Hammers Down at Christie's South Ken

Last Wednesday saw the last auction at Christie's South Ken, London's premiere middle-market salesroom, a venue that stood for 42 years at the center of London's art and antiques scene.

Nic McElhatton, CSK's chairman, knocked down the last sales.  Buyers, sellers, and dealers kindly offered The Main Point their observations, and McElhatton made a moving farewell speech.

Camille Paglia on the Crisis in Art

A wonderful and important essay by Camille Paglia in today's Wall Street Journal.  I love that she addresses the matter of Art, with a capital "A," rather than "the arts."

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years....

But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.) Today's blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege....

We live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.  Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland?

Read the whole thing HERE.

Mexico City and Its New Wave of Artists

I've written about Mexico City and its new wave of artists in the September issue of British Airways High Life magazine.  The feature should be on planes now and available on line soon.  I'll be writing more on that subject here, with interviews, artifacts, and a mini profile of photographer Dulce Pinzon.

What has driven this recent explosion of art in Mexico?  Damien Hirst, the original YBA (Young British Artist) has ideas what about the culture connects artists to the most chthonic streams of inspiration. For the last eight years Hirst has been living part-time in the country, collecting the work of Mexican artists, and of course his latest sensation, a diamond-encrusted skull entitled "For the Love of God," was itself a quotation of the Mexican tradition.

In an interview seven years ago for the Guardian he opined: "It’s about death. In England people hide or shy away from death and ideas about it, whereas Mexicans seem to walk hand in hand with it.  In that way I feel a bit liberated here."  Read the whole thing, at the link below.

This spring Hirst himself interviewed his dealer in Mexico Hilario Galguera, at a link below.

When I was in Mexico this May for the Zona Maco contemporary art fair, I spotted this (artist unknown to me) in the hallway of a patron's home. 

                                                                                                     Artist unknown.  Photo: JSL

Read Hirst in the Guardian here.

Galguera interviewed by Hirst here.

Recent Work by Ai Weiwei

... in the Lisson Gallery...

... and just outside the gallery.

- Lisson Street, London, 2011

Videos

Have been confounded and intrigued over the last year by the videos of Brighton-based artist Seraphina Samet. Among them, "Empathy with Trees" is the most accessible. Others are beautiful... if sometimes confounding. They can be found HERE, in the pink box.

It could be I've returned to these videos again because I'm romancing my own recent purchase of a FLIP video camcorder. A half-hour capacity to point-and-shoot, a USB connection to your computer, and only a hundred dollars.

Of course, I've only shot streetscapes outside my window, but that makes me admire her work all the more.

Everyone should pick one up. I had a friend long ago, David Robbins, who worked for Andy Warhol in the Factory. David was admiring some Mao silk screens that were being pulled, and said so. Warhol said, "So make your own."

Absinthe Drinkers

Above, Viktor Oliva's painting "The Absinthe Drinker," which hangs in the Cafe Slavia. Another absinthe drinker, Hemingway, had a favorite cocktail, Death in the Afternoon - a measure of absinthe in a champagne glass, fill to the top with Bollinger...