artgallery

Young Artists Get Shot at Success, Galleries Fight to Survive

Filed under: Art

Any successful entrepreneur can tell you that tough markets are fertile ground for future success. If you can carve your piece of the world out now, an upturn later will reward you handsomely.

This sentiment must be on the mind of young British artists – such as Merlin Carpenter. London's contemporary art galleries are starting to show affordable works by newer artists. Far from investing in the future or giving the hopeful a fighting chance, this tactic is seen as a way to develop a near-term revenue stream that will help galleries survive the current financial crisis. Retrospectively, this stopgap measure could be seen as pure genius for the art galleries that discover the next Richard Prince or (blech) Damien Hirst.

Claims of forward thinking, however, will have to remain in the future. For now, dealers and galleries in London are struggling. Allsopp Contemporary shut down an exhibition space, and Yvon Lambert pulled out of London.

The market is searching to find – and exploit – some young blood, and buyers are pressing for discounts. The winners may just be the artists. Those discovered through desperation will define the market in the future.

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Tags: art, art galleries, art gallery, ArtGalleries, ArtGallery, artist, artists, british art, british artists, BritishArt, BritishArtists, damien hirst, DamienHirst, england, financial crises, financial crisis, financial crunch, FinancialCrises, FinancialCrisis, FinancialCrunch, galleries, gallery, london, recession, richard prince, RichardPrince, united kingdom, UnitedKingdom

Jesus Stops Traffic on 5th Ave

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

A row of cars waiting for a green light was concealed by four large canvases proceeding across New York's busy Fifth Ave., creating the appearance of emptiness from W. 51st St to Central Park and beyond. Artist Nelson Diaz chose Palm Sunday to reveal his latest project, "The Isolated Christ," to the people of New York. The response to this unique mix of street art, performance art and oil on canvas was nothing short of astounding.

Five years in the making, The Isolated Christ is a four-part rendering of the most famous figure in one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most recognized works. Diaz "isolated" the image of Jesus Christ from the apostles in DaV inci's "The Last Supper" and plotted thousands of points on the image by hand. Then, using advanced calculus techniques, he fed the point into an equation that exposes "hidden" four dimensional space in the original image and used the results as the foundation for his signature perspective.

The result is four faces of DaVinci's Jesus, reflecting various situations. The final canvas – transcendence – offers an obscure, almost headless presentation, signifying the departure from the norm. The meaning is left to the viewer, with the religious assuming resurrection and the atheist likely to posit obsolescence. Diaz remains coy with his intention, believing that interpretation (like faith) is a personal affair.

With half a decade spent on the vision and production of The Isolated Christ (all four paintings were completed by hand – sans brushes, literally with his fingers), Diaz spent the last few months struggling with venue. He decided last summer to skip the traditional alternatives (such as art galleries) during his protest against the treatment of art as a commodity, during which he auctioned 10 paintings on eBay for the princely starting bid of $1 each.

"The old way of doing things is dead," he explained during several of our meetings. Deep-pocketed buyers writing checks for pieces they don't understand, he believed, would not be able to sustain itself ... a lesson to which the art market was treated last September. Diaz wanted a public setting. As with his eBay experiment, he wanted to return the aesthetic to everybody, not a self-proclaimed elite.

That left only one "gallery" from which to choose: the streets of Manhattan.

Gallery: Nelson Diaz and The Isolated Christ