Hasta La Ideas

“On [car] colors, I have always heard that green is unlucky. The British racing green is also often confused with the modern metallic green that seems to be favored by accountants. A good friend of mine, who controls a multinational conglomerate, forbids any of his companies to carry out transactions with a country whose flag has got green in it. So no Zimbabwe, and half of the countries in Africa–nor Ireland nor Italy. It is, surprisingly, a rather smart rule. On cleanliness, I hate the images of the father washing the car, with his young son drying with one of those yellow suede cloths, in the drive of their semi-bijou residence. This is such a haunting image that I have never worried about the state of cleanliness of any car. When I got married, I left the church with my bride in a filthy Hummer full of mud that had been accumulated from three days of shooting.”

–Sir David Tang, who first visited Monte Carlo in “a completely clapped out [Citroën] Deux-CV,” in his most recent “Agony Uncle” column for the Financial Times

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Damien Hirst, who this month announced his defection from Gagosian Gallery, where he has been represented for 17 years.

“Through ‘loyalty,’ lethargy, apathy, or fear, the biggest-name artists have been willingly shackled to their heritage galleries–now that may be changing. I don’t believe this trend is specific to Gagosian. The very foundations of the ‘artist representation’ model are crumbling. Maybe all the top-selling artists will fire their galleries and form one big collective, then they can just set prices and cut out the dealers. I’d prefer it if they charged one price at the door and then a bingo machine randomly chose which artwork you got; that would make it fun again.”

-Collector, gallerist, and writer Adam Lindemann in “The Art World Game Changers of 2012,” published in the December 24-31 issue of The New York Observer

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“When I thought of myself as a writer in the 1960s, I questioned what made me go from the left to the right margin, from one page to another. As I thought of the space I was also thinking about time. Then I thought: ‘Why am I limiting myself to a piece of paper when there’s a world out there?’ I focused on performance in the early 1970s because the common language of the time was ‘finding oneself.’ In a time like that, what else could I do but turn in on myself and then go from me to you? Photography, film, and video were sidesteps–spaces in front of you–whereas I was more interested in the space where you were in the middle. Now I’m involved with peopled spaces–that’s design and architecture.”

–Vito Acconci, whose Acconci Studio is Design Miami’s 2012 Designer of the Year, in an interview published today in the Art Basel edition of The Art Newspaper

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Ori Gersht, “Pomegranate” (2006). Courtesy Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art.

“‘Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism. A [Juan] Sánchez Cotán painting and [Harold] Edgerton photograph then emerged from my unconscious. The final film is a fusion of these three elements.

For the production, I worked with a film-commissioning group in London called Film and Video Umbrella. With their production team, I constructed a wooden window in the studio and hung the fruit and vegetables from the top frame. When we lit the vegetables, very simply, and looked at them through the camera lens, the transformation was instant: they looked very painterly. For the shooting, we consulted with a special-effects expert, who constructed a special gun and devised a mechanism that allowed us to control the speed of the pellets.

After the filming, I realized that the fusion between the Cotán painting and the Edgerton photograph was also the fusion between opposite ends of a spectrum. Cotán was attempting to achieve compositional equilibrium through painstaking mathematical calculations, while Edgarton, who was trying to freeze time, captured a perfectly balanced composition from an event that happened in a flash, conceivable only through the mediation of the camera.”

-Photographer and artist Ori Gersht in an interview with Ronni Baer that appears in the catalogue for “History Repeating,” the first full survey of Gersht’s work. The exhibition is on view through January 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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(Photo: Iwan Baan)

“The Broad Art Museum presents as a sharp, directed body, comprising directional pleats which reflect the topographic and circulatory characteristics of its surrounding landscape. Its outer skin echoes these different directions and orientations–giving the building an ever-changing appearance that arouses curiosity yet never quite reveals its content. This open character underlines the museum’s function as a cultural hub for the community.”

–Zaha Hadid, in her architect’s statement for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The $40 million building opened to the public on Saturday.

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