It’s a New Year! And it might be the Chinese Year of the Sheep (or Goat depending on which Chinese fortune teller you’re visiting). Gallery Girl would have preferred to celebrate by gathering up the 100,000 or so HKD that might have secured Gu Wenda’s ink on paper Gu’s Phrase – Happy Chinese Year of the Tiger when it was auctioned today in Sotheby’s Hong Kong, but it went for 187,500 HKD. Is it bad luck to buy the wrong Chinese New Year themed art work? Should I have been be looking for Hirst sheep things or Matthew Barney goat costumes discarded after shooting Cremaster back in the day, to fit in with the whole sheep and goat vibe? Who knows!
Meanwhile over in Singapore they’re getting hot under the collar about the presence of Gilbert & George presenting work at Arndt’s booth at Art Stage Singapore. The two loveable old timers’ best piece of work is still their 1972 humorous video Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk, so Gallery Girl is adding a bottle of gin as the second item on this wishlist.
On the subject of mischievous tricksters New Year’s generosity obviously got through to Banksy, who gave away one of his squiggles to teenager Ben Azarya after the polite young chap picked up some of Banksy’s dropped spray cans. I might be blind drunk on cheap gin but there’s still no way I’m putting a Banksy on this wishlist even if it’s free. So instead I’m amazed that Jeremy Deller’s free digital art work commissioned by Own Art and Sedition, We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold, (2014), in an edition of 10,000 is still available, so I’m going to get one of those as I don’t want Jeremy to be the only artist not to sell out a free giveaway.
Jeremy of course, was the Christmas offering during Fig-1’s run back in 2000. I totally missed all the Fig-1 shows organised by Jay Jopling and Mark Francis but that was cool because so did everyone else, so we just made up which of the 50 weekly consecutive shows we were at. This year I intend on doing exactly the same with Fig-2. It’s a lovely idea and Hiraki Sawa is up from 19-26 January but unfortunately it’s also in the pain-in-the-ass-to-get-to location of the ICA, so instead I’m going to buy Sawa’s lovely lenticular print Aurora (2013) from Dundee Contemporary Arts.
It’s this sort of commitment to serious intellectual enquiry that I’ll expect to see resulting from the year’s most significant art world move – yes, Vito Schnabel has taken over Bruno Bischofberger’s place in St Moritz. Bischofberger is written about for championing Warhol, Basquiat and Johns. Vito is written about for attending parties and for being Heidi Klum’s toy-boy. The old world is passing. The new world is Vito. Let’s crack out the Martini’s!
20 January 2015
