In response to yesterday's takeover of a federal building by a white American militia, this was posted online. (via @smoothkobra)

In response to yesterday’s takeover of a federal building by a white American militia, this was posted online. (via @smoothkobra)

This week, Gramsci hates New Year’s, art market bubble, advice from art dealers, remembering Ellsworth Kelly, and more.

 Did you know the Italian Marxist theoretician and politician Antonio Gramsci hated New Year’s Day?

That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.

 I usually don’t link to the tiring stream of articles predicting an art market bubble or something similar, but when the BBC starts reporting on the topic I can’t help but take notice since it suggests the topic has hit mainstream consciousness, so:

However, 2015 also saw seen many auction flops. Claude Monet’s Nympheas sold for $33.8m, well below its top estimate of $50m and Andy Warhol’s Four Marilyns sold for $36m rather than the expected $40m.

It seems that many of the world’s millionaires are now feeling worried about the future, and are opting to keep their wealth in cash.

This is particularly true of rich Chinese, who now make up a fifth of the world’s buyers of art.

 The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) blog has advice about art dealing from some leading dealers, including:

Pavel Zoubok, Founder of Pavel Zoubok Gallery

“In the beginning, the best thing you can do is identify the people in our field who are doing what you aspire to do. Visit the galleries, and often. If you can, try to form a relationship. Most dealers will be happy to chew your ear off about what they love.

The business side has its own weird, internal logic but if you make investments in ways that are true to your instincts, things tend to work out. This has always been a kind of feast or famine business, but that’s part of the fun.”

Eric Brown, Co-Owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery

“It’s good to be hungry and porous—take in everything! There is no longer just one art world, there are many. Find your niche. It isn’t just about art. It involves a close relationship with artists, their lives and their work, which after all is their lifeblood. To be a committed dealer is much the same.”

 An interview with curator Charles Esche on his 2015 Jakarta Biennale:

Q: Do you think that the biennale has the power or responsibility to act as a catalyst for social change?

A: I think artists have the potential to make the world a better place, and I am most interested in those that accept this challenge. The exhibition is often about small, immediate victories that can be discovered in and through art. There is a modesty here, but also a contrast to the total solutions that go back to old traditions or forward to utopian futures. I think artists from this region have some sympathy for that idea.

 Whitney Museum Chief Curator Scott Rothkopf remembers Ellsworth Kelly:

Despite his renown, Mr. Kelly was an inveterate charmer who could make you believe the twinkle in his eye was only for you. I was surprised to learn from his obituary that as a young man he was drawn to the silence of postwar Paris, because I knew him as a real talker. He lit up at parties, especially those increasingly given in his honor, where he would momentarily feign abashment before seizing the mike and wooing the crowd.

Privately, he was especially generous to students, unspooling stories about his past like a Scheherazade for the art historian set. There was his early service as a camouflage designer during World War II, and the visit to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio in the company of young female friends (whom the master insisted sit on his lap). There was the pilgrimage to discover Monet’s last canvases in his pigeon-infested atelier in Giverny, France, and the quiet of a vanished New York where Mr. Kelly lived alongside the artists Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman in airy old lofts along Coenties Slip.

As he grew older he seemed intent on making known other, more difficult stories, whether about being a young gay man in the Army or fearing throughout long periods of his career that his work might be misunderstood. Always at his side was his beloved and devoted husband, the photographer Jack Shear, chiming in with a missing name or punctuating a tale he’d heard dozens of times with a tender eye roll.

 In November 2008, Hossein Derakhshan was imprisoned by Iran for his blogging. Upon his recent release, “he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia,” and here’s his story:

Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it is an entire era online. Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become, so I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. It turned out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

It became clear to me, right there, that things had changed. I was not equipped to play on this new turf — all my investment and effort had burned up. I was devastated.

 Kriston Capps summarizes the brutal buildings we’ve lost this year.

 When “Life Hacking” is really white privilege:

It happens all the time that white people claim not to be racist because they didn’t intend to be racist; they weren’t thinking about that at all.

But there are many situations in which it is precisely your job to think about that. Nothing induces more rage in others than your taking what you do not deserve and not even noticing.

 Who is suprised by the statistic that “9 out of 10 people killed in [US] drone strikes weren’t intended targets” … The Intercept has the story:

The conceptual metaphor of surveillance is seeing. Perfect surveillance would be like having a lidless eye. Much of what is seen by a drone’s camera, however, appears without context on the ground. Some drone operators describe watching targets as “looking through a soda straw.”

 Slavoj Žižek has recently been writing about Turkey and their use of ISIS as a tool for retribution towards their real enemies:

This obscure background makes it clear that the “total war” against Isis should not be taken seriously – they don’t really mean it. We are definitely dealing not with the clash of civilisations (the Christian west versus radicalised Islam), but with a clash within each civilisation: in the Christian space it is the US and western Europe against Russia, in the Muslim space it is Sunnis against Shias. The monstrosity of the Islamic State serves as a fetish covering all these struggles in which every side pretends to fight Isis in order to hit its true enemy.

His article has been attacked by various people, including by Ibrahim Kalin, who is the spokesperson for the Turkish presidency:

Zizek’s false claims about Turkey’s discreet help to ISIL are a regurgitation of cliches uttered by Moscow these days. The funny thing is that Zizek – otherwise a staunch opponent of the Russian propaganda – takes sides with it when it comes to attacking Turkey.

But Žižek has hit back at his critics in a lucid piece:

In contrast to me, Kalin writes as an official spokesperson, giving us the official version of the situation. From following the news, the least I can say is that I find deeply problematic not only many of Kalin’s particular claims, but also his overall stance. While he reproaches me for my silence about the PKK terror (a reproach that I find meaningless: of course I didn’t mention it, as it was not the topic of my very short text), I find it politically and ethically deeply problematic how Kalin reduces the Kurdish resistance to terrorism, ignoring the blatant fact that the fate of the Kurds is an authetic tragedy of colonialism imposing artificial borders: divided among four countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey – they are deprived of cultural and political autonomy.

 How politics works in the 21st century (via @noahmccormack):

 LA Taco has captured images of U-Pick Parts, which is a legendary auto salvage shop in Sun Valley. Unfortunately it is closing down but you can see great images on their blog:

upick44

 Did you know:

icecreampoo1

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic.

10 replies on “Required Reading”

          1. It is, though, disingenuous (or generally ignorant) to construe the event in Oregon as one of race. Given, most news outlets cover the event without offering any understanding of what it is about, but it doesn’t take much research to find out, either. “End White Terror” could be stretched into an Onion article.

          3. I was talking about the event. These folks might beat their wives too, but that’s not why they’re protesting federal control of public lands around their ranches.

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