Old and profitable, Kaldor’s sanga, deep face, ambient noodling + more!

Friday Degustation: serves 4-6

Profiting from obscurity

One of the interesting side effects of attempt to redress the neglect of female artists and create projects such as Know My Name, there has been a noticeable rise in the value of work by women. In Why Old Women Have Replaced Young Men as the Art World’s Darlings at artsy.net Anna Louie Susan writes that [>] “…demand for older, female artists like Carmen Herrera, who was famously 89 when she sold her first artwork and is now a ripe 102, has risen sharply in recent years, the result of a perfect art-world storm. As institutions attempt to revise the art-historical canon, passionate dealers and curators see years of promotion come to fruition, and blue-chip galleries search for new artists to represent among those initially overlooked, prices and institutional recognition for artists such as Carol Rama, Irma Blank and Greta Bratescu, and Herrera have soared.”

Like many ‘rediscovered’ female artists, it turns out that the market has been quietly assessing future market potential [>] “To be sure, many of these artists have long been known to art-world insiders. Fergus McCaffrey, founder and president of his eponymous gallery, has been collecting Rama’s work since first seeing it at an art fair in Berlin more than a decade ago. He’s since amassed well over two dozen works. Manuela Wirth, co-founder with her husband Iwan of Hauser & Wirth, has long collected Romanian artist Br?tescu, although the gallery only began representing her in April. Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski and her husband, the architect Thomas Krahenbuhl, have followed Blank’s work for years, watching sadly as her prices keep moving further out of their reach. Isabella Bortolozzi notes that Rama was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2003.”

The Kaldor Sanga Party

John Kaldor‘s Kaldor Public Art Projects is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a retrospective piece covering all the KPAP’s previous iterations at the Art Gallery of NSW, opening in September, and a forthcoming documentary that just had its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, and which will be released in September.

The Financial Times published a profile of Kaldor and projects by Jane Ure-Smith [>] “In September KPAP will mark its 50th anniversary with Half a Century in the Public Eye, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). The show is based on a concept by Michael Landy, whom Kaldor met in London in 2001, when the artist was destroying all his possessions for his landmark installation “Breakdown”. Kaldor invited Landy to “come and destroy something” in Australia and a longstanding creative partnership was born […] Last year, Kaldor invited the artist to come up with ideas for the 50th-anniversary show (aka Project 35). An 11m x 5m Landy “doodle” referencing all 34 KPAP projects will greet visitors as they descend the gallery’s escalators. “I never like starting a drawing,” the artist explains, as we pore over a tiny version on his laptop. “But a doodle sounds like you’re just passing the time, so I can tell myself it won’t be an actual drawing.” Once inside the exhibition, visitors can explore a series of 4m x 4m “boxes” in (or around) which letters, drawings, original artwork, videos and films evoke each project.”

Meanwhile, over at Art Guide, the director of the fetchingly-titled It All Started With A Stale Sandwich, celebrated Australian director Samantha Laing, explained the approach the documentary takes. [>] “Lang says there is “a little” of Kaldor’s life story in the documentary, even though he requested when being interviewed that the film be about the artists. Lang has artistic freedom, her film being funded by Screen Australia, the ABC and Create NSW, and not by any Kaldor-related sources. “John Kaldor already has an incredible website with all of the projects,” says Lang. “His narrative is very well curated by himself, and I didn’t want to make a hagiography. I did want to talk about the art and the impact it has on the cultural landscape, trying to find a balance of John’s personal story vis-à-vis those other things, and not fall into an Australian Story-type narrative – but at the same time, John is the glue that holds this story together.”

Astronomy photographers of 2019

“The competition, now in its 11th year, has broken the record of entries, receiving more than 4,600 photographs from amateurs and professionals. The winners will be announced at a ceremony at the National Maritime Museum on 12 September, with an exhibition of the winning and shortlisted images starting on 13 September…”

[>] “Deep in the Heart of Mordor – NGC 7293: Andrew Campbell (Australia). NGC 7293, also known as the Helix nebula, owns its name to the fact that it looks like looking down the axis of a helix. In reality, it has a surprisingly complex geometry, including radial filaments and extended outer loops. The Helix nebula is one of the brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a sun-like star.”

Of course, it comes from Russia…

No sooner do we post a story about the algorithmic creation of photo-realistic faces, than technology jumps ahead once more. As we recently noted, it’s possible to produce images of faces based on large data sets that combine a variety of features into a single, believable picture. The related ‘Deep Fake’ videos that plaster one face over another in a moving image is a related field. So it shouldn’t really have come as surprise when Samsung announced that it has developed software that has the ability to believable animate a face from a single frame. [>] “The technology can be used for fun, like bringing a classic portrait to life. The Mona Lisa, which exists solely as a single still image, is animated in three different clips to demonstrate the new technology. A Samsung artificial intelligence lab in Russia developed the technology, which was detailed in a paper earlier this week. Here’s the downside: These kinds of techniques and their rapid development also create risks of misinformation, election tampering and fraud…”

Ambient noodling

Way back in the primeval swamp of early YouTube, uploads were limited to 15 minutes, but once that limit was breached the platform became home to many eccentric audio projects. Among our favourites were [>] ten hour train rides, recordings of [>] lift wells in Russia, and short loops of annoying refrains from pop songs stretched [>] seemingly to infinity. A pioneer of boutique soundscapes is Cheesy Nirvosa, who has created 12 hour long ambient soundscapes based on the background sound design of classic science fiction films including Blade Runner, Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Writes electronic beats.net [>] “Nirvosa has morphed these tiny moments into massive 12-hour ambient soundscapes that are absolutely perfect to bliss out to. In no time at all, you’ll be floating away on Discovery One. You can check out the entire Cheesy Nirvosa sci-fi sleep playlist [>] here.”

Assorted Links

RIP [>] Peter Batey, Bald Archy Prize founder

Mount Barker Adelaide Hills house fire kills two cats, [>] destroys $500,000 of art

The painter’s depiction of breezy palm trees and picturesque mountain ranges contain eccentric, discordant details [>] Paradise Lost: Paul Davies’s Fictive California

The 130-Year-Old Paint Shop [>] That Invented Oil Pastels for Picasso

This group of one-time art punks is now a multimillion-dollar corporation intent on building a new kind of entertainment empire – a surreal multiverse of impossible physics and playful surreality [>] To Disneyland and beyond – the weirdly wonderful Meow Wolf is on the prowl

Located in central Norway, Mjøstårnet is a 280-foot-tall structure that is pushing the limits of architecture and setting a path for the sustainable cities of tomorrow [>] The World’s Tallest Timber-Framed Building Finally Opens Its Doors

In 1915, with the newly innovated film camera, a young Russian-born, French actor named Sacha Guitry captured some of France’s greatest artists and authors including [>] Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, and Edgar Degas.

Frida Kahlo‘s only known voice recording [>] possibly found in Mexico

The sex scene is dying out: not just because of #MeToo, but also because of new box-office economics [>] How Hollywood fell out of love with sex

You could argue that the world’s biggest city has hit a sweet spot: a flatlining population, pervasive transit and little gentrification. Where does Tokyo go from here? [>] Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?

Vanessa Crofskey [>] declares war on art jargon

[>]Dubai Completes Construction On World’s First Full-Scale Replica Of Dubai

And finally…

[>] “After first arriving in 1976 – for what was intended only to be a short visit – Greg Girard then made the decision to stay in Tokyo. working part-time during the day as an english teacher, the photographer would spend his evenings exploring the city’s night life and entertainment districts, often wandering the streets between the time the last trains stopped and first trains of the day began. Girard also started photographing in nearby Yokosuka, southwest of Tokyo, home to a sprawling US navy base and the many bars and clubs clustered around it. renting a darkroom and making black and white prints, and sending his slide film to a commercial processing lab, the photographs from this period remained largely unseen…”