Whipped Cream Difficulties

Not really anything new, but by way of the Statesman, we learn that Damien Hirst is having a retrospective exhibition, opening on Wednesday at the Tate Modern.

You may remember Mr. Hirst as one of WCD’s favorite modern artists, responsible for such works as “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”:

Yeah, that one. I believe last time we touched on Mr. Hirst’s work, he was making wheel covers for 4x4s.

According to the exhibition’s website, the shark will be there.  Which raises some questions: last we heard, the shark was not in the best of shape. (EtA: I forgot about the NYT article stating that they were replacing the shark.) And how do you move a tank full of formaldehyde with a shark suspended in it? (Answer: “Very carefully.” Thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

Art critic Julian Spalding recently called Hirst’s creations “worthless as works of art” and advised anyone who owns them to sell now, before the artificially inflated market collapses.

My other favorite quote:

“People don’t like contemporary art,” Hirst said Monday as reporters swarmed over the exhibition like — well, like flies over a cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.

“like flies over a cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation” is my new favorite analogy, replacing “The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.” I encourage people to join me in making frequent use of this turn of phrase.

The rock arrived safely at LACMA.

And the LAT has collected a bunch (but I don’t think all) of their coverage here. Just in case you want to relive the story from the beginning.

The LAT is still covering the LACMA boulder.

An estimated 20,000 people came to Atlantic Avenue for what became a street festival in honor of the rock. Local artists painted renderings. Onlookers said they had taken vacation days from work to be there. The party lasted five hours longer than planned; community organizers had to beg a disc jockey to stick around.

And (ahem):

The installation, “Levitated Mass,” is so highly abstract that some question whether it is art at all.

The rock is on schedule to arrive at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art early Saturday morning, barring technical difficulties.

There’s a market in everything. But did you know there was a substantial market in paintings of dogs?

“Dejeuner,” a painting that shows dogs and cats eating from a large dish, set a record for the artist, William Henry Hamilton Trood (1860-1899), when it sold for $194,500, Fausel said. That record was broken an hour later when Trood’s “Hounds in a Kennel,” showing a half-dozen dogs staring at a bird outside their cage, sold for $212,500.

There’s even a dog painting specific auction (which takes place after the Westminster Dog Show, and where the above sales took place) and a dog painting specific gallery in Manhattan. (That’s one thing I love about New York; say what you will about the city, but no matter how esoteric and specific your interest is, there’s almost certainly a store in the city catering specifically to it.)

Cutting off the punchlines…

American painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1884-1934) was known for his whimsical, cartoonlike images of dogs playing poker. The Doyle Auction House in New York sold one of them in 2008 for $602,500. But while Coolidge’s paintings and prints of gambling hounds have their devoted fans, they are not considered part of the canine art market, Secord said, because they are not realistic.

And in case you were wondering, Lawrence, Labradors and golden retrievers are apparently the most popular dog painting subjects today. Personally, I’m wondering how anyone gets a golden retriever to sit still long enough for a painting, but perhaps that’s just me.