Boom! More auctions, more records, more champagne, more dwarves with plates of legal highs on their heads! The art world is on fire! It’s time to party and to celebrate the art world’s splendid excess, so top of my wish-list this week is a T-shirt by the artist Anastasia Klose which was on offer at Tolarno Galleries stand at Art Basel Hong Kong emblazoned with the logo ‘L’Hausér, NYC, Zurich, London: Because you’re Wirth it.’
Because let’s face it, we are ‘wirth’ it. All of us. The art world is showing the rest of the world that the ‘Great Recession’ is long-gone, just a blip where some crazy shit happened with some naughty bankers. There might still be the occasional teething problem in some of the world’s lesser economies but it is important to distance ourselves from those issues, and those sort of people. So second on my shopping list is a request to Luhring Augustine to reserve me the artist’s proof of Ragnar Kjartansson’s Me and My Mother, currently on view at the artist’s New Museum show where Mrs Ragnar Senior repeatedly spits in the good artist’s face. We, the art world, are Mrs Ragnar. The rest of the world is Ragnar. Or something like that.
Last November a grand total of $782,368,375 was spent at Christie’s record-breaking Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions, which most reported as being the largest amount spent on contemporary art over two evenings. Clearly these reporters have never been out with Independent art fair co-founder Darren Flook at one of his legendary benders in the Groucho Club! But seriously to celebrate this splurge of cash, third on this month’s shopping list is Manchester United Football Club. After a disappointing season, three quarters of a billion dollars should persuade them to run around in Gallery Girl colours and obligatory merkins.
I’m delighted that the Queen Bee of art’s heady rush into the outstretched arms of bling, Marina Abramović, will shortly have her show, 512 Hours, open at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Fresh from having ‘killed performance art’ with the help of Jay Z and Pace Gallery, Marina is going to sit around for six days per week whilst the Serpentine Young Patrons group and any occasional stray visitor from Hyde Park looking for the loo will mill about with her. All visitors will be asked to shed bags, phones, watches and cameras by the friendly door person, so in order to subversively record what’s going down, the fourth item on my wishlist is a pair of spectacles with hidden camera available from www.onlinespyshop.co.uk
And finally to wash down all the champagne flowing around, Gallery Girl’s last item on her wishlist is fried chicken cooked by chef Ellen Parr that will be served at the opening of Chicken Show at East End project space Roman Road. The fried chicken celebrates a show that will involve live chickens looking at around 100 pictures taken from the internet. It’s a metaphor! It’s the art world! It’s us! But most importantly, it’s chicken, fried in a secret combination of herbs and spices!
16 May 2014
