
A vendor walks past a sand sculpture of Osama bin Laden created by Indian sand artist Sudarshan Patnaik on a beach in Puri, India May 2. (Stringer/Reuters) via Boston Globe’s The Big Picture
Better late than never … here’s this week’s recommended reading and looking.
“In 1983, you started to feel things percolating in the art market and I decided to address that in my work. I did a show with Annina Nosei [the New York gallerist] more focused on the commodity status of the art object: the ones that said “Buy me, I’ll change your life”. Those shows sold out in like two days. But I didn’t have a pot to piss in.” (In 2004, an original “I shop therefore I am” serigraph sold at Philips de Pury for $600,000, though Kruger herself never saw much profit from those early labours).
When Gustave Courbet was incarcerated in 1871 under a questionable accusation of involvement in violence during the Paris Commune, he produced a small body of paintings necessarily reduced in scale from his better-known works of the 1850s. A small still-life in the National Gallery, made while Courbet was in Sainte-Pelagie prison in Paris, develops an additional layer of meaning in the context of the solitude and melancholy of the prison cell (although the fact he managed to sneak in paints and canvas suggests it wasn’t quite Guantanamo).
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning at 7am-ish EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links (10 or less) to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.