LEFT, COURTESY OF TIM JENISON.
Left, Tim Jenison, with part of the optical apparatus he created above him, at work in his San Antonio studio. Right, Vermeer’s The Music Lesson, the painting Jenison chose to re-create.

Thanks to Kurt Andersen and a magazine we do not normally scan (but maybe we should; click the image above to go to the source):

In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic “Sphinx of Delft” is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909—their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that. Continue reading →

Zwirner at home, with a painting by Raymond Pettibon. “Nobody’s selling expensive stuff like we do with the frequency we do,” Zwirner said. “This is an industry in its golden age.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic.

Art as industry? Say it ain’t so! But if it is, then better to say so clearly, unambiguously:

Very important people line up differently from you and me. They don’t want to stand behind anyone else, or to acknowledge wanting something that can’t immediately be had. If there’s a door they’re eager to pass through, and hundreds of equally or even more important people are there, too, they get as close to the door as they can, claim a patch of available space as though it had been reserved for them, and maintain enough distance to pretend that they are not in a line. Continue reading →

Photograph: Christie’s LTD

Since we are not a site for art criticism, we have not found the words to say so, elegantly, but we see a worthy distinction between art and commerce. In a blog post called “The Circus” we have found a one minute reading assignment to recommend:

A hundred and forty-two million dollars and change is a lot of money, or is it? What would the former possessor have done with the wad if he or she—or a corporate it—hadn’t splurged, at Christie’s in New York, yesterday, on the triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” by Francis Bacon? Nothing as interesting, certainly. Far larger amounts of money move around the world—numbers falling on one balance sheet, rising on another—night and day, and few notice. Most entail commodities (stuffs, like oil or wheat, sold by metric measure) or abstractions (stocks and bonds, financial instruments). When a tangible, useless object is the occasion, in public, there’s drama, though the stakes are relatively trifling. Continue reading →