OLD NEWS

IT'S NATIONAL TRADING CARD DAY!
Fake Pink Flamingos bubblegum cards, 2003:
<https://tinyurl.com/264zcdam>
The checklist:
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9t2d5b> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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SO THAT’S BANKSY. ANYWAY… by J.J. Charlesworth
<https://tinyurl.com/3ppf9dbv>
So legendary celebrity-anonymous graffiti artist and media agit-popster Banksy has finally been unmasked. In a lengthy investigative exposé, Reuters journalists traced every clue and trawled historical records to reveal that the alleged Bristolian master is a fifty-something bloke called… David Jones (real name Robin Gunningham). Given that it took so long, and required such digging and expending of journalistic resources – Reuters’s journos <https://tinyurl.com/4ph243k4> went to frontline Ukraine to quiz locals about recent Banksy works that popped up in bombed-out apartments – the question that raises its head is… does anyone really care anymore?
Like many artistic figures to emerge from the punkish antiestablishment swagger of the late 1990s, Banksy has grown up to encapsulate a particular brand of punkish antiestablishment swagger, giving visual shape to the restless, discontented mix of idealism and cynicism that characterised the worldview of Generation X: sentimentally anti-capitalist, disgusted by consumerism and enamoured of environmentalism, suspicious of authority, anti-war and romantically committed to a Manichaean vision of oppressor and oppressed. While Early Banksy balanced this with humour, visual inventiveness and the upbeat side of the cheerful nihilism of the 1990s and 2000s, Late Banksy has become an increasingly un-fun mouthpiece for select political causes, positions that by now have all the edgy, underground minority status of a Guardian op-ed.
Early Banksy traded in an adolescent mockery of figures of authority – all those British coppers snogging. Early Banksy sketched out a cynical view of a doomed culture we could nevertheless (in the breezy boom years of the 2000s) have a chuckle about. Early Banksy produced that couple in romantic embrace, their heads encased in deep-sea-divers’ helmets, which became the cover for the 2003 album Think Tank, by middle-class indie moaners Blur, and cemented Early Banksy’s position in the pop-cultural zeitgeist. In its own terms, it was a good image (even if the idea was appropriated, or pilfered, from René Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers), articulating an idle complaint about social atomisation and the loss of intimacy, along with perhaps an extra dose of eco-anxiety about toxic environments. But it was the early sign of an artist whose imagination existed only to make visual the cultural prejudices and received ideas of a particular section of generational opinion. Banksy was good at isolating the dominant tropes of the liberal-minded post-Britpop mums and dads, those earning good top salaries in the culture industry and partying in the glamping reservation at Glasto while fretting about war and the environment.
<https://tinyurl.com/wnm5hrhd>
As the 2000s wore into the 2010s, Early Banksy’s image-world became the opposite of oppositional, turning increasingly to the visual catechism of banal progressive truisms. Global warming is bad? Check. That consumer lifestyle of yours is empty of meaning? Yep. War is terrible and peace is nice? Absolutely. And after a while the imagery began to be less fun too. The politics became more insistent, and Early-to-Late (let’s say Mid) Banksy’s ego and accruing wealth turned him increasingly into a figure lecturing the public. In 2014, Mid Banksy went to UKIP-voting Clacton-on-Sea (now the parliamentary seat of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage), to paint his ‘anti-immigration birds’, a depiction of ugly, stupid-looking grey pigeons holding up ‘migrants not welcome’ placards against a lone, colourfully plumed ‘migrant’ bird. When, in 2016, British voters voted for the UK to leave the European Union, Mid Banksy headed for leave-voting Dover, occupying the side of a house with a 7m-high mural of the EU flag, and the image of an overalled workman blithely chipping away at one of the 12 stars. To mark ‘Brexit Day’, Mid Banksy made a point of a special display of his 2009 Devolved Parliament, a painting of the House of Commons in which all the human MPs are replaced by chimps. (It sold for £9.9m at Sotheby’s in October 2019; how’s that for antiestablishment?) Those politicians, in case you didn’t get it, are just shit-throwing monkeys.
<https://tinyurl.com/ymnzuj9y>
<https://tinyurl.com/zpsrjt79>
So as Late Banksy has become increasingly frustrated with his fellow Brits and their stupid opinions, his attention has turned elsewhere, bringing his Bono-level saviourism to the oppressed abroad. In 2017, to signal his support of the Palestinians and his dislike of Israeli policy, he opened his popup Walled Off Hotel in East Jerusalem. In 2020, by which time migrants making the perilous crossing from the North African coast to Southern Europe had become a major story, Late Banksy financed a rescue ship to patrol the Mediterranean. With each of these increasingly grandiose stunts, a model became clear: reduce major political and social problems to simplistic good-versus-bad moralising. His latest high-profile adventure sought to highlight the plight of the people of Ukraine, with such standout works as a bearded man in his bathtub overlooking the now floorless ruin of his collapsed home. (It was this creative effort that allowed Reuters’s journalists to identify him, tracing checkpoint records of passport entries.) No doubt the people of Ukraine thank Late Banksy for his concern, but what they probably want is weapons, munitions and air defence systems to eject the Russian forces that threaten and kill them daily. Anti-war? Nothing is ever that simple.
What does anonymity matter in all this? Early Banksy’s mystery identity played to the mythology of the scrappy, truth-telling street artist covering his tracks to avoid the strong arm of the law. As the local authorities gave up fretting about whether it was vandalism and instead started preserving Early Banksy’s oeuvre under Perspex, the anonymity shtick morphed into a useful vehicle for Mid Banksy’s turn to targeting the artworld, the mystique apparently irresistible to the buzzy cohort of millennial collectors who saw in Banky’s assault on artworld etiquette the reflection of their own disruptor, anti-elitist attitudes. By now, though, why should anyone care very much for the anonymity of a wealthy, self-important tourist whose simpleminded opinions impose themselves – tediously and unaccountably – on the public, cosplaying ‘street art’? If we still have to put up with this, we should at least know who we can blame. _ArtReview

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ALLOW
<https://tinyurl.com/yeyrn484> _DavidShrigley

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IS MATH ART? WERNER HERZOG SAYS YES
Making the best case for math’s omnipresence was Werner Herzog, who kicked off the evening with a keynote titled “Mathematics and the Sublime.” The German filmmaker’s 30-minute talk spanned geometry, data visualizations, the golden ratio, and even numerology—“the black sheep of mathematics,” he half-joked.
“Beyond all of this, I do believe mathematics is a new form of art,” he emphasized. “It is loaded with meaning. It’s not just an aesthetic or a form of abstract painting. It’s loaded with poetry.”
For a man who has long worked in a visual medium—“with images, with inner landscapes”—his approach to math has been about visualization, he said. He brought up crystallography and meteorology, as well as the mysteries of the Ulam spiral, a visual pattern revealed when prime numbers are plotted on a spiral grid of integers. “I love to watch fractals,” he added.
These aesthetics of mathematics, Herzog said, can even touch the sublime. He made clear his love for Euler’s Identity—math’s most beautiful equation which links five fundamental constants—that borders on rapture. “I’m stunned by its simplicity, really,” he said. “Sometimes when I look deeper into it, I get the feeling that I want to cry.”
In ways, Herzog was alluding to his long-held theory of “ecstatic truth,” which proposes that there is a deeper, more profound reality to be found beyond mere facts. As examples, he has pointed to the deeply Romantic (and unlikely) landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Michelangelo’s Pieta, in which Christ appears as a 30-year-old man and the Virgin a teenager.
<https://tinyurl.com/cj8658wx>
In his own work, Herzog has sought out his own ecstatic meaning, beyond plain documentary. Case in point: the “mutant albino crocodiles” in 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, creatures that prompt one of Herzog’s most surreal voiceovers—​​”Are we today the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time when we see the paintings of Chauvet cave?”
And for a maker of films, time naturally came up in his address to the library. “Truth is the daughter of time,” he quoted Leonardo da Vinci.
But time, too, is just a construct, “another framework for organizing our experiences,” he said. He brought up his friendship with Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who spent 30 years on a tiny island in the Philippines fighting WWII, long after it was over (Herzog dramatized his one-man war in the 2022 novel The Twilight World). “In concordance with Onoda,” he said, “we are the ghost writers of our reality of time.”
Near the end, he reads a passage from Virgil’s Georgics about bees—“Some say the bees have drunk from the light of heaven,” it goes, “and have a share in the divine intelligence”—before stopping himself. _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4y7yyd> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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BENEATH THE GREAT WAVE: HOKUSAI AND HIROSHIGE
<https://tinyurl.com/k4dnwmk5>
The printed images made in Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, known collectively as “pictures of the floating world”, could be bought from a local bookshop for about the price of a bowl of noodles. Collected casually, like posters or magazines, these mass-produced media started out as sexy, charming and dazzling snapshots of Tokyo high-life for the vicarious enjoyment of those who could not afford it. Manufactured by workshops of artists and artisans, they made professional works of art available to ordinary people for the first time. They’re breathtakingly beautiful, and they changed the history of art.
The first and most enduringly popular subjects for these collectible prints were famous actors from the kabuki theatreand beautiful women, typically courtesans from the brothel district of Yoshiwara. By introducing us to the denizens of the floating world, the first half of this dazzling exhibition sheds light on the dreams and desires that drive popular culture. Kunichika’s portrait of an actor in the role of a “heavenly being” is as heart-throbbing and as gender-bending as Rudolph Valentino in a bolero vest. A “fashionable beauty” caught by Eizan in the process of applying her lipstick, a delicately turned ankle visible through the gap in her marvellously rendered gown, is erotic in a way that is unavoidably (and by design) voyeuristic. You could imagine stumbling upon this half-dressed model, glimpsed through an open door, in the pages of Vogue Italia.
Night View of Matsuchiyama and the San’ya Canal from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8s35p7>
That these images were transgressive is integral to their charge. In a celebrated picture by Hiroshige (one of the two masters around whom this show is built), a man leaving the red light district at dawn covers his face so as not to be recognised. The more of these images you see, the more you become aware of the darkness beneath the glamour. The two young girls accompanying three sex workers in a disarmingly elegant portrait by Shunchô are serving their apprenticeship into the industry, and might have been bought by the brothel from families too impoverished to support their female children. It becomes clear that the hedonism is counterpointed, you might even say sharpened, by a despair that is kept offstage.
And then you come to Hiroshige’s heartbreaking picture of a geisha by the banks of a river at night. Her lantern-carrying attendant has been cropped out, so that we see a woman whose job is to entertain others through music and dance standing alone against the shimmering darkness. It is not only that her absorption in thought manifests a startling new psychological complexity, but that the cast of her mouth so economically expresses what the Japanese call mono no aware, or the sweet and melancholy revelation that all things must pass. We cannot know what is on her mind, but we can be sure that this deep thought has been precipitated by (and cannot be separated from) deep feeling.
This irony – that we come closest to eternal truths only when we have cause to dwell on the fleeting nature of the world – animates all great art, to which category the second half of this exhibition unquestionably belongs. It focuses on the landscapes produced in the mid-19th century by Hiroshige and the most influential of all Japanese artists, Hokusai. In it we witness a remarkable expansion in the horizons of commercial printmaking from Tokyo’s pleasure districts to the order of the cosmos. This miracle, comparable to those that electrified Elizabethan London and Renaissance Florence, cannot be attributed to a single cause, although the masterpieces here suggest several contributory factors.
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The first was exposure to another way of constructing the visible world, made possible by the arrival of European art with Dutch sailors. Clearly delighted by this new box of tools, Hokusai used western perspective to compose landscapes combining dramatic depth with characteristically striking graphics in the groundbreaking Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (a series so popular that, as a blockbuster film spawns sequels, it eventually came to number 46). Not to be outdone, the younger Hiroshige responded with his magnificent Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road. This scenic tour of the journey from Tokyo to Kyoto mixes western and Asian compositional models to build the hallucinatory vistas that would later enchant the impressionists and, by way of return, transform European painting.
<https://tinyurl.com/x4p38hms>
The most celebrated of all the prints featured here is, of course, the Great Wave that gives this show its title, and which will be known to anyone who has visited a university common room. The familiarity of Hokusai’s image has rendered it cosy, but this is a terrifying vision. The wave threatens to overwhelm not only the fishing boats caught in its tow but Mount Fuji itself, symbol of Japan and guarantor of divine order (as the exhibition literature points out, one plausible source of the mountain’s name is fu-shi, or “not-death”). This apocalyptic scene speaks to the anxiety of the final decades of Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, the drawing to a close of the prosperous Edo period, and the awareness that great change was coming.
Hokusai’s wave is presented next to Hiroshige’s homage or riposte, printed about 25 years later. This transcendentally harmonious composition (in which Mount Fuji stands untroubled, and time appears to have stopped) not only illustrates the differences in temperament and technique between the artists, but also introduces the most difficult to quantify factor in the transformation of woodblock prints from disposable popular media into instruments for the expansion of human consciousness. Namely the near-simultaneous emergence of two artists who were capable of accessing ideas and feelings that had previously lain beyond reach, and of making these ideas and feelings accessible to large numbers of other people. The shorthand for this is genius.
This shorthand should not disguise the fact that Hokusai and Hiroshige depended on independently gifted collaborators, or that they were products of a given time and place. But it does serve to connect them to other thinkers who have shared their preoccupation with understanding how the ever-changing appearance of things can be reconciled with the persistence of ideas and identities, and who likewise come to the conclusion that the boundary between life and death is more fluid than we are conventionally equipped to perceive. So they show it to us: the spume from the crest of Hokusai’s wave becomes the snow that falls on Mount Fuji; the flecks of foam from Hiroshige’s transform into a flock of birds flying over its summit.
_Ben Eastham _GuardianUK

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WALK OFF
<https://tinyurl.com/4wjayx9p> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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54. NANTUCKET SCRIMSHAW by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/yc663vjt>
The story of the whaling industry on Nantucket Island is a reminder that beauty, tolerance, destruction, and exploitation are inseparable, not merely awkwardly adjacent. We choose to see one side or the other; or we attempt the more difficult task of encompassing the whole.
Nantucket was founded by people fleeing religious persecution from Puritans on the mainland—themselves refugees from persecution in the Old World. In 1702, the island converted en masse to Quakerism after its most powerful resident, Mary Coffin Starbuck, was moved by a single afternoon sermon.
The fortunes of the pacifist, abolitionist religion rose as they began whaling in earnest. Quakers perceived no contradiction between their beliefs and t https://tinyurl.com/mv9p5n66> , plain-dressed millionaires: the dissonance was total and apparently untroubling as they depleted local whale populations by the mid-18th century and took to the open oceans for multi-year hunts. Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”
Scrimshaw and whaling logbook illustrations are among the most intimate artifacts of American folk art: made slowly, in isolation, by people with too much time and too much at stake. The brutality is displaced by whales with unfathomably merry faces, which is either Quaker guilt sublimated into whimsy, or the strangest form of tenderness imaginable. The beauty of the whaler’s folk art is inextricable from the industry that produced it. _TheImpatientReader

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BEN SAKOGUCHI, "WORLD WAR III BRAND," FROM THE ORANGE CRATE SERIES, 1974-81.
Sakoguchi, now 87 years old, is a Japanese American artist who was interned in Arizona during WWII.
Based in Southern California, he has been steadily making work since the 1960s
<https://tinyurl.com/4m3dakfm> _MichaelLobel

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VANDAL CAUSES $240K IN DAMAGE TO CHIHULY GLASS MUSEUM AT SEATTLE CENTER
<https://tinyurl.com/ypezxx2c>
Seattle police arrested a 40-year-old man accused of causing more than $240,000 in damage at the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum late Monday.
A security guard found the man damaging colorful glass plant sculptures around 11 p.m. in an outdoor area on the museum’s grounds, according to a police blotter post.
“The man threw broken glass shards at security, fortunately the security officer wasn’t hurt,” police reported. “The suspect also picked up a broken shard of glass and tried to stab the museum security officer multiple times. The guard retreated to wait for police.”
<https://tinyurl.com/fduf9v6m> _SeattleTimes

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MELCHIOR D'HONDECOETER, OIL SKETCH OF SEVEN CHICKS, C. 1665-C. 1668
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3mv4pd> _JesseLocker

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LAWSUIT SETTLES WHO REALLY BOUGHT BEEPLE’S $69 MILLION NFT
<https://tinyurl.com/2rch7san>
In March 2021, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million, sending an earthquake through the art world. But who on earth had bought the thing? That question has been at the heart of a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York in 2023 that has now reached a settlement. In late January, Vignesh Sundaresan and his company Portkey Technologies compelled its former independent contractor, Anand Venkateswaran, to concede he was in no way responsible for the Beeple purchase.
Shortly after the Christie’s sale, a pseudonymous duo emerged to take credit: Metakovan and Twobadour, who explained they had acquired the NFT through MetaPurse, a crypto-native investment fund. In time, they revealed themselves to be Sundaresan and Venkateswaran.
A great deal of high-minded boosterism invariably followed. They promised to revolutionize how the world engaged with art and that they were part of a movement “equalizing power between the West and the Rest.” Eighteen months later, in 2022, the two split. At first, the break seemed amicable, with Venkateswaran saying he was stepping down to write a memoir, one Sundaresan said he looked forward to reading.
A man sitting at a desk showing off the Beeple NFT, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, on his computer screen
Vignesh Sundaresan (AKA Metakovan) showing off Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (2021) in his home in Singapore, 2021. Photo: Roslan Rahman / AFP via Getty Images.
Then, in June 2023, Sundaresan and Portkey Technologies sued Venkateswaran for trademark infringement and false claims of having been closely involved in the purchase of the Beeple artwork. In essence, Sundaresan was aggrieved that Venkateswaran had spent the better part of a year promoting his own NFT businesses and appearing on podcasts and conference panels by leveraging his connection to MetaPurse and the Beeple purchase. The trademarks for Metakovan, Twobadour, and MetaPurse all belonged to Portkey, the suit claimed, and Venkateswaran had been nothing more than an independent contractor who dealt with marketing and communications.
The settlement puts the question of who bought the extremely expensive JPEG firmly to bed. A statement released by Venkateswaran as part of the settlement notes that “Mr. Sundaresan exclusively purchased the ‘Beeple (b. 1981), EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS‘ NFT,” and that “Mr. Sundaresan made all decisions regarding the purchase of this and any other NFT for Portkey or Metapurse, and Mr. Venkateswaran did not have any decision-making or management authority over those purchases.”
In addition to making an undisclosed settlement payment, Venkateswaran is forbidden from claiming he was the founder, co-founder, creator, co-creator, christener, co-christener, steward, or co-steward—among other descriptors—of Twobadour, Metapurse, or Metakovan.
Venkateswaran is also required to post a statement to his social media accounts clarifying his previous role at Portkey and reach out to third-party websites and ask them to amend such descriptions. This spans nearly 50 third-parties including film festivals, blockchain events, YouTube channels, and online publications. Many of the third parties appear to have complied by pulling down the offending pages.
When the lawsuit was filed in 2023, it barely made a ripple and its conclusion now seems perfunctory, a weird echo from some other era. The NFT market has dropped roughly 90 percent from its 2023 sugar high, Beeple is off making photo defecating robot dogs, and even Sundaresan is onto new projects having opened an experimental art and technology space in Singapore late last year. Still, its first offering was a VR experience by Olafur Eliasson that was minted as an NFT. _Richard Whiddington _artnet

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CATTLE-AC SIDNEY, MT
<https://tinyurl.com/3jzt4rpb> _RuralIndexingProject

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IT'S NATIONAL TELL A FAIRY TALE DAY!
Prince Charming in the Forest,
red ink drawing by Walter Crane,
probably about 1880:
<https://tinyurl.com/42ffmbmt> _‪PeterHuestis‬