I’d be the first to admit to my ambivalence about both fame and the art market.
FAME AT ANY PRICE. WHO NEEDS IT?
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Artist
WHAT’S IN A NAME? CALL ME ANYTHING BUT DON’T LABEL ME.
Maybe that’s the clue. Invent your own label. None of this vacillating between modes, methods and materials but an easily identifiable label, preferably one word, that would fit neatly on your gravestone
I STARTED A JOKE – HAVEN’T I HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE?
I also read this week of a Ghanaian artist who went from selling his paintings for $100 a pop on the streets of Accra to selling for sums in excess of $600,000 on the streets of New York. Lucky him. Let’s hope his sense of humour is in place when he passes his use-by date in a year’s time and Larry Gagosian moves on to his next big discovery. After all, you’re worth a lot more dead than alive. Ask Basquiat, who died at just the right time. Now that is a joke.
I MISTAKENLY THOUGHT THAT I WAS AN ORIGINAL. TURNS OUT I AM JUST A MISPLACED DERIVATIVE.
Sales, recognition and respect are just jam in the end but having said that, either Greenberg or Rosenberg, amongst pre-eminent art writers, considered that there was no such thing as progress in art. All art exists at once, in the same time, in the same space – and we’ve now got the internet to prove it.
BY CHANCE, I PRODUCED A PAINTING. AREN’T I CLEVER?
So, what in the end is chance for an artist? There are any number of amateur abstract painters and resin pourers with a firm belief in the physical ability of malleable paint to create something pleasant with little human intervention. It is good that they find simple satisfaction in doing so but, as with Bacon, an understanding of the nature of art as opposed to accident is key.
THE RISING FLOODWATERS, THE IVORY TOWER, THE UNLIMITED BUDGET.
Even Noah, much vaunted survivor of existential flooding, was instructed to preserve only human and animal kind. No mention was made of Art or antiquities.