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Jean-Michel Basquiat is still an enigma + Can art save Aussie manufacturing industry?

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Jean-Michel Basquiat Is Still an Enigma
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...ty/561728/

EXCERPT: In May 2016, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 million. One year later, another painting of his from 1982, Untitled, sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth-most-expensive work of art ever purchased at auction, and setting a record for an American artist. Basquiat is not the first painter to have a canvas sell for a price that strikes ordinary people as obscene. But when Jeffrey Deitch, a prominent curator and dealer, said after the sale, “He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” it was hard to pin down the precise meaning of the word league. Was Basquiat now considered as great an artist as Picasso? Or was he merely as expensive to own?

Basquiat became famous in the early 1980s, when the idea that artists were supposed to be commercial innocents fell apart for good, and when the idea of the “art star”—a funnily abbreviated inversion, if you think about it, of starving artist—first came into vogue. In 1985, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Basquiat, titled “New Art, New Money.” Its tone was both awed and suspicious, with constant references to a hot, possibly gullible, market in contemporary art. His work was said to be selling “at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry,” and Basquiat himself was quoted as worrying he had become a “gallery mascot.” Whatever else was true, as the art historian Jordana Moore Saggese has said since, “this was not the starving artist the public was accustomed to seeing.”

In the 30 years since Basquiat died of a drug overdose, in 1988, at the age of 27, the prices of his work have climbed steadily upward, taking some astonishing leaps along the way. Everyone remains fascinated by him—the life is compelling, the person bewitching, the canvases impossible to turn away from—but nobody agrees on why. [...]

What critics seem to be striving for on behalf of Basquiat isn’t understanding but respectability, which anyone looking at the paintings can immediately see Basquiat was uninterested in. These canvases were made by a young man, barely out of his teens, who never lost a teenager’s contempt for respectability. Trying to assert art-historical importance on the paintings’ behalf, a critic comes up against their obvious lack of self-importance. Next to their louche irreverence, the language surrounding them has felt clumsy and overwrought from the beginning. What little we know for sure about Basquiat can be said simply: An extraordinary painterly sensitivity expressed itself in the person of a young black male, the locus of terror and misgiving in a racist society. That, and rich people love to collect his work. We have had a hard time making these two go together easily. But so did he.

[...] Basquiat’s mother, Matilde, was a Brooklynite of Puerto Rican descent. [...] His father, Gerard, was a Haitian immigrant. [...]

His paintings, the art dealer Annina Nosei later said, “had a quality you don’t find on the walls of the street, a quality of poetry and a universal message of the sign. It was a bit immature, but very beautiful.” Nosei’s background in the art world was deep [...] Her connection to Basquiat’s work was instantaneous and serious. She was frantic to represent him, but there was a hitch. Other than what he’d exhibited, he had no paintings. Visiting Basquiat (different apartment, new girlfriend), Nosei was floored to discover that he had no inventory to show her. “You don’t have anything?” she asked him, as she recalls in a 2010 documentary called *The Radiant Child*. And so, in September 1981, Nosei put him to work producing canvases in her Prince Street gallery’s basement.

The arrangement understandably makes commentators squirm: a white taskmistress keeping a black ward in her basement to turn out paintings on command. Basquiat himself said, “That has a nasty edge to it, you know? I was never locked anywhere. If I was white, they would just say ‘artist in residence.’ ” With its large, oblong skylight, the space was neither gloomy nor cramped, and it was continuously restocked with supplies by fawning assistants. Basquiat treated the arrangement like a job. Nosei recalls him showing up early in the morning with croissants from Dean & DeLuca and apologizing if he was late. Once in the basement, he would put on music, often Ravel’s Boléro, incurring the bang of Nosei’s umbrella from the floor above. And then he would paint....

MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...ty/561728/



Science makes art. But could art save the Australian manufacturing industry?
https://theconversation.com/science-make...stry-97849

EXCERPT: The “hand-made” nature of artistic works has been highly valued by humans over thousands of years. But digital capability is changing art – not just how art is designed; also how it is made.

Now we’re at the point where the art and design industry in Australia is demanding “mass customisation” of artworks. Some companies have started to address this using the latest generation of robotics technologies – but making the technology work in the right way needs input from creative expertise.

Done right, this mashup of creativity with technology could strengthen manufacturing capability in Australia.

[...] Reproducing or re-sizing works of art can [...] present manufacturing challenges. Originally, artisans would carefully measure the original object and then hand craft the copies, sometimes adjusting the scale. Now, modern scanning technology can create highly accurate computer models of such objects – but the same problem of how to manufacture the new objects presents itself.

The technology to take a digital design into a mechanical fabrication process exists, but it is normally too costly for one-off pieces and is reserved for mass production. This is where robots come into play....

MORE: https://theconversation.com/science-make...stry-97849
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