I have some remarks to make about the articles appearing recently that focus on the art market - it’s highs and lows, interesting turns, and newer viewpoints.  The articles I have in mind are on an array of topics but all offer some new
viewpoints on contemporary art and the contemporary art market.

The first article is “Color Theory Examined As Visual Esthetics.”  It is a very good commentary, from an historic point of view, of the advent and changes in the various theories on color as part of the human visual esthetic.  The article essentially points out the movement of color theory through different scientific eras and into a modern use of color as a personal nomenclature by individual artists.  This article should be of special interests to artists very involved with color.

The second article is “DAMIEN HIRST Non Artist of the Hyper Culture.”  A brief run down of the “shock” “concept” as art is examined.  Using Damien Hirst as an example, the author points a very big finger at the inbred and well-funded hype
of the “hyper culture.”  And as you read the article you will eventually get validation if you have ever asked, “But, where is the art?”  Tom Wolfe might even get a laugh out the remarks quoted in the article.

The third article is an interview with “MICHAEL BIERUT of Design Observer.”  The idea that design at it’s best enters the area of art is at the core of this interview.  Michael Bierut has some interesting things to say about his work and about design more generally.

The fourth article is an interview of “Art Market Blog Writer Consultant NICHOLAS FORREST.”  This interview questions a young and erudite scholar and entrepreneur on contemporary art trends from his viewpoint.  Based in Australia, Nicholas Forrest has made a real contribution with his blog writings to new and intermediate level art collectors and enthusiasts - and all done with value as a major criteria.

The fifth article is “Top 10 Ten High Price Famous Auction Paintings.”  This popular topic is written about with information on each of the top 10 works sold at auction in the recent years.  Remember when you could pick up a Van Gogh for one or two million?

The sixth article is about Pop culture’s love of it’s music and performers packaging with visual art - “Top 100 Best Music Recording Artists Album Covers Art.”  The list was drawn from votes by several music album cover design art experts.  You will see a lot of the old favorites on the list as well as some newer work too.  Do Boy groups get the best cover art?

Well read up and drop me a line when you can.  I’m always glad to hear opinion on contemporary art.

- Daniel Ferris

Design approaches art every time it contains the necessary elements observing the necessary principles with enough balance to maintain a powerful elegance. Designers working in planar or spatial worlds cope with the same elements and
principles of design but in somewhat different applications. Some recent articles that I have read on design may be of interest to you.

RICHARD DAVIS Architecture for Contemporary Art

Interview of Architect: RANDY BROWN

Art and Decor: TRICIA HUNTLEY

Principles and Elements of Design Challenged

COLOR THEORY examined as visual esthetics

Top 100 Record Album Cover Designs

MICHAEL BIERUT of Design Observer

Designers cope with the same elements and principles in architecture, decor, art, and media design. The interviews and articles above give some specific examples of the problems in each of these design areas.

Color theory has it’s uses in each of these areas. The article on color theory posits that the truly creative designer or artist works from a color palette that was developed from numerous personal experiments in color theory, but has pushed beyond the most conventional uses of color to a more personal and more creative practice.

Many of these color theories and styles are not written or logically spelled out - they exist only in the body of work of the artist. Even though they are not written or proven, these personal color theories or styles can be recognized by critics and analysts for all of their originalities.

Each of the elements and principles of design can be stylized, and should be, to move to a more unique and personal theory in practice by creative artists and designers.

- Daniel Ferris

Contemporary art is becoming more popular. I’m not in command of all the statistics or demographics but attendance and sales are up generally. Why is that?

I can’t say it’s because of our public schools educational regime of the last 20 years. I believe it has at least a little to do with the availability of the media to everyone - and indirectly a more sophisticated populace when it comes to images. More sophisticated in the sense that people see at least 10 times as many images as they did 30 or 40 years ago (rough guess).

Just think what could happen if the educational systems used the internet for something more than a reference sourc. The net could easily serve as a repository of each student’s work and progress, including standardized test preps, in almost every field of didactic learning. This goes double for the visual arts.

Here’s some of the words that curators have to say on recent contemporary art exhibitions. The articles links are listed just below:

Paul Dorrell of Leopold Gallery

Ellen Bradshaw of Pleiades Gallery

Connie Wolf of Contemporary Jewish Museum

Jason Hall of AAM

These people have a good vantage points on the interests of the community in contemporary art. By the way if you know a curator or gallerist who would like to talk contemporary send them my way.

- Daniel Ferris

There are many abstract painters on the contemporary art scene worldwide. If you would like to see their work you need only run a search to visit their websites. The abstract styles you can find are varied, and some are stylistically strong.

The nonobjective painters - a group within the abstract painters - are also well represented. Nonobjective painting is denoted by a complete lack of subject matter. In fact, in nonobjective painting, the abstraction is carried to an elemental degree so that only basic structures, forms, surface textural variation, color, transparency versus opacity, and usually with minimal patterning. Artists working in this way were called abstract expressionists for several decades, sometimes called action painters, particularly if they used active and spontaneous painting in the execution of the work.

These artists have some great canvases, and some interesting things to say as well. You can read about several of these journeyman artists at the articles, interviews and websites listed below.

Brad Bannister
Lynne Taetzsch
Shawn Mc Nulty
Lorraine Huber
Anne Stahl

These artists provide a cross section of abstract painting in nonobjective style. When your read the interviews and various statements by these artists you will find the common theme of formal concern rather than pushing an agenda. The reason for this is simple, their only agenda is the formal execution of art, without other mitigating messages. And that is the real strength of nonobjective painting - it doesn’t drag in subjective dogma of meaning.

Critics today may compare nonobjective painting to eye candy. They said that about Monet too. But in the words of Pere Tanguy, “My God, What an Eye.” Now Monet’s paintings, in retrospect, evoke the words “ethereal” or “spiritual”. And nonobjective painting is a perceptual statement that frees the viewer. No preaching, no hand-wringing.

It can be much stronger than eye candy. Nonobjective painting can be more visually powerful than any other style because of this freedom. Granted, that kind of freedom is frightening to many people, who need a prescribed meaning to cling to. But to see a powerful, purely designed, spontaneously produced nonobjective painting is the equivalent of seeing human creativity at its zenith - seeing the unknown, mastery of chaos, attaining a pure balance between the complex and the simple.

- Daniel Ferris

There are some new articles available by Allan Swinson at CAG in the Influential Artists series. Contemporary Art Gallery Magazine has been adding to the series as an overview of some of the major influences on contemporary art. Each of the artists in the original list of the Top 125 Most Influential Artists on Contemporary Art is considered for a short bio article with emphasis on that important artist’s influentuial contributions to visual art.

The most recent additions to the series are listed below. The articles are written more for information and context - there are few images included. However, as a quick reference they provide basic to intermediate level information, as well as some insightful analyses, as to why the artist is seen as important and as influential.

Hans Hofmann
Georg Baselitz
Isamu Noguchi

You can see the earlier additions to this list of articles on my earlier post, “Important & Influential Artists.”

Contemporary artists have been majorly influenced, along with art writers, gallerists, museum curators and collectors, as each of these artists essentially opened up new areas for visual art, created uniquely original styles, and generally furthered each part of the visual esthetic. This in effect tests the limits of what we as a culture can acknowledge as art, and pushes the boundaries of our perception of beauty.

Daniel Ferris

One of the best ways to find out how things are going in the contemporary art market is to ask questions of the people who own and run contemporary art galleries. Of course galleries have their own areas of specialization or even niche marketing. So, the more people you talk to, the more answers you will get.

Artists, collectors and aspiring gallery owners need to understand the gallery market in contemporary art. The popularization of art fairs is only one trend that galleries deal with, often participating with their own artists. Another major trend is online websites that have grown in number as artists, collectors, galleries and critics have all made their entry into this newer medium.

I write and read on contemporary art because of business and personal interest, so any time I can get opinion from someone who is involved I like to pass it along to interested readers - artists, gallery owners, collectors and other writers. There are five good interviews that offer some opinion on contemporary art gallery affairs listed here. Let me know if you like them and I will pick out some more.

PAUL SHARPE - Chelsea, New York City
PETER STRUB of Marshall Arts Gallery
Painter and Gallerist - STELA BARRETO
Davidson Contemporary: MICHAEL SWENEY
Gallery Interview: TIMOTHY TEW
PAUL DORRELL Leopold Gallery Kansas City

These gallery owners and directors all have a take on contemporary art from their locale and market. Paul Sharpe, Peter Strub, Stela Barreto, Michael Sweney, Timothy Tew and Paul Dorrell have major input into their galleries as well as their local contemporary art markets. Also, when you read the articles, links are provided to the gallery websites, so you can see some really very interesting artist portfolios at each gallery website.

If you have or know of a gallery that specializes in contemporary art, and they would participate in an interview, please contact me. I am always interested in communicating with gallery owners and directors.

- Daniel Ferris

The art market is not immune to the burgeoning of the new communications media. Using the formats of print, television, and the internet many new contemporary art magazines and programs will be available free of charge worldwide. This has made artists, galleries and collectors much more aware of one another.

This has begun, and I believe will accelerate, the inclusion of many more artists and collectors into a mainstream milieu of the art magazine world. The traditions of a gallery’s representation of artists from one locale or even one nation is continuing to lose ground. International media is allowing more international arts awareness and arts business. The bricks and mortar art galleries with local art critics talking it up, or down, in the local newspaper is giving way to a spectrum of developments - mainly the magazine.

Critics and dealers can certainly see an international style in art that is becoming more predominant by the decade. While the introduction of new styles and media accelerates on the contemporary art scene, even the traditional institutions of the art world must change.

Artists already show work in multiple locales, and galleries work in cooperation from state to state or nation to nation. But these changes will compound until display of images to any collector and the resulting gallery sales are done far less in the bricks and mortar of the past. Contemporary art is still affordable enough to make shipping and insurance nonprohibitive. Greatly improved technology for viewing the art, communicating with living artists, transacting sales will make the initial viewing of the artwork in a magazine a very good first look.

How will these images be displayed? By magazines in all of the media - whether print, video or internet. Contemporary art magazines can display excellent art for artists, galleries or the collector quickly and cheaply. With digital technology the art can be further inspected, and with scans or high res digital photo enlargements the art can be inspected almost microscopically.

The future belongs to some version of the contemporary art magazine. The more interesting contemporary art magazines show images, talk about collector and artist concerns, review changes in the art market with gallery owners. This is the reason art magazines will continue to grow in the contemporary art world.

One excellent example of this phenomenon is the Contemporary Art Gallery Magazine for Artist and Collector Business. This art mag for artists and collectors makes good sense. CAG has several interesting departments. Contemporary Art Gallery Magazine provides the following articles for the art market.

What’s Not Hot 

Future Art

Artists Sell

Abstract and Nonobjective

Who’s Who

Design Challenges

Why Artists Create

- DF

Art historians plot the changes in art’s trends over many centuries. Contemporary art certainly draws on all past art - you can see numerous references to art of ancient civilizations and various tribal influences in many artists’ works. Picasso used African art and Matisse used Moroccan art, just to name a pair of examples.

Whether a contemporary artist goes to the very ancient or renaissance roots of an artistic convention, or reacts to the later fused forms of art of the 20th century, there are many influences that can appear in a unique style. Although these influences appear intentionally many times, some artists using these conventions second-handedly from later fused forms of creativity may not know or intend the reflection of a particular past creative convention.

For contemporary artists, as is done by all creative workers in any field, the artist must use the past to some extent in order to build upon to create a new style. In research science, as in the arts, a worker can adapt and mix technologies in new ways, adding or subtracting, making minor variations here, major variations there. Sooner or later the artist must add their own twist to the experiement or recipe to achieve the unique style to which they aspire. Art historians can trace most of what has been developed in art in this same way.

How does an artist know what works best? It is a personal viewpoint that is derived from numerous experiements and endless workings of the imagination. Creative individuals often work on their problems in their sleep, when out of the office, in their unconscious or subconscious - because the motivation is pervasive.

The story about Einstein’s conceptualizing Relativity while he was riding on a trolleycar quickly passing vertical structures is typical of the creative breakthrough. In actuality, we all have creative problem-solving experiences, some more important than others. The artist or scientist must sort these experiences into categories of unacceptable or acceptable, better to best, and be ready to change and adapt their perception and thinking when a better solution is sensed.

In contemporary art what is important and influential is what works best. All artists who gather and try the tools of the past know it’s their job to surpass or at least provide important variance in creating new tools and new styles. The most influential past creators affect many artists in many fields. Who are the most influential artists? What artists made the most meaningful additions available to contemporary artists?

The answer to who are the most influential artists is actually a subjective matter for individual artists, but if we look at contemporary artists generally we can see which past masters were called upon most frequently and most strongly. Here are some articles that can used to review some of the most influential artists on contemporary art:

Pablo Picasso

Henri Matisse

Wassily Kandinsky

Andy Warhol

Jean DuBuffet

David Hockney

Robert Indiana

Gerhard Richter

Kenneth Noland

Certainly any such list will grow as art progresses and what is now contemporary becomes a matter of history. Important artists can arguably only be recognized when they move roughly just ahead of some point of recognition. An influential artist can be ahead of their time, or the artist can be too far ahead of their time. If too far ahead of their time, their work is seen as completely disconnected from any current recognizable forms. So, in some respects, many complete revolutions in art or any field remain unrecognized for long periods of time.

Contemporary art at least has the self-awareness to know that it must change rapidly to be anything near revolutionary. Influential artists can still make a mark by way of a unique and personal style without a complete revolution. Artists can reach the level of ” important ” with a personal vision, although many historians will refer to them as quirky rather than the “Father” of some major art movement. Unique style, even if not overly revolutionary, should not be completely discounted as un - important because all media have limitations and artists who fill in these areas remain influential in slightly different ways.

Contemporary Art Gallery Magazine has some good reading for anyone interested in the area of contemporary sculpture.  The articles, mostly interviews of the sculptors also show images of the works and some shots of the studio as well.  CAG has written on sculptors including:

Peter Reginato
Liisa Rahkonen
Todd VanDuren
Michael Binkley
Damon Hildreth
John Simms
Pekka Paikkari
Heidi Maiers
Dorothy Edwards
Robin McGee

These sculptors work in a variety of media - steel, clay, stone, mosaic, aluminum, and wood.  While their sculptures run the gamut of styles you can see a real array of contemporary styles in living sculptors.  Whatever style of sculpture you enjoy you should be able to appreciate the creative products of these sculptors.

For a gallery magazine that is only six months online CAG has tried to make sculpture a strong part of its focus.  Sculpture made by each of these sculptors can also be seen at their websites.  Sculptor studios can be seen on almost all of these websites.  CAG believes that any gallery magazine should focus on sculpture and the work of contemporary sculptors doing quality work as often as possible.  And with CAG, it shows.

- Daniel Ferris

Recently I have spoken with several gallery owners who claim they can only sell objective or figural work. Some of these
galleries have standing in their respective communities, but claim people might look at somewhat abstracted paintings but
that they cannot make sales with purely abstract or nonobjective paintings.

I cannot personally analyze whether this is a self-fulfilling prophesy on the part of the gallerists, but some of them do carry one or two nonobjective painters within those represented.  Other galleries claim to have no such problems and may even handle nonobjective painters predominantly. These two groups of galleries seem to be roughly equivalent in other factors. Why this happens I cannot say. I look at both types of painting with interest.

There are some excellent nonobjective painters out there to choose from. In fact I ran a quick survey and found five easily accessed websites that show some beautiful works. These artists have had some exposure on CAG as well.

Merlin Emrys

David Tycho

James Pearson

Rosetta DeBerardinis

Scott Foxx

Certainly every gallerist must have preferences, and I would be surprised if there weren’t some trends in the preferences
of their clientele, but it will take some further analysis to determine the different demographics in these two groups.

There is a third group as well, those who show only nonobjective painters. My favorite gallery of this third group is Stephen Haller’s gallery in Chelsea, NY.

If you know of a gallery that specializes in nonobjective painting and art please let me know by comment.

- Daniel Ferris