Dali House

A bit more on the Artist.Ranking (A.R) system mentioned in our Rousseau biography, as found at ArtFacts.net.

As mentioned, lonely old Henri is currently ranked #724 with a bullet on this overtly mercenary chart, which arranges 62,436 artists by volume of exhibitions over the last five years.

Picasso is #1, Cezanne 32 and Monet 62, just to grab some examples.

“The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck),” the website explains. “Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism. Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest.

“For Franck, the curator (eg the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).”

Here’s the top 10 after Picasso: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse, Edward Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.* See the rest.

Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.

Ah, the Musee du Montparnasse – genteel, meditative, scholarly. Actually, this quiet little pile of bricks in south central Paris is where the post-impressionists posted some very, very bad impressions with nightly piss-ups early in the last century. That was long before it became a museum, of course.

The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him. See the rest.

This is “Circus Girl Resting” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953), who was an American. It’s not very exciting now and it probably wasn’t really all that much more exciting when US President Harry Truman saw a picture of it in a 1947 edition of Look and offered the immortal judgement, “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”

Taste aside, it was a poor choice of terminology on Harry’s part, “Hottentot” being an 18th-century Dutch word for any old African tribe when actually the Khoikhoi, who the Europeans were primarily talking about, had a perfectly good name of their own, meaning “men of men”, or “a pure race”.

But Harry had the magazine’s headline screaming at him at the time: “Your Money Bought These Pictures”. That was the main problem. “Circus Girl” was garish, crude and a little risque – it didn’t even seem very well drawn – so what was the federal government doing giving the artist money (and him with a Japanese name to boot)? See the rest.

“Race Horses” by Edgar Degas, stabled at the Musée d’Orsay

After decades of rural landscapes lining the walls of the Paris salons, French painters in the 1860s turned to modern urban life. Edouard Manet led the parade of Parisians at play with “Luncheon on the Grass” and quickly had a rival in Edgar Degas, with his always popular ballet scenes.

Their interest converged here at fashionable Longchamp racecourse, which opened in 1857, during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, an integral element in Baron Haussmann’s replanned city. At the Bois de Boulogne home of “le Jockey Club”, seen here in a Google Earth image, Degas initially tried and failed to reproduce the imagery he’d seen in British racing prints and Gericault’s paintings of English horse races, and Manet at first struggled too.

See the rest.

Salvador in his usual company – Chris Rock, Hunter Thompson, Prince, Michael Jackson, Steven Spielberg, and above them you can pick out Tim Burton, Bill Gaines, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Baba Ram Dass, Monty Python and, hey, Van Gogh standing next to the guys from “Reservoir Dogs”.

This past Hallowe’en, Howard Hallis completed the first section of “The Picture of Everything 2″.

This epochal moment in the history of art – well, at least the history of cartooning – is the latest development in the nine-years-and-counting journey of one man’s raw ambition to document Life, The Universe And, That’s Right, Everything.

Service to mankind? Or just totally anal retentive? Dozens of people are making the judgement call with a visit to Hallis’ eclectic website. If you’re in a hurry, the main event, the whole Picture of Everything #1 is here. Above is mere trifle of one corner of it. Below is a whole bunch more. See the rest.