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.
digital art
TO BE OR NOT TO BE ? THE FUTURE IS WITH US WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT
One of the peculiarities of artists is their stubbornness. I
THE RELEVANCE OF ‘ABSTRACT’ IN THE 21st CENTURY – JUST SEMANTICS?
Not that long ago I could define Abstract art as work without a formal, recognisable subject and essentially, centripetal.
NAKED, NUDE and THE REVERENTIAL SELFIE
Perhaps as a society we’ve actually grown up. Having seen episode one of Bridgeton and social and emotional suppression taken to extremes, lived through the sexual revolution of the late 60s when for some all ‘rules’ went out of the window, to whatever we have today...
MORAL RIGHTS, MORAL INDIGNATION AND A LIFETIME OF SOOT.
Michaelangelo, though, was somewhat different. Half a millennium after he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling the then pope decided to have the accumulated candle soot cleaned off. What the cleaning revealed was intense colour. Michaelangelo, being long dead, might well have insisted on having it cleaned sooner if he’d known how little care the Catholic church was going to take of it.
OF SHARKS IN TANKS, CRYPTOART, AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF PURITY.
…….Kelani Nichole, who first priced and sold artworks in bitcoin in 2013 as the owner of the Transfer Gallery who said that ‘it’s absurdity at every level of implementation [the auction sale]. They, Christies, sold a JPEG. This was a $69 million marketing stunt……