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Ben Kefauver

an obscure 36 year old cultural reference is just not quite enough to tip off the parody.
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One of the many ironies of the Schwarz urinals is that they are carefully crafted earthenware sculptures modelled on the Stieglitz photo of the “original”. Every edition has a story, but there is no beating the provenance of the 13th one. Dubbed “the prototype” and bearing Duchamp's signature, it slipped quietly onto the market in 1973 at the then fledgling gallery of Ronald Feldman in New York. Andy Warhol, who visited the gallery repeatedly, pressed Mr Feldman to trade the urinal for some of his own portraits. “Duchamp didn't sell well in those days,” says Mr Feldman, “but Andy knew what multiples meant because he made them.”

via afc news sidebar When Warhol died in 1987, his urinal was consigned to Sotheby's as part of his giant five-volume estate sale. “Fountain” was buried in a volume devoted to prints and given a lowly estimate of $2,000-2,500. It sold for $65,750 to Dakis Joannou, a Greek-Cypriot construction tycoon, and is now enshrined in the front hall of his main home in Athens. “I couldn't believe that we could actually own it,” says Mr Joannou. “People didn't appreciate its historical importance, so we got a bargain.” In the following decade, Duchamp's renown increased yet again, as did the marketing of his work. In 1999 Sotheby's put an official Schwarz urinal on the cover of its Contemporary Art evening sale catalogue; it commanded $1.8m.

Collectors of contemporary art are comfortable acquiring individual works in series, but they don't relish unlimited editions or dodgy authorship. Some may be dismayed to learn that there are at least three more “Duchamp urinals”. Gio di Maggio, a collector whose Fondazione Mudima is in Milan, and Luisella Zignone, a Duchamp collector based in Biella, both have “Fountains” that Mr Schwarz says he gave as gifts. Sergio Casoli, a Milan dealer, is also thought to own one. (He declined to comment.)

Mr Schwarz claims that these works were made in 1964 under Duchamp's direction, but were not included in the original edition due to “imperfections”. (It is unlikely that more than 17 urinals could have survived from this edition, but only Mr Schwarz knows for sure.) None of the newly discovered pieces have the “Marcel Duchamp” signature of official ready-mades. Nevertheless, the “Fountains” owned by Mr Di Maggio and Mrs Zignone have been shown in public institutions in Basel and Buenos Aires. In interview, Mr Schwarz reluctantly confirmed that he is trying to sell a fourth “Fountain” for an undisclosed sum, which one source says is $2.5m. (When pressed, Mr Schwarz says the asking price depends on whether the purchaser is a museum, a well-reputed collector or a speculator.)

The artist’s estate is not pleased. Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, the head of the Association for the Protection and Conservation of works by Marcel Duchamp, says that “neither my mother nor I ever sanctioned the sale of unauthorised ready-mades.” Mrs Monnier’s mother, “Teeny”, was married to Pierre Matisse, the dealer son of the Henri, before she married Duchamp, making her an heir to both the Henri Matisse and Duchamp estates. She sees Mr Schwarz's activities as curious given that “Arturo was a great friend of Marcel.”

Some Duchamp connoisseurs are outraged. Francis M. Naumann, a scholar and dealer who has published widely on Duchamp, argues that these urinals cannot be considered Duchamps at all. “For Duchamp, the signature was everything,” he argues. “It is the single most important element in the process of transforming an ordinary everyday object into a work of art.”

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The Rolling Stones’ classic Exile on Main Street — one of Rolling Stone’s highest-ranking Greatest Albums of All Time — is returning as a very special reissue. On May 18th, Universal Music Group is re-releasing the album with 10 never-before-heard tracks, including “Plundered My Soul,” “Dancing in the Light,” “Following the River” and “Pass the Wine,” that were produced by Jimmy Miller, the Glimmer Twins and Don Was. The disc also features alternate versions of “Soul Survivor” and “Loving Cup.”

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sam you made the pants too long


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raised beds
cold frames


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swamp thing


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from james meyer minimalism art and polemics in the sixties ("Specific Objects" pages 140-141):

As Francis Colpitt has observed, for Judd, to take an interest in a thing is "to value that thing." "Does the work hold your interest?" Judd would ask. "Do you want to live with it and think about it?" Declaring that a work "needs only to be interesting," Judd means that it only be worth looking at. It may not be a good work, but it held ones gaze. A work that caused one to look again was even more interesting; a great work had a lasting interest. Judd seems to have adopted Perry's notion for another reason. A term of judgement, "interest" sounded more neutral, more objective perhaps, than effusive panegyrics favored by the writers at Artnews durring the late fifties.

[...]

In short Judd did not intend to supplant Greenbergian "quality" with a non-evaluative interest. He meant to suggest that a work that was interesting was worth looking at not "merely" interesting.

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14bus


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edit: Erwin Hauer

pierced cement blocks of very vintage vegas

(modular constructivisim)
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[ ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In its unhallowed brazenness Waters's Visit Marfa calls for a reconsideration of Judd's enterprise and, by extension, Minimalism as a whole. Its multiple assaults could be addressed, even rebuked one by one. Still, the allusion to Judd's bed should not be overlooked, particularly in light of the recent "Minimalist-art tour" of Manhattan offered by the Guggenheim's curators. The list of attractions, recounted in the New York Times, is in no way exhaustive. Happy tourists hopped from a restaurant designed by Richard Meier in TriBeCa to the Flavinesque window display of the Apple Store in SoHo, but they could just as well have glanced at the even more Flavinesque window of the Helmut Lang boutique a block away, and rather than visiting the Jil Sander store uptown, they might have patronized Calvin Klein on Madison Avenue, replete with excellent examples of Judd's furniture. The question is, in short: Has Minimalism merely turned decor? Have Minimalist sculptors become, as Barnett Newman would have said, just new "Bauhaus screwdriver designers"? The answer is yes, but only in part, and I am not certain that Judd was the foremost agent of this devolution, even if he did design furniture. Flavin's exhibitionist staging of his wedding in the rotunda of the Guggenheim during his own exhibition there is much more to the point. Indeed, as Lucy Lippard reminds us in her 1968 essay "10 Structurists in 20 Paragraphs," Flavin himself spoke of Minimalism as a longing for a "common sense of keenly realized decoration."

Let us say, first, that this scenario is inevitable. Meyer Schapiro long ago remarked on fashion's co-optation of modern art in the immediate aftermath of the 1913 Armory Show. Since then, the market forces at play--and not simply those of the culture industry--have grown exponentially. Second, being able to design good furniture does not mean that your art becomes mere design. Judd was adamant on this point, establishing a clear distinction between the two practices even if he admitted that both his furniture and his sculptures, particularly when in plywood, had a similar look. (On this score he was perfectly right: Although Mondrian's art was long thought of as design, no one in his or her right mind would return to this misconception on account of the similarity between his late canvases and the latticed tables and shelves he built in his studio.) Third, it is hardly a tragedy that current design appropriates certain features of Minimalism, even if this appropriation is a complete misprision .

I do not mind at all that architects look at Minimal art if this leads them to dispense with their ridiculous froufrous. Fourth, Minimal art is especially hard to install, which is what led Judd to architecture in the first place. For all its ponderous piety, his Marfa fiefdom does offer us a precise document of what he meant by marrying architectural and sculptural space, and it remains stunning. Judd was perfectly correct in thinking that the best way to ensure that his works would forever be seen in a proper setting was to provide it himself.

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windorsky casement windows

via justin
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reclaimed redwood waterpipe

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coffee wiffer

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whit-bi '10


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Koons’s recourse to an air of collegiality and aesthetic assault is dictated by a distinct vulnerability in his position. His career and the plutocratic culture that it has adorned represent an epoch-making collusion of mega-collectors and leading artists, which has overridden the former gatekeeping roles of critics and curators and sidelined the traditional gallerists who work with artists on a long-term basis of mutual loyalty. With numbing regularity, newly hot artists have abandoned such nurture for gaudy, precarious deals with corporate-style dealers like Larry Gagosian, Pace-Wildenstein, and David Zwirner. In the boom era, buzz about the opportunistic exhibitions of such dealers and the latest sales figures from art fairs and auction houses were what passed for critical discourse. The situation mesmerized newcomers, by flashing promises of ascension to the starry feeding trough. Now that such promises can no longer be made, the posturing of “Skin Fruit”—roughly, noblesse oblige, laced with a left-libertarian raciness—cannot long deflect the mounting potency of class resentment. People are going to notice that the defensive elements, in this particular scrimmage of sensibilities, are members of the putatively vanguard aristocracy of wealth and social clout. The future of art, and the corresponding character of cultured society, seem bound to be determined by some smart, talented, as yet unidentified parties among the howling sansculottes. ♦

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