Lost & Found Paintings

Sometimes it's nice to find paintings in places I wouldn't expect. It inspires me to think differently about venue, space, mark making and colour.   I really love the random marks and painting on the bottom garage-  made by kids? with painted over graffiti and faded zebras...

Two major commercial art galleries in Vancouver have closed their doors.  It's caused a bit of a ripple of speculation among artists about reasons that are beyond just the economy, or the personal reasons of the gallery owners.  Some say the amount of art fundraisers in Vancouver at this time have changed how people buy art.  That people feel better about buying art when they are supporting a greater cause.   Perhaps without realizing it, what seems like a win/win for an art collector, has the potential to be a  lose/lose for both the galleries that support artists, and the artists themselves. 

It's  been interesting to think this through over the past few days and just to wonder about how art markets around the world have been changing.  Two fairly recent films I've watched about contemporary art were The Great Contemporary Art Bubble by Ben Lewis and Exit through the Gift Shop by Banksy.  Both had me really thinking about contemporary art, it's relevance, it's value, and purpose.  I find the art market rather intimidating, perhaps this is why I make more ceramics then paintings, but also very intriguing. 

New Cafe in Town

We found a new cafe close by called the Cafe for Contemporary Art (down on Esplanade, on the East side of Lonsdale in North Vancouver) and have been spending the past couple of Thursday nights there, while our boys attend a kids club for 1.5 hours. It's got really good locally roasted coffee and a large exhibition space with new exhibits rotating monthly. The owner is a contemporary/conceptual artist/curator himself, and it was great to find some common experiences with him, one being that we both were at the 2001 Venice Biennale the same year. The Biennale is the most prestigious by-annual Contemporary Exhibition world-wide and it was a long-held dream of mine to go to Venice to see it! Reminiscing with someone else (other than Dean:) brought me back to how art can transform your experience, create memories and change perceptions, beyond what you would ever expect!
Speaking of transforming your experiences, Dean was engaging in one of the installation pieces which made him a little bug-eyed for a good 10 minutes afterward. Ahh Art.

The Game of Art

It's film festival time here in Vancouver and we were lucky enough to get in a film on friday night called The Great Contemporary Art Bubble. Ben Lewis, the British Journalist and Art critic turned film maker, interviewed people within the inner core of the Contemporary Art scene to understand the false markets that were being created during Art Auctions. In exposing the business of buying and selling high end Contemporary Art, it became clear that it was not only the galleries and collectors driving up art prices in order to over-value their own collections, but that the artist at the top were just as entrenched in the game as everyone else. They would often over-saturate the market by making multiples of work, so the collector who had bought the painting for $3 million previously would start bidding to raise the price to $10 million at auction in order to raise the value of their other work. Galleries, collectors and artists seemed in cahoots, driving up prices in the high millions for work that .
This film describes a world that seems so far removed from the average existence of many artists. Historically most artists never see such an amount of money that their work could generate during their life-time. It really seemed like a big boys club throughout the entire film: not one female artist was mentioned with a large price tag involved and most of the collectors and gallery owners mentioned were also men. I can appreciate the work of the exclusive list of high rolling art stars as their work has made an impact on the art world at large, but is paint on canvas with some butterflies pasted on it really worth $14 million dollars?