Dali House

It’s amazing how facts can ruin a terrific story, which probably explains why you can find the original yarn about “the giant Lego man who washed up on a beach” repeated all over the Web without seeing the slightest effort being made to discover what it really was.

The story was picked up by news outlets around the world and dozens of blogs and socialising sites, and only one at the outset, as far as I can tell, suggested an explanation. It was still only a suggestion from the BBC, though. Readers were left to giggle or possibly wonder if this was an updated Klaatu or The Man Who Fell to Earth.

The Lego beach boy even has his own website, GiantLegoMan.com, but, other than a short version of the tale of the discovery in Holland, it seems to be just a Google ad vehicle.

Perhaps it’s a classic case of things being best left to the imagination. Because when the truth eventually emerged, it was fundamentally boring.

That’s not to say there aren’t many people who admire Dutch artist Ego Leonard for dreaming up this elaborate policy statement, but it did cause a lot of other people to simply shrug and get on with their lives, while muttering gloomily about viral advertising scams.

Briefly, in August 2007, some holiday-makers in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort pulled a 2.5-metre-tall Lego man out of the sea. It had a yellow head and blue torso and bore the message “No real than you are” in quasi-English. It was “floating towards the beach from the direction of England”, a witness said.

Then, in October 2008, another one washed ashore on Brighton beach on the English coast. “It’s got some Dutch writing on it,” a witness said, although another, seemingly more reliable source claimed it carried exactly the same message.

In both cases, children danced around the castaways and the news media danced around the possibilities. The Dutch case coincided with the actual Lego man’s 30th anniversary, one outlet noted. Maybe it floated over from Denmark, which has a Legoland park, another ventured. See the rest.

It occurs to me that the trick to liking Jack Vettriano’s paintings is to catch one out of context. You look at the one above, “Amateur Philosophers”, and it’s quite striking. You’re immediately lost in the possibilities of a story there.

Unfortunately (well, I see it as unfortunate, and I’m far from being alone on this), when you take a few steps back and see the same work with its intended wall-mates, you get Vettriano’s story, which is a cheap, missed-the-point modern remake of a cheesy old B-movie, complete with garter belts.

So the philosophers having a confab in the painting above aren’t discussing their latest experiment in nuclear fission or their next mob hit — they’re arguing about which one of them gets to see Penelope in her underwear tonight after dinner.

The painting below, “Ghosts from the Past”, is the only other clue you need to assess Vettriano’s weight as an artist. Any mystery is gone, the mood spoiled. You’re at a bad play with no hope of a refund.

I like this one, even if the title — “Fetish (Study)” — is just more silliness.

You take an image like this and wonder about the man who painted it, so you visit his website (from which the photo below by Richard Kalina comes), and you swiftly lose hope again.

The Scotsman, now about 54, was a miner’s son but yearned for something better, blah blah blah. His girlfriend gave him a watercolour kit and he taught himself to paint.

For a while starting in 1979, says the Guardian, Vettriano worked as a management consultant in Bahrain while churning out paintings-to-order for the local expatriate community. He honed his skills in art as well as salesmanship.

The Royal Scottish Academy evidently overcame its initial mirth and showed and quickly sold some of his early pieces, and his own subsequent exhibitions around the globe have been big successes.

His popularity comes down, Dan Brown style, to this 1992 piece and its mass marketing. “The Singing Butler” was originally sold for £3,500, and four years later for £5,000. In 2004 it was auctioned for £745,000 and snagged him a royal honour “for Services to the Visual Arts”. It’s been endlessly reproduced on greeting cards, posters, coffee mugs and cookie tins and pulls him in £250,000 a year in royalties.

It’s so famous that, when the model for the dancing woman was identified, it was headline news. Jack Nicholson collects his stuff, and Jack’s got a lot of money. Below, “Olympia”, a portrait of Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips, is a piece of crap done especially to raise money for Sport Relief.

“Even if one doesn’t take Vettriano seriously as a painter,” the Observer observed in June 2004, “one has to take him seriously as an investment.”

“Jack is not of the fine art world,” the Guardian quoted restaurateur and collector Sir Terence Conran as saying in July 2002. “I would never suggest Jack is a great artist in the manner of Francis Bacon. I don’t think he would claim to be. But he is an extremely competent artist in the Edward Hopper mould.”

Those are fighting words, but let Jack dig his own grave.
See the rest.

What can I moan about Damien Hirst that hasn’t already been moaned elsewhere? You don’t see a lot of contemporary art at Dali House, and he’s one of the reasons why.

But the folks at Sotheby’s have given me a nudge about their big, two-day “Damien Hirst — Beautiful Inside My Head Forever Evening Sale” in London in September, and I just had to have a look at the catalogue. Well, you do, don’t you, when something ghastly comes along?

There’s nothing ghastly about pickled fish, of course. It’s the prices people pay for them that are horrific.

The auction house says Hirst has come up with a batch of “new” stuff — 223 lots in all that are collectively expected to generated £65 million-plus.

The picture up top shows a construction called “The Kingdom”, and I’ve tossed Damien in with the shark, just for fun, alright? Tiger shark, glass, steel, silicone and formaldehyde solution with steel plinth. It was created this year.

Didn’t this used to be called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? Yes, it was, but this is a fresh specimen, and the asking price is between £4 million and £6 million. Talk about catch of the day.

He’s capable of a decent picture, like “Transience Painting 2″, shown here, a relative steal at £500,000, but it’s an anomaly in his world.

The dead sharks, zebra, dove, sheep and calf are all back for the autumn sale, the flies stuck to resin, the butterfly wings glazed with diamonds, the packets of medicine and bottles of pills, the spins, the spots and the, uh, unicorn.

I suppose we should just look the other way because Hirst is giving a fair chunk of the proceeds to charity — kids and musicians in need and Survival International, plus a bit for Bill and Melinda Gates’ AIDS concern — but certainly not all the money.

Hirst, says Whitecube.com, “has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture”. I think the bloke after whom this blog is named was doing that around the time Damien was born, and Don Salvador was already standing on the shoulders of scientifically minded giants of art.

And I believe we’ve seen plenty of curiosity cabinets from the 17th and 18th centuries. Wonderful things. You can put one together yourself from odds and ends. Or you could pay Damien Hirst £3.5 million for the zoologist’s special of the day pictured below, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”: glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution.

The title is apt for Hirst, but far too obvious to be a decent joke.

October 11, 2008: I really did have to add this.

Just as Lehman Brothers was going belly up and the US Congress and Senate were frothing over the credit crisis, Damien Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale at Sotheby’s London on September 15 and 16 was raking in $200,752,179 for 218. Somehow, even with, five lots went unsold. The prices averaged out to $920,882.

Sotheby’s subsequent Art Market Review credited the auctioneer’s own marketing blitz for making the auction “more than a sale of artwork”.

“It became an international cultural event of significant proportions. Hirst is one of only a handful of artists with global name-recognition — and possibly the only one alive today. The artist’s status as a living symbol of contemporary art set up a rare opportunity for collectors (and non-collectors) from around the world to participate in a unique event …

“One of Damien Hirst’s central rationales for selling new work through an auction instead of through the artist’s network of dealers was his often-repeated desire to ‘democratise’ his market,” the review continued. As a result, as far as the auction house could determine, 91% of the buyers were acquiring their first work of art by Hirst, and they accounted for 69% of the sale’s total value.

“Sotheby’s reports that bidders and buyers at the sale were ‘primarily Russian, Indian, French, UK and US collectors’.”

This was, the review concludes, “a unique event. Hirst is the rare personality who would take the risks involved. Both the volume of art on offer and the level of media interest necessary to propel the sale, suggest that it is an event that cannot easily be repeated.”

The photos in this post are by Teri Pengilley for the Independent

Dorothea Tanning, a member of the original surrealist tribe, long-time wife of Max Ernst, and turning 98 in August, gave an interesting interview to Salon.com in 2002 in which she lamented the art being produced today.

“Most of it comes straight out of dada, 1917,” she said. “I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people labouring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad.”

Tanning didn’t drop any names, or even nationalities, but I think Britain currently seems to be leading the world in inane, derivative pointlessness. I’ve given up trying to find hope in Damien Hirst, and now this …

Jake and Dinos Chapman — who once infamously added funny faces and clowns heads to Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings — bought a set of watercolours by Adolf Hitler for £115,000, added psychedelic rainbows and big wobbly hearts to 13 of them, and are now offering the batch for £685,000.

The point, you see, is that they’ve taken Hitler’s art away from him.

No, I don’t see it, either. See the rest.

Jeremy Pettis, a product of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, has had lots of cybertime in Blogworld with his website devoted entirely to one, admittedly great, piece of artwork, a typographic installation called “Twenty-Six Types of Animals”, with each letter of the alphabet corresponding to a different beast. It’s like one of those email-forwards, I guess, with no other information about Pettis accompanying it.