yesterday in what felt like the middle of the night, we were sleeping and someone started banging on the door and saying ‘Miss W., i need to talk to you’. i had no idea what time it was, chiquita and i were both fast asleep. I went to open the door and it was one of our neighbors, some horrible guy, one who’s already yelled at chiquita for being loud. I opened the door and my eyes were all squinty from being asleep, and he was like STOP MAKING NOISE, i know it’s you! i already warned you to stop making noise, if this happens again im going to call the police.’ I was like ‘what the fuck you woke me up! we were sleeping,’ and he was like ‘yeah right.’

He’s crazy, he hears noises that don’t exist, and always blames it on chiquita, the whole building dislikes him. I dont know what his deal is, he doesn’t seem to drink, we’re not sure if he lives alone, he lives one flight down on the other side of the hall. i’m going to call the landlord today.

It turns out it was only 2:30am but i was sleeping so deeply that it was completely freaky and we couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour. So, no, i didnt sleep very well.

(kenmare/elizabeth)

(kenmare/mulberry)

MOMA’s founding director and “intellectual creator” viewed Johns’ first solo show at Leo Castelli and telephoned MOMA curator Dorothy Miller to come right over so they could select works. They purchased Johns’ 1954 Flag, Green Target, Target with Four Faces and White Numbers (thus anointing the 28-year-old into the modernist pantheon).

https://findlayart.com/magazine_pre2000/features/boettger/boettger11-12-96.asp

Rauschenberg opened up the possibilities that are now being mined by contemporary con-artists such as Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons. Rauschenberg didn’t poeticize the ordinary. He aggrandized the ordinary, he put a high-art style price tag on the ordinary.

http://tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=66843dca-95e0-45de-aba9-4da3ae73ffc2

$12 million, that’s how much Damien Hirst’s famous shark sold for in 2005. …. It’s not just about the work of art; rather, the value placed on a particular work derives from how it feels to own that art. Most art dealers know that art buying is all about what tier of buyers you aspire to join, about establishing a self-identity and, yes, getting some publicity. The network of galleries and auction houses spends a lot of its time, money, and energy giving artworks just the right image. Remarkably, buyers support the process in the interest of coming out on top, rather than fighting it and trying to get the lower prices. ….

art critics don’t matter much anymore. If the magazine Art in America pays $200 for a review article, why listen to that writer? We have a much richer and generally more accessible guide to the value of art — namely the market itself. ….

Damien Hirst is now worth more than Dali, Picasso, and Warhol were at the same age, put together. The point isn’t whether, in aesthetic terms, he deserves that compensation. The question is whether this way of organizing the art market makes overall sense.

http://www.nysun.com/arts/bubbles-booms-and-busts-the-art-market-in-2008/81581

Earlier this year, hedge-fund millionaire Daniel Loeb made a sweet trade. The 43-year-old partner at Third Point LLC had purchased a rare asset in 2003. He found a buyer in January and sold it for a 500% profit, making a quick $1 million. …

Hedge-fund managers are reinventing the art of the art deal. With their sudden riches, quest for status and big houses in need of adornment, fund managers have become some of the most active buyers and sellers in the art world.

They have been buying up hundreds of millions of dollars of paintings, sculptures and pop-art installations. They have helped turn middling artists into media stars. … where others see art, many fund managers see another market ripe for trading, buying, selling and flipping. Many invest heavily in one or two artists, to build up a “position.” They promote the value of the artists, help boost their prices and sometimes later unload pieces through a tax-favorable gift or sale.

http://www.realestatejournal.com/homegarden/20050519-frank.html

“Who makes that kind of money in the stock market?” said Sender, 38, as he swiveled round the 21 screens at his desk in New York. “In the hedge-fund business these days, you’re having a great year if you make 20 percent.”

Sender revamped his hedge fund Exis Capital Management Inc. last year, returning some investors’ money after losses in 2004 and 2006. Meanwhile, the value of his art, with works by Richard Prince, Mike Kelley and Andreas Gursky, has continued to rise, quadrupling in 10 years.

Art is now his biggest single asset — 800 works that Sender values at more than $100 million. He said he recouped most of the $25 million he spent in the past 10 years on art with the sale of about 40 pieces.

Sender is a new type of financier collector, with Steven Cohen and Daniel Loeb. Their gains on works by Prince and Martin Kippenberger aren’t just dumb luck in a boom. They apply rules for buying art, as well as stocks.

Sender tries to buy the best works of artists he admires, whose pieces also are being acquired by museums and other collectors.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a7Ke6UuweaxE

When a big-name artist has a gallery show at a big-name gallery like White Cube or Gagosian, his best paintings aren’t even on public view: “The new buyer has little chance of even seeing the hot paintings, which will be kept in a small private room. What is hung in public areas is available for purchase but of lesser significance.” ….

One of the things which fascinates me about the recent run-up in contemporary art prices is that it’s meant a huge change in the way that many artists work: it’s commonplace nowadays for artists to have dozens of assistants, something which was a decidedly unusual and controversial practice back in the days of Warhol. With prices for new works regularly breaking into seven figures, art has become bigger and more polished; it often uses much more expensive materials and can draw on resources which would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/07/28/the-economic-paradoxes-of-contemporary-art

To Mr. Galenson markets are what make the 20th century completely different from other eras for art. In earlier periods artists created works for rich patrons generally in the court or the church, which functioned as a monopoly. Only in the 20th century did art enter the marketplace and become a commodity, like a stick of butter or an Hermès bag. In this system, he said, breaking the rules became the most valued attribute. The greatest rewards went to conceptual innovators who frequently changed styles and invented genres. For the first time the idea behind the work of art became more important than the physical object itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/design/04pica.html

Jeff Koons says:

I had begun to support myself by selling mutual funds on Wall Street, and I had got involved a little bit in the investment area.

I went around and bought up all the vacuum-cleaners I could before they stopped making a certain model. I put all my money into building the first five of The New pieces. And there was no market for the work. So I ended up not having any money. I had to leave my apartment on 16th Street and the studio where I had been working. I had to live with friends for a short period of time. Eventually I had to go back and live with my parents in Sarasota to get myself back on my feet. That was 1982.

Finally I was able to get back to New York, I saved up enough money. I sold a lot of things including art. Eventually I became a commodities broker, I specialized in cotton. It was about being independent from the art market. So I didn’t have to kiss anybody’s ass. And that I could make exactly what art I wanted to make. And I would always know that I didn’t need the art market.

Then I got the idea for the tanks. Equilibrium. I drew a basketball on a piece of paper that you use to line the back of an aquarium. I wanted to create permanent equilibrium. I worked with over fifty physicists and I had the honor to work with Richard P. Feynman (a Nobel prize-winning physicist for quantum dynamics). Permanent equilibrium in the tanks is unachievable. The basketballs always sank to the bottom. But I went for it. I pushed it to the limit. I could have created permanent equilibrium with oils. But I wanted to keep it a very womb-like situation with water. So I arrived at an equilibrium which is not permanent but very pure.

I was doing well as a commodities broker but I was also doing my art. I wasn’t a broker who made art on the side. And I reached a certain intellectual point where I could only concentrate on my art. Instead of being on the telephone all day trading cotton I was speaking to people, so I could create my equilibrium tanks.

Meyer Vaisman offered me a show at International with Monument in the East Village. So I had my Equilibrium show there. I sold several pieces. I made a little money on the Tanks, but I sold most of the work at loss. My Aqualung cost me $20,000 to make and I sold it for $4,000. My Lifeboat cost the same and I sold it for $8,000. The gallery got half of it so I walked away with big loss. Even the Nike poster. People thought it was shocking that I would charge $1,000 for a framed Nike poster. But I went back and forth to the Nike headquarters in Oregon. I made two trips because I wanted the posters to be absolutely perfect. I made a portfolio to carry them back and forth. I lost money on thoose too. That was where my Wall Street money went. But that was OK. It was all about getting the work out there.

I made the Equilibrium show in 1985. Then Daniel Weinberg of Los Angeles was the first dealer to come in and really put some serious money behind my work. That let me produce work without directing my own expenditure. So I created Luxury and Degradation.

i always liked jeff koons, but then, like jurgen teller, he started to show his dick.

broadway/grand st

howard st/broadway

new york times, 1899-1901

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.

…..

England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.

“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales” among the first evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence versus a midphrase first-person pronoun. Yet these variations eventually fell by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I,” a potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-guestsafire-t.html

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/04/science/Ape_4.html