Six Links in Search of a Commonality

What do the following stories have in common?

Story 1: The New York Times reports on how Chinese artists are getting vocal about the distance between what they were told about the Estella Collection when they sold their work to its representatives and what actually ended up happening:

[A]rtists and curators say that as the collection was being formed, they were duped into thinking that a rich Westerner was putting together a permanent collection and would eventually donate some of the works to leading museums.

Instead, they say, the buyers were a group of investors who quickly cashed in by selling the works last August to the Manhattan dealer William Acquavella, who is in turn selling them through Sotheby’s. (The second half of the collection is to be auctioned this fall in New York.)

Some of the artists say they sold works in the Estella Collection at a discount in the belief that the collection would gain long-term renown and help enhance their reputations.

Story 2: The McKibbeners lifestyle is put under a microscope by the Times as well:

To spend a few days at the McKibbin lofts is to experience what it is to be young, hungry for acceptance, and willing to put up with just about anything in order to gain a foothold in the city’s competitive, and thriving, underground art and music scenes. This could have been Greenwich Village 60 years ago, or SoHo 30 years ago, or the East Village in the 1990s.

Who cares if the walls are paper thin and people honk saxophones and bang drums at 3 a.m., when a band and audience can be assembled without leaving home? So what if bedbugs ravage all of one’s earthly belongings if it means couch surfing with the cute painter in Apartment 2F? And if people’s iPods and cellphones mysteriously vanish after nonresidents visit Potion, the McKibbin’s in-house coffee shop, what of it? That just means the McKibbin is keeping it real.

“It’s rare to have so many scenes stacked like they are here,” said an 18-year-old poet living in 255 who gave his name as Eirehan Failte. “Even when it’s really loud, it’s still better than some terrible stock-trading roommate listening to Fox in the next room.”

Story 3: Speaking of mixing art and accommodations, artinfo.com reports that the "London chain Guest Hotels has announced plans to open a series of arts club hotels":

The company, which already runs several high-end hotels in London, including a design and a boutique hotel, will partner with a series of arts institutions to stage exhibitions and live music events at the sites. Guests as well as non-residents who may pay to become club members will be invited to the events and gain special access to partner institutions, among them the Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Tate.

Iram Quraishi, the former head of creative networks at the ICA, will act as the hotels' curator, and Stephen Bayley, founder of the Design Museum and design correspondent at the Observer, will be the style director. "Until now, hotels have used art as decoration.... We are reversing that concept by allowing artists to use our hotels as their showcase," said Johnny Sandelson, chairman of Guest Hotels.

Story 4: Tyler Green offers a pair of interviews with curators Anne Ellgood and Lisa Dorin (full disclosure, I've met them both but have worked with and am friends with Lisa), exploring the difference between how commercial galleries and museums approach solo exhibitions by relatively unknown artists:

A couple of weeks ago, in writing up the Hirshhorn's Amy Sillman 'Directions' show, I complained that the exhibition resembled a commercial gallery show: The paintings were fresh out of the studio, that the installation didn't provide any specific Sillman-related context, and that the Hirshhorn show was essentially indistinguishable from how Sikkema Jenkins would show fresh-from-the-studio work. In a succeeding post, I discussed that this was a broader, substantially unexamined museum issue. Last week I talked with the Art Institute of Chicago's Lisa Dorin about these contemporary mini-shows here and here. Today: Three posts with the Hirshhorn's Anne Ellegood, who curated the Sillman show.

Stories 5 & 6: The Art Newspaper offers two pieces about art and death (actual death in these cases):

Story 5: One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

and German artist Gregor Schneider seems to contradict himself in his reply to a story (that generated lots of comments) about his plans to include an actual dying person in a museum exhibition [emphasis mine]:

Story 6: Death is a very private and intimate occurrence that is usually not “beautiful”. I would be happy to die in a room chosen by me, in a private part of the museum, surrounded by art. Not in a side room. I hope to die beautifully and fulfilled. Perhaps we shall manage to liberate death from its taboo, to make it a positive experience, like the birth of a child.

OK, so what's the commonality? I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed when reading the contemporary art press this morning. Take the word "art" out of any of those stories and reframe them in a slightly different context and you might have the top headlines for just about any given day of the year. Indeed, contemporary art has seemingly infiltrated virtually every corner of modern living and its moral dilemmas to the point that there's not much difference between the regular news and the art news anymore.

In other words, contemporary art has seemed to catch up with life. Or perhaps life has caught up with contemporary art. I'm not sure. Surely the post-art era is dawning, no? Or perhaps I'm merely a bit too behind in my sleep.