GREEN VS. GREED

SOTHEBY’S "BEAUTIFUL" HIRST SALE

LONDON (Reuters) - Sotheby's will auction a series of new works by artist Damien Hirst, including a trademark animal preserved in formaldehyde that is expected to fetch up to 12 million pounds.
Hirst, one of contemporary art's most bankable stars, said he chose to sell his latest work in the auction room rather than the gallery because "the world's changing".
The big auction houses have never made any secret about their ambitions to move into the primary market: As Christie’s deputy head Amy Cappellazzo told Art Review not too long ago, "We’re the big box retailer putting the mom-and-pops out of business." Christie’s acquisition of the private dealer Haunch of Venison was widely seen as a move in that direction -- but now Sotheby’s has once-again leapfrogged its rival by securing a high-profile auction of completely new works by Damien Hirst. The sale is dubbed "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," and is set for Sept. 15-16, 2008, in London (a preview show opens to the public Sept. 5-15).
Sotheby’s is making the most out of the coup, billing the event as "an historic sale." The centerpiece of the auction is The Golden Calf, a bull preserved in a tank of formaldehyde -- a classic Hirst trope, this time with the twist that the animal is fitted with a solid gold halo and hooves and horns cast in 18-carat gold. The work is estimated at £8-12 million. As for the rest of the sale, Sotheby’s promises it will "document the full breadth of the artist’s creative output," including new works incorporating his popular butterfly, pill and cancer motifs, as well as a suite of preparatory drawings, all created in the last two years.
Acknowledging his dealers, Hirst said in a statement, "I never want to stop working with my galleries," then added, "This is different. The world’s changing, ultimately I need to see where this road leads." As for those scrappy mom-and-pop operators, Hirst dealers Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling, the Sotheby’s press release quotes them both as being OK with the arrangement. "As Damien’s long-term gallery, we’ve come to expect the unexpected," Gagosian said.
The 43-year-old also based his decision on the success of a 2004 auction, also hosted by Sotheby's, which raised 11.1 million pounds from the sale of objects he designed for the defunct Pharmacy restaurant in London.
"After the success of the Pharmacy auction, I always felt I would like to do another auction," Hirst said in a statement on Thursday. "It's a very democratic way to sell art and it feels like a natural evolution for contemporary art.
"Although there is risk involved, I embrace the challenge of selling my work in this way," he added. "I never want to stop working with my galleries. This is different. The world's changing, ultimately I need to see where this road leads."
The main lot in the auction, to be held in London on September 15 and 16, is "The Golden Calf", a bull in a glass tank of formaldehyde with its head crowned by a solid gold disc and its hooves and horns cast in 18-carat gold.
The work, which Sotheby's said united the artist's preoccupation with "science, religion, beauty and death", is estimated to realise eight to 12 million pounds.

German Memorial by Elmgreen & Dragset Unveiled

On May 27th, Germany unveiled a memorial to the Nazis' long-ignored gay victims, a monument that also aims to address ongoing discrimination by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing.
The memorial, a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin's Tiergarten Park, echoes the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, which opened three years ago just across the road. The pavilion-sized slab includes a small window where visitors can view a video clip of two men kissing. Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the monument was a reminder of the ongoing struggles that still confront gays.
"This memorial is important from two points of view - to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Wowereit said as he inaugurated the memorial alongside Culture Minister Bernd Neumann.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality a threat to the German race and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
"This is a story that many people don't know about, and I think it's fantastic . . . that the German state finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well," said Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen. Even in the hubbub of Berlin’s political life, such a queer mixture is seldom to be seen: Last Tuesday, the conservative minister of cultural affairs, Bernd Neumann, stood amid hundreds of gay men of all stripes. There were guys in bomber jackets and skinny jeans, in suits and kippahs, in brogues and a bow tie—even one with a neon-red Mohawk. A few lesbians were among the crowd. A special occasion, to be sure, for the culture minister that day had the honor and duty to inaugurate Germany’s national memorial for homosexual victims of National Socialism—a monument, it should be noted, that his party had frequently opposed, as it also does gay marriage. But other high-profile politicians, among them Berlin’s lively mayor (and gay icon), Klaus Wowereit, were on hand.
The memorial sits on the edge of Berlin’s biggest park, Tiergarten, within view of the Brandenburg Gate, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the new, terror-proof American Embassy. It consists of a concrete stele, thirteen feet high, with a small window through which viewer’s can watch a looped video, shot by Robby Müller (Wim Wenders’s cinematographer) and directed by Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg, of two men kissing. The memorial was designed by Elmgreen and Dragset, who submitted their proposal to two consecutive competitions (the first open, the second invite only) and beat out fellow artists like Wolfgang Tillmans for the commission.
The unveiling was not without its tensions. The ministry of culture’s invitations to the unveiling did not depict the kiss, which angered the artists, who voiced their frustration a week earlier in an interview (which, full disclosure, I published in Zitty). “The kiss is central to the memorial,” Michael Elmgreen said. “We would have liked to show it on the invitation. But the minister made clear that this was not desirable.” His partner, Ingar Dragset, added, “So the memorial is more relevant than ever, when the kiss poses a problem even for the minister. Not to show the kiss was his personal decision.” At Tuesday’s ceremony, however, Neumann praised the work, saying, “This memorial is a sign against intolerance. It has sparked important debates and marks Germany’s mature culture of remembrance.” He even praised the video itself, which “directly links the memory of victims with the situation of gays and lesbians today.” But when Neumann approached the stele to be the first person to see the kiss, the artists did not accompany him. Neither did they pose for pictures with the politicians. “Politicians come and go. We stay,” Elmgreen joked from the sidelines.
So why all the fuss? Elmgreen elaborated: “You can grant us homosexuals all rights: marriage, adoption, inheritance. But as long as people are grossed out when they see us kiss, something is missing.” In his frustration, Elmgreen overlooked that it was Neumann who made the memorial possible: A year ago, the minister negotiated an agreement after the artists’ initial proposal had met with criticism. With Neumann’s help and blessing, the artists decided to change the video every two years, with an open call for submissions for other depictions of homosexual love.

Carnegie Museum Guard Defaces a Celmins

A guard at the Carnegie Museum of Art is accused of using a key to deface a $1.2 million painting, reports Jerome L. Sherman and Timothy McNulty in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece—from Vija Celmins's "Night Sky" series—was on display as part of the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition, according to a police affidavit. It was damaged beyond repair on May 16; a "large vertical gouge" runs down its middle. A surveillance tape caught Timur Serebrykov in the act of defacing the work, the affidavit said. "I didn't like the painting," Serebrykov told police when they arrested him at the museum on May 20. He added, "I'm sorry." Serebrykov was charged with one count of institutional vandalism. He has waived his right to a preliminary hearing. James Sheets, whose law firm represents Serebrykov, said he may use a mental-health defense.
Ellen Baxter, the museum's chief conservator, told police that the art piece was a "total loss." The painting was one of at least eight “Night Sky” paintings on display in the museum's Gallery Fifteen, part of "Life on Mars," the latest version of the Carnegie International.
Artforum

BASELMANIA 2008

"People come to Basel in June to buy art, sell art and see art, not necessarily in that order. Of late doubts have been raised about the health of the art market, which can now be laid to rest. The market is strong. It is strong not only at the top, where it is very strong, but also in the middle, where it has been said to be soft."
Walter Robinson

KOONS BALLOON FLOWER OPENS IN LONDON

A giant sculpture by American artist Jeff Koons is to go on display in London before being sold for an estimated £12 million.
The work, in the shape of a pink, shiny balloon twisted into a flower, will be in St James's Square from June 21 until Christie's sale of post-War and contemporary art on June 30. Balloon Flower (Magenta), 1995-2000, is the most valuable and significant work by Koons to be sold in Europe. It is being sold by the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas. At about three metres square, the sculpture, which was designed to be in the open air, is too big to get through the doors of the auction house. The work is one of a series, called Celebration, that Koons, 53, created over the course of a decade.

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS

MAY 9 -AUGUST 3, 2008
JOHN ARMLEDER and OLIVIER MOSSET

This spring, conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset take over the galleries at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Strongly influential for a younger generation of artists working in the U.S. and in Europe, Armleder’s and Mosset’s work remains unfamiliar to a wider American audience.
The inaugural show of the Contemporary’s new curatorial team signals a commitment to artist-centered exhibitions. Jointly conceived by the artists—who have been close for more than twenty years—the exhibition represents neither a curated two-person show nor two independent solo exhibitions. Instead, it proposes an active juxtaposition of parallel and opposite artistic approaches where artworks act as obstacles, and obstacles act as artworks. Armleder contributes new pour and pattern paintings, a site-specific fifty-foot wall-painting, an installation of Mylar Christmas trees, and strips of metallic vinyl. Mosset, in addition to a series of his infamous “circle paintings” from the late 1960s and early 1970s, presents a large-scale installation of several dozen Toblerones, large cardboard sculptures based on anti-tank structures used by the Swiss army.
John Armleder has produced thousands of sculptures, paintings, drawings, books, and performances, creating an art of impenetrable surfaces that collapses the unique into the generic, and vice-versa. Olivier Mosset, on the other hand, chooses to remain firmly committed to blankness, stripping art of any content, and pursuing a decelerated process, rejecting our conventional notions of progress and insatiable hunger for the new.

TERENCE KOH. CAPTAIN BUDDHA

TERENCE KOH
WARHOL REMAINS AS A CHINESE WINTER
GARDEN IN MY HEART (SELF PORTRAIT), 2006
Courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin
copyright the artist

28 May - 31 August 2008
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany

Terence Koh is installing one of his signature monochrome environments especially for the Schirn; for this exhibition, he will initiate the surreal objects, ritually summoning them to life, in a secret performance. Under the title “Captain Buddha”, visitors who set foot in the luminously flooded room are invited to accompany the artist on a journey that will take them on a search for themselves through the entire world – India, China, Burma, Belgium, Africa, Mexico and Canada are just some stations along the way – one that aims to reach nirvana and ends in nothingness.
For his installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Koh links two worlds that at first glance seem almost antipodal: Buddhism and that popular classic of world literature, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” – the tale of the fateful quest of charismatic and supremely obsessed Captain Ahab for the Great White Whale. But the two worlds are alike in their descriptions of endless and irresolvable search - a unity conveyed in the title “Captain Buddha”. For this installation, Koh himself set out on a quest: clad as a monk in a golden robe, he journeyed to fifteen places – Canada, Japan, China, Thailand, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Iceland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Africa, and the USA – in his search for objects, much as Captain Ahab sailed the world over in search of the White Whale. In Terence Koh’s words: “I’m like the captain in Moby Dick. I’m trying to find the White Whale in the white objects, but in the end I find nothing.”

JEFF KOONS LENDS ART TO US EMBASSY IN CHINA

Jeff Koons is lending his sculpture Tulips, an edition of which is shown here in the courtyard of the Nord/LB bank in Hanover,
Germany, to the US embassy in Beijing for ten years.

WHAT'S LEFT FOR THE YEAR

June
Early June Artranspenine08
http://atp08.blogspot.com/
3 - 8 June Scope Art Fair, Basel
www.scope-art.com
4 - 8 June: ArtBasel, Basel
www.artbasel.com/go/id/kh/
12 June - 12 Sept: BP Portrait Award, London
www.npg.org.uk/live/bpmenu.asp
14 June - 14 Sept Folkestone Triennial, Kent
www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk/
18 June - 7 Sept: Sydney Biennial
www.biennaleofsydney.com.au
20 June - 2 July: London festival of architecture
www.lfa2008.org
21 June - 6 July: Whitstable Biennial, Kent
www.whitstablebiennale.com/
June 22 - October: 26 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico
www.sitesantafe.org/biennial_2008/biennial2008fr.html
July
19 July - 2 Nov: Manifesta, Italy
www.manifesta7.it/
8 July - 14 Sept: Rencontres-Arles Photo Festival
www.rencontres-arles.com/
August
25 Aug - 17 Sept British Glass Biennale http://www.ifg.org.uk
September
5 Sept - 9 Nov: Gwangju Biennale, Korea
http://www.gwangju-biennale.org/
6 Sept - 15 Nov: Yokohama Triennale, Japan
www.yokohamatriennale.jp/2008/index_en.html
8 Sept - Nov: Shanghai Biennale
www.shanghaibiennale.com/
11 Sept - 16 Nov: Singapore Biennale
www.singaporebiennale.org
Mid Sept: Jerwood Drawing Prize opens in London
www.jerwoodspace.co.uk
18 - 21 Sept: 100% design
www.100percentdesign.co.uk
20 Sept - 30 Nov: Liverpool Biennial International 08
www.biennial.com
20 Sept: New Contemporaries Opens as part of Liverpool Biennial
www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/
20 Sept - 4 Jan: John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/
26 Sept -12 Oct FRED, Cumbria
www.fredsblog.co.uk/about.html
October
Brighton Photo Biennial
www.bpb.org.uk
7 - 19 Oct: Origin - The London Craft Fair
www.craftscouncil.org.uk/
15 - 19 Oct: Scope Art Fair, London
www.scope-art.com
16 - 19 Oct: Frieze Art Fair, London
www.friezeartfair.com/
16 - 19 Oct: Bridge Art Fair, London
www.bridgeartfair.com/
17 - 20 Oct: Zoo Art Fair, London
www.zooartfair.com
23 - 26 Oct: FIAC, Paris
www.fiacparis.com/page.php?lang=uk
30 Oct - 2 Nov: Bridge Art Fair, Berlin
www.bridgeartfair.com/
November
7 Nov - 11 Dec: Jerwood Photography Awards, London
www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/photography/
December
4 - 7 Dec: ArtBasel, Miami
www.artbasel.com
4 - 7 Dec: Bridge Art Fair, Miami
www.bridgeartfair.com/
6 Dec - mid Feb 2009: Artsway Open 08
www.artsway.org.uk/

THE JOKES ON...

“Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, Richard Prince's dealer since 1988, said jokingly as she was leaving Sotheby's salesroom. Seems the jokes on her! Ever since art-industry newsletter the Baer Faxt made the pithy announcement that “Richard Prince is working independently,” the rumor mill has been in the kind of overdrive that would befit the 1980s-era soap. Some say Prince sold paintings out of his Guggenheim show directly to billionaire Ukrainian collector Viktor Pinchuk. Others say Larry Gagosian took a commission on the deal. Indeed, word has it that Gagosian Gallery has lined up an exhibition in Rome. Although the gallery would not confirm that Prince had joined the roster, one of its senior directors was willing to assert... A new gallery with a new tier of collectors can take an artist up an echelon.

MAY AUCTIONS EVENING SALES

MAY 13, 2008-CHRISTIE'S CONTEMPORARY DOES $348 MILLION-the second-highest total ever.
Lucian Freud’s large-scale Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, brought $33.6 million with buyer’s premium, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund, is eighty-five years old.
MAY 14, 2008 -SOTHEBY’S CONTEMPORARY DOES $362 MILLION
The auction, which totaled $362 million, was the biggest in the company’s history. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, said the sale was the result of “global hunger” on the part of “global individuals” who “live everywhere.” Enlightening!
A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.
MAY 16- PHILLIPS CONTEMPORARY DOES $59,345,000, with 55 of 64 lots selling, or almost 86 percent. Top lots included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 Untitled (Fallen Angel), which sold for $11,241,000; Jeff Koons’ 1991 marble Self-Portrait, which sold for $7,545,000; and Gerhard Richter’s 1986 Abstraktes Bild 610-1, which sold for $4,521,000.

Art collectors shrug off market woes

Art collectors this week shrugged off the US economic downturn and global financial turmoil to buy solidly at the big New York auctions although there were some signs of a more cautious mood seeping into the market. Sotheby’s and Christie’s had bet that record-breaking prices would prevail at their Impressionist and modern art sales last week, and they were largely proved right, although both auction houses had tempered expectations by reducing the number of lots on sale compared with similar auctions last year.
Source: FT

Carnegie's "Life On Mars"

Detail of of a large installation by Barry McGee.

"Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people “love to hate,” or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference. Their underlying message seems to be: Careful now, don’t frighten the trustees.“Life on Mars,” the 55th Carnegie International, is the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens.
It has been organized over the last three years by Douglas Fogle, who was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1994 to 2005, when he joined the Carnegie as curator of contemporary art. For his advisory committee Mr. Fogle selected Daniel Birnbaum, the director of Portikus, an alternative space in Frankfurt, who will organize the next Venice Biennale; Chus Martínez, director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Richard Flood and Eungie Joo, the chief curator and director of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In the lead essay of the show’s exceptional catalog Mr. Fogle notes some questions posed by his show’s title. Are there other forms of life in the universe? Can art help us explore what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called its “intimate immensity”? And, more pertinent, has the human race turned Earth itself into an alien planet, a place of rampant waste, arrogance, immorality and violence?
The show itself has little of the catalog’s pointedness. It seems selected largely from a preapproved list of veterans of shows just like this. When the exhibition’s participants were announced, I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning.
Despite the international character of the Carnegie, more than half of its 39 artists are from only three countries: the United States, Britain and Germany. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern.
Curators have about the most complicated and daunting job in the art world; they are pulled apart by pressures to raise money, write, hunt out hot new artists and oversee acquisitions, while organizing shows that attract the public. Their value and responsibilities seem less and less appreciated by trustees, who are experiencing their own kind of pressures. Jobs and budgets are at stake. These are expensive shows; don’t make waves.
Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." Roberta Smith

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Beyond the familiar Campbell's Soup cans, Brillo boxes, silkscreened Marilyn Monroes, and floating silver mylar pillows--20 years after pop icon Andy Warhol's death, we are still picking through his incredibly prolific output to understand what his artistic legacy actually is. Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, published on the occasion of the major exhibition by the same name at Amsterdam's renowned Stedelijk Museum, provides some new insight, digging into Warhol's lesser-known film, video, and audio tape works. Important--and just a little scandalous--films like Blow Job and Kiss, audio tapes of celebrities, friends, and anonymous hangers-on talking, and other marginalia are considered alongside a selection of key photographs, drawings, screen prints and spatial installations, such as the spectacular Silver Clouds.

Edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann and with contributions by Geralyn Huxley, Greg Pierce, and Warhol Museum Archivist, Matt Wrbican, who is currently unpacking hundreds of never-before-seen Warhol Time Capsules in Pittsburgh, this volume brings readers up to date with the most recent developments in the way we see the late artist's oeuvre.

WILFREDO PRIETO WINS THE CARTIER AWARD 2008

Untitled (Footprint)

Frieze Art Fair is delighted to announce that the winner of The Cartier Award 2008 is Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Prieto, based in Barcelona, is a talented young conceptual artist whose works often take the form of site-specific installations. His winning proposal was chosen from over 400 applications submitted by artists across the world. The award allows an emerging artist from outside the UK to realise a major project at Frieze Art Fair as part of the influential Frieze Projects programme curated by Neville Wakefield. Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Habana in 2002. His work has been exhibited at SMAK (Ghent) in 2008, the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, at the Kadist Art Foundation and Apolitical at the Louvre Museum in Paris as well as the VIII Havana Biennial in 2006 and in A Moment of Silence at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2003. Prieto was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.

Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, strangers in our
own world?
Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International explores the important yet continually perplexing question of what it means to be human in the world today. Organized by Douglas Fogle, curator of contemporary art at Carnegie Museum of Art, the provocative Life on Mars will present the varying perspectives of 40 artists from 17 countries, spanning generations and continents. This is the 55th installation of the series of contemporary-art survey exhibitions that was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1896. It will include 204 works of art in diverse media, from painting, sculpture, and drawing to animation, film, installation, and performance—all searching for the sublime in the confusion of everyday life.
The question “Is there life on Mars?” is a rhetorical one posed by the exhibition in the face of a world where political, social, natural, and economic global events increasingly seem to challenge and threaten to overtake the most basic forms of everyday existence.

SPIKE ART MAGAZINE

SPRING 2008 OUT NOW!
http://www.spikeart.at

Cover image: Matthew Barney

THEFT IS VISION by BOB NICKLAS

Theft is Vision gathers essays and interviews from the past ten years by the influential New York critic and curator Bob Nickas, offering a personal, shoot-from-the-hip take on the American art scene. More of a fan than a theorist, Nickas views art through a focused, subcultural lens; he pursues overlooked figures such as graphic designers Art Chantry and Jamie Reid, post-punk legends The Fall, cult artists Cady Noland and Steven Parrino; collaborates on photo/text pieces with Trisha Donnelly and John Miller; and offers a fictional conversation between Andy Warhol and On Kawara. Interviews with Philip Taaffe and Jeff Wall reflect on the 80s, while those with Wolfgang Tillmans (not previously published) and Kelley Walker bring us into the present. Since 1985, Nickas has organized over 60 exhibitions for galleries and museums as an independent curator. As Curatorial Advisor at P.S. 1 from 2003-2007, he organized more than 20 exhibitions, including Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fredom From The Known, William Gedney-Christopher Wool: Into the Night, Peter Hujar and the Lee Lozano retrospective. .

PUBLISHED BY: JRP Ringier
FORMAT: Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 160 pgs / 24 b&w.

THE MIRACLE IS LOVE

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films. While the name Patti Smith evokes an image of a founder of the New York punk-rock scene, she has explored the visual arts and poetry since the late 1960s. The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier embraces the various facets of her creative process. Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem.” Many of Smith’s photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.

"Blubberland" The Dangers of Happiness by Elizabeth Farrelly

The MIT Press
6 x 9 1/4, 219 pp.
$19.95 (PAPER)
I, like you, drive too much. I buy too much--of which I keep too much and also throw too much away. I overindulge my children, and myself. Directly as well as indirectly I use too much water, energy, air and space. My existence, in short, costs the planet more than it can afford. This is not some handed-down moral stricture, nor any sort of guilty self-flagellation, but a simple recognition of fact. The consequences are obvious, and near enough now to see the warts on their noses. For my own future, as well as my children's, I must change. And yet--this is what's weird--I, like you, can't. Cannot abandon comfort, convenience and pleasure for the sake of abstract knowledge. Can't stop doing it. This is interesting.
It's interesting because we think we are so rational, so intelligent, and yet we behave, both individually and as a herd, in such unintelligent ways. That's what drove this book into being.
--from Blubberland

Welcome to Blubberland--a world of quadruple-garaged mansions, vast malls, gated communities, stretch limos, and posh resorts. Blubberland is a place, but it is also a state of mind: we expect to be happy (trophy house, SUV in the driveway, home entertainment system, pension fund, cosmetic surgery), but in fact we've grown increasingly bloated, bored, and miserable. In Blubberland, award-winning critic Elizabeth Farrelly looks at our "superfluous superfluity," our huge eco-footprint, and asks why we find it so hard to abandon habits we know to be destructive. Why can't we build human-scale cities, design meaningful public spaces, eat reasonable meals, and stop assaulting nature?
Farrelly, trained as an architect, begins this story with architecture, urban sprawl, and housing, but she does not end there. She also looks at "affluenza," childhood asthma, diabetes, addiction, beauty, ugliness, narcissism, climate change, mega-churches, big box retailers, sustainability, depression, anorexia, and the links that collect all of these issues under the same roof--the roof, as it were, of the McMansion. As "big" becomes more and more pervasive, and success is seen in increasingly measurable and material terms, the goal of happiness jeopardizes our survival. Blubberland is a smart, thoughtful, and stylish argument for turning things around.

About the Author
Elizabeth Farrelly is one of Australia's liveliest and most provocative writers on architecture and the environment. The winner of the CICA International Critics' Award, the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and the Marion Mahony Griffin Award, she is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, a commentator on Australian television and radio, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney.

The MIT Press