Happy Birthday, Mr. Burroughs
T-Shirt photo via Cory Q | Monkey River Town
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The Great Contemporary Art Bubble
February 5th, 2010 Comments
via artdaily.org
Ben Lewis stands outside of Christie’s.
LONDON.- The contemporary art boom is now over, but between 2003 and Autumn 2008 the world witnessed a craze for collecting contemporary art unprecedented in history.
During the last frenzied year of this boom, art critic and film-maker Ben Lewis followed the contemporary art market, travelling to art fairs, auctions, museums, and the offices and homes of billionaire art collectors,, interviewing dealers, auctioneers, gallery-owners, art market analysts and art collectors, trying to find out the reasons behind this historic phenomenon. He uncovered a world of complicated deals, distinctive market practices and widespread secrecy as well as passionate enthusiasm for contemporary art.
On September 15th 2008, the day of the collapse of Lehmans, the worst financial news since 1929, Damien Hirst sold over £70 million of his art, in an auction at Sotheby’s that would total £111 million over two days. It was the peak of the contemporary art bubble – the greatest rise in the financial value of art in the history of the world.
One art critic and film-maker was banned by Sotheby’s and Hirst from attending this historic auction: Ben Lewis.
Why? He had spent a year making a documentary searchng for the reasons behind the booming contemporary art market, and they claimed he was “biased” against them and contemporary art.
During the easy-credit boom years, there were bubbles in many assets – property, wine, copper, oil. But there was one bubble that was bigger than all the rest: contemporary art. An Andy Warhol sold for $72 million, a Rothko for $73 million, and a Francis Bacon for $86 million. While the rest of the economy began to falter under the Credit Crunch in late 2007, the contemporary art bubble kept on inflating, bigger and fatter than ever before.
Art critic and film-maker Ben Lewis spent all of 2008 investigating this contemporary art bubble. Everywhere he went, the art world told him that the contemporary art boom would go on forever, fuelled by a new passion from the world’s super-rich. But Lewis found other big reasons for the contemporary art boom – a world of unusual market practices, speculation, secrecy and tax breaks that involved the whole art world – dealers, collectors, galleries, auction houses and, in some senses, even public museums.
In the climax of the film, Lewis’ discoveries lead him to play his own part in the bursting of the contemporary art bubble, which is revealed for the first time in this film.
Finally the moment came that he had long predicted. A month after the Hirst auction at Sotheby’s, the contemporary art market crashed, dropping by 40% in November 2008 and 75% by February 2009, and still falling today.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble is not only a film about the art market , it may be read as a parable for the delusion and greed which drove the world economy over the edge in 2008. In future years the contemporary art bubble may come to be seen as the epitome of the boom-times we have been living through.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble
http://benlewis.tv/
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The Moose & Pussy Issue Five
January 24th, 2010 Comments
The Moose & Pussy Issue Five (The Moose & Pussy Vs. The Sexless Marriage), will be launching on Tuesday, January 26th at the Mercury Lounge at 56 Byward Market Square in partnership with Place Records’ electronic music night. Artists include pH and Adam Saikaley.
So come out for an evening of sexy readings and rad beats in a venue that looks like something out of a David Lynch film, starting at 9pm. Facebook Event here.
Contributors include: Jessica Azevedo, Andrew Battershill, Danielle Blasko, Tanya Decarie, Kira-Lynn Ferderber, Barbara Foster, John Grochalski, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Jenna Jarvis, Kristel Jax, Kasandra Larsen, Stephen S. Mills, Katie Moore, Pippa Rogers, Ken Shakin, Rachael Simpson, Christine Sirois, Chris Weige and, last, but not least, Rotem Yaniv.
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HOWL Premieres at Sundance
January 21st, 2010 Comments
“You feel a responsibility to get it right,” said actor James Franco regarding what it was like portraying one of his heroes, poet Allen Ginsberg, in the anticipated new film HOWL. The movie, which pays homage to Ginsberg’s epic poem, is set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Thursday. (…)
In 1956, one of the most controversial works of American art galvanized a generation. Now, the story behind Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL come to life in a genre-defying feature film that is at once a legal drama, a character study and an animated trip into the magic and madness of the modern world.
James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg – poet, counter-culture adventurer and chronicler of the Beat Generation – who recounts in his famously confessional, leave-nothing-out style the road trips, love affairs and search for personal liberation that led to the most timeless and electrifying work of his career, the poem “Howl.”
Meanwhile, in a San Francisco courtroom, “Howl” is on trial. Prosecutor Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn) sets out to prove that the book should be banned, while suave defense attorney Jake Ehrlich (Jon Hamm) argues fervently for freedom of speech and creative expression. The proceedings veer from the comically absurd to the fervently passionate as a host of unusual witnesses (Jeff Daniels, Mary Louise Parker, Treat Williams, Alessandro Nivola) pit generation against generation and art against fear in front of conservative Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban).
The trial’s heated controversy and Ginsberg’s provocative memories are woven around “Howl” itself, its images of ecstasy and anguish, of desire, madness and wonder, brought to vivid, visceral life in a fever dream of inventive animation. Echoing the vastness and originality of Ginsberg’s poem, HOWL mashes up genres and rides wild emotions as it reveals all the ways a fearless work of art impacted its creator and the world.
Opening night at Sundance used to be the province of big crossover movies that linked the independent world and Hollywood. But the new festival director, John Cooper, is shaking things up. “I was inspired by this film,” he says. “It’s time to talk about art in America again, not just healthcare because art really can change everything. We owe so much to Ginsberg.” (…)
‘The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later’ (Greil Marcus)
How Allen Died (in the words of Gelek Rimpoche)
After 50 Years, Ginsberg’s ‘howl’ Still Resonates by Npr
Download now or listen on posterous
Download now or listen on posterous
howl20061027_atc_16.mp3 (3843 KB)
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Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway
January 21st, 2010 Comments
Allen Ginsberg at that same ‘Beatnik party’ in Chicago, Ill., October 1959 – his hand is fondling the dog Corso is feeding cookies to
(Good art on that wall!)
(Photo: Francis Miller, LIFE)
Gregory Corso w/ milk, cookies, dog & the hand of Allen Ginsberg
(Photo, cropped – Francis Miller, Chicago 1959 – LIFE)
Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway
Of course I tried to tell him
but he cranked his head
without an excuse.
I told him the sky chases
the sun
And he smiled and said:
‘What’s the use.’
I was feeling like a demon
again
So I said: ‘But the ocean chases
the fish.’
This time he laughed
and said: ‘Suppose the
strawberry were
pushed into a mountain.’
After that I knew the
war was on?
So we fought:
He said: ‘The apple-cart like a
broomstick-angel
snaps & splinters
old dutch shoes.’
I said: ‘Lightning will strike the old oak
and free the fumes!’
He said: ‘Mad street with no name.’
I said: ‘Bald killer! Bald killer! Bald killer!’
He said, getting real mad,
‘Firestoves! Gas! Couch!’
I said, only smiling,
‘I know God would turn back his head
if I sat quietly and thought.’
We ended by melting away,
hating the air!
Gregory Corso at a poetry reading, 1959 (Photo: Francis Miller, LIFE)
Perhaps he read them this one, from Gasoline
Last Night I Drove a Car
Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
people I loved
went 120 through one town.
I stopped at Hedgeville
and slept in the back seat
excited about my new life.
She thought society had run out of poems
January 15th, 2010 Comments
Poetry returns to N.Y. Transit
The Poetry in Motion campaign, which places poetry in New York buses and subways, is returning this month after a two-year absence.
In 2008, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority decided to suspend free access to ad space for the short poems selected by the Poetry Society of America.
So now the Poetry Society is paying for ad space, says the group’s executive director Alice Quinn, who is poetry editor for the New Yorker.
Quinn told CBC Radio’s Q cultural affairs show the society felt strongly that poetry was important, both to make commuters feel better, and improve the quality of life in the city.
“I think [poems] can be rediscovered anew on repeated readings in the crowded world of a commuter’s day,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “They provide more than solace, they provide a heart-stopping jolt. It’s just a very important and popular program.”
Quinn said she was mystified why the New York transit system ended Poetry in Motion, which was originally a free program. A transit official was quoted as saying she thought the society had “run out of poems.”
It may have been a matter of a new director wanting to put her stamp on operations, Quinn said.
Poetry in Motion had been in operation for 15 years and was a model for other such programs on transit systems across North America.
” I often saw people memorizing poems” while riding a bus or a subway, Quinn said.
The Poetry Society had to boost its fundraising to pay for ad space for its selection of poems.
Quinn said she thinks poetry is more popular now than it has been in 30 years, thanks in part to the music world.
“I think rap has helped poetry. Whenever you expose young children to it, they absolutely adore it. When you’re first learning speech, there is a lot of chiming that babies do ? rhyme is a very innate thing for us,” she said.
The poems planned for the transit system in 2010 include some Emily Dickinson, a 10th century Japanese poem, a 9th century Aztec poem and a “cheeky, chiding poem” by Stevie Smith called Deathbed of a Financier.
via CBC News
Metrophobia: Are We Afraid of Poetry?
January 14th, 2010 Comments
Finally, it seems, we are rising from the sick-bed of Metrophobia, and returning to poetry.
Metrophobia (otherwise known as the fear of poetry), an American pandemic more tenacious than Swine Flu, is finally on the wane. And not a moment too soon.
For the last few generations, our nation has managed to marginalize poetry, an art that is and always has been central to the species. Since the earliest hominids sounded their pre-literate, poetic musilanguage to one another, since ancient Greek orators recited poems at the Olympic Games, since the first Griot in Mali turned the history of his tribe into poetry, igniting a tradition carried on by his descendants today, since Sappho’s lyrics, Basho’s haikus and Rumi’s ghazals, poetry has been known to be a necessary nutrient in the human diet, as essential as breath or music.
And still today in most countries, poetry resides in its time-honored place at the heart of the culture. There, people turn to poetry the way we turn to the music that fills our homes and cars, the art that covers our walls, the architecture that lines our streets, the plays, dance and film that fill our theatres. In the Middle East, for instance, the most popular prime-time TV show is The Million’s Poet, boasting an audience of over 70 million viewers and ratings higher than sports or the news. Within a format similar to American Idol, male and female poets from throughout the Gulf region, some from very poor Bedouin tribes, perform poems on all themes imaginable. The show has even inspired a TV channel completely dedicated to poetry.
In most cultures, reciting poetry is not relegated to the poets, or to the alabaster halls of academia. People who never dreamed of being poets, and some who cannot read or write, recite their favorite poems at the slightest provocation. Poems are recited at parties, at the family dinner table, on the street. My students from Wales and Ireland describe how the poems of Dylan Thomas or William Butler Yeats are exchanged into the night at almost any local pub. (…)
Interrobang by Kumi
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