Adieu, Ingmar

--Vem är du?
--Jag är Döden.

(--Who are you? --I am Death.)

from The Seventh Seal.

Pierre & Gilles in Frame

We've never been keen on Pierre & Gilles photographs. Crossing camp and propaganda, these loud, glittering images are all artifice and beefcake (with the occasional glimpse of cheesecake just to keep you on our toes) often revolving around mythology and religion. The style is easily recognizable and repetitive, which is why their work pops up in fashion magazines and advertising on a regular basis.

But Double Je, the current Pierre & Gilles retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, has enlightened us. If you haven't seen their work in person, YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THEIR WORK. The ads, posters, etc. are a poor substitute.

P&G don't produce photographs really, but old-fashioned, unique works of art. The photographic foundation (shot by Pierre) of these very large images is heavily retouched in paint (by Gilles), such that the object before your eyes is more painting than photo. It has texture and reflects light in different ways. The overpainting is a particularly interesting choice in the latest works, given the ease of creating digital effects today.

Each image is subsequently placed in a specially designed frame (from rough wood to shiny plastic) befitting the theme and mood of the image. Unfortunately, reproductions almost never include the frames, yet they are clearly integral parts of the work. See the image included here and you know what we mean.

They become enormous icons. A far cry from a magazine ad.

Cy Twombly's French Kiss

We never condone physical assaults on works of art. Okay, almost never.

This week, a woman kissed a Cy Twombly painting in his current show in Avignon, France. She's going to court next month for having smeared lipstick on the white canvas. Huh? A smear on a Cy Twombly painting? Didn't anyone notice that there are smears all over Twombly's work? Look at the example included here. That's Cy's thing, smears.

We certainly hope Twombly comes out in support of his French lover during the trial.

Authenticating Andy

It was bound to happen. Someone is suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board for their authentication practices.

Andy Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine. His mechanical art practices back that up. As a result of that attitude and Warhol's penchant for knock-offs and marketing, I imagine authenticating his work is no small task. Warhol used authenticity as a foil for his work. His friends all played roles (he loved them more on film than in the flesh), the Factory was a silver-walled spectacle for fun-house reflections and of course he reveled in knocking out phony Brillo and Del Monte boxes. The very idea of the authentic must have made him frown.

There's a lot of money to be made on Warhol's art, so people are bound to seek some system of authentication. It'll be interesting to see how this $20 million suit plays out, but of course Andy (and his art) has the last laugh. Or frown.

Tate Modern's Urban Blight

The Tate Modern's Global Cities summer show is a confused shantytown clogging the back half of the museum's immense Turbine Hall. Ironically, the show targets the dangers of rapid urban growth in the face of inadequate planning and lagging infrastructure. It's a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do." They even shot a video of themselves creating the mess.

How's it go awry? The show's themed zones-- size, speed, form, density, diversity-- remind us of the Tate's maligned exhibition categories when it first opened: environment, history, body... The zones are teeming with redundancies, inconsistencies, contradictions and lacunae, both on a formal level and in the alphabet soup of statistics and statements plastered all over the cheap board walls.

Works from artists like Andreas Gursky and Paromita Vohra are scattered among the panels of text, models and charts. Architects like Rem Koolhaas and Hadid & Schumacher contributed as well, but it wasn't always clear what exactly, or where they were. The show screams the world-wide need for what it, itself, sorely lacks: coordination!

Beaux-Arts Open House - Back to the Future

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, that Paris bastion of art academy, had an open house this weekend. Art school shows like these are far and away the best place to see how recent art's been digested. Strolling through the studios and looking over a lot of student work, there's a lot of regurgitation. One work nods to Gerhard Richter, a second smells of Marlene Dumas, a third stinks of Chuck Close, and so on through Neo Rauch and Peter Doig and Tatiana Trouvé and Damien Hirst.

Some of these similarities derive from a lack of creativity and some from a sheer youthful searching through the styles of established artists. All of us can learn as much from mediocre or bad art as we can from the best. The works of people who've been studying the field and taking it seriously for a couple of years offer a great opportunity for reckoning. So here it is: Sloppiness and abstraction are out. So is installation. Live art (like plants and ant farms) are in, especially when combined with man-made materials.

And beer is still in. Lots of it. We found empties all over the place. Some aspects of an art apprenticeship don't change.