Exactly one year ago Christie’s procured a sale of a non-fungible token for an eye-watering sum of US$69,346,250. Since then, my friend and former colleague Professor David Hawkes and I have co-authored a series of articles on the subject of NFTs: their relationship to other currencies, their lack of aura, and their use for art history.
Over the winter break, as I was preparing to teach my usual Spring course on later 20th century art, I reread The Painted Word—an oldie-but-goodie little book by Tom Wolfe originally published as an article in 1974. I was struck by how well the model of modern art’s de-materialization Wolfe constructed (and raged against) fits our current NFT predicament. Wolfe’s astute social comedy that caused outrage among critics and especially artists turned out to be eerily accurate in its predictions of trivialization and monetization of culture that started decades ago, but picked up pace recently.
The resulting analysis “Against De-Materialization: Tom Wolfe in the Are of NFTs” is our fourth article on the subject. It just came out in Quillette (which bravely published my article on the relationship between art history and pornography last summer). In it, we apply Wolfe’s ideas to the new, Twitterfied, reality.
My tribute to the great Wayne Thiebaud is out in the February issue of The New Criterion—a magazine he had subscribed to for decades. I had the privilege of working with Wayne for the past few years, so the text below contains my insights into this man of impeccable integrity, strong will, and unwavering dedication to painting. Click on the image below to read the article.
During the time of our collaboration (Wayne’s words), I wrote three magazine articles—all published in The New Criterion—and three catalogue essays about his work. First, came the “Hour of the clown,” an article that dealt with social and artistic contexts, as well as the reasons for the timing of his circus-themes series. It was followed by “There ought to be clowns”—a piece on the historic background of the series. An in-depth essay on the topic, titled “Nothing is Unimportant,” was included in Wayne Thiebaud 100 centennial catalogue. Shortly after this essay was published, I took part in a panel discussion “Three Takes on Thiebaud” organized by the Crocker Museum of Art.
The third article on the circus series was “Past continuous.” It explored the parallels between Thiebaud’s direction and T.S. Eliot’s theory of artistic influence. I also contributed an essay “A Masterwork: Thiebaud’s One Hundred-year-old Clown” to the catalogue for the Wayne Thiebaud: Clowns exhibition held at the Laguna Art Museum in 2020-21. As part of the programming for the LAM exhibition the museum recorded my video tour an online lecture on the evolution of the series.
My latest monographic essay on Wayne’s work “Anyone Can be My Protagonist: Wayne Thiebaud’s Unrepresented Spectator” is forthcoming in the volume titled People. The book contains a selection of paintings and drawings of the human figure from the entirety of the painter’s career. This was Wayne last project before his passing on Christmas Day 2021.
Posted
on January 5, 2022, 9:16 PM,
by jfriedman,
under Art Criticism.
I wrote this piece following Dave’s passing November 12, 2021. It was published in the January 2022 issue of The New Criterion magazine. Click on the image to read the full text.
I met Dave in 2012, and three years later we embarked on a project based on his Facebook writings. The result was two pendant volumes, Wasted Words and Dustbunnies, which explored Hickey’s mood over the eighteen months he engaged in debates on social media. It also gave a rare glimpse into what could best be called his verbal ephemera—bon mots and musings that would not necessarily make it into the critic’s honed writings. Times Literary Supplement published a review of the books. A series of in-conversation events in Las Vegas CAC, Site Santa Fe and the UCLA Hammer Museum followed.
Contemporary Arts Collective in Las Vegas, NV, 03.05.2016, Photo Credit Check Salgado
Our third essay on crypto art (co-authored with David Hawkes). The first one “The Marriage of Art & Money” dealt with the financial nature of the digital art NFTs, while the second “The Afterlife of the Aura” took up the thorny subject of materiality in contemporary art. This article explores the significance of Damien Hirst’s NFT project “The Currency” which recently entered its second phase—the redemption—when the owners of NFT tenders can exchange them for physical art. Once the painting is collected (in person, or via a shipping courier), its NFT is destroyed. This process cannot be reversed. We will not know how the experiment ends until late July 2022. To read the full text click on the image below.
My review of the first book about the American art and culture critic Dave Hickey is out in Atheneum Review. Click on the image below to read the full text.
Oppenheimer is the first writer to dedicate an entire book to Dave Hickey, who is now in his early eighties. Although Hickey made occasional public appearances in the 1970s and the 1980s (most notably as a smartly dressed and inexorably clever member of the 1975 panel on William Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line with Tom Wolfe), he came into real prominence in the mid-1990s, with the publication of The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Art Issues Press, Los Angeles: 1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Art Issues Press, Los Angeles: 1997). Invitations to speak at various art institutions began to pour in, and Hickey delivered dozens of intrepid lectures in which he dazzled audiences with knowledge and wit, while mocking the academic and museum bureaucrats who paid his honoraria. In 2001 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the Genius Grant, and in 2006 Hickey won a Peabody Award for his work in the American Masters series documentary about Andy Warhol. The College Art Association honored him with the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 1994. His decades-long writing career has included essays on art, music and culture in Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum, the London Review of Books and Art in America, where he also served as an executive editor.
In 2012 a revised and expanded version of The Invisible Dragon was published by The University of Chicago Press, which also printed 25 Women: Essays on Their Art in 2016, and Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy in 2017. In 2014, Pirates and Farmers (Riding Press, London) hit the shelves, sending Twitter into overdrive. There is even a collection of short stories, written in the 1960s and issued in 1989 as Prior Convictions (SMU Press, Dallas). As Hickey’s fame grew, and his readership expanded, a new generation of art students fell under the spell of his artful prose. But he also made enemies along the way and, by the time Pirates and Farmers was published, his detractors were burrowing into his frequent infractions of the tightening PC codes. In his book, Oppenheimer sets out to bring the spotlight back on Hickey’s serious writing. Penetrating the ruse of his subject’s impish provocations, and fully understanding the power of critical thought, Oppenheimer builds a solid argument for revisiting Hickey’s books—not only because they contain some of the best-ever Anglophone writing on art, but also because we badly need Hickey’s evaluation of the 1990s to help us survive the culture of the 2020s.
An upcoming Christie’s sale of a stunning Vincent Van Gogh drawing led me to contemplate Dave Hickey’s two decades-old predictions about the danger of shifting our collective gaze from the “beautiful object” to the “rhetoric of virtue.” All, because of a silly headline on CNN.style.com.
Click on the image below to read the full article.
Earlier this month, I was invited to be a guest on William Shatner’s new talk show I Don’t Understand. I am honored to join the ranks of his distinguished guests, including astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Our topic was: “What is Art, Really?”
Click on the image below to watch the full episode.
UCLA Hammer Museum: in conversation with Dave Hickey 05.11.16.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more)
Northwestern University Press
7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth
ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories.
In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works.
Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous.
Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career.
Hardcover : 212 pages
ISBN-10 : 1087501172
Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches
ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev
Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor)
With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more)
Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822323133
ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman
In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010
Hardcover: 665 pages
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
New edition edition (October 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1443823929
ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman
"Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal...
In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008
Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass.
Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi
Paperback: 422 pages
Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9042026189
ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée.
In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
In economic terms, the purchasers of Trump’s NFTs are not producers but consumers. They play no part in the creation of the cards’ value, which they only enjoy passively. In political terms, they are not citizens but subjects. They do not constitute a self-governing community; they have projected their own power onto an alien idol. […]
Xavier Hufkens gallery (Brussels) recently published a clip of an interview I conducted with Los Angeles-based artist Evan Holloway. The interview was conducted on the occasion of his upcoming exhibition Scry if you want to which runs February 10 through April 1, 2023. We discussed work which ranges from abstract relief paintings Enochian Tablets based in on the writings of 16th […]
Our third article on Damien Hirst’s ongoing NFT project The Currency (co-authored with David Hawkes) is out in Whitehot Magazine one year after it published ‘The Currency’ referendum in November 2021, and four months following the second article that addressed the aftermath of July vote that pitted physical artworks against their digital avatars. Part three […]
Quillette just published my article about Ben Sakoguchi’s spectacular smackdown of literalist curators. Sakoguchi was invited to participate in the revived California Biennial, to be held at the Orange County Museum of Art, which was reopening with great fanfare in a brand new $94 million Morphosis-designed building. The curators had selected a his 16-panel polyptych titled Comparative […]
A gonzo, and now veteran (established in 1992), art journal Coagula seemed like a perfect venue to throw well-deserved shade on the newly fashionable A.I.-generated art. In this short essay, I contrast the limited capabilities of computer algorithm with the emotional nuance of analogue human-made art. To read the full article, click on the image […]
