Sometimes You Get It Right…

And When You Do, Why Not Crow About It?!

I bought this painting 30 years ago in a yard sale from a neighbor, who was Pakistani, as he was leaving the housing development we lived in then. I didn’t know the artist, but I very much liked the painting, and paid $5,000 for it.

A year later, my ex-neighbor called me and offered to repurchase the painting for $6,000. I declined. Every few years, he called me anew, making consecutively higher offers. The last one I turned down was, I think, $20,000. At that point, I decided to do some research on the artist. (Not easy. No Google then.) I discovered that he was an important Pakistani modernist. His name is Sadequain Naqqash. His work hangs in the Lahore Museum, the most important art museum in Pakistan, as well as dozens of other major museums around the world.

Last week, Suzanne, my partner in Ford Fine Art, told me that one of his pieces, similar to but smaller than mine, had recently sold at Artcurial in Paris for $146,000 (with buyer’s premium). I got online and did some checking on my own. Another piece of his sold recently for almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Wow! Am I smart, or what?!

Things like this have rarely happened in the art world. And these days, thanks to the internet, they almost never do.

But when it happens, it’s hard not to brag about it. So, there you go.

Performance Art or Wanton Destruction of Property?

On Monday, July 4, two people from a group calling itself Just Stop Oil went into the National Gallery in London and glued themselves to the frame of John Constable’s The Hay Wain. They also covered the painting with a modified version, showing the same bucolic landscape but with planes passing over a sullied sky. According to CNN, this was the third such “protest” engaged in by the group in recent weeks. “New fossil fuels are a death project by our government,” one of them said. “So yes there is glue on the frame of this painting, but there is blood on the hands of our government.”

The Ara Pacis Museum 

Every time we are in Rome, K and I stop by the Ara Pacis, a museum built around a 2,000-year-old altar dedicated to the goddess of peace.

The altar itself is a never-flagging source of pleasure. Enclosed, as it now is, in an enormous steel and glass box makes it somehow better. (As you can imagine, the ultra-modern enclosure – part of a massive redesign of the museum – was controversial from the moment it opened in 2006.)

The museum is currently exhibiting a retrospective of the work of Robert Doisneau, the French photographer that produced those iconic black and white images of Paris between 1930 and 1950.

Like this one…

I love retrospectives like these. They give you the opportunity to see the scope of an artist’s work over a lifetime. It is always informative, and sometimes helps you understand why and how his/her reputation developed.

“Go to Hell With Your Money” 

I’m not ideologically inclined to like Asger Jorn’s school of art. But I have a number of pieces by him in a collection of COBRA art that I inherited through my first failed attempt at the art business. And so I was delighted to read a telegram he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1964, rejecting the $2,500 award they had given him for his work.

1. 1. GUGGENHEIM. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION N.Y.

GO TO HELL WITH YOUR MONEY BASTARD. REFUSE PRICE. NEVER ASKED FOR IT. AGAINST ALL DECENSY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY. I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME. JORN

(Source: Letters of Note)

More on the Conceptual Art Scam 

On May 16, I wrote about a discussion I’ve been having with my partners in producing my next book on Central American art. The issue at hand is conceptual art and why I think so much of it is BS.

Click here to read a review of a new book on the subject that makes my argument cogently: The Fraud of Contemporary Art by Avelina Lesper.

Another great essay by the great Theodore Dalrymple in Taki’s Magazine, this one on junk art. Here’s an excerpt:

            “Empty Frames”

“Only a couple of weeks after the draping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a Danish self-designated artist called Jens Haaning has exhibited a work, or possibly two works (depending on how you look at it, or them), called Take the Money and Run. They consisted of two empty frames, one larger than the other.

“Haaning had previously exhibited two works, An Average Danish Annual Income, which consisted of Danish currency notes (lent by a bank) in a frame, and An Average Austrian Annual Income (likewise in Euros). The Aalborg Kunsten Museum of Modern Art asked him to reproduce these great works for an exhibition at the museum to be called “Working It Out” and paid him $85,000 to do so.

“The artist, however, thought it would be more interesting – for whom he did not say – to create a new work rather than copy or repeat the old, hence the two empty frames. The museum asked for its money back, but the artist refused. I must say that in the dispute between them, my sympathies are with the artist. He was like one of those highly colored insects that proclaims its poisonousness to all would-be predators; no one who gave him $85,000 could have thought that he was going to get a Velasquez or a Vermeer in exchange. And in fact, Mr. Haaning, wittingly or unwittingly (I suspect the former), performed a useful social service by exposing the fatuity of the way in which, in our contemporary conditions, money for the arts is doled out by the supposed keepers of the flame….

“It then occurred to me that the episode suggests a way forward for Western art.”

To read the entire essay, click here. 

I became a fan of M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist, the moment I saw this print. His pictures seemed designed to draw me in and hold me in a way that was enticing but also disturbing. They are like some of Dali’s landscapes, but more puzzles than dreams.

In any case, there’s now a movie about him. Dutch filmmaker Robin Lutz has just released M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. According to a review on the Zeitgeist Films website, it provides an “entertaining, eye-opening portrait” of the artist “through his own words and images; diary musings, excerpts from lectures, correspondence and more.”

You can check it out here.

How to Apologize for Being Drunk 

Getting drunk, behaving badly, and then apologizing for it is as old as civilization. In Dunhuang, China, a thousand years ago, it was so common that the municipality’s Bureau of Etiquette came up with an official apology letter for its public officials to use.

What follows is an actual example of that letter, discovered in a cave in 1900. It was sent in 856 AD. (Source: Letters of Note)

Official Apology 

“Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state. The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realised what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame. It was due to a vessel of my small capacity being filled for the nonce too full. I humbly trust that you in your wise benevolence will not condemn me for my transgression. Soon I will come to apologise in person, but meanwhile I beg to send this written communication for your kind inspection. Leaving much unsaid, I am yours respectfully.”

The Reply 

“Yesterday, Sir, while in your cups, you so far overstepped the observances of polite society as to forfeit the name of gentleman, and made me wish to have nothing more to do with you. But since you now express your shame and regret for what has occurred, I would suggest that we meet again for a friendly talk.”

Wonder how an ordinary New Mexico couple pulled off a $150 million art heist? Click here.