Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Obit watch: June 29, 2022.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

Hershel “Woody” Williams, big damn hero and Medal of Honor recipient. He was 98.

His Medal of Honor citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as demolition sergeant serving with the 21st Marines, 3d Marine Division, in action against enemy Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, 23 February 1945. Quick to volunteer his services when our tanks were maneuvering vainly to open a lane for the infantry through the network of reinforced concrete pillboxes, buried mines, and black volcanic sands, Cpl. Williams daringly went forward alone to attempt the reduction of devastating machine-gun fire from the unyielding positions. Covered only by four riflemen, he fought desperately for four hours under terrific enemy small-arms fire and repeatedly returned to his own lines to prepare demolition charges and obtain serviced flamethrowers, struggling back, frequently to the rear of hostile emplacements, to wipe out one position after another. On one occasion, he daringly mounted a pillbox to insert the nozzle of his flamethrower through the air vent, killing the occupants, and silencing the gun; on another he grimly charged enemy riflemen who attempted to stop him with bayonets and destroyed them with a burst of flame from his weapon. His unyielding determination and extraordinary heroism in the face of ruthless enemy resistance were directly instrumental in neutralizing one of the most fanatically defended Japanese strongpoints encountered by his regiment and aided vitally in enabling his company to reach its objective. Cpl. Williams’ aggressive fighting spirit and valiant devotion to duty throughout this fiercely contested action sustain and enhance the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

According to the paper of record, he was “the last survivor among the 472 servicemen who were awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in World War II and the oldest living recipient of the medal”.

(Alternative link.)

Lawrence’s tribute from 2019.

Margaret Keane, the painter of big-eyed children.

In 1970, on a trip to San Francisco, Ms. Keane told a reporter that her former husband had painted none of the big-eyed waifs, and offered to prove it with a demonstration of their respective painting abilities in Union Square. The media splash drew crowds. Ms. Keane arrived with paints and easel. But Mr. Keane did not show up, and he continued to play the part of the successful artist.
In 1986, Ms. Keane raised another dramatic “paint-off” challenge — this time in a Honolulu court, where she had brought a defamation suit against Mr. Keane for falsely claiming that he had painted her work. Her lawyers argued that a painting demonstration was the only way to settle the case. A judge agreed.
In less than an hour, Ms. Keane executed a big-eyed urchin. Mr. Keane, who represented himself in the case, said he had a sore shoulder and could not lift his arm to paint.

Posted in Art, Heroism, History, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 13, 2022.

Sunday, February 13th, 2022

Ian McDonald, co-founder of King Crimson and Foreigner.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Lars Eighner. I’m not sure how many people outside of Austin recognize that name. For those long time Austinites, this should be a blast from the past.

Mr. Eighner lost his job and spent three years homeless on the streets of Austin with his dog. He wrote periodically for the “Austin Chronicle”, and eventually published Travels With Lizbeth about that experience. He published two other books after that, but those were less successful.

I’m going to put this last obit behind a jump. I’m noting it because it’s a sad sundae with chopped sad and a sad cherry on top.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#61 in a series)

Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Damien Hirst has done other works than “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living“.

One of those was a diamond encrusted skull called “For the Love of God”.

Back in 2007, Hirst’s market was exploding. The same year he said he sold For the Love of God, his work made a total of $86.3 million at auction, according to the Artnet Price Database. The following year, he notoriously sold his work directly through Sotheby’s for a whopping $201 million. But his auction sales never approached those heights again. (Last year, his work generated $38 million, a 13-year high.)

Hirst has claimed for a while now that he sold the work for $100 million in 2007.

Turns out…

In a profile published in the New York Times on the occasion of his first New York show in four years, Hirst said the work, titled For the Love of God and allegedly made from more than 8,600 diamonds, was sitting in a storage facility in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district.
According to Hirst, he still owns the bauble in partnership with his gallery, White Cube, and a group of unnamed investors.

More:

In the recent Hirst New York Times profile, the newspaper took at face value the artist’s claim that he sold around 80 new works for between $750,000 and $3.5 million each.
“We could have sold many, many more,” Larry Gagosian told the Times. “People were literally begging to buy these paintings.”

ArtNet article. Some people have told me they have trouble with this link, so here’s an archive.is version.

NYT profile.

“He’s a talented artist, but this? Really?” said Alan Baldwin, an art collector, looking down recently at a fluffy black sculpture of a spider with bow legs and googly eyes. Back in 1992, three years before winning the prestigious Turner Prize, its creator had astounded the art world by displaying a real 14-foot tiger shark embalmed in a tank of formaldehyde.

Archive version of the NYT profile.

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 15, 2022.

Saturday, January 15th, 2022

Eddie Basinski has passed away at the age of 99. He was the second oldest former major league baseball player.

Interestingly, Mr. Basinski was also a trained classical violin player.

Basinski, who had taken classical violin lessons since childhood, played with the University of Buffalo’s symphony orchestra before embarking on his major league career in 1944, a time when baseball rosters had lost many players to service in World War II. (He was deferred from military service because he had poor eyesight.) He played in 39 games for the Dodgers in his rookie season, mostly at second base, and in 108 more games in 1945, filling in at shortstop for the future Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese, who was in the Navy.

…

Basinski had a .244 career major league batting average.

…

Basinski told The Times that there was a relationship between playing the violin and fielding ground balls. “I had great quickness because of the bowing and the fingering, which just has to be lightning quick,” he said. “There is a great correlation.”

NYT obit for Terry Teachout.

Saousoalii Siavii Jr., former defensive tackle with the Kansas City Chiefs. This is an odd one: he died in custody at Leavenworth.

In August 2019, Siavii was arrested and later charged with being an unlawful drug user in possession of firearms after suburban Kansas City police say he was spotted exiting a vehicle reported stolen and fighting with officers, who used a stun gun on him twice during the arrest. Prosecutors alleged Siavii possessed a gun, ammunition, methamphetamine and marijuana.

Posted in Art, NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 14, 2022.

Friday, January 14th, 2022

Terry Teachout, critic, blogger, playwright, cultural commentator, and biographer, passed away yesterday.

“About Last Night” blog. WSJ (through archive.is). National Review.

I wrote briefly about him and his blog when his wife died. I was still an irregular follower – I tried to check in once a week – but I knew he had found a new love and was excited about that. This seems especially unfair.

On Twitter, he described himself as a “critic, biographer, playwright, director, unabashed Steely Dan fan, ardent philosemite.”

Though he led a sophisticated life of culture in New York, Mr. Teachout retained some of his small-town earnestness. “I still wear plaid shirts and think in Central Standard Time,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still eat tuna casserole with potato chips on top and worry about whether the farmers back home will get enough rain this year.”

I never met Mr. Teachout, though I would have liked to. He seems like one of those good decent people whose passing leaves a void in the world.

Edited to add: tribute from Rod Dreher.

Posted in Art, Books, Media, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022

Explained:

Runner-up:

Posted in Art, Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 9, 2021.

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

Lina Wertmüller, Italian director.

In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were.

By way of Lawrence, Christos Achilleos, SF artist.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Administrative note.

Thursday, October 21st, 2021

I value and highly esteem all of the people who comment here.

(Except Eric from talk to customer dot com or whatever it is today. He can die in a fire.)

If I don’t respond to your comment, it isn’t because I don’t like you. It may be because I don’t have time. It may be because you said what needed to be said and responding “Mega dittos, Rush!” would be as superfluous as painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

(Duchamp did it.)

(You know, if you’re going to put a button on your page that says “Order Oil Painting Reproduction”, when I push that button…take me to the page where I can actually order an oil painting reproduction of that specific piece, not your generic art page.)

(Of course, the original wasn’t an oil painting anyway, so an oil painting reproduction would be odd.)

(“1940, Paris
Color reproduction, made by Duchamp from original version
Stolen in 1981 and never recovered”

Yet another piece to add to the “decorate my house with reproductions of stolen art” list.)

But I digress.

Anyway, thank you to all my valued commenters, especially the ones who have been commenting over the past week or so. This isn’t prompted by anything in particular or any specific complaints. Just wanted to get this on the hysterical record.

Posted in Admin, Art | 2 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#60 in a series)

Friday, October 8th, 2021

This could be an obit watch, too, but I thought I’d go in this direction.

Over his long, provocative career, the artist Billy Apple changed his name, registered it as a trademark, branded products with it, had his genome sequenced and, finally, arranged to have his cells extracted and stored so that they might survive forever even if he could not. He died on Sept. 6 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand, at 85.

…

By 1964 he was in New York City (subletting a loft on the Bowery from the sculptor Eva Hesse) and showing his work. His cast bronze, half-eaten watermelon slice was one of many objects included in “The American Supermarket,” an early Pop spectacle at the Bianchini Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where one could buy artist’s versions of real products: a painted turkey by Roy Lichtenstein, candy made by Claes Oldenburg and Campbell’s soup cans signed by Andy Warhol. The gallerist took orders on a grocer’s pad.

…

Mr. Apple went on to work in neon, enchanting some reviewers like Robert Pincus-Witten of Artforum magazine, who described Mr. Apple’s rainbows as “sensuous neon impersonations.” But city inspectors were not charmed. In 1966, when Mr. Apple was 27, they unplugged a show of his at the Pepsi Gallery, in the lobby of the Pepsi-Cola Building at Park Avenue and 59th Street, saying the pieces weren’t wired to code.
The show’s opening had been so well attended that it caused a traffic jam. One attendee was Tom Wolfe, who later panned Mr. Apple’s pieces in New York Magazine — “they’re limp … they splutter,” he wrote. (Mr. Wolfe was writing about the artistry of commercial neon sign makers and poking fun at the art world in the process.)

…

Their art-making methods — Mr. Apple went through a tidying phase, washing windows, scrubbing floor tiles and vacuuming up the dirt on his studio’s roof — were not always well received. His “Roof Dirt” piece, which came in the form of an invitation in 1971, prompted John Canaday of The New York Times to write that it “belongs to an area of art‐related activity in which nothing but the word of the artists makes the difference between a put‐on and a seriously offered project.”
Mr. Apple then turned to less festive practices, like saving tissues from his nosebleeds and toilet paper from his bathroom activities. When this work was included in a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, some objected, and the police shut it down. But Mr. Apple was no prankster. He was deadly serious about his work, which, besides meticulously documenting his bodily processes, often included renovation and redecorating suggestions to institutions like the Guggenheim. (He proposed getting rid of its planters; the museum ignored him.)
Back home in New Zealand, to which he returned for good in 1990, Mr. Apple began exploring, in a variety of work, ideas about the transactional nature of the art market, branding practices, mapping and scientific advances. Among the works was an apple cast from pure gold, Billy Apple coffee and tea (for sale in galleries only) and the “immortalization” of cells from his own body, which are now stored at the American Type Culture Collection and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.

…

In 2016, Mr. Apple donated some of his early career bathroom tissues along with a contemporary fecal sample to a molecular biologist, who was able to determine that nearly half of the bacteria in Mr. Apple’s gut was still present in his body decades later, as The New Zealand Herald reported. It was a boon for science, and Mr. Apple, too, made new work from the study.

Posted in Art, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 6, 2021.

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

Richard Donner. THR. Variety.

I feel like he’s been getting the tributes he deserves, and don’t really have much to add to those. Other than: what a career.

Hash Halper. No, you never heard of him: this is one of those kind of obits the NYT does well.

Sometime around 2014, little hearts drawn in chalk mysteriously began appearing on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Some materialized in clusters on sidewalks, while others cascaded along blocks. The hearts inevitably faded away, but for New Yorkers who encountered them, they offered a respite from the harshness of city life.
At least that was the intention of their creator, a street artist named Hash Halper, who started drawing the hearts as a gesture of affection for a woman he was dating. The relationship didn’t last, but the hearts made him feel better, so he kept drawing them. Mr. Halper soon began spreading the healing properties of his hearts, calling himself New York Romantic.
“A heart makes you feel good when you’re not feeling good,” Mr. Halper told Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” in 2018. “And a heart makes you feel great when you’re feeling great.”

…

Tall and shaggy-haired, Mr. Halper could be seen wearing stylish hats or a red suit covered in hearts while he planted himself on streets for hours, bringing his hearts into existence with pieces of pink, blue and yellow chalk and a swift swoop of his hand. Over time, he became something of a downtown folk hero, cherished for his ability to conjure up positivity with a humble shard of chalk.
Once, when he learned that a woman was having a rough time with her romantic life, he began chalking hearts outside her workplace; she met someone special a few weeks later.

But:

He grappled with sobriety. When he had jobs, he didn’t hold them for long. He was at times homeless and would sleep on the benches of Washington Square Park or the couches of friends. His family had paid his rent over the past year in an apartment on Broome Street that he shared with roommates.
“He didn’t tell people that he was troubled because it was dissonant with his public persona,” his brother Omkar Lewis said. “He was the heart guy, so he couldn’t reveal his problems to the world, because he was the guy carrying other people’s pain.”

…

Shortly before his death, Mr. Halper, who was also a painter, had been preparing for a solo exhibition at a venue on Hudson Street that would showcase his artwork. But, his family said, his paintings were destroyed during an altercation with someone who attacked him in his Lower East Side apartment. Rattled by the incident, he took to the streets and was seen two days later walking barefoot in SoHo.

According to his family, he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on June 11th. He was 41.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2021.

Friday, June 11th, 2021

Gottfried Böhm, Pritzker Prize-winning Brutalist architect. He was 101.

Arguably the defining work of Mr. Böhm’s career was the Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Church at Neviges, known in German as the Wallfahrtsdom or the Mariendom, close to the city of Wuppertal in northwest Germany.
Completed in 1968, it is a monumental Brutalist Gesamtkunstwerk or total of work of art, whose jagged concrete roof has been likened to a tent, a crystal and an iceberg. Set at the top of a hill, the church rises imposingly above the picturesque houses of medieval Neviges.
Mr. Böhm lavished as much attention on the church’s forum-like interior as he did on its folding roof and sculptural facade, with their rough concrete textures and sharp angles. He designed the stained-glass windows, lamps and door handles and even the chairs. With room for 8,000 worshipers, it is the second largest church north of the Alps.

Posted in Art, Obits | 1 Comment »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#59 in a series)

Thursday, June 10th, 2021

I don’t want to draw too much on the NY Post. But Mike the Musicologist sent this to me with a challenge:

An Italian artist sold an invisible sculpture for over $18,000 and had to give the buyer a certificate of authenticity to prove it’s real, the Daily Mail reported.

“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” the Sardinian-born artist explained, according to Hypebeast. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

…

This isn’t the first piece of Garau’s that is unrecognizable to the human eye. In February, the artist exhibited “Buddha In Contemplation,” another invisible sculpture at the Piazza della Scala in Milan. And just this week, Garau installed his most recent statue, “Afrodite Piange,” facing the New York Stock Exchange.

Edited to add: I was unaware of this previously, but it popped up on Hacker News after I posted. I know, he only has 501 views as I write, but it seems like a good commentary. Or at least I found it mildly amusing.

Warning! Mime! Achtung! Mime! Avvertimento! Mimo! Avertissement! Mime!

Warning! Mime! Achtung! Mime! Avvertimento! Mimo! Avertissement! Mime!

Posted in Art | Comments Closed

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