoever for what happens to the Gulf waters or the U.S. coasts.  It concerns itself only with limiting financial losses and maximizing oil profits.  Cleanup and stopping the spill are completely irrelevant to this company.  Obama needs to consider what he would do if he wakes up tomorrow and realizes that BP is falsifying the entire operation at the spill site.  What would you do, Mr. President?

Further thoughts: Extreme language and extreme action are required in this very odd situation with the Gulf disaster. I think it is only this kind of extreme, left-field thinking that will somehow break the massive inertia that is apparent in our government’s response to a major world emergency. I continue to hear high government officials, including the President, talk about what the government, military, and BP can’t do. Everyone seems to think that there’s not much that can be done that BP isn’t already doing. This thinking is very dangerous and indicates a total collapse of the nation’s intellect and general technical infrastructure. That is not the way the United States expresses itself. We are seeing what is either an anomaly or an indication of failure on a massive and existential scale. The United States that has existed up until recently would never say that it could not plug a hole 5,000 feet below the sea. Never. It would turn all of its technical, military, industrial, and intellectual resources toward filling that hole immediately. I’ve heard reports that President Obama has an IQ of 160. Really? Really? I’m not sure which test was administered to this guy, but it is quite apparent that somebody got paid a little extra to score it.

This country is bleeding out of its asshole. And our President is modeling business casual slacks on the oil-slicked shores of a destroyed southern coast.

The President should be using extreme language and taking extreme actions to get this hole filled instantaneously. He should be reacting in very much the same way he would react if a nuclear bomb had exploded somewhere on American soil. Nothing less will suffice. What is wrong with our President and what is wrong with America?

Watch Astounding Deepwater Submersible Work to Fix Gulf Oil Gusher

by Editor

Update June 4 10:00 am: The BP robot operators are trying to close the valves on the gusher cap they installed last night.  Meanwhile, oil blasts out through those valves while some channels up to a surface ship.  It remains to be seen if by closing the valves BP can stop the uncontrolled gusher and channel all of the oil to their ships.

Update June 3 10:00 pm: It does not appear to be working.  I think BP keeps insisting on using rather narrow pipes to handle this gusher which is putting out enormous loads of pressure.  Why don’t they fit a large sewer pipe around this blowout preventer?  A large diameter sewer pipe could simply hang around the gusher without even making a tight fit.  Then the gushing oil would be gradually corralled into a somewhat narrower pipe leading to the surface.  Blockages of frozen matter seen in the original effort to put a big box around the gusher must be a product primarily of using too narrow gauge a pipe for this job.  You can’t try to push all this high-pressure oil into a narrow pipe leading to the surface.  You have to gradually ease it up into a very wide pipe.

The cap BP is trying to fit on the gusher simply doesn’t have enough weight to press its rubber gasket tight enough to the pipe, so too much oil is leaking around it.  BP’s robot operators are wonderful, but I’m having very serious doubts about the competence of its engineers.  Very serious.  It may be well past time for President Obama to get NASA involved.  There’s no way that a good engineer is going to be trying to fit a narrow pipe over a high-pressure volcano.  It’s silly.

By the way, this planetary level disaster is quite likely to wipe out most of the coast of the United States.  The greatest superpower nation on earth is about to lose most of its coastline from the south all the way up the eastern seaboard to New York.  A single company with a single 24-inch hole in the ground has done this.  It is this event, not 9/11, that is the turning point.  We have reached the end of the era of global corporations.  They are too dangerous.  Governments must retool and rethink.  Companies like BP must be destroyed, either financially or legislatively.

Original post below:

If you want a few heroes out of this horrendous Gulf Oil Disaster, you should start by watching the work of whoever is controlling the deep water submersible arms. It’s fascinating and highly educational to observe the careful thought process that goes on in advance of every single minute movement made by this machine. Remote control at 5000 feet of depth is a rare skill indeed. BP is attempting to place a cap and pipe onto the cutoff top end of the pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf waters. So the robots will need to be carefully controlled to aim this device and place it right into the center of the gusher.

This approach has a high probability of success. But if they miss the hole and bend something, they will need to try again. This could well be one of the great feats of engineering in modern times. Well worth watching patiently.

Audio Podcast Novel: Robinson Crusoe (Part 12)

by Editor

DOWNLOAD ROBINSON CRUSOE – PART 12

Crusoe worries about being attacked if his presence is discovered by cannibals who visit the island. He finds a spectacular cave and then, during a night storm, hears a cannon shot.

Get all the previous parts here

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Read by Alessandro Cima

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Art: Digital Prints on Canvas

by Cimaxion

I Was Thinking

I’ve been making large original artist prints of these images through a gallery in Los Angeles. They measure 68″ x 38″. They are original works created from images used in my film Yellow Plastic Raygun.  They are not exact frames from the film, but rather artworks based on fragments of the film.  I make the film, then I mine it for artworks that will stand on their own.  So the film becomes a sort of a paintbox or a scrapbox that I dig through and manipulate.  I could go on working like this forever.  It’s an endless trove to explore.

Wave Rider

I Was Thinking hanging on a wall: