張曉剛 卡夫卡式的藝術家

来源:人民日報海外版

位於北京城郊的酒廠藝術園，在烈日下燥熱而安靜。下午起來，穿著汗衫大褲衩的張曉剛，應聲出來開門——門外站著六七個人，分屬於日本、法國以及中國本土的3家不同媒體記者，禮貌而固執地要求採訪。

這還不是他的最高紀錄，最多時，他的工作室裡同時接待過5撥記者。這個少年時害羞、沉默、輕度自閉的畫家，現在可以流水作業般，從容應付那些內容相仿的提問。

畫室的四面，豎著他新畫的作品，隨著工作室越來越大，他的畫也越來越大了，整整一面牆的尺寸，畫了5個一字排開的小孩子，他們分別穿著工農商學兵的服飾，滿臉成人般井然、嚴肅的世故表情。

從去年開始，張曉剛的畫在拍賣會上屢創新高，《大家庭》系列中的一幅在蘇富比拍到了78萬美元。很快，他的《天安門》在經過一番激烈競投之後，被一位神秘買家以1800萬港元拍得，而這幅畫從他手中被買走時，價格只不過是1000多美元。他的名字很快飆進了全球當代最著名的畫家之列，並創下了活著的亞洲畫家的拍賣最高紀錄。“我的畫賣100美元的時候，心裡是實實在在的踏實，賣到100萬美元的時候，反而感覺很虛幻。這個市場瘋掉了。”

與名畫家同班

張曉剛4歲開始握畫筆。在機關工作的母親怕孩子們出去野，便教幾兄弟畫畫打發時間，最後只有老三張曉剛堅持下來。“小時候害羞，基本上不怎麼跟人來往，一個人呆在家，看書，畫畫，慢慢變成了一種習慣，一種精神寄託，同時，也是一個出口。通過畫畫，你可以和你創作的人物交流，就不用跟外面的人交流了。”

16歲那年，父親帶他去看望一個畫家。這位啟蒙老師把歐洲的繪畫技法和理念灌輸給了張曉剛。“我完全控制不了自己學畫的欲望，每天都跑到那位畫家家裡學畫畫，進步飛快。父母都認為我瘋掉了。”

在張曉剛的印象裡，從小到大，他幾乎就沒有從父母老師那兒得到過表揚，教畫畫的老師雖然認為他是自己最得意的門生，但也從不說一句讚揚的話。這種藝術上的自卑，在張曉剛考入四川美院以後，被放大到了最大。“別人跟我說我的人事關係被四川拿走時，我說：‘不可能，我這麼差。是不是招生的人弄錯了？’”

張曉剛所在的班級，是當時全國美術界的明星班，何多苓、程叢林、羅中立、高小華等，都是他當時的同班同學。初進校時，跑到同學宿舍一看，他就傻眼了，他們畫得太好了！“比我臨摹的範本都好很多，簡直跟國外的畫冊一樣。像何多苓的畫，我覺得跟謝洛夫沒什麼區別。”

太平間樓上

他們班的同學很快創作了一批傷痕題材的作品：程叢林的《1968年×月×日雪》、高小華的《為什麼》、何多苓的《春風已經蘇醒》、羅中立的《父親》都在全國引起了極大的轟動。傷痕繪畫的風格和語言主要是學習俄羅斯巡迴畫派，這與張曉剛從啟蒙老師那裡學習的歐洲繪畫模式有著很大的不同，也與他的天性相左，他試圖糾正和模仿，但始終覺得彆扭。一年級結束的時候，他寫信給哥哥說：整整一年都沒有進步，我想退學。

大學二年級的時候，學校圖書館買入了一些西方現代藝術的畫冊，當時還看不懂的表現主義和超現實主義把張曉剛弄得很興奮，他發現除了蘇聯式的繪畫語言之外，原來大有另外的道路可走。

臨畢業創作時，他去四川阿壩藏族地區體驗生活，回來後畫了一批藏族題材的創作稿。結果學校認為他的風格太粗野，草稿沒有通過，沒發給他畫布、畫框和顏料。張曉剛最後把畫畫在牛皮紙上，在四川美院成了一個眾所周知的事件。

時任《美術》雜誌編輯的栗憲庭來四川組稿、找新人。開會時，栗憲庭說了句，“除了別人的，張曉剛的這批也不錯。”就因為老栗這句話，學校通過了張曉剛的畢業創作。當期的《美術》發表了羅中立和張曉剛的作品，評價張曉剛有“近乎凡高的情緒”。這在很大程度上鼓舞了他的藝術自信。

畢業回到老家雲南昆明，張曉剛在地方歌舞團做過幾年舞美，“白天看很豔俗的東西，晚上畫一些恐怖的魔鬼”，主張在理性主義之外尋找神秘而原始的生命訴求。後來又轉到四川美院任教，“四川美院盛行的是鄉土藝術，只有我和葉永青兩個人喜歡現代藝術，校領導還勸教師不要跟我們來往。”

有幾年他幾乎是泡在酒桶裡，“每個星期大醉一場，小醉兩場”。喝得胃出血，被送到醫院住了兩個月，他病房的樓下，是太平間。

他要求醫生讓他看看人死的時候是什麼樣子，醫生同意了。這也許是他第一次觸摸到死亡。“生死關頭是一個體驗。當時又年輕，又有幻想，讀的書又比較多，受到的毒害比較深，加上身體不好，想的問題就比較大，比如死亡，比如宗教。”那段時間，他陸續畫了一批陰暗、晦澀的作品：肢解的手，殘缺的軀體，疑似人腦或羊腸的不明物體軟塌塌地堆成一團，而上帝的頭顱漂在水面上……

“出院以後我開始畫一些跟死亡有關的題材，精神上又孤獨又驕傲，覺得自己想要表達的東西和周圍已經有了距離，沒有辦法跟別人溝通。我們那幫人基本上都是過這種分裂的生活。”

血緣牢不可破，家庭不堪一擊

1993年，張曉剛從北京回到昆明老家，他發現了一套家藏的老照片，大時代背景下的小家庭，是不是可以作為一系列以“文革”為背景的創作素材？

那瞬間，他感覺到，“要出東西了”！似乎是某種更為強大的意志抓住他作為一件表達的工具。為了達到想要的效果，他花了兩年時間專門研究技法，把背景降到最低，把色彩降到最低，把一切學院教給他的東西降到最低。按照他的畫法，每一幅畫他都必須畫三到四遍以上，一層幹了，畫另一層。“我是一個追求原作感的畫家，我一定要讓人看了我的原作，覺得看印刷品不過癮。”

張曉剛似乎永遠也畫不出陽光明媚的畫來，他的性格決定了他的藝術作品永遠是陰性和憂鬱的。後來的《血緣大家庭》系列、《同志》以及《記憶與失憶》等系列，那些似乎是斑駁老照片中的人物，擁有被時代整齊劃一了的外型、衣著和表情，單眼皮的眼睛，眼仁微微凸起，冷漠而警覺，神態遊移。

“我就像家裡一個多餘的人，他們根本不需要我。下鄉時，臨走前我爸給我哥10元，只給我5元，哥哥分一些錢給我，我爸還跟他說：‘別給他，他又會亂花。’我每次從鄉下回家，一定要背一袋米回來，快吃完的時候，我爸就會跟我說：‘米吃完了，你該走了。’如果我不帶口糧回去，他會說：‘我們怎麼養得起你？’所以，我從小就沒有家的感覺，下鄉讓我精神愉快，我覺得我自由了，能夠靠勞動掙錢養活自己，離家越遠越好。”

曾經有一個法國人對張曉剛說，感覺他是一個“卡夫卡式的藝術家”——比較關注私密性；內向，相對地封閉自己；關注的都是個人的感覺，而且是不太正常的感覺；都有幻想的成分；都是日記式的表述方式，寫什麼都是我我我，而不是他他他。“我覺得他說得很有道理，而且我也很喜歡卡夫卡。”

1999年與唐蕾離婚後，他拎了個包從成都來到北京，41歲換個城市重新租房過單身漢的生活。上午睡覺，下午畫畫，晚上跟朋友們碰面、喝酒。之後的8年裡，他搬了好幾次家，還是沒找到紮根北京的感覺，他說：我是一條野狗。

一次在重慶，他跟方力均、王廣義一起辦講座，學生問他，對血緣和家庭怎麼看，他脫口而出：血緣牢不可破，家庭不堪一擊。

是的，掌握了血緣與家庭，就掌握了張曉剛的主線。他的畫裡永遠都是父母隱約浮現的面孔，他的工作室裡貼著女兒歡歡從小到大的照片。女兒13歲出畫冊《家有小狗》，他歡喜地為她寫序言，並暗自得意孩子繼承了他的稟賦。他辦公桌上的煙缸，是一隻張開的大手，每個手指頭上都刻著不同表情的人臉。女兒小的時候，他常把自己的手指頭畫上哭笑各異的人臉，他的大手就成了女兒的玩具。女兒大了，看見這樣的煙缸，憶起兒時的遊戲，就買下來，送給他。

Simon Sainsbury, modest to the last, leaves £100m masterpieces to the nation

From The Times

October 30, 2007

Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

He shunned honours and refused to have an entry in Who’s Who but became one of Britain’s most generous philanthropists. Now, a year after his death, it has been revealed that Simon Sainsbury has made one of the most significant art bequests to the nation, a collection worth about £100 million.

The Tate and National galleries have received 18 paintings, including works by Monet, Degas, Gauguin and Bacon, each one a masterpiece, from a benefactor who preferred anonymity during his lifetime.

The Tate gets 13 works by Bacon, Balthus, Bonnard, Freud, Gainsborough, Pasmore, Wootton and Zoffany, while the National has five by Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Rousseau.

Sainsbury, a great-grandson of John James Sainsbury, who opened his first shop selling butter, eggs and milk at 173 Drury Lane in 1869, lavished millions of pounds on the two institutions during his lifetime.

During the last ten years of his life he had told them that he wanted the pick of his international and British art collection to be enjoyed by the public after his death. Some of the works have rarely, if ever, been exhibited.

The rest of his collection has been left to his partner, Stewart Grimshaw, with whom Sainsbury shared his life and homes in London and West Sussex for 40 years, celebrating a civil partnership last year. Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said: “Simon was one of the UK’s most private but generous philanthropists. I am extremely grateful that he chose to bequeath so many remarkable works to the nation.

“This is one of the most important gifts in the history of Tate . . . what a difference they will make to our collections.”

Sainsbury had supported institutions from the National Theatre to the Royal Opera House and also a great many smaller, less glamorous appeals. His insistence on anonymity became impossible when the three Sainsbury brothers: Simon, Lord John and Sir Timothy, came together to fund the National’s Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991 at a reported cost of £50 million.

Works donated to the National include Monet’s Snow Scene at Argenteuil, 1875. This canvas is the largest and most atmospheric of about 18 scenes that he created during the winters of 1874-75. Donations to the Tate include Bacon’s powerful and quintessential Study for a Portrait, 1952, created when the artist was developing his iconic Screaming Pope series.

Sir Nicholas said that the Tate now had one of the premier collections of Bonnards outside Paris with the addition of the luminous Nude in the Bath, 1925, and The Yellow Boat, c 1936-8.

Three paintings by Freud, arguably Britain’s foremost contemporary artist, include Girl with a Kitten, 1947, a striking image of the artist’s first wife, and Boy Smoking, 1950-51, a haunting image, despite its small size.

Asked what the collection said about the collector, Sir Nicholas said: “He had a very good eye, with a particular love of paintings that showed domestic interiors and individuals within those interiors. He was an incredibly sensitive person . . . his early British pictures reflect an interest in the English landscape and sporting pastimes.”

Works donated to the National Gallery

Claude Monet: Snow Scene at Argenteuil, 1875. The largest and most atmospheric of 18 such scenes.

Monet: Water-Lilies, Setting Sun, c 1907. A vibrant and colourful scene, full of dramatic light effects.

Paul Gauguin: Bowl of Fruit and Tankard before a Window, c 1890. A still-life that shows the influence of Cezanne as well as his own exploration of form.

Henri Rousseau: Portrait of Joseph Brummer, 1909. The sitter was an art dealer and early champion of Rousseau’s art, commissioning this monumental portrait soon after meeting the artist. The jungle vegetation alludes to Brummer’s passion for Africa and African sculpture.

Edgar Degas: After the Bath, c 1896. One of the most colourful and visually complex of his late female nudes.

Works donated to the Tate

Francis Bacon: Study for a Portrait, 1952. A powerful image, of which no equivalent image exists in the Tate.

Balthus: The Snack, 1940, Nude on a Chaise Longue, 1950, and The Golden Fruit, 1956. Will give the Tate a strong representation of the artist’s disturbing but rich subject matter.

Pierre Bonnard: Nude in the Bath, 1925, and The Yellow Boat, c.1936-8. Although Tate already holds Bonnard’s The Bath, 1925, Nude in the Bath 1925 is a radically different work, by virtue of the inclusion of a self-portrait and its extreme cropping and dynamic vertical format. The Yellow Boat is a fine example of his late style.

Lucian Freud: Girl with a Kitten, 1947, Boy Smoking, 1950-1, and The Painter’s Mother, 1972. This group of works reflects the psychological and stylistic shifts in the artist’s work. Boy Smoking, little known or reproduced, is one of the finest examples of his incisive approach to portraiture in this period and The Painter’s Mother is a moving depiction.

Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Carter, c.1747-8. An important work from the artist’s early career and patronage.

Victor Pasmore: The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1, 1944-7. Complements the more abstract and later The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 2 1949 already in the Tate.

John Wootton: Life-size Horse with Huntsman Blowing a Horn, c.1732. A monumental work, about 10ft by 7ft, by an important artist of landscape and sporting subjects.

Johan Zoffany: Colonel Blair and his Family and Indian Ayah in an Interior, 1789. A composition that reflects life in India.

Simon Sainsbury's £100m art gift to Tate and National Gallery

30/10/2007 Telegraph

The late Simon Sainsbury has bequeathed a treasure trove of paintings to the nation, writes Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent

In pictures: Sainsbury bequest The greatest British art bequest in decades, which will see 18 masterpieces valued at up to £100 million divided between the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, was revealed yesterday. Lucian Freud's Boy Smoking: one of the 18 paintings bequeathed by Simon Sainsbury The paintings, including two Monets, a Gauguin, three Lucian Freuds and a Francis Bacon, have been left to the nation by Simon Sainsbury, a scion of the supermarket family who died last October aged 76. Sainsbury, with his two brothers - Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and Sir Timothy Sainsbury, a former Conservative Trade ministe - paid for the £35m Sainsbury wing at the National Gallery in the 1990s. Although Simon Sainsbury was the most private of the grocery dynasty - he refused honours and would not allow an entry in Who's Who - he was a major art collector and one of Britain's most generous philanthropists. He is estimated to have given away more than £100m during his lifetime. With no children - he lived for 40 years with Stewart Grimshaw, a restaurateur and bookseller - Sainsbury offered the Tate and the National Galleries the pick of his collection 10 years ago and asked them to submit "wish lists". Several of the paintings have not been seen in public for years.

From Sainsbury, a great-grandson of the founder of the grocery chain, The National Gallery is to receive five pictures: two Monets, Snow Scene at Argenteuil (1875) and Water-Lilies, Setting Sun (about 1907); Paul Gaugin's Bowl of Fruit and Tankard before a Window (about 1890); Edgar Degas's After the Bath (about 1896); and Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909).

The two Tate galleries will receive 13 works; John Woootton's Life Size Horse with Huntsman Blowing a Horn (1732); Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Carter (1747-8); Johan Zoffany's Colonel Blair and his Family and Indian Ayah in an Interior (1789); two paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath (1925) and The Yellow Boat (1936-8); Victor Pasmore's The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith No 1 (1944-7); three works by Balthus, The Snack (1940), Nude on a Chaise Longue (1950) and The Golden Fruit (1956); Francis Bacon's Study for a Portrait (1952); and three paintings by Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten (1947), Boy Smoking (1950-51) and The Painter's Mother (1972).

It is expected that other, unnamed works from Sainsbury's collection, will be sold at auction.

The bequest will be shown for the first time at Tate Britain next summer.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, described the gift as "extraordinarily generous" and called it "one of the most important bequests to come to the nation in the last 100 years".

Top prices for artists

Below are the auction records for the artists named in the bequest list.

Claude Monet: £18.5m (2007) Snow Scene at Argenteuil, 1875

Water-Lilies, Setting Sun, about 1907

Lucian Freud: £7.8m (2007) Boy Smoking, 1950-51

Edgar Degas: £17.6m (1999) After the Bath, about 1896

Paul Gauguin: $40.3m (2006) Bowl of Fruit and Tankard before a Window, probably 1890

Henri Rousseau: £2.9m (1993) Portrait of Joseph Brummer, 1909

Thomas Gainsborough: £2.6m (2002) Mr and Mrs Carter of Bullingdon House, Bulmer, Essex

Johan Zoffany: £3.5m (2001)

Pierre Bonnard: $8.5m (2006) Nude in the Bath, 1925

The Yellow Boat, c.1936-8

John Wootton: £252,000 (1999) Size Horse with Huntsman Blowing a Horn (c.1732)

Victor Pasmore: £221,000 (1997)

Balthus: $6.7m (2006) The Snack

Francis Bacon: $52.6m (2007) Study for a Portrait, 1952

Saatchi gets a room at the Hermitage to showcase art collection

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Reporter
Monday, 29 October 2007

The State Hermitage Museum, which houses one of the world's most celebrated art collections including imperial works from Tsarist Russia and masterpieces by Michelangelo, Rubens and Rembrandt, is to create a "Charles Saatchi room" to showcase the British collector's most cutting-edge acquisitions.

The vast museum in St Petersburg, which consists of six buildings including the Winter Palace and owns three million works, hopes to display as much of Saatchi's works as possible in a dedicated room of "rotating displays".

A spokeswoman for Mr Saatchi said he had agreed to loan his contemporary works, which range from the conceptual creativity of the Young British Artists in the 1990s to avant-garde Chinese artists working under or referring critically to Mao's regime.

Mr Saatchi confirmed that curators from the Hermitage had approached him with the idea of creating a room named after him, adding: "I am a Hermitage groupie, one of the museum's greatest admirers."

The room will be in former government offices in Palace Square, which are being restored to provide a home for the Hermitage's collection of 19th- to 21st-century art, according to November's edition of The Art Newspaper .

Dimitri Ozerkov, the new curator of contemporary art at the Hermitage, said he was keen to broaden the museum's displays to include works which were unfamiliar to generations of Russians who were denied access to contemporary art during the Soviet regime. The museum is also trying to borrow Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull for display in St Petersburg by next year.

Mr Ozerkov approached Mr Saatchi because of his international standing as a pioneer of future art stars. He has famously championed artists such as Stella Vine, Paula Rego, Hirst and Tracey Emin, who are sometimes referred to as his "discoveries".

Works by Chinese artists, including some who worked under an oppressive communist regime, will be among the first to travel to Russia, although they could be followed by the works of the YBAs at a late date. Chinese artworks to be displayed in Russia will include Zhang Xiaogang's A Big Family, from 1995, for which Saatchi paid $1.4m, the highest price for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time, as well as Shi Xinning's Mao and McCarthy, from 2005.

The move to create the room follows the opening of Saatchi's USA Today exhibition unveiled in Russia last week after its launch at the Royal Academy in London last year.

The opening of the show marks the launch of the Hermitage's 20/21 project, which is an attempt to extend the museum's display of art produced after the 1917 Communist Revolution. The scheme's adviser is Sir Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the RA.

A Saatchi Gallery spokeswoman said that the idea to have a room specifically dedicated to changing displays of art was first brought up at meeting in London when the director of the Hermitage, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, met Mr Saatchi to discuss the 20/21 initiative.

Mr Ozerkov said: "We wanted to start our programme of contemporary art with a very important name and we came up with Saatchi. He is one of the most important players in contemporary art and the person most closely related to big British names such as Hirst and Emin."

Provocative posters win Saatchi's 'art idol' contest

By Andrew Johnson
Sunday, 28 October 2007

Meet the heir to Tracey Emin's throne. Sarah Maple, a 22-year-old Muslim from Brighton, is crowned the best of the new young British artists, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. She beat 20 contenders in a competition organised by the art collector Charles Saatchi and judged by the sculptor Antony Gormley and the gallery owner Sadie Coles.

Lord Saatchi has enlisted the aid of established artists to select the winners of the first "art idol" competition. Of the four finalists, three already have already been snapped up by collectors.

Maple's work features photographs of herself in politically provocative situations. The "Vote for Me" series, which won her the competition from an initial entry of hundreds of final-year students, shows her dressed as a Playboy bunny or in hijab with the slogan "Vote for Me – or else you're sexist/homophobic".

Gormley described her work as "direct and playful". He added: "She is playing out, in a way, notions of Western freedom of choice in terms of identity. It's very emotive stuff. She is using the female notion of appropriateness to explain political and personal realism." Maple's work now belongs to Channel 4, which co-sponsored the New Sensations competition.

She said yesterday: "I did a mock political campaign. My work takes the mick out of political correctness gone mad. I got an angry response from some people. It was good to get a reaction, but I do think PC is daft. I think a lot of people are trying to make sure that nobody gets offended.

"I'll probably move on from that now. I don't want to be the one who just does work about Islam. A lot of my work is about identity."

The competition was open to art students in their final year of study. Hundreds of entries were whittled down to 20.

The art collector Anita Zabludowicz, also a judge, has bought the entries of two of the other four finalists, Marcus Lanyon, 26, and Mark Melvin, 28, both from London. "I was incredibly surprised by the excellence of the work. Their art seemed to me to be of museum quality." The entry of the fourth finalist, Mie Olise Kjaergaard, 33, has been bought by a private collector.

動漫旋風來台 御宅族最愛

中國時報2007.10.18
吳垠慧／台北報導

　台北將吹起一陣動漫美學風！廿日陸蓉之策劃的「3L4D 動漫美學新世紀」，帶來
四十三位以動漫美學為主題的國內外藝術家作品。十一月份台北市立美術館的「欲望與消
費─海洋堂與御宅族文化」大展，推出日本著名模型集團「海洋堂」創立四十年來所生產
的三千多件動漫模型。

　「3L4D 動漫美學新世紀」展出日、韓、美、台和中國等地藝術家作品，其中不乏
國際知名藝術家。如日本草間彌生展出色彩鮮麗的孩童雕塑，小孩身上佈滿她的註冊商標
無限蔓延的「圓點」。韓國權奇秀自創的Dongguli，是個微笑的可愛角色。而設計師出身
的松浦浩之，其人物造型很具個性力量。在台灣深受歡迎的奈良美智展出像顆大南瓜般造
型的小女孩頭。

　海洋堂模型文化 盛大展出
　「『動漫美學』是最能代表廿一世紀的時代美學，他們共通的特徵，就是色彩的層
次豐富，圖像造型敘事性強。」陸蓉之說，「不論是韓國、中國或台灣，都受到日本這個
動漫大國的影響，動漫文化進入人們日常生活的各個層面，因而這類作品很容易跨越藝術
疆界的藩籬，為普羅大眾所接受。」陸蓉之觀察，這類作品目前在亞洲最為壯大，創作比
例也最高。為此，陸蓉之提出「3L4D」這個名稱，描述這類作品的共同特徵。

　3L4D藝術 超越時空與生命

　「3L是從紅極一時的網路遊戲『第二人生』（Second Life）而來，第二人生是模
擬真實人生（第一人生）的情境設計出的遊戲。但是動漫角色是虛構、無中生有的，我稱
之為『第三人生』（Third Life）！」她說，「藝術家也在作品中創造類似的角色，這些
角色的生命永恆不朽。」

　立體化角色 玩家搶著收藏

　此外，數位空間和網路的崛起，改變了現代人的思惟和視覺慣性，「藝術家在數位
世界創造出獨特又奇異的形體；數位或虛擬的空間，我稱為『第四度空間』（4D），是這
些角色生存之處。」陸蓉之說：「這些動漫角色不僅超越時空，也超越人生的生命。」

　「海洋堂與御宅族文化」是國內罕見大規模引介日本模型文化的展覽，「海洋堂」
是日本著名的模型集團，四十年的歷史和日本動漫、御宅族文化有很密切的關係。海洋堂
在一九六四年就已成立，直到七○年代才開發組裝模型。

　一九八○年代將日本動漫、電影中的角色予以立體化，為模型界帶來革命性的發展
。海洋堂的設計師在設計模型造型時，多半會帶入自己對角色的觀察與詮釋，因此，他們
的模型造型顯得精緻而獨特，被玩家視為收藏等級的精品。

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

Damien Hirst’s shark, titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” from 1991, will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum for three years.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: October 16, 2007

The shark has landed. On Tuesday Damien Hirst’s killing-machine-in-a-box begins its three-year stay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It lies in wait on the second floor, close to a bank of south-facing windows, entombed in a steel-and-glass tank that suggests a collaboration between Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. On sunny days the light should intensify the azure cast of the 4,360 gallons of formaldehyde. After dusk, when I saw it, the window reflects the tank back at you, doubling the piece into a shark gantlet.

How does it look? Weird. Usually “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” as the sculpture is formally titled, is seen in like-minded company. A few of Mr. Hirst’s sliced-up cows and sheep would set the stage, or works by his fellow Young British Artist, or Y.B.A., shock jocks.

On its own the shark looks a bit tamer than usual, though at the Met, of course, it still shocks. If you passed it at the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park, you might not look twice.

Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator of 19th-century, Modern and contemporary art, who brought the shark here, emphasizes its art status by hanging three shark-themed paintings from the museum’s collection in the gallery. Two are American: a late-18th-century anonymous copy of John Singleton Copley’s famous rescue drama “Watson and the Shark,” and Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream” (1899), which shows a black sailor adrift on a hurricane-battered fishing boat encircled by sharks.

The third and most appropriate is “Head I” (1947-8), by the British painter Francis Bacon, a recent bequest to the Met. Bacon’s interest in twisted flesh and howling mouths is often cited as an influence on Mr. Hirst, and “Head I” fills the bill. Its central gray mound is featureless except for an upturned, gaping, sharp-toothed mouth that is more than a little sharklike and also echoes Picasso’s monstrous “Olga” paintings of the late 1920s.

Some have argued that Steven A. Cohen, the owner of the Hirst shark, is using the Met to increase the work’s value and fame, but it seems more like the other way around. The display advertises the Met’s intention to be a player of sorts in the feeding frenzy surrounding the new and the next.

The shark is a symbol of the onset of this frenzy. Made on commission in 1991 for the collector Charles Saatchi, it is synonymous with the Y.B.A. art scene, from which descend, arguably and with some simplification, Mr. Saatchi’s controversial “Sensation” exhibition, the Tate Modern, the Frieze Art Fair and the bustling London art market that the fair has fostered. (There have been no Y.B.A.’s like the first Y.B.A.’s, but never mind.)

If the shark is a beginning, perhaps the peak (and beginning of the downward spiral) is Mr. Hirst’s latest controversial artwork, the diamond-encrusted platinum skull shown in London this summer. It seems like the perfect summation of our wasteful, high-priced, oblivious moment, an implicitly regal 21st-century equivalent of Cellini’s gold saltcellar.

But the Met means to be hip, if only in its fashion. At 16, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” is a golden oldie. It suggests that the museum intends to show only unquestionably anointed art, preferably at least a decade after its anointment. If you want to accuse the Met of letting itself be used to inflate contemporary-art values, a recent show of brand-new paintings by Neo Rauch would make a better example.

Will the shark attract a new audience to the Met? Maybe. Is it worth the trip? Definitely. Mr. Hirst’s detractors accuse him of being a Conceptual artist, with the implication (misguided even for most genuine Conceptual art) that you don’t need to see the work in person. Mr. Hirst often aims to fry the mind (and misses more than he hits), but he does so by setting up direct, often visceral experiences, of which the shark remains the most outstanding.

In keeping with the piece’s title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.

The shark in the tank is a recent replacement of the original, which more or less disintegrated. It is smaller but more fierce, and it seems to surge forward, ready to pounce on some unseen prey just beyond the tank. If you bend down and peer through its sharply jagged teeth, you’ll be looking past the pure white mouth at the large black hole of its gullet. It’s a reasonable visual metaphor for the crossing-over that we think will never happen.

“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

In London, Art and Commerce Scratch Backs

Yayoi Kusama’s “Moment of Regeneration” is among the works at the Frieze Art Fair.
Jonathan Player for The New York Times

By SARAH LYALL

Published: October 13, 2007

LONDON, Oct. 12 — “I thought it was some kind of strange feminist piece,” said Jessica Stockdale, a 21-year-old photography student, pondering “Untitled (Original)” by the American artist Richard Prince at the Frieze Art Fair. “But I do like her boots.”

The boots in question were adorning the shapely legs of the skimpily attired young woman in the installation, whose job is to rub Mr. Prince’s bright yellow, souped-up 1970 Dodge Challenger provocatively with a cloth while the whole thing rotates on a silver disk. While the Frieze program describes Mr. Prince’s work as offering “the ultimate vehicle in which to pursue the combined fantasies of upward and lateral mobility,” it is equally true to say that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder.

“I like the color,” said Janice Thompson, who is 43 and a recent art school graduate. “The fact that it can be driven away — that’s important. The use of the iconography of the girl; for me it would be like the old masters in some ways, especially because she’s quite ... ”

Busty?

“Yes, that was the word I was looking for,” Ms. Thompson said.

So it goes, the search for meaning at Frieze, Britain’s largest contemporary art fair, now in its fifth year. The influential event opened on Wednesday for the usual coterie of serious buyers and collectors, but let in the rest of the world on Thursday: students, artists, tourists, gawkers and members of the noncollecting public eager to take in the riotous jumble of art, even if they were not always sure what it was.

At one point a tour guide — there are tour guides at the fair, and art appreciators can hire private ones — herded his charges, a group of American women, past a work called “Project for Some Hallucinations.”

“This tree is by ... ,” he said, rifling through his notes.

In fact, it was by Lara Favaretto, an Italian artist who had invited Queen Elizabeth II to visit the fair. The queen had declined; Ms. Favaretto had affixed the letter of regret to a tree as an exercise in “living surrounded by the empty set of a show, from which the main character is missing,” she explains in the Frieze catalog.

The women tried to keep up. “Is this a real tree?” one asked.

Some 151 galleries from 28 countries were chosen to take part this year, drawn from 450 applicants; each has a booth displaying its best pieces — or at least pieces it hoped would sell or provoke. The fair, which continues in Regent’s Park through Sunday, is enormous, noisy and occasionally carnival-like, and the mood in one section of the building can be very different from the mood in another section.

To the extent there is a buzz at Frieze this year, it has centered on the booth run by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a New York gallery, which has been turned into a flea market organized by the artist Rob Pruitt.

Several dozen artists are selling donated old records, old clothes, old knick-knacks and objects that they have turned into art, sort of, including freshly laid hen’s eggs, brownies, paperbacks and nails (the kind hammered into things) signed by the artist.

The artist Jonathan Horowitz was peddling little 1970s greeting-card figurines whose messages he had altered: from “Congratulations on your new job,” for instance, to “Suicide bombers are people too.” (He also had one that said, “Larry Gagosian is a person too.”)

On Wednesday the artist Sam Taylor-Wood could be found in the booth, photographing members of the public alongside Mr. Pruitt, dressed in a panda suit, at £200 ( about $406) a shot.

Why the panda ?

Mr. Pruitt took off the head for a moment.

“I’m a vegetarian, they’re vegetarians,” he said. “I like the equal parts black and white. I think it’s really funny that they’re too lazy to have sex, although I’m not saying that I relate to that, myself.”

This being a contemporary art fair, there were a fair share of people from all sides of the “Is it art, or what?” debate. Some purists said they felt the work at Frieze had become too obvious, too geared to the market.

“It’s interesting, but not as progressive as we thought it would be — it’s more of a commercial event selling for broader tastes,” said Andrew Kinmont, 35, a classmate of Ms. Thompson. “Although, I suppose if you’re not an artist, a lot of it is very avant-garde.”

One such nonartist was John Harvey, an interior and graphic design consultant.

“Many of these things are almost theater,” he said. He peered at Mr. Prince’s car, surrounded by people photographing its busty sidekick. “It’s ironic,” Mr. Harvey said, “although I have no idea what it means.”

Mr. Harvey, a regular collector (“we seem to be buying a lot of paintings at the moment, but the problem is that we’ve run out of space,” he said), considered another piece: an intriguing collection of fabric, urethane and wood tendrils rising from the floor, sinister or friendly, snake-like or seaweedy, take your pick. He said he had not been able to find the sign explaining what it was (“The Moment of Regeneration,” by the celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama).

“That’s the bizarre thing — first you never saw the prices, and now you never see the names,” he said. “We’re all too frightened to ask.”

Seven artists were commissioned by Frieze to create projects that “respond to the social and economic dynamics of the fair,” according to its catalog. These included Mr. Prince’s car, Ms. Favaretto’s note and a piece by Gianni Motti, “Pre-Emptive Act,” in which an actor dressed as a police officer does yoga as a way to subvert expectations about authority and security.

Another commissioned artists, Kris Martin, hit on a novel concept: stop Frieze for an entire minute on Wednesday, the day the fair was all but groaning with important art-world figures and important collectors like Charles Saatchi, Frank Cohen and Eli Broad.

The idea was to “succeed in temporarily stilling the wheels of commerce,” the catalog said.

“To be honest, I never thought it could work,” said the fair’s co-director, Amanda Sharp. But the announcement came across the loudspeaker: please stop buying, stop selling, stop talking and switch off your cellphone “in respect of the moment.”

Shockingly, everyone obeyed. Silence reigned. The wheels of commerce were stilled. “It was actually quite beautiful,” Ms. Sharp said.

The great thing was that Mr. Martin’s piece, titled “Mandi XVI,” would probably have worked even if it hadn’t.

“If it failed,” Ms. Sharp said, “it would have been an experiment in failure.”

Is the art market cruising for a fall?

From The Times

October 12, 2007

As wealthy collectors descend on London for this year’s contemporary art jamboree, our correspondent asks whether this booming and decadent market is cruising for a fall

Stefanie Marsh

In answer to the question, is the bottom about to fall out of the contemporary art market, Richard Feigen, the 77-year-old veteran New York art dealer, a man who has spent most of his professional life handling Picassos, Van Goghs and Beckmans – a man of formidable reputation and immaculate taste, a man with an eye – tells the story of how he was almost trampled in the mud by the occupants of a platoon of shiny BMWs in London last year.

The incident occurred in driving rain at the well-guarded entrance to Frieze, which, since its inauguration in 2003, has evolved into perhaps the most important contemporary art fair in the world. Out of the BMWs galloped the collectors – hedge-fund managers, oil magnates, pop stars, models, actors, CEOs, upstarts, wannabes: a convulsion of new money – “a stampede,” says Feigen, “being lead by these art advisers and curators. They’re like Sherpas with their air of invincibility and priority. I was almost physically crushed.

“Anyway, I went inside and deliberately picked out five of what I considered the worst pieces of work; the most putrid garbage there – and of course they are all going for thousands of pounds. Every single one of them had already been sold.”

Feigen goes against the received wisdom of the day when he opines that “a lot of it [contemporary art] isn’t even art”, that “Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have no place in the history of art”, and that “the market is governed by people buying with their ears, not with their eyes”, and (most sacreligious of all for those with a stake in this market) that “a lot of assets are overvalued . . . just as I wouldn’t like to be the developer of a $10 million condominium in Chelsea, I wouldn’t like to be the proprietor of a $30 million Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst because I would feel very, very vulnerable.”

In enlightened circles, such views have come to be considered not just controversial and disloyal but erroneous – they bring to mind Norman Tebbit emerging in 1997 from the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition, asking: “Have they all gone stark raving mad?” With hindsight, the joke is on Tebbit for having been mad enough not to have invested in Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, which Charles Saatchi went on to sell to the hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen for $8 million (£3.9 million) in 2004.

The old debate over what constitutes art is, in a sense, irrelevant. Feigen talks about the “mafia” of the contemporary art world “who will claim that because you don’t like what they do, you don’t understand art”. Another dealer, who wishes to remain anonymous, says: “These people with money have no taste and no confidence. They need an old Etonian – Jay Jopling – or an old family – Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst [who hosts a regular contemporary art fair at her family seat, Sudeley Castle] to give them the confidence they need. If you look at Jay’s client list, they’re a flashy lot.

“Look at what’s going on at the Serpentine Gallery. Matthew Barney – Björk’s husband – is touted as perhaps our greatest new artist. His work involves springing up on a trampoline in a harness, making marks on the wall with a pencil. It is hilarious.”

In case, dear readers, you are unfashionable enough not to know what is going on under your noses in the capital this week, here is a rough outline. Unprecedentedly rich, glamorous people from all over the world have descended on London to main-line canapés and chain-drink champagne in the week-long conga-line of parties, dinners and private views that surround three highlights of the international contemporary art calendar. Riding on their coat-tails are the aforementioned curators and advisers, as well as the speculators who believe that art now constitutes an “asset class”.

The Frieze Fair is flanked by the smaller, less expensive but increasingly well thought-of Zoo art fair and the feverishly anticipated auctions of contemporary art at Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s this weekend, the results of which, since the galleries are so opaque, remains the only accurate means of measuring the market’s temperature.

“October 13 at five o’clock is judgment time,” says Kenny Schachter, a trader-turned-dealer, who also has his doubts about the long-term viability of some contemporary art. “Markets always go in cycles and there’s no market in the world that only goes up – look at the subsequent reassessment of Millais. People in the art world are so fickle. I can say with absolute conviction that there will be a downturn or an upset. It is a very mature market. It could be in six months, two months, a year.”

Figures published this year by ArtTactic, an art consultancy, hint at a slowdown: “Our May survey indicated a change in attitude. Despite our confidence indicator remaining high, about 25 per cent of respondents moved into the ‘neutral’ position from ‘positive’ at the last reading in November 2006, showing that people were increasingly becoming uncomfortable with the high valuations.”

Until such a time, the partying and prolific spending goes on. If you had been driving past the Ritz on Tuesday evening you would have seen a long queue of men and women in black-tie, waiting patiently to get into the White Cube party. At the Decadence, Decay and Demimonde party on Wednesday night, 250 guests watched a historical reenactment of Cora Pearl’s party piece in which she would be brought in to dinner as the dessert course, naked, covered in cream and borne aloft by “Nubian slaves” on a silver salver.

“It’s just a frenzy,” says Tot Taylor, co-director of the Riflemaker Gallery. “It’s turning into what the record business was like in the Eighties.” For his part, Taylor is pleased to be showing his artists’ works in Sotheby’s toilets for a week. “Gavin Turk will have his piss paintings in there,” he says. “They are an homage to Jackson Pollock, who used to urinate on all his paintings because he didn’t like his dealers.”

When people say that the art marketis booming, what they mean is that the postwar and contemporary art market is booming. Since Sensation spurred even Myra Hindley to write a letter of complaint to the Royal Academy about Marcus Harvey’s portrait Myra, created from the handprints of children in 1997, Young British Artists in particular have collided with an era of new money from all over the globe.

Some examples of the exponential growth: a Peter Doig painting costs £450,000 in July 2005 and is sold at auction for £1.2 million the next year; the Hong Kong collector Joseph Lau pays £9.19 million for a Warhol Mao painting; an auction of Russian art at Sotheby’s is cancelled because the billionaire Alisher Usmanov has made a successful preemptive bid for the entire £20 million collection. It is thought that he paid more.

One well-known collector said: “We’ve been eclipsed by these people who have limitless money but no idea about art. Artists like Richard Prince and the Leipzig School have been massively overhyped. There is a herd mentality among people who weren’t around in the Nineties when Japanese money fled and the market went into a tail-spin. The insides of the auction houses have started to remind me of casinos – art has become monetised. But it is frightened money. If all of a sudden two or three lots fail to get sold, it wouldn’t take much for people to decide that some of this stuff is no longer a repository for serious money.”

Philip Hoffman, who left Christie’s as finance director to set up the Fine Art Fund, the first art hedge fund, is more optimistic – but clears about his priorities: “Our focus is purely profit. Passion doesn’t come into it. I have bought a piece for £70,000 which we sold for £300,000 two and a half years later, and I loathe it.”

But behind some gallery doors there is discomfort at the way business can be conducted. Earlier this year Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, was sold to a consortium for an alleged £50 million. Who was behind the deal? Hirst, it was alleged, was a member of the consortium. The Art Newspaper quoted unnamed trade sources saying that the skull’s price had fallen to £38 million during earlier negotiations as Hirst struggled to sell the piece. The artist’s business manager, Frank Dunphy, categorically denied this claim. Cristina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper, said: “When works of art are sold privately it is extremely difficult to verify the price paid. Dealers and artists naturally have an interest in publicising the highest figures discussed in negotiations.”

We know that the money changed hands only because Hirst’s gallerists, White Cube, told us so. The buyer allegedly paid in cash. Kenny Schachter says: “Unless you see the paperwork, nothing is as it seems.”

But Nicolai Frahm, a contemporary art consultant, insists that Hirst’s skull was a stroke of genius: “It is quite humorous; it shows what is happening in art and culture – the whole bling culture.” Of the alleged sale, he adds: “It was brilliant. Whether or not it sold, it completely screwed up the market. What it did was make everything else seem cheap. After that skull came on sale, one of his cabinets was sold at Sotheby’s for £20 million.”

Frahm believes that the market will remain robust, if only because it is so tightly controlled by the dealers and their entourages. Curiously, he insists that this maintains the integrity of the artworks. It is considered bad taste to resell art for profit at auction – a sin for which collectors can be ostracised by dealers.

“Let’s say there is an exhibition by Jeff Koons: all those pieces will go to a major collector like Pinaud. For the top pieces it is a closed shop – that’s why you need somebody else to do it for you. It really freaks people out that the hot artist they want to get their hands on is inaccessible to them.”

As Frieze and Zoo open their doors, how will collectors know who to trust, let alone decide whether an artist will stand the test of a market crash? For example, you don’t hear that much about Julian Schnabel these days, even though he was a star before the last art crash in the 1990s, which took an enormous toll on the value of his work. The situation is different now, says Hoffman: “I have clients from all over the world spending huge amounts, they are completely oblivious to the credit crunch. In the long term the art market is a one-way street.” He points to the 540 per cent annual return that his company recently made on a single artwork.

On the other hand, Michael Moses, an art economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, gives warning: “Remember that from 1990, postcontemporary art lost 60 per cent of its value. I hope the optimists are correct, but what people are saying about the contemporary art world today is what they were saying about the Nasdaq in 1999, a year before it crashed.”

Feigen is more certain still: “I believe it will happen, sooner or later. It smacks of confection. It wouldn’t take very much to scare off the serious money.”

‘I daren’t wear my best dress’

A visit to the Frieze art fair is like strolling on the art village green at its annual fête. It has a carnival atmosphere but I no longer wear my best dress or I risk being pecked to death by Botoxed, designer-bag ladies. Even in mufti I find moving about difficult as I bump into someone every 10 metres. Nicholas Serota and the gallerist Nicholas Logsdail dispense fleeting eye contact and a perfunctory wave without breaking stride. Serious connections and money are there to be made, but I prefer to wander through the MDF souk and give myself up to chance meetings. Some are pure pleasure, such as with jovial Paul Hedge of Hales Gallery. Some are fun, like being interviewed by Wendy Jones for Resonance FM. Some are protifable. A Scandinavian collector wants a snap of us together next to the sculpture of mine he has just bought; and some are upsetting – a disgruntled artist rants in my face wanting redress for some slight I dealt him. I self-medicate with VIP champagne and chat to the charming Pierre de Weck of Deutsche Bank, the fair’s sponsor. It’s all so cosy in an international billionaire meets elitist intellectual way.

Grayson Perry

Why Frieze is hot

From The Sunday Times

October 7, 2007

London’s Frieze fair is the hippest place to be this week: and the art will be pretty good, too

Waldemar Januszczak

Since we live in a democracy, you are notionally free to choose where you go between Thursday and next Sunday. If, however, you live your life in the manner of most modern citizens, guided by the frantic proddings of the zeitgeist, pushed this way and that by the rhythms of cool, then you actually have little say in the matter. If you don’t want to be the only square in your village, you need to go to Frieze. Everybody else will be there.

On paper, it’s just an art fair. But then, on paper, Michelangelo’s David is just a lump of stone. On paper, the Taj Mahal is a building, and Helen Mirren is an actress. When it comes to describing exceptional cultural phenomena, the English language is occasionally out of its depth. And “art fair” is a particularly unfortunate example. It’s the way word two seems to undermine word one that annoys. I’m not saying Frieze isn’t, technically, an art fair. My point is that this glum definition doesn’t begin to capture the drama and buzz of the event in the tent.

For four days in October, the Frieze Art Fair transforms London into a mecca, and collecting into a hajj. People fly in from Miami and New York, from LA and Chi-cago, from Berlin and Zurich, and now, I see, from Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo. Hotels are packed, restaurants booked. You can’t get a limo for love nor money. But the most remarkable thing about Frieze is that it has achieved all this from a standing start. Five years ago, it didn’t even exist.

If you’ve been to the Ideal Home Show or the Motor Show, you will recognise the basic setup. People who want to sell you something rent a venue, jolly it up and fill it with their wares. You are then invited to join them, and are flogged as much of the stuff as your weaknesses will allow. It’s what happens at all trade fairs. But Frieze’s first organisational masterstroke was to locate these familiar exchanges in a venue that was excitingly unfamiliar. Where the typical trade fair takes place in the sucked and spat-out misery of Olympia or tatty old Ally Pally, Frieze happens in a specially designed tented pueblo, a kind of temporary Brasilia made of tarpaulins, situated for some fantastical reason in the unlikely horticultural expanses of Regent’s Park. Marching up to this huge and noisy big top makes you feel like an excited kid being taken to the circus by his nan. And the people selling stuff inside are a different crowd from the ones you are probably used to. Art dealers follow a specific sartorial rule book. The men dress like Mormon missionaries, in dark suits and crisp white shirts, while the women wear only Prada.

The second defining decision made at the outset by the organisers was to deal exclusively in contemporary art. Not modern art, contemporary art. No Picassos, no Henry Moores; no repetition from any of the old-timers. The rule-makers are hardliners on this subject. Only new art from around the world is allowed in. If you’re up with Frieze, therefore, you’re as up as you can be with art. There is nothing fresher than this.

It was all planned and enforced by two absurdly young and adventurous cultural entrepreneurs. One of them, Amanda Sharp, lives in New York, and I know nothing about her. The other one, Matthew Slotover, I’ve encountered a few times, and I can happily confirm that he looks more like my paperboy than the creator of the definitive 21st-century art event so far. As with many contemporary millionaires and internet revolutionaries, he seems far too callow and casual to have achieved what he has.

The name “Frieze”, he confesses happily, was discovered by chance in a thesaurus. He was looking for synonyms for “art”, and there was “frieze”, meaning a horizontal band of carved reliefs. By a curious coincidence, it’s a homophone of the pioneering exhibition mounted in a London warehouse by Damien Hirst in 1988. Freeze was the event that triggered the whole Brit Art thing – and the entire dramatic turnaround in British art taste that was to culminate in the opening of Tate Modern can be traced back, I suggest, to the original Freeze show. So, it was a good name to stumble across.

Before Frieze the art fair came along, Slotover and Sharp ran Frieze the magazine, and that, too, was an impossibly hip blend of obscure thoughts and elegant ads. They started thinking about an art fair in 1998. But it wasn’t until the day Tate Modern opened, in 2000, that they knew they had to go ahead with it. “The whole of the international art world was here,” Slotover says.“They had never come before. But we looked around and thought, they will come to London.”

Bravely and perspicaciously Slotover and Sharp remortgaged their houses and began planning the Frieze Art Fair in the exact detail that characterises their approach to this day. And from the moment it untied its tent flaps in October 2003, it was clear that the zeitgeist was behind it. The figures speak for themselves. In 2005, 47,000 visitors were lured into the great marquee, and spent £33m on art. The next year, the figures were up by 35%. They’ll be up again this year, and next year, and the next. But by how much, we will never know, because, last year, Frieze stopped releasing the details. I suspect they were embarrassed by them.

I spotted Jude, Gwyneth, Elton and Nigella at last year’s Frieze. Jude and Gwyneth were definitely buying, as, I presume, was Elton; and if Nigella wasn’t, then her husband, Charles, whom I also saw, must have been. I think I noticed Claudia hurrying past, too, and Kate would have been there, because Kate goes to everything. Tracey was around, of course, and although I didn’t see Damien, I couldn’t miss Jake and Dinos, because they were plonked right in the middle of the thing, churning out ludicrous portraits of anyone prepared to fork out £4,000 for the pleasure. I wanted to have mine done – who wouldn’t? – but the queue was too long.

Those were just the recognisable faces in the crowd, the A-, B- and C-listers whose presence so handily signals a cultural success. Then there were all those anonymous visitors who, judging by the cut of their thongs and the swing of their bling, constituted a large percentage of the nation’s groovers: the young, the fresh, the giggly. If Al-Qaeda decided to take out the Frieze tent, they would undoubtedly take out most of Britain’s happening types.

But the hipness of Frieze is certainly not why I, a longtime abhorrer of art fairs, approve of this event and, indeed, delight in it. I like Frieze because it gives so much away. I don’t mean the leaflets and baseball caps you come out with. That happens at all trade fairs. Frieze deals in a different kind of freebie. One of the best things the fair does is to commission work by artists who are not directly involved with a particular gallery. This year, the venerable American trouble-maker Richard Prince will be showing a full-size recreation of a macho 1970 car called a Dodge Challenger. The original Challenger was a mass-produced piece of flash that guys liked. But Prince has reversed its usual manufacturing process by building his model entirely by hand, from scratch. What’s being challenged, therefore, is the nature and value of an original – a key art-world question. And seeing it being asked at Frieze is like going to a motor show and finding a poster covered in road-safety warnings. All the Frieze commissions this year seem to be biting the hand that feeds them by asking awkward questions of the event itself. Elin Hansdottir has set up a lighting system that ensures your shadow is split up into its constituent parts as you enter, as if you don’t really exist.

All these performances share a questioning mood. And that applies to Frieze in general. On the surface, it’s an art fair, but beneath that it’s an art-world conspiracy to subvert the system. In my favourite conceptual manoeuvre, Gianni Motti has asked one of the policemen patrolling Frieze to take a regular public break from security to practise yoga. That I really want to see. And it’s why a hardened art-fair hater like me will be at the head of the queue on Thursday, making sure I get in before you.

Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park, NW1, October 11-14.

How to sell Banksy — hire some strippers

From The Times

October 6, 2007

Luke Leitch

It is a list of contemporary art that would have the staff of any auction house drooling with envy. The sale in question includes three Andy Warhols (combined guide price, £390,000), a Basquiat collage (£800,000), three new Damien Hirst paintings (£925,000) and works by Banksy, the celebrated anonymous graffiti artist.

But while the strength of the sale’s catalogue is notable, it is the venue — and the nature — of the event that is particularly unusual.

About 100 collectors, including retail and City millionaires, pop stars and Hollywood actors, have been invited to The Soho Auction in The Shadow Lounge, a vogueish gay nightclub in Soho, Central London.

Before they contemplate the works on offer, the potential bidders will be entertained by burlesque acts, strippers and other risqué entertainment of a type unlikely to be seen at Sotheby’s.

Conceived as an irreverent shot across the bows of the art establishment, The Soho Auction is the brainchild of the photographer-turned-gallerist Steve Lazarides. Mr Lazarides has flourished in the past few years thanks to his representation of artists including Banksy and Antony Micallef, the emerging talent from Brighton whose show in Los Angeles this summer sold out for $6.5 million (£3.2 million) in two hours.

“The idea is to inject a little anarchy back into the staid, serious business of buying art,” Mr Lazarides said. “It will be an evening of booze and burlesque, with the odd bit of extremely desirable art thrown in.”

Although the guest-list is undisclosed, collectors who have bought items through his gallery include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Robbie Williams, Jude Law, Dennis Hopper, Sir Paul Smith and Frank Cohen, the “Saatchi of the North”.

Mr Lazarides said: “There is a whole new set of buyers who have entered the market. Whether they’re rag trade, City boys or celebrities, they tend to be under 45. They’ve got money and they don’t particularly want to spend it on a Picasso — they want to buy something that relates to their lives, their time and their culture.”

Next Thursday’s event coincides with Frieze, the enormously successful contemporary art fair that each year lures the great and the good of the London art world to a huge marquee in Regent’s Park and acts as a catalyst for art sales worth tens of millions of pounds. Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions during Frieze are predicted to raise up to £145.5 million.

A Christie’s sale on October 14 includes a Jeff Koons estimated as being worth £2.5 million – as well as a 1992 Hirst, a Banksy estimated at £60,000 and three works by Jean-Michel Basquiat with a total estimated value of up to £6 million. It will not, however, be crammed full of wine, women of dubious virtue and debauchery.

The Hirsts to be sold at The Soho Auction include the first of a new series of paintings depicting the world’s most magnificent diamonds, following the success of his sculpture of a diamond skull which sold for £50 million. The Regent shows the 410-carat stone found in India in 1698 which, after its sale by Thomas Pitt, the adventurer to the Duke of Orléans, in 1717, was worn by such eminences as Napoleon, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVIII.

Hirst has also provided a new spot painting and spin painting, above, entitled Beautiful Lazarides Inc Auction Spinny Thingy Where Will It All End, Money For Old Rope, Buy This You B****r, Its Got Kline Blue Bloody Splashes In It for F***’s Sake, Love You Really Painting (with xxxxx).

In an e-mail to The Times, Mr Hirst wrote: “I’ve put three paintings in Steve’s auction: he asked me to do it because, he said, I’m ‘a big name’.

“I like helping him because he’s changing the way things are done.”

Also on sale will be Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen and Jonathan Yeo’s pornographic portrait of President Bush.

Zoo: Behind the scenes at Britain's coolest art fair

Soraya Rodriguez is the director of London's Zoo Art Fair. But as the exhibitors set out their stalls, she tells Alice Jones why you can't put a price on creativity

Ciaran Murphy, 'Palm Trees From Below', 2007. Courtesy Mother's Tankstation, Dublin

Wednesday, 3 October 2007

Until just four months ago, Soraya Rodriguez was running Zoo Art Fair from her old bedroom at her mother's house. These days, Rodriguez and her team operate from fashionable Whitechapel, east London , a much more fitting home for the fair that began as a satellite to Frieze four years ago but is now quietly making its name as a younger, cooler alternative in its own right.

Last year its showcase of emerging artists from young commercial galleries and non-commercial collectives and spaces took £1.7m in sales and drew visitors such as Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers and Peter Blake, while Charles Saatchi, and curators Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota were spotted wandering the stands.

This year, Zoo Art Fair has a new home behind the Royal Academy. Leaving behind not only the quirky location that gave the fair its name but also Regent's Park, home to Frieze, is a bold move that demonstrates just how far the fair has come since it first set out its stall among the penguin pools of London Zoo. "It's good to shake things up," says Rodriguez. "I like doing things in threes. An old boss of mine used to say that in the first year everyone loves you, in the second year you have to sustain it and in the third year you have to start to change."

The Burlington Gardens building used to house the Museum of Mankind, to which Rodriguez was a frequent visitor during her days studying sculpture. Now 35, she embarked on a career in art with a BA at Liverpool University, then an MA at the Royal College.

"I was very intent on being Michelangelo by the age of 26, but that didn't quite work out," she says wryly. After a two-year break from the art world, Rodriguez joined the publications department at the Royal Academy, where she met Max Wigram. A year later she left to help Wigram with his business, acting as his "mini-me" as he expanded his gallery from his front room to his bedroom, eventually going on to become director of exhibitions at the New Bond Street gallery.

Three years later, Rodriguez upped sticks again. Within two weeks she had bumped into David Risley and Zoo was born. "Things like Max and Zoo could only have happened if I'd jumped ship without a clue as to what might happen. If I'd done the sensible thing and got a curating job at the Tate, none of this would have happened. I almost don't feel responsible for it."

But responsible she was, along with Risley, an art dealer who was curating the philanthropic Bloomberg Space (he has since left the fair to concentrate on his own gallery). "We had a nice blend of thinking of a fair not just as a commercial shop front," says Rodriguez. "We'd both been very excited about the arrival of Frieze. And it was clear, even from the first year, that it was turning into a calendar moment."

Rather than compete with Frieze, Risley and Rodriguez decided to add to it with a fair that would give a platform to the myriad young organisations that had sprung up in the capital since the millennium.

Having decided to become non-profit making ("because there was no other way of doing it"), they set about raising funds from collectors including Saatchi, Anita Zabludowicz and Jay Jopling. Many continue to sponsor the fair, under the title of "Honorary Zoo Keepers", and both Saatchi and Zabludowicz will have stands at this year's fair.

Since 2004, when there were 26 exhibitors, all from London, the fair has grown to take in regional and international organisations. This year, there will be 61 exhibitors from as far afield as Los Angeles, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as exciting London spaces such as Riflemaker (which counts Gavin Turk, Jamie Shovlin and Julie Verhoeven among its artists) and Paradise Row, home to the cult photographer Poppy de Villeneuve. Rodriguez is hoping that sales will go up by another 30 per cent to top the £2m mark.

"London has kept its momentum," says Rodriguez. "In some ways that scares me because I wonder whether it's possible to sustain this much quality. Perhaps people think, 'the market's great, we can all live a nice lifestyle being a gallerist in a refrigerated space.' But then every year I think that and it's still going."

For now at least, there's no place she'd rather be. "I like being part of somewhere that's burgeoning, really struggling to achieve, constantly at it. It's much more die hard in London. You really have to think about it when you devote your life to it here."

So what should visitors be looking to buy? There is "something for everyone" from £50 imitation Bic pens by Gemma Holt on the Associates stand, to The Rape of the Sabine Women, an epic video artwork by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation from the New York gallery Roebling Hall, costing £100,000. But it's not all about the price.

"People irritate me going on about the affordability of art. There is nothing affordable about art – making it isn't affordable, showing it isn't affordable, insuring, transporting, writing about it. It's a stupid idea to think that we have to tell the public that this is the only way they can access it. The most affordable thing in art is a Tate Modern ticket. You can pay £7 and own it for an afternoon and have an experience of it, which is the true thing that you take away and you don't have worry about the insurance, the transport, the cataloguing, the archive. How affordable is that?"

Rodriguez is equally dismissive of hedge-funders who tie up their assets in canvas. "It'll be a walk in the park for one sunny afternoon, but when the weather changes they won't come back. And who needs them? If you really love something, buy it. If you want to live with it and have tiny pieces of brain surgery done to you every day, then it's a good thing to do. Otherwise, buy a car or buy a dress," says Rodriguez. "It's funny how people expect art to give back this huge dividend on investment. If you spent £5,000 on a Christian Dior dress, you wouldn't eyeball the dress vendor and say 'is it going to cost twice as much in three years?' Why make art do that? It's not fair. Just buy it and love it."

Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1 (020-7247 8597; www.zooartfair.com), 12 to 15 October

「白盒子」內的展式 操作太保守

吳垠慧／台北報導 　(20071003)

　由國美館自發性舉辦的第一屆亞洲藝術雙年展，也是台灣第二個由美術館籌辦的國
際性當代藝術雙年展。美術界人士有所期待，但也對這個雙年展未來的定位、影響以及延
續性感到關心。

　策展人兼藝評家黃海鳴表示，台灣透過雙年展的方式，與鄰近的亞洲國家產生連結
，是值得關注的，「台灣與亞洲地區在文化、人種、思想上較為接近，雙方的交流也較能
聚焦」。

　但是，也有人憂心這個雙年展是否有延續的能量。任教台中東海大學美術系的李思
賢表示，「這個展覽是第一屆舉辦，館長薛保瑕是一手促成的推手，倘若館長任期屆滿，
展覽是否還會繼續？」

　李思賢關切：「這個雙年展與其他同樣定位在亞洲區的雙、三年展，有何差別？對
於台灣當代藝術的現況能產生什麼樣的影響？」他打比方說，如果因為台灣藝術家走不出
去，所以辦這個展覽，讓國外進來跟台灣交流，「那這樣台北雙年展是不是就夠了？」

　不過，北美館展覽組主任張芳薇則說，展覽的定位很重要，而且需要經營很久，逐
步調整，幾屆之後才可能看出績效。

　藝術家姚瑞中則是提出與外部場域結合的建議。他以伊斯坦堡、威尼斯雙年展和
德國卡塞爾文件展為例，「這些雙年展大多連結外部資源，將展出場域擴展到城市之外，
在展覽之外，還可以欣賞到當地文化與環境生態。」姚瑞中說，台灣的雙年展都停留在美
術館「白盒子」內的展出方式，操作的方式還是保守了一點。