IZO

Thoughts on how to become an art dealer (Alex Wengraf).

Marat Guelman on a Russian artist who found brittle success "among the dilettantes" in New York (galerist, in Russian). As one of his commenters puts it, it's "the same old story", but a poignant one for all that. I don't know about the artist in this tale, but several Russian emigres to America have now returned to Russia, among them Sundukov and Kizevalter (old work by both of them did ok at Sotheby's today, btw). The same thing happened in the thirties: Falk and several others came back, mainly from Paris, driven not (one imagines) by socialist zeal, but the difficulty of earning a capitalist crust.

Painting by Geli Korzhev as illustration to words of Philip Roth (Gonzalo Barr).

On art and music

Gene Simmons, founder of KISS, considers the problems in the music business:

SO WHAT IF MUSIC JUST BECOMES FREE AND ARTISTS MAKE THEIR  LIVING OFF OF TOURING AND MERCHANDISE?

Well therein lies the most stupid mistake anybody can make. The most important part is the music. Without that, why would you care? Even the idea that you're considering giving the music away for free makes it easier to give it away for free. The only reason why gold is expensive is because we all agree that it is. There's no real use for it, except we all agree and abide by the idea that gold costs a certain amount per ounce. As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy. And that's what going on.

But of course gold is a physical commodity (although many who buy and sell it will never see or handle the stuff they're trading). And art is, too. In decades past the very thinginess of art made it seem a little clunky and anachronistic: from the beginning of the C20, if not earlier, many avant-gardists aspired to achieve in their work something like the condition of music. But in the digital age this thinginess, the irreducibility of art from physical object, has not merely saved it from market meltdown but given it a higher status.

Triumphant flights, tragic landings

Zinovy Zinik on the Sputnik.

Boris Groys in Bolshoi Gorod

Critic Boris Groys has published an article in Bolshoi Gorod (Big City) which gives his prognosis for our shared culture. It's in Russian (pdf) but the headlines perhaps give an outline of his thinking:

We're all marginal
The world is becoming a railway station
The concept of "bad" is abolished
There will be no matriarchy
Minorities will triumph
Terrorists are the new pirates

Or you can try a babelfish translation (pdf) of the whole thing.

Old Wreck

I am honoured to present exclusively for visitors to IZO an article by Zinovy Zinik. Entitled Old Wreck, it addresses our consciousness of ruins: a subject currently being explored in the contemporary art context (see, for example, the seminar Ruins of the Twentieth Century at the last Frieze Art Fair) but also relevant (why not?) to the struggle between developers and conservationists in Moscow. The dilapidation of old inner Moscow, as Zinik might suggest, is comforting in a sic transit gloria mundi kind of way; certainly the present state of repair affords the ruinophile emotional lebensraum and the flaneur a sense of history; this is not to mention the practical benefit of cheap space for artists in the city centre. But Mayor Luzhkov, Norman Foster and assorted faceless property-garchs seem bent on replacing it with new construction, some ueber-contemporary (Foster), some repro kitsch (the Russian consensus). However, they've still got a long way to go ;)

Zinik's article is planned the first of regular contributions to IZO by guest writers. For more on Zinik go to Complicite; to read Old Wreck, with related video material, go beneath the cut; or if you prefer, download the pdf (no video). Below: Alex Melamid, Katya Arnold and Nina Petrova on the Jersey City shore, 1990s; photo Zinovy Zinik.