Caught, Can We Get A Witness?

Sometimes we have to take our knocks. A reader took us to task for our short piece last week on the latest Christie’s Contemporary sale:

Since when does Art Life fall for the laziest trick in the journalistic lexicon and print directly and uncritically from an auction houses press release? You should be ashamed of that first paragraph. These are neither seminal nor important works. If you are going to cover anything of quality coming up for sale at the moment look at the Foster’s Collection Auction to be held in Melbourne on Monday, full of stunning and truly important pictures- [signed] Less Talk

We’d like to apologise to our readers from printing directly from the Christie’s press release, particularly the bit where we said that the sale had an “absence of show stoppers”. Anyone reading that would have twigged instantly that we had lifted it from the auction house’s press bumpf since they are well known for expressing doubt about their own offerings. We should have also realised that our opinion was just that, an unfounded opinion, and that clearly it is Sotheby’s that had all the good stuff.

What’s with the heading F*** Matisse? Is the use of an expletive really appropriate here? I thought this was a classy web page! – [signed]Kenny

We’re all grown ups here Kenny and we apologise for any offence caused, but since the word ‘fuck’ is on TV at teatime nowadays we thought it would be OK for us to express our feelings about the knee jerk pro-Matisse sentiment that rules the world. Yeah Matisse, great guy, classy dresser, knew a thing or two about using the colour blue and he’s made some great Christmas cards, but for fuck sake can we please just get off our knees every time a new book on the master gets published?

There has been a bit of talk about our description of The Cross Arts Project as an “artist run gallery”. Some readers have pointed out that XAP honcho Jo Holder isn’t an artist, it’s privately run and therefore what we said was blatantly incorrect. Holder wrote to us and said as much herself:

I’d just like to point out that The Cross Art Projects is not an artist run space, rather a curator run space. (Although I did once study photography at Sydney Tech College.) However, our structure is based on the initial First Draft model (Abercrombie Street days).

What we meant was that XAP has an artist run space kind of vibe. (We’re also glad that they have a model, but it’s a shame it’s not the First Draft (West) model when the gallery was on Parramatta Road and they had their own wine label). And by ‘vibe’ we mean the egalitarian feel of XAP and the white walls and pleasant people in the book shop. So in summing up, it’s the Constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the vibe and – no, that’s it. It’s the vibe!

We get a bit of email from readers making smart or funny comments but recently someone who signed their name Art Admin thought it a good idea to send us the this:

Wham
bang
mon chat “Splash” gite sur mon lit a bouffe
Sa langue en buvant trop mon whysky
Quand a moi peu dormi
vide
brime
J’ai du dormir dans la goutiere
Oil j’ai un flash
ouh
ouh
ouh.
En 4 couleurs
allez op
un matin
Une louloute est v’nue chez moi
Poupee de cellophane
cheveux chinois

Sparadrap
une gueule de bois
A bu ma biere dans un grand verre en caoutchouc
(Ouh
ouh
ouh) comme un indien dans son igloo

It took us ages to work it out but finally twigged that it was the first two verses from Plastic Bertrand‘s classic Ca Plane Pour Moi . We don’t know why, but thanks!