The Unfair Fair: Expanding World

Sunday, 24 February 2008

Expanding World

ARTISTS: Ozlem Altin and Olivier Maarschalk
TITLE: Freunde and Futter
DESCRIPTION: Booklet by Ozlem Altin, published by Orient Press, Berlin 2008 plus music-collage animals by Olivier Maarschalk

Freunde and Futter is a collaborative work by Ozlem Altin and Olivier Maarschalk. The booklet playfully explores topics such as relationships, friendship and love. For the music-collage, Olivier selected titles from his record collection which are associated with animals in one way or another.

ARTISTS: Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer
TITLE: Infinite Library
DATE: 2008

A proposal which outlines the amalgamation of two books by reassembling and merging them together, which results in two new unique entities. This proposition will in effect, once hypothetically executed on all existing books to date, shift the authorship from the maker to the book itself.
- Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer

www.harisepaminonda.com
www.danielgustavcramer.com

ARTIST: Pietro Sanguineti
TITLE: www_serie a_2007 (sketches for sculptures)
MEDIA/DESCRIPTION: Digital images found on the web while looking for ideas for new sculptures

The images are intended as a conceptual ensemble of sculptures. I understand them as sketches of ready-made sculptures to be re-realized, at a given time.

Language is the main subject of my digital films, images, sculptures and installations. Language appears as image. My basic tool is the computer. One of the focal points of my work is the relation between language and image on the one hand, and real space and (its) digital simulation on the other. I understand real space as layers of surfaces. As my concept of real space is "flat", my concept of the image is sculptural. I am fascinated by the glamorous seduction and artificial beauty created by our contemporary society of high definition spectacle. I am not interested in the analysis of forms of the real, but the real forms of the media. For the continuous production of surfaces, necessary to mediate and regenerate capitalist ideology, a huge repertoire of materialization is used and invented to give those concepts a meaningful visual form. Pure language and the immateriality of meaning was an (ideological) presumption of the protagonists of historical Concept Art. They obscured the disturbing differences produced by "dirty" materiality, unavoidable to give language an appearance. In contrast to Concept Art I am interested in that "dirt" and happy to make use of the return ticket: from language back to the image. Visual complexity creates differences vis-à-vis the 'original' meaning of the words themselves, that can only be sublated by additonal linguistic operations. With the shifting of the referential frame(s), image, language and object start to lack their established stability. What you see is what you see. Not.
- Pietro Sanguineti

ARTIST: The Metropolitan Complex (Sarah Pierce)

Click on image to enlarge

www.themetropolitancomplex.com

About

This blog catalogues the inaugural UNFAIR FAIR, which took place in Rome from Friday 29 February to Monday 3 March 2008. The first UNFAIR FAIR project was a sort of event, situation, exhibition, intervention, action and infiltration timed to coincide with two new contemporary art fairs in Rome - ARTEcontemporaneamodernaROMA and ROMA (The ROAD TO CONTEMPORARY ART). The UNFAIR FAIR is in no way formally associated with these art fairs, though it does have a strategic relation to the mainstream economy they represent. Whereas the raison d'être of the contemporary art fair may be characterised by maximization and accumulation, the conditions of the UNFAIR FAIR relate more comfortably to the states of minimization and disintegration. The aim of the UNFAIR FAIR is to show the process of artistic production and transitional art works that index broader practices by each of the invited artists.
Click here for further information

The Principle of Equivalence - Well done, badly done, not done

In 1966, Robert Filliou proposed that the world economy no longer be considered from a political angle, but rather from a poetic point of view, so that work as pain would become work as play. From 1968, he developed his Principle of Equivalence - the principle of the equality in value of the Well Done, the Badly Done and the Not Done. Filliou proposed an unfinished work, by essence not done, but in the process of being done, realised in a state of "Permanent Creation" - "to decide nothing, to choose nothing, to want nothing, to possess nothing, fully awake, sitting quietly, doing nothing."

Going, going gone for ... how much?

The highest price ever paid for a Francis Bacon (£14 million), for a photograph (an Andreas Gursky, 1.7m)... all auction records were shattered in London last week. But who is buying art at these prices - and, frankly, is it worth it? Carole Cadwalladr went in search of the top bidders.

The Observer
Sunday February 11, 2007
Click here to read the article

Silly money

5 Dec 1766
Date of first sale held in Pall Mall, London by James Christie, founder of Christie's

$104.168,000
Record sale at a fine art auction: for Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe, May 2004, Sotheby's, New York

£186,645,960
Value of total sales realised last week at Sotheby's, London

40
Record number of days for an auction sale (for Duke of Buckingham's collection at Stowe House by Christie's in 1848)

£2.51bn
Total global arts sales by Christie's in 2006

85
Number of works sold for over £1m last week at Sotheby's and Christie's, London

£1.7m
The record price for a photograph sold at auction (Andreas Gursky's 99 Cents II, Diptychon sold last week at Sotheby's, London)

£70.4m
Total revenue from Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art Sale last Wednesday. This broke the record set by Sotheby's just 24 hours earlier for a contemporary art auction in Europe.