ArtWranglers to the rescue! This link is prefaced by a warning. Don’t look at yesterday’s ArtDaily (unless you beat us to it)! Only some readers will find Sotheby’s auction promos entertaining. But this one, broadcast to the world on ArtDaily Newsletter, begins with a typo and a malapropism “…inscluded is an important lot made by Russell Drysdale”. It gets worse, and concludes with a bloomin’ lot of tripe and nonsense. Why Rocky is still smiling we’ll never find out! So if your Tatslotto millions are burning a hole in your pocket, resist the itch, stay home and watch the repeat of the Olympic flag-waving ceremony instead of the hammer fall… All it will cost you is your integrity, and you’ll be able to start afresh the next morning.

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Or: it’s art minus the name. Thanks to Marcus, who tells us: “This car cost $4.8 mil. It is a Diamond encrusted Mercedes Benz. If you want to touch it, you have to pay $1000. It belongs to Prince Alwaleed from Saudi Arabia. It is his 38th Car. The point? With petrol at 160c per litre – you paid for it.” You think this is extravagance? See Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull which reputedly sold for $100m…

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Not. (click)

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ArtWranglers Mission is for everybody to own at least one Slim Barrie. So get over to ArtWranglers this weekend to see Slim Barrie’s drawings and sculptures before they’re dispersed to all their new owners! We are “at home” 10-5 this Saturday and Sunday. All welcome!

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Enjoy it here, from the London Review of Books. Thanks to BP for the lead. (We recommend you subscribe).

Sample his concluding paragraph: “Modernism is paradox. It is dialectics. It is an art that continually, relentlessly proposes that human qualities, which once were implicit and embedded in the texture of experience – qualities of intensity, depth, directness, vividness – are on the verge of extinction. They have been outlawed, or, worse still, vulgarised and commodified, so that everywhere miniaturised and compressed kitsch images of them whirl by in the ether of information, as background to buying and selling. Modern art is an act of dialectical retrieval, in what it sees as desperate circumstances. The human will only be found again, it says, by pressing on towards the human’s opposite.”

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Or don’t go to Basel! And what will you say when you meet Mrs Szarkosi? “Revolted, I’m sure…” (Thanks to a snap happy colleague - who wishes to remain anonymous).

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see the blogreview at glasscentralcanberra. Thanks Megs! And for those of you who missed the opening, and last weekend, we’re “at home” 10-5 Saturday and Sunday this weekend as well…

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We thought the opening ceremony was (in general) a triumph of digital technology - even when the digits took the form of robotic performers - but we did not expect old-style virtuality, that is, dubbing. It seemed too good to be true, and now we find that what Geremie Barme described as “a young girl in red singing a song to the motherland… a famous Communist paean to the power of the Communist party” - is now revealed as dubbed, the voice of a less-perfect looking girl, which destroys the perfect illusion of a perfect future, whatever the consequences of the one-child policy will be. (No more uncles, as Kevin Murray observed). And then we find that the best of the fireworks, the footprints marching across the night sky towards the stadium, was also pre-recorded? Read Mary-Anne Toy and Sanghee Liu in The Age, and Reuters, about the virtual fireworks. Thanks to Breakfastpolitics for the lead…

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And for the iconographic analysis, read Geremie Barme… Geremie, described elsewhere by ninemsn as “a blogger”, has also published a translation of the ‘Eight Don’t Ask Courtesy Notices’, posted prominently in all districts of the city:

“Citizens, please be mindful that in your exchanges with Foreign Friends during the Olympic period that you:

• Should not ask about a person’s income or the way they spend their money;
• Should not ask people their age;
• Should not ask people about their ‘love lives’ or marital status;
• Should not ask about people’s health;
• Should not inquire after a person’s residential address;
• Should not inquire about an individual’s personal history;
• Should not ask people about their religion or politics; and,
• Should not ask a person about their profession.”

While Geremie publishes on blogs (see his 2006 anticipation of last Friday) we don’t think he has time to be a blogger, yet…

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Read Roberta Smith hacking into the new crop of visual arts graduates in New York (“How Soon Is Now?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts) in the NYT: “…Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. Different artists claim that their efforts “contend with codes of power, authority, race and class,” “question man-made constructs,” “challenge the anthropological categorizations of early photography” or “reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.”

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