Prospero

MUCH fanfare greeted the $388m made by Christie's post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month—its highest total ever. Few seemed to notice that the auction was unprecedented in another way: it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby's evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie's sale tallied up to a mere $17m—less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.
 
An analysis of data provided by artnet, however, suggests that the prospects for women are slowly improving. Compare, for example, the top ten most expensive male and female artists. Admittedly $86.9m, the highest price for a work by a post-war male artist (set by "Orange, Red, Yellow" by Mark Rothko) dwarfs the highest price paid for a work made by a woman—$10.7m for Louise Bourgeois's large-scale bronze "Spider". However, of the top-ten men, only two are living, whereas among the top-ten women, five are still working (see chart below).
 
"Attitudes are changing generationally," says Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of post-war and contemporary art development at Christie's. "It wasn't long ago that it was hard to be taken seriously as a woman artist. There will be some remedial catch up before women artists have parity on prices."

Continue reading "The price of being female" »

GREETED with anticipation and some nostalgia, the Hong Kong International Art Fair opened on Wednesday. An increasingly essential stop on the art-market circuit, the once-scrappy fair is enjoying its last year as an independent show. From next year it becomes Art Basel Hong Kong, taking its place alongside Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach.

MCM Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd acquired 60% of the Hong Kong fair last July. Although the far's official rebranding takes place in 2013, the international imprimatur of the Basel brand was already evident at this year's event. Once dominated by Asian galleries, this year the 266 exhibitors—chosen from 700 applicants—were divided evenly between Asia, Europe and America.

The purchase of the Hong Kong fair by Basel coincided with an explosion in arts spending in mainland China, and by Chinese collectors buying at auction in Hong Kong. Last year China beat out America in its art buying, with an estimated 41% share of global art-auction revenue, according to Artprice.com.

This surge in Chinese spending, together with dwindling sales in Europe and America, made the Hong Kong Art Fair an irresistible target for the Basel crowd, master money-makers of the art world. The strategy, though generally denied by Basel executives, seems clear. Chinese collectors are the richest art buyers in the world, but their spending is almost exclusively devoted to Chinese art, particularly antiquities. One of the aims of Basel Hong Kong will be to encourage the Chinese to diversify into European and American art. Hence, the growing concentration of the big prestigious international galleries at the Hong Kong Convention Centre this week, including Gagosian, White Cube, Leo Castelli, Marlborough and Acquavella. There were second-tier examples of Bacon, Picasso and Degas at some of these booths. But how much of a lure would these paintings be to the Chinese?

Continue reading "Broadening its reach" »

AS HIS solo show opens in London, the internationally acclaimed photographer discusses his career and some of his most iconic work

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IN 1963 the Caldecott Medal, given yearly for the best picture-book for children published in America, went to "The Snowy Day", a pleasant, anodyne tale about a boy named Peter who tromps around snowy city streets and then returns home to a maternal embrace (it was notable for featuring an African-American boy as its protagonist—then unheard of in lily-white American children's literature). In 1965 "May I Bring a Friend?" won the Caldecott; it was a similarly unruffling story of a boy who brings exotic animals to visit a king and queen.

In between those two prizes, the Caldecott went to "Where the Wild Things Are", by Maurice Sendak, which was an altogether different sort of book. Peter may have had darker skin than the average children's-book lead character, but he was otherwise indistinguishable: obedient, mother-loving, appropriately curious, dutiful, safe. The protagonist of "Where the Wild Things Are" was none of those things. The story opens with him pounding nails into a wall as a pathetic-looking stuffed animal dangles from a noose tied to a clothes hangar. He then chases a frightened-looking dog out the door, and when his mother yells at him he yells right back.

As anyone who has sons knows, this is what a real boy does, especially in that late-afternoon witching hour, after school and friends but before dinner. Sent to his room, Max retreats into his imagination to conjure up the opposite of childhood: a realm peopled by wild things (as opposed to the real world, which is thinged by wild people) whom he controls with a magic trick. The trick involves a stern expression and threatening hand gestures: precisely the same trick adults often use to control children. He then smells "from far away across the world...good things to eat," so he sails back home to find dinner waiting for him. There are no adults in this book; they exist entirely offstage. The book does not end with a hug and a word of acceptance from a parent. Max does not apologise for being naughty. There are no lessons learned. Just a brief, blissful time-out from the terrifying and unjust world, and dinner at the end.

Continue reading "Childhood terrors" »

IT IS painfully hot and dry in the rodeo arena at Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in America. Under a blazing sun American flags hang limply around the sand-covered enclosure, where 70 prisoners are acting out a unique version of "The Life of Jesus Christ". By the time the three ingeniously constructed crosses are raised on a small hill of dirt, the physical torture of a slow death by crucifixion is palpable. 
 
This is the first time a passion play has been staged at a state prison. The idea came from a meeting between Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden at Angola, and representatives of Sir Jack Stewart-Clark, who had staged a version of this play at his Dundas Castle in Scotland. Burl Cain, the prison warden, gave the project his full approval. The head of the 18,000-acre prison for nearly two decades, Mr Cain firmly believes in the moral rehabilitation of offenders, and in the potential for redemption through Christian faith. He also believes that, like Jesus, some of the men here are innocent. Profits from the three early-May performances went to the Louisiana Prison Chapel Foundation.

The cast was drawn from Angola's all-male population of nearly 5,330 prisoners and the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St Gabriel. Inmates from both prisons came to watch in separate sections of the stands; a swathe of blue jeans with white T-shirts for the men, jeans and blue shirts for the women. Most of the men in Angola are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Gary Tyler, the longtime president of the Angola Prison Drama Club and the play’s director, is one of them. In a trial that a federal appeals court found to be “fundamentally unfair”, he was convicted of murder and originally sentenced to death. Since his arrival at Angola in 1975 there have been repeated calls for his release.

Continue reading "Enacting forgiveness and redemption" »

FOR many of us growing up, the landscapes of literature were mainly English. Heathcliff’s moors, Wordsworth’s lakes, Ratty’s river, the storm-swept French Lieutenant’s coast. Whether we as readers came of age in the Americas, the Antipodes or elsewhere in the far-flung Commonwealth, the poems and novels we encountered in the last half of the 20th century came first and foremost from Shakespeare’s scepter’d isle.

“Writing Britain”, the summer exhibit at the British Library, is something of a gift to foreign visitors arriving for the Olympic Games. It is an attempt by curators to take us by the hand and lead us back into these hallowed places, seeing them once more through the eyes of those who wrote about them first.

The show ranges the length and breadth of the British Isles, but breaks this landscape into all the varied ways it has seized imaginations. The land is multiple, and shifting over time: not just idyllic, pastoral, bathed by the sea and the Thames, but wild in places, and then urban: both magical and dreadful, haunted by the memory of steam and mills. A chief pleasure of the show is seeing, book by book, the traces of each writer’s hand, both capturing and charging all these places with their meanings.

Continue reading "England, my England" »

PICO IYER has been an incisive chronicler of global culture since his first book, "Video Nights in Kathmandu", was published in 1988. An astute observer and exacting literary stylist, he also has a unique viewpoint, thanks to his own global background. Born in England to Indian parents, both noted scholars, he moved with them to California when he was eight. He shuttled back to attend primary school in Britain, later studied at Eton and Harvard, and then worked at Time magazine, from where he set off to remote corners of the world. In addition to nonfiction books about the Dalai Lama and Japan, where he lives, he has written two novels and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Financial Times, among other places.

In his new book, "The Man Within My Head", Mr Iyer blends a contemplation of Graham Greene—whom he notes is “often taken to be the patron saint of the foreigner alone”—with intersecting episodes from his own life and travels. These narrative threads lead him to consider relationships between fathers and sons, real and adoptive.

“I tried hard to make sure this would be not be my story, but an almost allegorical tale of any human life," says Mr Iyer. His book begins with what could be called a near-birth experience and ends with a near-death experience. "When I write about my father, I say little about the man himself but try to catch something archetypal about the way every boy, growing up, thinks that he has to create his own individual destiny entirely apart from his parents—and then, 30 years on, looks in the mirror or hears his own voice and realizes he’s become his father. We rebel against our parents until, almost inevitably, we become them.”
 
How would you describe this book? At one point you call it a counter-biography, that is, an exploration of someone’s terrors and obsessions and what it touches off in the rest of us. But it’s also a memoir, a literary essay, a travel narrative and perhaps a kind of exorcism. What did you have in mind?
 
All of the above—and none of them! I worked really, really hard to ensure that it wasn’t quite memoir but not typical biography, not sustained literary essay and not just a collection of travel stories. I wanted it to have the flow, the elusiveness, even the untrustworthiness of a piece of fiction.

Continue reading "The importance of ambiguity" »