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A GOOD READ Global Art Highlights
A Good Read AUCTIONS
A Vampire-Hunting Kit Purportedly From the 19th Century Sells for $20,000 in the U.K., Exploding Its Meager $2,400 Estimate The hunting kit went to a collector in the U.K.
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First published on news.artnet.com - July 15, 2022
A purportedly authentic late 19th-century vampire-hunting kit sold for £16,900 ($20,000) at Hansons Auctioneers in Derby, U.K., last month, greatly outstripping its low £2,000 ($2,387) estimate.
According to the auction house, the kit first belonged to Lord Hailey, a one-time administrator of British India.
“Whether through fear or fascination, it’s interesting to know a member of the highest aristocratic social order, a man with a place in the House of Lords, acquired this item,” auction house owner Charles Hanson said in a statement.
Hailey’s alleged vampire-hunting kit was equipped with all the tools one would need to survive an encounter with one of these supernatural beings. The wooden box has two decorative brass crucifixes on the lid that double as a secret locking mechanism securing the contents.
Inside are two matching pistols, a brass powder flask, Holy Water, a Bible, a wooden mallet, a stake, brass candlesticks, rosary beads, and more crucifixes. The kit also contained Metropolitan police paperwork from the era.
The anonymous buyer for Hailey’s kit—who prevailed in what the auction house described as an international bidding war attracting interest from France, the U.S., and Canada— is from the U.K.
Vampires have had a place in European folklore for centuries. The undead creatures are said to have sharp pointy fangs and survive on human blood. Supposedly vulnerable to sunlight, they can also be killed by a wooden stake and can be warded off by garlic, crosses, and other Christian artifacts, according to legend. But it was Dracula, published by Bram Stoker in 1897, that really propelled them into the wider public consciousness.
Yet vampire-hunting kits from the era have been questioned by scholars who say they’re often a mix of authentic objects and artificially aged ones.
In 2014, Jonathan Ferguson, curator of firearms at the National Museum of Arms and Armour in Leeds, England, conducted a study of known examples on the occasion of an exhibition at the British Library.
“These enigmatic objects transcend questions of authenticity,” Ferguson wrote. “They are part of the material culture of the gothic; aspects of our shared literary and cinematic passions made physical. Lacking any surviving artifact of vampirism either folkloric or fictional, fans of the gothic had created one to fill the gap.”
In 1994, Sotheby’s openly admitted that a vampire-hunting kit from one of its sales was of dubious origins.
“I’m afraid it’s only a pastiche, a romantic curiosity,” Sotheby’s consultant Nicholas McCullough told the Associated Press. “There was never a vampire-killing kit.”
“The case itself is mid-19th century, probably English, of no particular rarity,” he added. “But presented as a vampire killing kit, it opens up whole new vistas. Everyone’s intrigued by it, from interior decorators to jokesters.”
Despite the news story debunking the kit, it fetched $12,000, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
This late 19th-century vampire-slaying kit sold for $20,000 at auction. Photo courtesy of Hansons Auctioneers, Derby, U.K.
An Edwardian-era kit for killing vampires. Courtesy of Hansons Auctioneers.
Artist Miriam Cahn on Painting Controversial Subjects in an Age of Correctness With an eye on political and social conflicts, Cahn touches on hot issues, evoking their ambiguousness and complexity.
First published on news.artnet.com - July 18, 2022
At 72, Miriam Cahn is still enraged, a feeling that has always fueled her artwork.
“One can be enraged every day, no? Just look at the news. That’s the daily material that interests me,” she told Artnet News. The Swiss artist spoke as she prepared to receive the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen, Germany, on June 26; past laureates include the likes of Cy Twombly and Francis Bacon. For the occasion, the Kunstmuseum Siegen is featuring five decades’ worth of the artist’s work in an exhibit titled “Meine Juden” (translated: “My Jews”), on view until October 23.
A feminist and so-called “activist artist” with an eye on political and social conflicts, Cahn touches on hot issues, evoking their ambiguousness and complexity, which often strikes a nerve—perhaps even more so during crisis-ridden times. She has spent decades relentlessly awakening viewers to the horrors that plague our humanity, as well as its fragility.
In her figurative paintings and performative drawings, she depicts sexual violence, war, migrating refugees, and female empowerment, among other subjects. Gender-ambiguous, ghostly bodies appear lost and fleeing on barren landscapes or mothers and children drown in deep, beautiful aqua blues. Lifeless dots for eyes and grins scratched on the canvas conjure deranged smiley faces; elsewhere, bright red genitals are raw and fully exposed.
The works are never easy to take in, which is perhaps why she has only relatively recently been given wider recognition, including at the Venice Biennale this year, where she has a large installation on view within Cecilia Alemani’s group show “The Milk of Dreams.” Her work also appeared in Documenta 14 in 2017 and is in the collections of Tate Modern, London, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the Pinault Collection in Paris, among others.
Miriam Cahn, gefühl beim schlafen 18.2.2022. Courtesy the artist, Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe and Jocelyn Wolff Gallery, Paris, Photo: Heinz Pelz
Yet, despite having become one of Europe’s most important artists, many outside the continent are only just beginning to discover her powerful canvases. There are “people who at first say they can’t look at the work— it’s too violent—and 10 years later, those same people come back, and feel that she is a remarkable artist. But there is a journey,” said Sandrine Djerouet, director and partner at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff which represents the artist alongside Meyer Riegger in Berlin. That said, “for others, it is immediate, and they say: this is life.”
DEVELOPING A WORK METHOD
Throughout her career, Cahn has maintained an unapologetic approach. And while it appears that Cahn has suddenly become well-known, she actually has a long history of key exhibitions, including early presence in European institutions and involvement with a community of feminist performing artists of the 1970s such as Valie Export and Marina Abramovic. Cahn, who lives and works in the Swiss mountain village Stampa, participated in the Venice Biennale back in 1984 and was invited to Documenta 7 in 1982. Her early protest drawings, like My being a woman is my public art, a work done in charcoal on public construction sites in Basel in 1979 and 1980, are a testament to her longstanding practice of using the public forum to push social issues. The seminal piece refers to the difficulty of looking at her paintings, some of which show nude bodies in explicit, rough sexual contact. Her 2019 retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern reportedly warned visitors, “This exhibition could hurt your feelings.” Cahn brushes it aside. “It’s not my problem if people have trouble looking at an erect penis. It’s society’s problem, and that’s why it’s interesting,” she told Artnet News.
The artist’s fast working pace (her works are dated to the day they are made) is also something she developed early on and kept, even as she transitioned from mostly largescale, black charcoal drawings done on the ground, using her entire body, to the colorful oil paintings that she is known for today. Speed “is very important, because it comes from the performance art scene of the 1970s and 80s,” said Cahn. “The body dictated more or less the speed or the duration of a performance [in those works] and I found that very interesting.”
Miriam Cahn, das schöne blau 2021 + 10.1.2022. Courtesy the artist, Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe and Jocelyn Wolff Gallery, Paris
Miriam Cahn, schnell weg! 27. + 30.1.2021. Courtesy the artist, Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe and Jocelyn Wolff Gallery, Paris, Photo: Heinz Pelz
Miriam Cahn, o.t. 15.11.2021. Courtesy the artist, Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe and Jocelyn Wolff Gallery, Paris, Photo: Heinz Pelz.
She discovered her instinctive method early on when she gave herself five years to test whether or not she was cut out to be an artist. “To make art, you need to be able to structure your daily workload,” said Cahn. “And nobody tells you what to do.” She wanted to make sure she had the drive and direction for that lifestyle. If not, she said she had planned to become a designer.
In the end she found her work rhythm quickly, which is one she said is short and “very intensive.” As for young artists trying to make it in a more difficult economic climate, Cahn suggested trying “to carve out one or two years where you don’t have to run after money, if you can.”
“Art is something that’s slow in itself, so you need enough time to find what you want to do, and how you want to work,” she added.
WHAT TOOK THE ART WORLD SO LONG?
Perhaps many were not quite ready for Cahn until more recently. Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, but also the migrant crisis and the war in Ukraine have contributed to a broader sensitivity for subjects that Cahn has long discussed. She will have a major solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in February next year.
“It appears as though [her recognition] has come suddenly, but it happened because there was work leading up to it,” said Djerouet. The director confirmed prices for Cahn’s work have increased, with medium-sized works now costing from $50,000 to $105,000, or over $1 million for larger installations, which occur as clusters of paintings not unlike what she is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, Djerouet said Cahn’s pieces have started appearing slightly more frequently at auction this year, with prices a little higher than the primary market.
Yet the activism flowing through her paintings bucks recent waves of politically correctness or cancel culture. “BLM is great, but the moment we say that a white artist—a distinction that I already find stupid—cannot work on problems that directly concern Black people, then it becomes wrong. And the same goes for #MeToo,” she said, adding that such progressive movements in themselves are “very good,” but should not be overly simplified. In art, “we have our imaginations. It doesn’t mean it’s realism, though it might be reality,” she said.
“I react as a Jew,” said Cahn, but “only when there is something rather anti-Semitic that happens.” The current exhibition at Kunstmuseum Siegen addresses a sense of otherness and the act of fleeing, which Cahn associates with her Jewish identity; it also addresses anti-Semitism, a topic she has been outspoken about. The exhibition’s title, called “My Jews,” is a continuation of her publicized critical response late last year to the Kunsthaus Zürich’s new wing dedicated to the art collection of Nazi-arms supplier, Emil Georg Bührle, despite questions around the provenance of some of the works, possibly acquired from Nazi victims.
Though she rebuked cancel culture in general, she did ultimately try to withdraw from the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich after a representative from the museum concluded that Jews in Switzerland were not oppressed during World War 2 during a conference. The artist was angered by what she called a “false” statement and a case of “historical blindness.” She offered to buy back her roughly 30 paintings. “I started to react violently, because it was too much,” she said. The institution refused, but her proposal “was a bomb that caused a lot of reactions,” she noted.
Indeed, Cahn feels it is her “duty” to conjure the hardships of others in her signature, empathetic way. “It might be my Jewish side to tell myself that, if you have a privilege [such as freely making artwork in the Swiss Alps] then it’s your duty to comment” on the pain of others. And also, she said, “to think: it could be me.”
MARK COETZEE 2022
Luan Nel Reflects on Mark’s life and bold vision
First published on Facebook
Ifirst met Mark in 1996. I was visiting Cape Town, then still living in Johannesburg with my Neil. I remember finding the Cape Town art scene vibrant with many new galleries opening their doors, in town, there was the Hanel gallery with Robert Weinek and also some new life in Woodstock. Upon visiting Robert at Hanel, he directed me to a new space that opened up just two blocks away on Bree Street. I walked up the road and I found the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet. It was the most intriguing of the lot, being tiny, literally ten meters square, if that.
Just enough room for a tiny exhibition or show on a wall and a small desk and chair for the gallery assistant. Soon after I met with Mark to see if I could possibly show there and a date was decided upon and it happened the following year, 1997.It was only my third solo exhibition and in Mark I found a young gallerist who was also an artist. I think it was shortly after or towards the end of his Masters. He was a fountain of information, he knew everything that was cutting edge, queer, and concerning painting. I could not possibly have been in better hands. Upon Mark’s suggestion I included a small stack of prints, cards of a selection of work, five individual pieces from the hanging works and some ink drawings I made specially for the stack. We editioned 200 of these, placed them in little boxes and as a gesture to Cape Town, handed them out for free. Everybody could leave with a small bit of my work. They flew and became very popular, finding homes on some art critics’ fridge doors and one stack even finding its way into the Smithsonian, this I only found out years later. This is but one example of Mark’s foresight and very specific and individual approach to each show and each artist. He was very good at getting the whole picture. As artist, I was treated with respect and also challenged somewhat on the ideas informing the exhibition, made to consider all aspects of the installation. So much so that once the work was installed, all rather neatly, my friend Brian Webber (who was staying with me in our apartment in St James) and I packed up and headed back. That evening at around 10 pm it struck me like a bolt of lightning, it is all wrong. Neat is not what the work was. It was a mess. We contacted Mark and asked if he would mind if we work through the night we need to re-hang. We collected the keys, and he was as calm as ever, not making us more on edge. We went and created the perfect mess in the space and in the morning, he said, I was wondering what solution you would come up with. It was important to have such trust and freedom for one of the pivotal exhibitions in my cultural production.
I returned to Johannesburg and soon after left for the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. I today find myself living in Cape Town and in similar shoes to Mark’s back then. I am an artist and I own an art gallery. I have a program that stretches a year ahead, and I deal with artists. It has been an incredible education and I am still learning every day. My experience with Mark’s Cabinet informs the ways in which I approach exhibitions, as individual projects with their own set of needs. No two are the same and no two artists are ever the same. I do custom-made presentations or at least I try to. This I learnt from Mark. I did not forget he was also an artist and invited him to participate in our inaugural exhibition. He has shown on all our Queer exhibitions, not surprising as Gay Rights was something very close to his heart, and he often worked with the idea of breaking the binds and lifting the veils on
Mark Coetzee, visionary, with model of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art designed by Thomas Heatherwick. Photo: Eric Nathan
male homosexual desire and lending visibility where there was little or not enough at the time. Those first works on our show were very ‘in your face’ expressive and loudly political. They were executed during a residency he did in Argentina, and the work addressed marriage equality.
I find it poignant that Mark and Philip quietly tied the knot a month ago, realising one of his big dreams. When I curated the art component to Pride Afrique, the first pan-African Pride celebration, which took place online during the height of the pandemic, Mark presented us with a very poetic piece. It was a hand-tinted print of a reef of pink roses laid at the grave of Oscar Wilde. Wilde of course an icon of Gay love in times that were hostile to the mere idea of it. The Victorian era is known for its puritanism and cruel laws and punishment which saw Wilde imprisoned.
It has been an honour to show Mark’s artwork. I hope participating in my program was useful to him in his own artistic journey. It is sad we will not see what works he might still have produced. He was incredibly bright, a born creative, a leader in many fields and so brave. What we do have as well and something that will by its nature evolve, is Zeitz MOCAA. This museum would never have happened was it not for Mark’s vision. It remains an incredible contribution to the cultural landscape of this city and that can never be denied or taken away from him. Part of the legacy he leaves behind is that he managed to finally get all eyes from around the globe, focused on the contemporary art of Africa.
That and the many people whose lives he enriched, and the many ways in which we are tied through our connection with Mark, is part of the legacy Mark has left us. His unflinching ability to stand up for contemporary art, no matter the cost. I remember him telling me in 2020, he and his family all have membership cards because this institution should be supported.Mark understood the value and potential of art. He knew that art could transform people, places and thinking.Art is transformative.
Art was his life. Thank you Mark.
A Good Read THE SUCCESS OF ‘IMMERSIVE VAN GOGH’
Investors and Banks Hoping to Cash in on the Success of ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ Are Pouring Funds Into Art Experiences for Klimt, Kahlo, and More
First published on arstechnica.com July 22, 2022
A flood of Van Gogh exhibitions in the form of fully immersive, multi-sensory experiences proved a hit globally last year after L’Atelier des Lumières’s version was featured on Netflix’s Emily In Paris. Since then, the industry has continued to grow substantially as investor money is poured in.
A clear sign that investors were taking notice of the huge popularity of these shows came in January, when Goldman Sachs Asset Management led a funding round that brought in $227 million for Fever Labs, the company behind the blockbuster “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” which first opened in 2018. The largest-ever round of funding for a live-entertainment startup, Fever claims it brought its pre-money valuation to more than $1 billion.
In the months since, the company has a range of new offerings, including “Mexican Geniuses,” dedicated to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; “Small is Beautiful,” dedicated to the miniature art movement, and “Klimt: The Immersive Experience.” The company also specializes in events relating to Netflix hit shows like Stranger Things and Bridgerton.
A spokesperson for Fever told Artnet News that the company’s revenues have grown 10 times and, in the past five years, it has expanded from three cities to more than 60 across Europe, America, Asia, and Oceania.
“Our global presence allowed us not only to mitigate the impact [of the pandemic] but also to see how despite the change in behavior during periods of restriction, as restrictions eased people still preferred faceto-face events and so began the growth,” the spokesperson said.
Corey Ross, CEO of Lighthouse Immersive, another giant of the sector, attributes the popularity to the medium’s novelty. “I have been experiencing art in art galleries since childhood and the presentation has more or less stayed the same—paintings on the walls with labels. The public is extremely curious to experience a new genre, and one they have seen it done well they love it,” he told Artnet News.
Lighthouse has worked with a team of more than 850, including creative director and theater designer David Korins and artist Massimiliano Siccardi.
Subjects like Van Gogh, Monet and Kahlo have widespread appeal. Lighthouse Immersive reported selling more than five million tickets to “Immersive Van Gogh” between February 2021 and May 2022, indicating that one in 90 Americans had bought a ticket.
Museums have long been under pressure to hold exhibitions dedicated to blue-chip names for the guaranteed footfall. Many are hopping on board with this latest trend, including Newfields’s the Lume Indianapolis, LACMA’s Pipilotti Rist show, and the Louvre and Grand Palais’s immersive light exhibition inspired by the Mona Lisa. Ticketed events also provide a new model of making commercially-viable work for new media contemporary artists, such as those exhibiting through ventures like Pace’s Superblue.
Immersive art experiences have proven particularly popular in the U.S., which accounts for 40 percent of Fever Labs’ revenue. These kinds of shows have a much longer history in France, however, according to Pascal Bernardin, founder of the Encore Productions behind “Imagine Van Gogh, the original immersive exhibition in Image Totale.” He refers to the venue Cathédrale d’Images, now Carrières des Lumières, in the South of France. Established by the photographer Albert Plécy in 1977, he used the space to screen art. In 2008, creative director Annabelle Mauger held what is likely the first immersive Van Gogh show and “Gauguin and Van Gogh, the color painters” followed in 2012.
The considerable growth of this sector since has no doubt been bolstered by the low cost of using images old enough to be in the public domain and the high ticket prices typically being charged, including $45 dollars at the weekend for Fever’s Van Gogh exhibition and at minimum $35 dollars for Lighthouse Immersive’s new showing of Klimt.
“The problem with immersive shows is they are very cheap to do,” said Bernardin, who is dismissive of the sudden proliferation of immersive Van Gogh experiences and decries the lack of critical engagement to differentiate them by quality. “You just buy 20 projectors… give me $100,000 and an American city and I could produce an immersive show of bad quality tomorrow.”
