My Love Affair with Rothko

[Rogie]

Or so I thought after reading one of his paintings sold for $86.9

 

Yes indeedy, his Orange, red, yellow painted in 1961 fetched that amount at an auction in New York back in May this year.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-18001432

 

I know I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but when I saw the object of all the fuss I decided I didn't think it was worth two farthings to rub together.

 

And just recently one of his 'works' (can't bring myself to call them paintings and more) got a nasty surprise.

 

A man has been arrested in connection with the defacement of a Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern in London.

 

Earlier a Russian man named Vladimir Umanets who has claimed responsibility for defacing the artwork told the BBC: "I'm not a vandal."

 

Words were scribbled with black paint on the painting, Black on Maroon, on Sunday.

The artwork is one of Rothko's Seagram murals.

 

Speaking to the BBC before the arrest, Mr Umanets, founder of a movement he calls Yellowism, claimed to be responsible but denied his actions were criminal damage.

He said he was a big fan of the artist and added: "Art allows us to take what someone's done and put a new message on it."

 

Works by the modernist US painter have sold for tens of millions of pounds.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk...london-19879650

[Guest thaiworthy]

Or so I thought after reading one of his paintings sold for $86.9

 

Eighty-six dollars and ninety cents (US$) doesn't sound like a bad price for a painting. I'll buy two.

[Rogie]

Let's round it up to $87. "Two Rothko's sir? We can sell those to you for $150, discounted price provided you pay in cash. The artworks are rather large sir, are you sure you have space for them on your walls"

 

Certainly a tad more than two brass farthings. I apologise earlier for omitting the brass, it is important the farthings are brass ones.

 

As there seem to be a surfeit of m's floating around (see Britishisation of American language thread), for me to omit the 'm' after the 86.9 was a monumental blunder. I believe there are websites devoted to scouting the 'net for just such slips, and by alerting their members giving them a chance to grab a real bargain, but TW got there first.

 

Watching a short video of Rothko's son gave me a laugh, might even warrant a rare LOL. Apparantly the secret is to sit or stand (it helps if you are in awe) in front of your chosen Rothko and spend a long time contemplating it, thereby somehow absorbing its true meaning and significance. He was also supposedly a master of blending, or blurring, the sacred and the profane.

[Guest fountainhall]

Would not the same have been said of Jackson Pollock and a whole host of other artists whose works were often condemned in their day, but have since become massively profitable investments? I loathe Damian Hirst, but his chopped animals and other rubbish has made him an estimated £215 million! Who on earth wants half a cow drowned in formaldehyde gracing their living room?

 

The money side of the art business seems for long to have determined who is ‘great’ and who is just an ‘also ran’. But ‘twas ever thus, I suppose, with today’s bloated bankers and other assorted crooks merely replacing the Popes, Kings, Emperors and their ilk who enabled the Michelangelos. Mozarts and Fabergés to earn a living.

 

Whatever happened to personal taste, I wonder? And yet, I suppose personal taste is no guarantee of future bankability or historical importance. “Fiasco at the opera” was how one headline described the booing, hissing and catcalls at the premiere of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at Milan’s La Scala, a work that has since become one of the most popular ever written. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzshe loathed Wagner’s music to the point of questioning: “Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease?”

 

Tchaikovsky – he of the massively popular Swan Lake and The Nutcracker – suffered similar slings and arrows. Of his Violin Concerto, one Vienna Daily paper, after dismissing obscene art as art which stinks to the eye, said: “(it) gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.”

 

Time changes perceptions. So, perhaps the reverse will happen with the Rothkos, Warhols, Pollocks and Hirsts. In 200 years time, will they be consigned to the dustbin of history?

 

Back to that BBC site. I liked this comment –

 

For my Art GCE I painted the entire canvas in blue and then added an orange square for good measure.

 



It took me 15 minutes and then spent the rest of the exam twiddling my fingers. 

I didn't get paid £53.8m for it nor did I even pass the exam – where's the justice in that?

 

Where indeed?

[Rogie]

. . . after dismissing obscene art as art which stinks to the eye, said: (it) gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

 

The trouble with uttering or writing so vehemently is your righteous indignatiuon will carry the majority of your listeners or readers but there will always be a minority whose ears and eyes prick up and in whom some kind of automatic reflex tells them it's all bunkum, surely the object of scorn has some redeeming feature. They listen to the music carefully trying to be objective and open-minded.

 

I wonder if the writer of the Vienna paper had taken the trouble to listen to the violin concerto a few times. Just listening once, knowing you have to make an instant judgement in order to make the deadline for the morning newspaper, is hardly fair either on the composer and soloist, but also on the reviewer himself.

 

Time changes perceptions. So, perhaps the reverse will happen with the Rothkos, Warhols, Pollocks and Hirsts. In 200 years time, will they be consigned to the dustbin of history?

 

It would be interesting to see how their artworks fare at auction in the decades to come. Short of a totally unlikely utopia in which extremes of wealth and poverty have been eradicated, as said earlier there will always be people with surplus money to spend.

 

Here would be a good test: It wouldn't work with an aesthete but would with a banker-type: I wouldn't mind betting you come into their office and hang a classic painting such a Canaletto on the wall and ask if they like it. Most will say yes, and many will recognise it as a Canaletto anyway. Then do the same with a Rothko or something similar, asak them if they like it and they might of course nod their heads but more likely they'll mutter something to the effect they're not sure. Tell them it's theirs for say $1,000 and chances are they'll say "no thanks!" Tell them it sold at Christies a few years ago for $75 m, but it's theirs for a knock-down price of $50 m, his eyes'll light up and he'll get his cheque book out (well he won't as cheques are on the way out but you get the drift).

[Guest fountainhall]

I wonder if the writer of the Vienna paper had taken the trouble to listen to the violin concerto a few times

 

I suspect that's unlikely. It almost certainly would have been his first hearing, as is the case today. Music critics in those days, especially the Viennese ones, had tremendous influence and set themselves up as arbiters of what was good or bad. Tchaikovsky, a closet gay (being 'out' in Russia in those days would have been the death of his career), had been undergoing a long period of depression. No doubt that critique didn't help.

 

There was a time when critics could with relative ease 'kill' a work/production literally at the stroke of a pen. The Englishman Clive Barnes, the witty but acerbic dance and theatre critic of the New York Times and later of the New York Post, once gave possibly the second shortest review ever to a show called Smile, Smile, Smile. He wrote: "I didn't, I didn't, I didn't." His shortest? For the play The Cupboard, he wrote just one word: "Bare!"

 

For his services to the theatre (!), Barnes was given a CBE by the Queen. Prominent playwright Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George, The History Boys) then wrote: "Giving Clive Barnes his CBE for services to the theatre is like giving Goering the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) for services to the RAF (Royal Air Force)!"

 

Fortunately, critics' views are not always shared. When Les Misérables opened its initial 12-week run in London in 1985, the reviews were universally negative. Yet, the public lapped it up. The show is still running and its estimated worldwide gross is just under US$2 billion! Once the movie version with Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway hits the screens at the end of this year, that gross could well jump by another billion!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0cDVdg7gVdg#!

[kokopelli]

Speaking of art and prices paid, I have an original in my collection (an original copy) by Kees Van Dongen of Le Jeune Arabe. Does anyone like this portrait? At one time perhaps it was considered inconsequential. What do you think? Would you pay $15 M

[kokopelli]

Speaking of art and prices paid, I have an original in my collection (an original copy) by Kees Van Dongen of Le Jeune Arabe. Does anyone like this portrait? At one time perhaps it was considered inconsequential. What do you think? Would you pay $15 M

[Guest fountainhall]

I see at least one of is paintings was auctioned for over $10 million! It's not really to my taste, but I'll offer $15 for it (no zeros)!

[Bob]

Being the low-class devil I am, I really don't see much personal use in most art and especially so-called modern art. I've love to own a Picasso - not to hang it on my wall but only to sell it and reap the millions some poor sucker would pay for it! With my lack of knowledge and appreciation for "art", all I see in works such as those of Picasso is what seems to me to be a juvenile effort to scribble nonsense on paper or a canvass. I simply don't "get it."

 

As for the work by Kees Van Dongen that Koko shows above, I guess it's okay but it realy doesn't do anything for me. But I usually always think that any attempt to imitate or interpret life never measures up to the beauty and fascination of the real thing. I'd rather have a photograph.

[Guest fountainhall]

Here's a modern oil painting that Bob might enjoy. It's yours for US$8,000 according to the website, with prints available for just $350!

 

 

http://www.limingshun.com/

[kokopelli]

As for the work by Kees Van Dongen that Koko shows above, I guess it's okay but it realy doesn't do anything for me. But I usually always think that any attempt to imitate or interpret life never measures up to the beauty and fascination of the real thing. I'd rather have a photograph.

 

Like this?

[Rogie]

Does anyone like this portrait?

 

I think it's a mistake to make up your mind (i.e. saying whether you like it or not) knowing what 'value' others have put to it. I do like this, the word I'd use to describe this Arab boy is insouciant. I don't really care whether he's 'worth' 15 bucks or 15 m bucks. I don't like the Rothko and I'd say the same whatever his supposed worth to the cognoscenti of the art world.

 

Like this?

 

Yes I do. Another Arab boy. I am a bit disturbed by the background though, which looks like an iron grating. I do hope he isn't in a prison. Very difficult to make out what he's thinking as his eyes are so downcast, or appear to be - the light could be deceptive. I can't sum this one up with a single word, it's a bit too intense.

 

Here's a modern oil painting that Bob might enjoy.

 

How come Bob gets all the fun? How about the rest of us?

[kokopelli]

Yes I do. Another Arab boy. I am a bit disturbed by the background though, which looks like an iron grating. I do hope he isn't in a prison.

 

No not in prison, just posed in front of a grill. I believe this and other similar photos were originally post cards. Some with photos of girls are rather titillating. Also think the photographer was a little light in his loafers. Here is web site.

 

http://michel.megnin.free.fr/tp.htm

[Bob]

Hate to resurrect old posts (I'm not BL, honest!) but I see another Rothko sold for $75.1 million. You can gander at this "lovely" work of "art" at this website: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/14/rothko-fetches-75-million-at-record-setting-sothebys-sale/?hpt=hp_c3

 

This event/sale only serves to add fuel to the notion that being rich substantially increases your chances of being stupid with your money. If "No. 1 Royal Red and Blue" is art, I'm Adonis.

[Rogie]

No Bob. you're no Adonis, sorry - you ain't Adonis.

 

I wasn't too thrilled to read this smug statement from a guy called Tobias (what parent would want to call his kid Tobias, Toby's ok, but Tobias. . . ?)

 

In 2012, Sotheby’s has raised a total of more than $1 billion.”If you’re looking for evidence that today’s market is alive and well,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, in a statement, “ look no further.”

 

 

I'm no socialist, but to me that's screaming: if you want proof the gap between rich and poor is widening . . . look no further!

 

______________________________________________________________________

 

And thank you Koko, I forgot to say I enjoyed checking out the site you linked to in post #14.

[Bob]

I don't begrudge anybody paying whatever amount for anything but I simply can't get my head around why anybody would pay 75 million dollars for something that, to me, could have been produced by a 5 year old with no talent whatsoever. Makes them feel important to pay that kind of money or do they honestly get any substantial thrill looking/staring at a swatch of orange and blue? I just don't get it.....especially when I can think of much better uses for that kind of money.

[kokopelli]

I checked out the website; I thought the painting was the backdrop.

[Bob]

I checked out the website; I thought the painting was the backdrop.

 

Nah, the backdrop was worth a lot more and prettier than the painting!