ABOVE: Artist’s very poor conception of what the Sistine Chapel could look like if Italians and their government don’t act soon to preserve their precious masterpieces. A new campaign depicting defaced artworks is trying to turn the tide.

Ask a fish how the water is, and it’ll probably look at you through the aquarium wall with a vacant look in its eyes, because a) fish are stupid, and b) fish don’t think about the water that much, because it’s everywhere. In a narrow sense, and mostly in the second sense, it’s the same with Italians and their classical masterpieces. Romans can’t spit without hitting an architectural masterpiece or a Botticelli sculpture, which litter the landscape. The result, writes the Independent, is a desensitization to the wonderment all around them, and a consequent neglect.

Cittaitalia, a group dedicated to preserving the ubiquitous beauty of Italian culture, unveiled today a campaign designed to jolt their countrymen from their long slumber. The campaign of street posters, print ads, and television spots depicts various Italian masterpieces in states of gross disrepair: Michaelangelo’s David is missing a leg and must be supported by a scaffold; Leonardo’s Last Supper has had all the disciples erased; Botticelli’s Venus Rising has been slashed to bits. Below is a plea to save Italy’s cultural heritage, and, coincidentally, a phone number to call with cash donations.

LINK: The Independent > Art treasures under threat: Trashing Michelangelo

ABOVE: left, detail from Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1976), the most notable piece of Philadelphia public art. Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke Group (detail of maquette, right) is being installed a few blocks away.

Public sculpture so often has all the aesthetic impact of a large pile of damp drywall, hulking on desolate public squares, only interesting enough to sustain the attention of the pigeons long enough to crap on it, ignored by all others. Philadelphia already had two exceptions to the rule: Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin, a 45-foot-tall clothespin, and LOVE, Robert Indiana’s iconic sculpture composed of the letters L-O-V-E. They’re a literal bunch in Philly, we hear.

Now the Sixth Borough is getting a third, resolutely un-dull public sculpture courtesy of the Roy Lichtenstein foundation and mega law firm Duane Morris LLP. Brushstroke Group is based on a maquette of a sculpture that the pop-art posterboy Lichtenstein made in 1996, shortly before his death. The actual sculpture was made years afterward, by a company called “Amaral Custom Fabrications,” so it’s not like Licthenstein himself got out his blowtorch in his mid-70s and forged the thing himself. But still, it’s a cheerful piece, even if it is partially hidden behind a wall and access-controlled by a clutch of snooty lawyers.

LINK: The Philadelphia Inquirer > Another brush with pop art in the city

ABOVE: detail from Andy Warhol’s Marilyn series (1967). The famous Warhol print will be reproduced on Levi’s clothes next fall.

Our first reaction to the news that the Warhol Foundation has authorized Levi’s to create a Warhol-themed clothing line for next spring called Warhol Factory X was anger, then puzzlement, hunger, itchiness, ennui, and finally acceptance. Why, we raged in our internal monologues, should Warhol’s iconic works be used to hock Levi’s products? It seemed to cheapen the works in question, stiching them on to a pair of $300 jeans. But the work was cheap in the first place—that was the point. It was cheap and commercial and crass and mass-produced and borderline advertising from the beginning. Warhol even did advertising work for Levi’s in the early ’80s, and apparently frequently wore Levi’s jeans himself, so we can reasonably suppose he’d be behind this project.

The clothing line will include little nods to Warhol’s work: the Silver Luck collection, named for the artist’s “Silver Factory” studio, will have silver threads woven into it, and the buttons will feature tiny images of items from Warhol’s paintings. Jeans will cost $190 to $300, and tops $80 to $300. That’s still a ripoff, price-wise, for some lousy silkscreened 501s, but hey, it’s art now.

LINK: San Francisco Chronicle > Andy Warhol art will adorn new Levi’s line

ABOVE: detail from Matisse’s Portrait of Madame Matisse (1913), for which the painter’s wife did more than a hundred sittings, as described in a new book by Hilary Spurling about Matisse’s Life.

Another biography of a modernist painter, another woeful tale of marital rot, emotional breakdown, aesthetic agony, sexual crisis, and political catastrophe. Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Hilary Spurling’s second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse: Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 in the New Yorker is complimentary, praising the book’s colourful explorations of the last half of Matisse’s life, in which the self-taught painter was initially compared—unfavourably—with Picasso, and later perfected the style of painting called Fauvism.

But of course, being an early 20th century French painter, he was also a total nut. For instance, for his Portrait of Madame Matisse, the painter asked his wife Amelie to sit for the portrait over a hundred times while he fussed interminably with it. Spurling announces in her book that she wishes to dispel first the notion that Matisse was diddling all his models, and second that he was a Vichy for the Nazis. To save you reading the whole thing, Schjeldahl agrees with Spurling that a) he wasn’t and b) he wasn’t. Sorry to spoil the ending for you.

LINK: The New Yorker > Art as life: the Matisse we never knew

ABOVE: MSNBC says more and more museums are accepting “fractional gifts,” or pieces that owners lend them for part of the year, and receive part of a tax return.

The concept of time-sharing—once reserved for Boca Raton condos and the children of divorced parents—is a growing one among gallery donors, MSNBC reported earlier this week. For collectors who like the idea of charity but can’t quite stomach the reality of it right now, “Fractional Giving” is an intermediate step (warning—math ahead): Wealthy Donor X allows Public Gallery Y to display Masterpiece Z, worth value V for a period of time (t) more than zero and less than one (1) year, e.g. 0.25 (three months). X receives a tax return ($) equal to tV. Got it? $ = tV. Or, as MSNBC more succinctly put it, if you donate a $1 million piece of art for 3 months of the year, you’ll get a $250,000 tax receipt. Another three months a few years down the road, another tax receipt, at the art’s new appraised value. Apparently more and more museums are finding their donors asking for this option, and what Wealthy Donor X wants, Wealthy Donor X gets.

Near the end of the article, the true motive of the whole scheme becomes clear, although the author doesn’t really connect the dots: donors get to space out their giving of a single piece over multiple tax years, and the piece is more than likely to appreciate in value over time. That means that the final chunk of display time (before the museum gets the piece forever), will bring in the biggest tax receipt. A pretty sweet system: the donors get to keep the art for longer and they get cumulatively bigger tax writeoffs over several years, instead of one lump sum (V increases, so $ does too). Who says accounting isn’t a creative art?

LINK: MSNBC > SFMOMA turns ‘timeshare’ gifts into an art form

ABOVE: detail from Mark Chamberlain’s Untitled, one of a series of watercolors featuring the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder dabbling in the love that dare not squeak its name, much to the displeasure of D.C. Comics.

There was always something swishy about Batman and Robin—New York painter Mark Chamberlain has just taken it to its obvious extreme. Chelsea gallery owner Kathleen Cullen received a cease-and-desist order from D.C. Comics (the owners of Batman® and all Batmaniana™) after opening a show of Chamberlain’s homoerotic watercolors featuring the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder cuddling, kissing, and posing with their Bat-units out. Cullen is supposed to take down the paintings and turn over the invoices for the pieces she’s already sold so that D.C. can track down the happy new owners (for what nefarious purposes one can only speculate).

Most instances we’ve seen of this story have treated it either as a total fluff piece or as a grave gay-rights/visibility issue, which completely misses the point: this story is about the commercial rights of intellectual property owners slopping over—in reality, aggressively expanding—into areas of legitimate artistic perspective on popular culture. This is an already vast and ever-expanding problem for artists of all kinds, who are discovering that they can depict any kind of grotesque sexual act, religious desecration, or horrific violence, but can’t paint a picture of a guy with pointy ears and a cape without lawyering up. Luckily, the people at Stay Free! magazine are on the ball.

LINK: Stay Free Magazine > Can’t a gay Batman get a break?

ABOVE: Detail from William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (1795), called one of the ten worst paintings in Britain by a panel of experts for the Guardian.

So last week while the BBC was gathering stones together (turn, turn turn), the Guardian was casting them away, (turn, turn, turn) assembling a crack team of misanthropic art wonks to choose the worst paintings in Britain. The whole thing quite succinctly demolishes the entirely vapid and arbitrary contest that the BBC is running with the National Gallery to choose the Greatest Painting in Britain.

The assembled team don’t pull their punches, either, as we felt was best demonstrated by by Sir Timothy Clifford, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland at Edinburgh: “We have been bequested eight paintings by Monticelli, each one more hideous than the last,” he is quoted as saying. “In my 21 years here, none has been hung because I think Monticelli produces screamingly awful art.” And another demolition expert, on The Blind Girl: “This is mawkish Victorian sentimentality at its worst. The butterflies are especially nauseating.” Ah, culture.

LINK: The Guardian > Ten of the Worst

ABOVE: Examples from the golden age of subway-car graffiti in New York. A block-party/fashion show has been denied a permit because artists were going to be doing graffiti murals on replica subway cars.

We’ve come down pretty hard in the past on fashion labels, but today we felt it was necessary to speak for poor little Marc Ecko, the titular designer of Ecko wares, who has been denied the necessary permit to hold a street party to launch the Ecko-designed, graffiti-based video game “Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.” The event was to feature graffiti artists painting murals onto replicas of New York subway cars, but some serious buzzkills at City Hall said that this would encourage people to start vandalizing the real subway again. Ecko et al. have called foul, saying the Mayor’s office is infringing artistic expression.

The artists—and we recognize that some people object to the use of the term in this context, preferring “vandals”—should be allowed to paint. The organizers of the party have committed to leaving even the asphalt pristine by putting tarps down and cordoning off the spray zone. The goal of the event is obviously to sell a boatload of video games, but that’s no reason these people shouldn’t be allowed to temporarily revive an influential and pervasive artistic moment in the history of New York City. There was a time in Manhattan when practically every train car had an elaborate abstract nickname sprayed onto its flank; not everyone remembers it fondly, but it was a cultural landmark regardless, and refusing to allow it based on some phantom intimations of vandalism yet-to-come is specious. This is art in the name of commerce, but it’s still art, and deserves to be seen.

LINK: Newsday > Fashion designer says he’ll sue New York mayor for calling off his graffiti party

ABOVE: A patented Z® Backscatter X-ray image of a suitcase bomb, a product of American Science and Engineering Inc, which manufactures x-ray machines. A Brooklyn artist was constructing a homebrew suitcase bomb this week, as the New York Observer reported.

Chris Hackett, a co-founder of the radical artists’ collective The Madagascar Institute, was reported in yesterday’s New York Observer to be constructing a suitcase bomb to display as part of an upcoming exhibition by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. So far, the sculpture was to be theoretically functional, including a cell-phone trigger, fuel oil, and fertilizer, and would be displayed open so that viewers could see the inside. It’s all a little touchy, of course, because the whole show opens a few days before Sept. 11, and Hackett cheerfully informed the Observer that it would be the equivalent of about four pounds of TNT, or “enough to kill everyone in the gallery.”

This isn’t Hackett’s first time using explosives in his artworks, although his last outing doesn’t inspire confidence: he blew up a propane tank last year while trying to hook it up to a confetti cannon, breaking his jaw in the explosion. Also, when the police arrived, they found a cache of guns and ammunition, and he’s currently out on bail while that weapons charge whoop-de-do gets settled. The planned show is called “A Knock at the Door…” and will be spread out between two venues in Lower Manhattan, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and the South Street Seaport Museum. The LMCC sent a clarification to the Observer later in the day saying that “there will be no hazardous devices on display.” So either the thing isn’t really a bomb, or they’ve pulled it. Remains to be seen which.

LINK: New York Observer > A Bomb Grows in Brooklyn

ABOVE: Detail from Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age) (c. 1920). The sculpture will be part of the upcoming Dada exhibit at the National Gallery.

First, stuff toilet paper in your ears and then come back and read this. Ready? OK, the National Gallery in Washington announced last week that it will be opening an exhibit of Dada in February, examining the “anti-art” movement of the 1920s that tried really hard to break the mold of conventional art appreciation, but was in the end co-opted and absorbed into modern and postmodern art. It’s become so establishment, it seems, that it gets its own show at the National Gallery.

The curators will take one notable step by breaking down the exhibit by city, since Dada manifested itself in different ways in different places. The show will be divided into sections on Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, and Paris, and includes more than 400 works. It seems a bit of a shame to resurrect Dada in such square circumstances, domesticated and musuemized for a docile viewership; it’s safe to say that the founders of Dada would probably be pissed off to see their work treated in such a fashion. But regardless, it was an important artistic moment and it’s happening regardless. The show runs from February 19 to May 14, 2006. You can take the toilet paper out of your ears now, we’ve rocked your world enough for one day.

LINK: National Gallery of Art > First Major International Dada Museum Exhibition…

ABOVE: tiny slices of the shortlisted paintings in the “Greatest Painting” contest being held by the British National Gallery in London. Voting goes until September 4.

The brits started all this “greatest this” and “greatest that” nonsense with their “Greatest Briton” contest in 2002, and the concept has spread worldwide faster than H5N1 Avian Flu, and will soon culminate, we’re sure, in a live television unveiling of a list of the “Greatest cat food can label manufacturer.” Now the National Gallery in London is going ahead with its “Greatest Painting in Britain” contest, and the shortlist of ten potentially great paintings was announced yesterday. They are (as pictured above from left to right):

1. Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait
2. Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ
3. William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress
4. Henry Raeburn, Revd Dr Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch
5. John Constable, The Hay Wain
6. JMW Turner, The Fighting Temeraire
7. Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England
8. Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
9. Van Gogh, Sunflowers
10. David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (not pictured)

The Hockney painting, the website helpfully informs us, cannot be displayed “due to copyright restrictions,” (proving yet again the total slobbering idiocy of 21st century copyright law) so, um, try to imagine how great it is. Voting goes until Sept. 4 and then the ranking will be revealed on the BBC’s Today show. Which, by the way, is a radio show. This is stupid. We’re leaving. [footsteps, door slamming]

LINK: National Gallery > The Greatest Painting in Britain Poll

ABOVE: Bees, british scientists report, adore pictures of flowers just as much as the real thing, and proved to be particular fans of Van Gogh.

This is a little too cute, but it’s Monday and we couldn’t handle seriousness in any case: British scientists announced over the weekend that honeybees prefer to fly toward, and land on, paintings of flowers instead of paintings of other things. To make it a little more surreal, the bees used in the experiment were raised in a laboratory and had never seen any flowers before, real or otherwise. Now, the BBC says that the researchers put four paintings under the flight path of their bees and tracked which ones they landed on; we’re assuming they meant four prints of paintings, since it seems more than a tad unlikely that the National Gallery would have seen fit to loan out Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) for the purposes of apian art appreciation.

The Van Gogh painting was the bees’ favourite, as the curious insects stopped to check it out 146 times and landed on it 15 times to try and suck out its sweet, sweet nectar; they soon found it was a cruel trick played by scientists with too much time on their hands. “The results show that the flower paintings have captured the essence of floral features,” Professor Lars Chittka told the Beeb, which essentially means that bees have proved—through science—what we knew all along: pictures of flowers actually do look kind of like flowers. Where’s the Nobel Prize committee?

LINK: BBC > Art-loving bees prefer Sunflowers

ABOVE: Charles Foster Kane’s beloved sled, Rosebud, burning at the end of Citizen Kane—burning just like the London Momart warehouse which engulfed £20 million worth of art. A bit literal, sure, but we’re not feeling complex today.

In May, 2004, a fire at the London facilities of Momart, a fine art storage and shipping firm, burned to the ground, taking its precious cargo with it. Now, more than 50 artists, collectors, and galleries who had entrusted their works to Momart are collectively suing the company for £20 million, alleging that the place was a firetrap. Momart has gently reminded its former customers that the warehouse burned down because an arsonist set fire to an adjacent building, but this has placated no one. A lawyer representing the largest group called the warehouse “a disaster waiting to happen.”

And these plaintiffs are not a bunch of grannies who lost their kitten watercolors: Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi, Gillian Ayres, Victoria Miro, and Janet de Botton all had pieces go up in smoke. Charles Saatchi settled with his insurers last year for about £10 million and is not part of the present lawsuits, but his firm Saatchi & Saatchi, which also stored items from its collection at Momart, certainly is. It’s enough to make you keep your Turners in a sock under the bed.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Artists sue Momart for £20 million

ABOVE: detail from Picasso’s Femme en Blanc (1922). A lawsuit over the Nazi lineage of the painting has been settled for $6.5 million.

Talk about your bad investments: Chicago collector Marilynn Alsdorf bought Picasso’s Femme en Blanc from a New York art dealer in 1975 for $357,000. Last month, just to hold on to the damn thing, she had to pay a further $6.5 million. Most Picasso originals, they’ll, you know, appreciate in value, but not this one. Because this is no ordinary Picasso: it is a Picasso with the bloody bootprints of Nazi looters all over it—metaphorically, of course—and that changes everything. The Chicago Tribune has the story.

Ms. Alsdorf, who is 80, says that she didn’t know the painting’s dark history: it started off in the house of the widowed Carlota Landsberg of Berlin, was later sent to Paris, and then was lost when the city was occupied. Mrs. Landsberg had sought the painting until her death in 1994, but now her grandson, Thomas Bennigson of California, is the one who will actually take payment on the settlement. Alsdorf says she wanted to settle because the uncertain outcome of the suit was affecting her bequest plans. It’s hard for us to feel particularly sorry for any of the wealthy parties in this story except the poor Mrs. Landsberg, who never saw her suitably melancholic painting again.

LINK: Chicago Tribune > $6.5 million will end Picasso fight

ABOVE: Detail from Xiao Yu’s Ruan (1999), which is a real human fetus head grafted onto a real seagull body, preserved in formaldehyde. The work is being “investigated” after being removed from a show of contemporary Chinese art in Bern.

OK, we’ve all watched Six Feet Under, and every Sally Housecoat in the Western Hemisphere is a CSI addict: the sight of putrefying human flesh has lately come to be considered light entertainment. So it’s a little surprising that the above image still inspires such visceral shock and disgust. But it is. This is disgusting. It’s the head of a human fetus grafted on to the body of a seagull with rabbit eyes sewn on to its face. The artist, Xiao Yu, says that the seagull and the fetus both died because there was “something wrong with them,” (this is what he told the Associated Press) and that sewing them together allowed them to “have a new life.” So there’s a statement being made here—our question is whether this statement required, um, human taxidermy.

Evidently, that’s the same question that Adrien de Riedmatten, the concerned citizen who complained to the Bern, Switzerland, District Attorney’s office, also asked. It seems that there is confusion about where and when the fetus head originated (what, did Xiao keep the receipt or something?) and how exactly it shuffled off this mortal coil. Riedmatten refers to it as a “baby,” which is obviously a terminological scab which we will not pick at here. Anyway, the show of Chinese avant-garde art, “Mahjong,” is still forging ahead at the Kunstmuseum Bern without Yu’s piece, which was part of the 2001 Venice Biennale. On August 22 the museum is hosting a symposium with philosophers, ethicists, and artists to decide whether to put Ruan back in.

LINK: L.A. Times > Chinese Artist Defends Fetus Artwork