Art...and like fame...and stuff.

from The Real Cindy Sherman in Harpars Bazaar...

...Last spring, Sherman's Untitled #96 (above) sold for $3.9 million, then the highest price ever paid at auction for a photograph. She says she was gratified that a photograph of hers set an auction record but also not surprised. "I felt, well, it's about time," she says. "Not that I feel it's worth that much, but so much other photography by men has been hovering in that range. I have to say I'm competitive: 'Hey, what about me? I'm in that same realm of fame as those guys.'"

Rhein II by Andreas Gursky, now the most expensive photograph ever sold at $4.3m

from Why is Art so Damned Expensive? in Newsweek/TheDaily Beast...

...“If I can’t sell something, I just double the price.” That’s what Ernst Beyeler, the great Swiss dealer who helped found Art Basel, reportedly said. Some people actually prefer to pay more than makes sense. Zelizer explains that, in all walks of life, we treat the biggest sums differently, with special respect or even awe, than more everyday money. “I think very often the price paid for a work is the trophy itself,” says Arnold Glimcher an art dealer.

My Faraway One

O'Keeffe & Stieglitz, ©Arnold Newman, 1944

Him:

"Stieglitz was temperamentally drawn to difficulty, both in the processes and the subjects of photography. Among his best-known early photographs are Manhattan street scenes under extreme visual conditions. He loved the melancholy of reflections caught in rainy streets at dusk."

Her:

"O’Keeffe joked that she came from the “tale end of the earth”; the charmingly misspelled word suggests that there was something legendary, like a fairy tale, about her upbringing."

Georgia O'Keeffe, ©Algred Stieglitz, 1918

A wonderful article in the New York Review of Books by Christopher Benfey on the publication of the correspondence between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keefe entitled 'My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume 1, 1915-1933' edited by Sarah Greenough.

I am always drawn to collections of correspondence from Van Gough to Hunter Thompson. Letters always seem to reveal huge depths about the individual's inner lives that perhaps are only present on the surface in their work proper. They're the reality TV of the artistic retrospective.

Benfey's article is a great read, Stieglitz, some 24 years older than his muse, seemed magnetically drawn to the burning talent of O'Keeffe, becoming, at the instant they met, both a dependent and a devotee of her work and of her body.

His possessiveness of all things 'Georgian' extended as far as his desire to be cremated with 'Blue Lines X', a work of hers that he felt represented their mutual being.

“In a way it’s criminal to ask you to have it accompany me beyond all Pain or Ecstasy—but I must take it with me.”

Blue Lines X, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1916

A Lot More to be Seen

David Hockney 'draws' from the video village. ©David Hockney

Great article in the Technology Review on David Hockney's latest series of motion collages captured using rigs of multiple DSLR's set up at different points of view. Long an innovator in the photographic medium and an astute commentator on the impact of lens based media on traditional painting and other art practices Hockney's contribution to photography is somehow still overlooked on university courses and by the photo establishment.

"A lot of people have told me," Hockney states, "that before they see these films they can't imagine what nine cameras could do that one can't. When they see them, they understand. It's showing a lot more; there's simply a lot more to see. It seems you can see almost more on these screens than if you were really there. Everything is in focus, so you're looking at something very complicated but with incredible clarity."

Image from the 18 screen video May 12th 2011 Rudston to Kilham Road ©David Hockney