The Pleasure (and Popularity) of Really Short Books
Photo
CreditIllustration by Konstantin Kakanias
You may have noticed them at the register of your local bookseller — very small, handsome paperback books of irregular trim, with plain covers in bold colors. Often stopping short at a breezy 150 pages, they make a point of being concise, and are meant to be dispatched in one or two sittings. As soon as you have finished beginning, you begin ending.
This short-book renaissance comes at the height of our Age of the Essay. Everyone is reading them, and even more people are writing them. The books’ modesty of scale appears like a rebellion against importance, but they are insistent, even a little pedantic — self-conscious intellectual sallies that bring a dignified brevity to nonfiction. They take themselves seriously, much like a very short man. Their titles announce a quarry, or query: “Men Explain Things to Me” (Rebecca Solnit), “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism” (Kristin Dombek), “The Hatred of Poetry” (Ben Lerner), “Little Labors” (Rivka Galchen), “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters” (Dan Fox), “Nicotine” (Gregor Hens), “The Art of Death” (Edwidge Danticat). Those steroidal Goliaths of nonfiction, magazine articles bloated to hardcover size that stalk the catalogs of the major presses — who reads them? The very short book topples them with a single stone.
Photo
CreditIllustration by Konstantin Kakanias
True to its essence, the very short book does not pretend to have more to say than it does. This is as charming as encountering the rare person who knows when to speak and when to be silent. As a form, the very short book is far preferable to the “essay collection,” whereby a writer’s previously published output is lazily sutured together into a Frankenstein’s monster that promises but rarely delivers more than its parts. Still, there are short books that could try a little harder. Only once has an idea from a very short book really caught fire — Solnit’s notion of “mansplaining.” Most of them aspire less to cultural diagnosis than to self-help; reading one can be a little like having a talk with an intelligent friend urging you to be your best self. Some, like “Little Labors” or “Nicotine,” combine elements of memoir with the insouciance of thinking out loud. Others, like “The Hatred of Poetry” and “The Selfishness of Others,” advance something as old-fashioned as an argument.
They quote philosophy and theory, presenting themselves as a kind of cheat sheet: We do the homework so you don’t have to. They are not, like Oxford’s Very Short Introductions, primers on useful topics such as human anatomy, banking or Rastafari. Nor are they, like the Penguin Great Ideas series, abbreviated snippets from the canon — pieces of the infinite night sky chopped up and glimpsed through the bound aperture of a telescope. They come already compressed, born rather than cut short. You will learn something, for sure, but not more than you can handle.
Ours is a busy world, and there are many television programs to watch. Very short books are an easy way to increase the total number of books you have read — a worthy goal in itself. Plus, photographs of short books, either on their own or in a stack, can be posted to one’s social media account to communicate taste and substance. Since short books are short, the odds are greater that the poster will actually read the books she advertises herself by. In this way, very short books contribute to a greater harmony, whereby people are more like the people they pretend to be.
*************************** Friday, 18th NOVEMBER 2016 Vantag's offices moved from Rua Miguel Bombarda, 552 Porto Portugal to number 578 on the same street ««««««««««««««««««««««««««« 6ª feira, 18 de novembro de 2016 Os escritórios da Vantag mudaram da Rua de Miguel Bombarda, 552 Porto Portugal para o nº 578 da mesma rua »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York (Image: Courtesy of Sotheby's)
Sotheby's concluded the New York autumn auction season with a strong contemporary art sale that saw successes for stalwarts and newcomers alike. Six works by Gerhard Richter from the Steven and Ann Ames collection—which represented the first 25 lots, all of them guaranteed—brought in a total of $63.3m at hammer, led by the perfectly composed A.B., Still (1986), which hammered for its high estimate of $30m after a protracted battle by three phone bidders.
The first lot after the Ames collection was an intimate scene by the hot young superstar Njideka Akunyili Crosby that soared past its high estimate, driven by at least six bidders, and sold for $900,000 hammer price, or $1.1m with fees.
This is over ten times her previous auction record of $93,750, which was achieved in September and already impressive for a 32-year-old artist. “She's a wonderful artist,” says the collector Mera Rubell, who showed her at the family's collection in Miami last year. “I'm happy for her. It's always nice when the artist has recognition beyond museums.” Her husband, Don Rubell, adds that the artist just had a “sensational” show at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, “the best body of work she's ever done”.
The auction took in a total of $237.4m (before fees) in a sale that was estimated to bring in $208.5m-$302m in hammer totals. This is impressive for a house that has ceded much contemporary ground to Christie's in recent years. Bidding in the room and on the phones was enthusiastic, even up until the end, as a trippy canvas by Frank Stella from 1974, Pratfall, sold for $7.7m hammer over a high estimate of $4.5m. Only four works failed to find buyers.
“The energy in the room was extraordinary,” the auctioneer Oliver Barker said at the press conference after the sale. “We've clearly dismissed any rumours that there were any problems in the market this year, lack of supply, anything along those lines. I think tonight was a kind of unbridled success and another great shot in the arm for confidence in the marketplace.”
The Ames collection was responsible for $122.7m of the evening’s total of $276.7m with premium, and a clear coup for the house.
“When they signed that collection in the summer it was very hard for the auction houses to get material,” the dealer David Nisinson said after the sale. “People were nervous and sellers didn't know how the autumn was going to be, they didn't want to take on the uncertainties: Brexit, the election, etcetera. They probably did a good deal and it guaranteed them a season because they could build around it.”
Make way for Francis Picabia, one of the grandest, most mordant exemplars of early modernism, and perhaps the least familiar. The Museum of Modern Art — having for decades drummed the artistic feats of Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Duchamp into cultural consciousness — has finally rolled out the red carpet for this capricious, prolific, subversive fellow traveler.
The Modern didn’t even acquire a Picabia painting until 1954, and this is its first substantial exhibition devoted to him. One imagines that the artist was too slippery or contradictory for the museum, too much of a prankster and publicity hound. Born to wealth, he never struggled as an artist and had a reputation, partly intended, as a playboy. He made important contributions to both Cubist painting and its nemesis, Dada, with its art-barbed hijinks, and refused to cultivate a personal style that deepened with time. Instead he toyed with kitsch and calendar art, and based paintings on found photographs. When he returned to abstraction at the end of his life, he tried several styles. But lately — when multiple mediums and styles are increasingly the artistic norm — Picabia’s stature has grown. His work seems more alive today than that of any artist of his cohort, even Duchamp.
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“Fratellini Clown” by Francis Picabia. MoMA’s exhibition is its first substantial show devoted to the artist.Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
“Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction,” which opens on Monday, amasses some 241 works into a full-dress retrospective that thoroughly examines the artist’s contributions to Cubism and Dada. It includes “Entr’acte,” the avant-garde film he made in 1924 with René Clair, and his contentious series of figurative paintings from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Borrowing from art history, soft-core pornography and commercial art, they presage Pop Art, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism.
“Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” is a Picabia aphorism consistent with another one: “The only movement is perpetual movement.” The show has a propulsive, joyous energy. Something new, different and often challenging waits in nearly every gallery.
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Foreground, from left, “Here, This Is Stieglitz Here” and “Here Is Haviland.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
Born in Paris in 1879, Picabia was the only child of a French mother and a Cuban-born Spanish father whose combined fortunes (French mercantile; Cuban sugar) meant that he never had to do anything but make art, which they encouraged. He worked as a painter, poet, graphic designer, filmmaker, set designer, publisher, editor and orchestrator of exhibitions, events and performances — some of which he helped pay for — and was also known as a lover of gambling, yachts, fast cars and speed in general, as well as women. He even seems to have painted and drawn fast, with a kind of impatient, unfussy glee. Though eminently physical as a painter, he had little time for masterly, recognizable brushwork. The exhibition includes a partial re-creation of a solo show he had in Barcelona in 1922, centering on a series of works on paper whose daunting variety makes explicit his refusal to commit.
As promiscuous in life as in art, Picabia almost always had a wife and a mistress, or two mistresses, who tended to get along. He traveled widely, spending long periods living and working in New York, Switzerland and the South of France as well as Paris, where he died, in 1953, in the house he was born in.
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Francis Picabia’s “Idyll.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
Picabia first became known for slightly leaden Impressionist paintings whose sincerity was regularlydebated by critics. An enormous example from 1905 dominates the exhibition’s first wall. It looks inflated and was painted from a postcard, not en plein-air, which upset Pissarro. A beautiful Munch-like landscape from 1909 hints at his talent.
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Francis Picabia’s “Dances at the Spring II.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
Moving deeper into the Parisian avant-garde, Picabia absorbed Cubism by 1912, evolving an exceptionally muscular style. “The Spring” and “Dances at the Spring II,” both about eight feet square, have the size, impact and all-overness of post-World War II abstractions. They achieve an oxymoron, a kind of irrepressible gravity. They dispense with the niceties of Analytic Cubism — the transparencies, drifting brushwork, old master browns and delicate scaffoldings of line — for solid overlapping shapes whose radiant pinks and terra cottas seem lit from within. These abstract patchworks are at once in motion and carefully puzzled together, seeming both topographical and tapestry-like.
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Francis Picabia’s “Comic Wedlock” at the Museum of Modern Art.Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
The tumbling shapes quickly segued into more dimensional rubbery presences suggestive of factories, science labs or the body, especially in “Comic Wedlock” and “I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie,” from 1914. By 1915, forms had hardened into sleek, imaginary machines whose titles sometimes identified them as portraits or female bodies — hence their name, Mechanomorphs. He adapted the style of mechanical drawing, while experimenting with painting as an object, using metallic paint and enamel, adding language and bits of relief to his surfaces and paints on raw wood. In later years he would cultivate cracked paint and other effects.
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An installation shot, with “Volucelle II” at the center, of “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
The Mechanomorphs line the walls of the show’s largest gallery while vitrines of Dadaist material occupy its center, reflecting the artist’s activities from 1915 to the early 1920s, during which he abandoned painting for drawings, prints and magazines and pursued Dada first in New York, with Duchamp, then in Switzerland with Tristan Tzara, the movement’s founder, and finally in Paris.
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Francis Picabia’s “Spring.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
This material is hard to summarize but rewards careful looking. The machine aesthetic continues into mechanically reproduced images for magazines like Alfred Stieglitz and Marius de Zayas’s 291 in New York; Picabia’s own 391 (named in honor of 291) and various Dada publications. There are manifestoes, fliers for events and a handbill titled “Funny Guy” in which Picabia identifies himself as “an imbecile, an idiot and a pickpocket.” A wonderful doodled drawing seems to depict barbed wire. The gallery ends with a very appealing object: “St. Vitus’s Dance (Rat Tobacco),” an empty frame strung with four lengths of cord and patches of butcher paper to accommodate the title and the artist’s signature.
By 1924, Picabia returned to painting with a vengeance, as evidenced by the last five galleries of the show. The only works that come close to the first Cubist canvases are the so-called “Monster” paintings from 1924-27. Hilariously gorgeous, even garish, these colorful, highly tactile works combine oil and enamel, are dense with dots, patterns and sartorial finery and suggest an artist thrilled to be painting again. Depicting mostly kissing couples who evoke carnivorous insects, they might be parodies of the saccharine images of Marc Chagall. Their influence runs throughout European and American painting of the 1970s and ’80s, starting with Sigmar Polke.
In the “Transparencies” series of 1927-30, Picabia shifts gears radically, smoothing his surfaces and layering together the outlines of images from the High Renaissance, popular culture and Catalan frescoes, combining Botticelli saints with half-dressed starlets. While a little wan, the linear entanglements are elegantly engrossing, and their layering and sampling of existing images are two key strategies of painting since the early 1970s.
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From left, Francis Picabia’s “Hanged Pierrot” and “The Adoration of the Calf.”Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
In the next two galleries, Picabia is all over the place. “Fratellini Clown,” an especially strange image of a menacing jester, might be a collaboration between the cartoon-inspired work of Ed Paschke and the “Big Eyes” artist Margaret Keane. A portrait of Marlene Dietrich, reduced to a series of brightly layered lines, gives formal punch to the Transparencies technique. Sometimes he produced skilled hackwork, obviously on purpose: paintings of Aryan nudes or works that seem based on Hollywood publicity stills. More directly disturbing are the Goya-like “Adoration of the Calf” (1941-42), based on a photograph of a cow’s head on a cloaked pedestal by Erwin Blumenfeld, or its neighbor, “Hanged Pierrot” (1940-41). But opinion may not matter here. These works destabilize notions of good and bad, high and low, transferring some of Dada’s self-consciousness to canvas, even as his robust paint-handling signals a passion for the medium.
Picabia may play as crucial a role for our time as he did for his own. He refused to choose between the two great factions of early modernism — one conceptual and linguistic and descended from Duchamp; the other, painterly and formal, from Picasso and Matisse. (Sadly, the schism is often pretentiously played out in the show’s overly academic catalog.) He loved both subversion and the physicality of making things too much to take sides.
Anne Umland, the Modern curator who organized the show with Cathérine Hug of the Kunsthaus Zurich, the partnering institution in this effort, understands the current potential of Picabia’s art “to make us think differently about the history of modern, in a way that is more open-ended, messier, nonbinary.” In a time when too many advocates of Conceptual-based art see it as taking the high road, and judge more marketable art as taking the low, this would be an extremely liberating development.
“Mélibée,” included in “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” at the Museum of Modern Art.Credit2016 Francis Picabia/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Agaton Strom for The New York Times
I write in 4 languages, not translations, I write in 4 tongues simultaneously. It's me and taschen and... a few more (who knows) but they are all major corporations. I am a one man show... with a big help from a few great friends.- Ain't life grand! :)
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Eu escrevo em 4 línguas, não traduções, eu escrevo em 4 idiomas simultaneamente. Sou eu e a taschen e... mais alguns (quem sabe), mas são todos grandes empresas. Eu sou uma UNIP... com uma grande ajuda de alguns bons amigos.- Que vidaça! :) \\\:///
J'écris en 4 langues, pas de traductions, j'écris en 4 idiomes simultanément. C'est moi et taschen et... un ou deux autres (qui sait) mais ils sont tous des grandes sociétés. Je ne compte que sur moi... avec une grande aide de quelques bons amis.- Ah la belle vie! :)
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Escribo en 4 idiomas, no traducciones, escribo en 4 lenguas simultáneamente. Soy yo y taschen y ... unos cuantos más (quién sabe) pero son grandes organizaciones. Yo sólo soy un monólogo... con una gran ayuda de unos cuantos buenos amigos.-¡Que bueno es vivir! :)
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Jorge Cardoso | outubro 2016 | Porto Portugal
Sunday, November 13, 2016
How Millennials Are Changing Corporate Art Collections
Artsy Editorial
By Abigail Cain
Nov 3rd, 2016 9:06 pm
Google’s Dublin office. Photo via Google.
For
centuries after Siena’s Monte dei Paschi bank founded the first
corporate art collection in 1472, the direction of these programs was
primarily dictated by the personal passions of the boss. Even in the
1960s, when companies like Chase Manhattan and IBM began to fill their
offices with works by Barbara Kruger, Sam Francis, and Eric Fischl, corporate collections were still primarily offshoots of the CEO’s artistic tastes.
Throughout
the following decades, as interest in corporate collecting swelled,
things began to change—instead of the boss’s pet project, a company’s
trove of art became a public relations tool that communicated prestige
and good taste to clients. Since the early 2000s, corporate collecting
has shifted its focus inward once again. This time, however, the art is
meant to serve the workers by enhancing the office environment and
reflecting company values. And for employers hoping to cater to younger
recruits, the focus is increasingly on a millennial-friendly ethos of
social responsibility.
According to a 2014 Brookings report, 63%
of millennials want their employers to contribute to meaningful social
or ethical causes. By comparison, about half the members of older
generations share this stipulation. As millennials begin to dominate the
workforce, the report notes that these proclivities “are already
changing consumer markets and forcing corporations to change their
workplace practices.”
Enter ArtLifting,
a Boston-based company founded in 2013 by siblings Liz and Spencer
Powers. The initiative was spurred by a problem that Liz discovered
while working with art programs in homeless shelters—once completed,
there was nowhere for the work to go. Today, the startup offers an
online platform for artists living with homelessness or disability to
sell their work to a global audience. When Liz presented at the offices
of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), ArtLifting’s combination of
high-quality art and community outreach had a clear appeal as a way to
build the company’s collection.
“It sounded like a great fit for a
company like BCG, which tries to be socially responsible,” said Karen
Hood, office manager for the company’s Center for Knowledge &
Analytics in Boston. “We wanted to support them and see how we could
partner with them. Large companies oftentimes work with generous budgets
and want to be able to spend responsibly and have an impact.” Hood is
in the process of buying several works from ArtLifting artists and
commissioning one more for a recently completed office build-out.
Artist Scott Benner with his work at Google’s Cambridge office. Photo courtesy of ArtLifting.
ArtLifting’s
mission also resonated with Google—so much so that the two companies
announced a partnership last month, Art@Google. The program’s inaugural
show opened on October 13th, repurposing an event space on the internet
giant’s Cambridge campus to serve as a gallery. The first exhibition
showcases the delicate pen-and-ink drawings of Scott Benner,
a Boston-based artist who developed Horner’s syndrome in 2012 and
subsequently lost his job and home. He began selling his art on
ArtLifting in 2014 and has since found housing; for this show, Google
acquired nine of Benner’s works. Google plans to feature two additional
local ArtLifting artists in Cambridge next year with the hope of
expanding the program to its other campuses across the country.
“Our
mission with Google is to create amazing work environments and
experiences that help Googlers perform at their best every day,” said
Google real estate project executive John Moran, who worked with
ArtLifting to develop the Art@Google program. “We look to find ways to
enhance the campus and create experiences that make this an interesting
place to work.” According to studies, a focus on experiences rather than
consumer goods is another hallmark of the millennial workforce—and
Google, with its median age of 29, employs a lot of them.
Shirley
Reiff Howarth, who has been studying corporate art collections since
1983 as the founder and editor of the International Directory of
Corporate Art Collections, notes that over the past decade there has
also been a growing interest across corporations in creating
community-oriented programs like Art@Google. “The big focus change I’m
seeing is that corporate collecting seems to be moving away from just
buying a lot of unrelated art and hanging it on the walls,” she said.
“Instead, companies are moving into integrated programs that try to
educate the employees and build a context, perhaps by collecting on
thematic grounds. And they’re partnering with local arts communities.”
Although
Howarth says this trend is currently more prominent outside the
U.S.—particularly in places like Europe, South Africa, and Asia—as
millennials enter the workforce in increasing numbers, companies like
BCG and Google are at the forefront of a practice that promises to be
increasingly common.
Local artists work on a mural in Google’s Toronto, Canada office. Photo via Google.
“We
saw in this an opportunity to use art as a way of engaging the
community, to get them exposed to an organization that we thought was
doing something interesting in this particular community,” Moran said.
“It’s about highlighting something that was started here in the Boston
area, bringing it into the campus to expand that exposure to our Google
community and to see what comes of that.”
Google has been
ranked the best company to work for by Fortune seven times in the last
decade; BCG has also ranked consistently in the top three. “That just
illustrates the point that our clients are buying artwork both because
they find it beautiful and because their employees, clients, and
customers understand that art is more than just decoration,” said
Spencer, ArtLifting’s co-founder and CEO. “It can provide a moral boost.
For these companies who are trying to recruit the best and brightest,
and they’ve found that ArtLifting art helps them do that. Our artwork
isn’t just art—it has a compelling story behind it.”
Hood agrees.
Her previous purchases for the BCG office included works by
up-and-coming artists, but Hood said she “barely knew anything” about
their background. With ArtLifting, however, the artists’ stories are
foregrounded in a way that improves the office environment.
“I
didn’t feel that my purchasing the artwork was helping them other than
their bottom line. I feel like the pieces we’re selecting now really
impact someone else’s life,” Hood said. “It feels good to look at
something that’s pleasing to the eye, but also pleasing to the soul.”
