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john zorn: genius grant
its in alphabetical order so youll have to scroll (but you knew that). the summer of the first year i moved to new york city (82?) i saw zorn perform several times. he was using (playing) various duck-calls blown in to a shallow bowl of water seated at a card table. GENIUS!! seriously.
the next year we started an east village gallery at 104 e10th st. i comissioned a show called "works in concrete" that was devoted to visual writing or concrete poetry work on paper. it included a whole bunch of people related to the local avant garde film scene. some nyu film students we knew took classes with abigail child whos extended crowd included word and concrete poets henry hill, chas burnstein, etc. also zorn, who was a fave for film soundtrack purposes. we included a bunch of his xerox street advert show flyers done in the ransom note cut and paste stye. Genius!
1) didnt we determine mr hirst intentionally botched the pickling process to make it rot on purpose a la' "bad boy"?
2) did we know about saatchis skinning and stuff job?
3) hirst the richest man in the uk?
But as a result of inadequate preservation efforts, time was not kind to the original, which slowly decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled, and the solution in the tank turned murky. (It didn’t help that the Saatchi Gallery added bleach to the solution, hastening the decay, staff members at Mr. Hirst’s studio said.) In 1993 Mr. Saatchi’s curators finally had the shark skinned and stretched the skin over a fiberglass mold.
“It didn’t look as frightening,’’ Mr. Hirst recalled. “You could tell it wasn’t real. It had no weight.’’
[...]
Mr. Hirst acknowledges that once the shark is replaced, art historians will argue that the piece cannot be considered the same artwork. “It’s a big dilemma,’’ he said. “Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a Conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.’’