Tokyo Mayor Insults Contemporary Art; Cattelan Vandal Sentenced; UN Consults Niemeyer; Bellet Reports on Art Brussels
TOKYO MAYOR INSULTS CONTEMPORARY ART
Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara added a sour note to the inauguration of the exhibition "Collection de la Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain au Musée d'art contemporain de Tokyo" (The Fondation Cartier's Contemporary Art Collection at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art [MOT]). As Libération's Michel Temman reports, the mayor spoke along with Bernard Fornas, president of Cartier International; Seiichiro Ujiie, the head of MOT; and Hervé Chandès, the director of Fondation Cartier, in front of 1,500 guests who were invited for the event. "Coming here, I thought I would see great things," said Ishihara. "But, in fact, I have seen nothing. […] The contemporary art shown here is ridiculous."
The exhibition, which was prepared over one year by Cartier's teams in Tokyo and Paris, features pieces by thirty-two artists of twelve nationalities—from the Congolese Chéri Samba to the American Liza Lou—whose works have been acquired by Fondation Cartier in the last twenty years. The broad international selection did not impress Ishihara, a populist mayor known for his nationalist diatribes. During a tour of the exhibition, Ishihara claimed that "Japanese culture is more beautiful than Western culture." Ishihara ridiculed Ron Mueck's sculpture In Bed, which is featured in the exhibition catalog and poster. "The big mother in the bed has the face of a baby." Any attempts to elaborate on the works fell on deaf ears. "Contemporary art that needs to be explained," claimed Ishihara, "is worth nothing."
CATTELAN ART VANDAL SENTENCED
An Italian man has been sentenced to two months in prison for vandalizing a public sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. The sculpture—which consisted of three puppet children hanging from a tree—was created for a Milan public square in collaboration with Fondazione Trussardi. As the Corriere della Sera's Giuseppe Guastella reports, in May 2004, Franco De Benedetto cut down one of the children puppets, which were hanging from the oak tree in the Piazza XXIV Maggio. During the action, the vandal fell from the ladder he was using to reach the puppets and had to be taken to the hospital. "I could not stand seeing them there," said De Benedetto, who wanted to "free" the figures. The forty-six-year-old man told the judge that he would not repeat his actions, due more to the troubles they caused than to any feelings of regret.
"After everything that has happened," writes Guastella, "[De Benedetto] still does not understand who Cattelan is. He knows nothing about hyper-realism—an art form that some find hard to consider as such—nor about the millions of Euros that others are willing to pay for Cattelan's works." The judge who heard the original argument rejected an original plea bargain to pay a €309 ($383) fine. As Guastella writes, the judge estimated that this sum was "not consistent" with the artwork's artistic value. Or was that its economic value?
UN CONSULTS NIEMEYER
Officials from the United Nations met last week in Rio to consult the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer about renovations to the organization's headquarters in New York. Citing an article in the Brazilian daily O Globo, Le Monde reports that the ninety-eight-year-old Niemeyer is the only living architect to have worked on the original project, which was signed by Le Corbusier and built between 1947 and 1952. A number of cracks have altered the building while the general assembly hall has lost part of its roof. Niemeyer decided on a renovation project that deviates as little as possible from the original plan. The renovations, which will cost $1.6 million, will be completed by 2014.
BELLET ON ART BRUSSELS
Le Monde's Harry Bellet sends a mixed report from the twenty-fourth edition of Art Brussels. "It's a very contemporary fair," writes Bellet, "but a wise one, all the same." Abdel Abdessemed seems to provide an exception to the rule: The artist sculpted a star from cannabis resin; the small sculpture is encased in a Plexiglas cube that is perforated with holes so that viewers can use other senses to complete their aesthetic experience. "Art amateurs will love it," writes Bellet. "Those who think that collecting is a hard drug will love it, too." "More fair and less museum," Art Brussels attests to an ongoing love affair between collectors and art. "Even among the Belgians, who are some of the most knowledgeable collectors in the world, everything is selling once again, just like in the sad good ol' days of the 1980s," writes Bellet. "With the same confusion, the same heterogeneity, and the same unpleasant feeling that everything is worth it."