{"id":81,"date":"2017-06-05T21:30:56","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T21:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/?p=81"},"modified":"2017-06-05T21:30:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T21:30:56","slug":"venice-report-1-fools-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/2017\/06\/05\/venice-report-1-fools-gold\/","title":{"rendered":"Venice Report #1: Fools’ Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cFool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.\u201d But what if I didn\u2019t get fooled at all, even though you tried? Damn: the clich\u00e9 doesn\u2019t include that.<\/p>\n

Those are my Damien Hirst-related thoughts after visiting \u201cTreasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable\u201d at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice<\/a>, the biggest hanger-on to this year\u2019s Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n

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OK, we already knew that Damien Hirst was all about money. Remember his 2007 diamond-encrusted skull, with 8601 flawless pav\u00e9-set diamonds?<\/p>\n

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Remember how relieved we were to know that all the diamonds were ethically sourced for the work? Were you tempted to buy one of the limited edition (1000) silkscreen prints with glaze and diamond dust on the skull, because you couldn\u2019t afford the real thing?<\/p>\n

Well, diamonds may be forever, but they just start as some crappy coal bits from the ground. Which isn\u2019t nearly as interesting as finding a nature-encrusted long-lost sunken treasure in the sea. The brilliance of this Damien Hirst conception is somewhere in the realm of classic one- liner jokes: \u201cwhy did the chicken cross the road\u201d and its relatives, e.g., \u201cwhy do firemen wear red suspenders?\u201d and so on. \u00a0At the Dogana we even are treated to a pithy epigram, presumably from the artist’s own intellect, slightly less deep than the waters from which these treasures were “rescued”: “Somewhere between lies and truth lies the truth”<\/p>\n

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Even Bruce Nauman does better than that!<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s impossible not to concede that Hirst’s\u00a0double-whammy exhibition (two major venues) is spectacular and brilliantly conceived. (Perhaps the guy who originally thought of asking why a chicken crossed a road was no dope, either.) \u00a0But since the joke is so lame, one is mostly overwhelmed by the spectacle and the presumed cost of arranging it all. Sort of Las Vegas, but without the fun. Hirst has made a lot of money in the inflated art market. After all, why should the dealers be the only ones to get rich? And the cost of creating his fantasy \u2013 surely many millions \u2013 has not been revealed (so far). Nor has the hefty investment of his patron, Fran\u00e7ois Pinault, owner of Christie\u2019s and a lot more, to make this greatest show on earth (well, in Venice, anyway) possible. Supposedly the works have been offered to collectors at prices start at around $500,000 apiece and rising to upward of $5 million. But they aren\u2019t on the market yet (or maybe they are), so who knows.<\/p>\n

The artifice could be considered \u201cbrilliant\u201d if it weren\u2019t such an obvious and shabby hoax. I have a long-time hoax fetish, so after\u00a0an artist friend of mine told me he was confused when he first visited the show, thinking it might really be an underwater discovery, I was excited at the prospect that someone had carried it off. But alas, it\u2019s lame. You never get sucked into the story, despite a 72-page booklet (free with entry ticket!) and<\/p>\n

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the staggering amount of technology and money and thought and analysis that has gone into making it an exciting hoax. It\u2019s not even a fun hoax. A few years ago my college classmate, Arthur\u2019s, wife sent us all an e-mail telling us that Arthur\u00a0had died, and we responded with condolences and reminiscences. So we were pretty pissed off when Arthur\u00a0told us he was still around (sadly, in the meantime his wife has died). But we got the idea that we all had our collective leg pulled and that the hoax had worked.<\/p>\n

The fantasy that Damien Hirst creates is about the discovery of a sunken ship, the Apistos<\/em>, off the coast of East Africa. The owner, a freed slave, who lived between the mid-first and early second centuries C.E., had amassed one hundred fabled treasures \u2013 \u201ccommissions, copies, fakes, purchases, and plunder\u201d \u2013 and after the vessel foundered, all of this \u201clay submerged in the Indian Ocean for some two thousand years before the site was discovered in 2008.\u201d A model of the ship has been created, along with a sophisticated video assist —\u00a0touch-screen and all — that helps you navigate (pun intended) the ship’s interior to see\u00a0where the treasures are believed to have been before the Apistos<\/em> sank.<\/p>\n

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The exhibition displays the discovered objects, as well as spectacular films — the kind we see in science museums — documenting the raising of these treasures from the ocean\u2019s floor. Watching recovery sea divers at work, and then seeing those very objects in the gallery should\u00a0be thrilling. But it isn\u2019t. How not to think about what it must have cost to create these objects, hire the ships and divers, pay for underwater film crews, put the artifacts into the ocean (or water somewhere) just for filming and then get them back up for display. It\u2019s staggering! An amazing theatrical feat! Something on the order of Lon Chaney in \u201cHunchback of Notre Dame\u201d or Arnold Schwartzenegger in \u201cTerminator.\u201d And while it may be extensively photoshopped, all the photo and film imagery looks really real. \u00a0(But remember, if you go to Atlantis in the Bahamas<\/a> you might even find yourself in the water and have more fun.) \u00a0Then there\u2019s the cost of the studio assistants (many!) to mold and carve and assemble all this stuff, some of which is immense, rising several stories inside (and outside) the fabulous exhibition spaces.<\/p>\n

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This must\u00a0have required a range of quite specialized \u00a0skills — involving more than what’s probably in the toolkits of the the many\u00a0wannabe artists who are often studio assistants. \u00a0Simply supervising the entire confection has to have been incredibly labor intensive \u2013 and costly. \u00a0This could be a Harvard Business School\u00a0management case study.<\/p>\n

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Which is why I came away thinking mostly of deep pockets, and of all the HBS MBA’s who will be adding these things to their collections once the show is over. \u00a0And there\u2019s a lot of stuff: \u00a0bronzes, marbles, carved precious stones, gold, and combinations of all of these. \u00a0It’s additionally reassuring to know\u00a0all that glitters here really is<\/em> gold.<\/p>\n

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That should suggest\u00a0a wide price range for the various galleries who will carry on the artist\u2019s exercise in ripping off the public by ripping off collectors. But hey, we already know that a lot of collectors want to be ripped off. Otherwise they might worry that they aren\u2019t genuine collectors. \u00a0Anyone want an Aztec sundial with sea creatures attached?<\/p>\n

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Almost better than the one in Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology:<\/p>\n

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This is not to suggest that the exhibition(s) doesn\u2019t have its thrilling moments. Who would have thought that an image of Jane Curtin as Connie Conehead<\/p>\n

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would have made it to the bottom of the Indian Ocean two millennia ago. Cif Amotan II, the freed ex-slave who amassed this treasure before his ship sank, obviously had very eclectic tastes (and was a SNL fan to boot). Mickey Mouse and a lot of other lesser-known characters also make their appearance here, as do a few Jeff Koons-type figures,<\/p>\n

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and even several Nancy Graves knock-offs\u00a0(who knew that<\/p>\n

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Damien Hirst ever heard of Nancy Graves?). But Nancy Graves\u00a0(1939-95) lived in the olden days, and was just a regular very talented artist working in less opulent materials (see below).<\/p>\n

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I kept thinking of one of my favorite \u201cexpansive\u201d art works: The Marie de Medici 24-picture cycle of paintings at the Louvre, painted for the Luxembourg Palace between 1622 and 1625 by Peter Paul Rubens and (probably) a slew of studio assistants.<\/p>\n

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Rubens must have run a pretty complex shop to handle some of these big commissions. \u00a0And he achieved some serious status: raised by Philip\u00a0IV of Spain to the nobility in 1624, and knighted by Charles I of England in 1630, he even made a lot of money. \u00a0But Rubens was a obviously piker compared to Damien Hirst!<\/p>\n

And always the former museum person, I kept thinking of all the museums that could use this sophisticated and costly technology and installation know-how to enhance the accessibility of their not-fake collections. \u00a0So many museums\u00a0for which this expertise would enrich entire communities, not just the privileged art groupies (including yours truly) who trek to the Biennale biennially.<\/p>\n

Try to imagine yourself spending a whole evening with your uncle who does nothing but tell corny jokes<\/a>. You don\u2019t want to be rude and tell him to fuck off, because he\u2019s your uncle. You don\u2019t want to groan and roll your eyes too much, but you can\u2019t help it and you hope his hearing and seeing might not be too great, so he won\u2019t notice. This expensive extravaganza is sort of like that. You get your ticket and you hope that maybe, just maybe, around the corner you\u2019ll discover something new. But you won\u2019t. Good god, Messrs. Hirst and Pinault, at least try to fool me once!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.\u201d But what if I didn\u2019t get fooled at all, even though you tried? Damn: the clich\u00e9 doesn\u2019t include that. Those are my Damien Hirst-related thoughts after visiting \u201cTreasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable\u201d at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in … Continue reading “Venice Report #1: Fools’ Gold”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freudenheim.com\/public_html\/tom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}