What makes this a contender for one of the most significant photographs of the twentieth century? Taken in Kandahar by Peter Jouvenal in 1996, this fragment of a film clip is (I find) absorbing on so many levels. It depicts the Mullah Omah enacting a religious ceremony – one that was to have huge consequences for the fin de siecle. Sometimes a photograph is significant simply for its value as evidence, and sometimes because it participates in the historical moment in a way that is itself significant. In this case, its non-material character – as streaming video – is but another development in the nature of photography itself. You can read the full story over at rugsofwar…

…comes round. Designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Belmond, constructed by Arup, the infelicitously named “Ancelor Mittal Orbit” opens today to the fee-paying public. While Belmond invokes Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-20), [and, incidentally, pre-dates it by a decade!] I can’t help thinking that the messiness of Rodchenko’s “Design for a City with Elevated Facades” (1920) provides us with a better precursor?

And in the Guardian Jonathan Jones also defends it against the “messiness” of the public debate… Over at ArtInfo Kyle Chayka worries about what such gigantism says about the contemporary art bubble…

Question of the day: was it the Baroness who sent Duchamp his first urinal? And the rest is history…

The historical opposition of avant-garde and kitsch is finally reconciled in the work of Damien Hirst, as demonstrated here in this masterly performance of self-parody. Not only is this manifested in the buttons (see Ben Davis’ review) which you can buy for 75p, or the 19.95 cufflinks, but also to the fifteen Iron-on Spots, above, which I bought for ten quid.

Such trinkets may appear to be superficially kitschy, in the contemporary sense, yet perhaps they are also a key to a characteristic of the rest of Hirst’s enterprise? Compared to other critics, it has been Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker who has worked hardest to extract some value from what he saw at the New York Gagosian venue of the global exhibition: “Hirst is originally unoriginal, to put it positively: a master of supererogation. His work comprehends all manner of things about previous art except, crucially, why it was created. It smacks less of museums than of art-school textbooks. What may pass for meaning in the spot paintings is the sum of their associations in the history of abstraction.” Despite his scathing reservations for this kind of art, as he concludes, the Hirst phenomenon produces only forensic pleasure: “In the course of one fair and square taunt after another, Hirst surely marvels at what he is abetted in getting away with. “The Complete Spot Paintings,” to his credit, makes no bones about what a certain precinct of the world has come to.”

Comparing the outcome of The Spot Paintings spectacle to some shady forms of post-GFC dealing, Schjeldahl evokes Marcel Duchamp to try to makes sense of Hirst’s strategies: “Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker.”

What Schjeldahl failed to extract from this use of the Duchampian formula is the presence of the shadowy third agent in the creation of meaning, which is the dealer. Of course there are other agencies which confer status on a work of art – notably museums and auction houses – but in this instance the figure of Gagosian himself participates equally in the transaction which leads to the appreciation (if that is the correct word) of this particular body of work.

When you visit a Gagosian gallery, the door is opened for you by a black-suited doorman, apparently groomed to be excessively polite. When Axel and I visited the Gagosian in London, in each of the galleries sleepy black-suited guards outnumbered the viewers. Three young women sat behind a row of computer screens. Another well dressed young man sat at a desk in the shop, where the prints, books, and trinkets such as the Iron-On Spots (above) were for sale. Strangely, despite the apparent similarities, this did not feel like a museum, the role of which is, in part, to strip the work of art of its commodity status. In museums, works of art are no longer for sale. In the Gagosian Galleries, you are made to feel as if you are privy to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, outside of trading hours.

And so I found myself sharing with Peter Schjeldahl the perverse necessity to search for meaning or aesthetic value in the paintings themselves: “I can enjoy looking at one for a while, but to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism, as herds of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” It is interesting, in its own way, to stare at coloured circles, separated by a white ground, to see what you see. And yet there is just enough white ground separating the dots for there to be no discernible cumulative colour-effect, as one comes to expect from abstract paintings, when the subject and content of which is purely the interaction of form and colour. In the Hirst spot paintings, even this effect is denied the viewer. It is an aesthetic of excessive denial.

When Clement Greenberg wrote his groundbreaking essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for the Partisan Review in 1939, both the word “kitsch” and the concept of the “avant-garde” meant something altogether different. And yet the argument still resonates, over the years. In those days, Greenberg’s use of the word “kitsch” evoked its Germanic origins, referencing a conservative “popular” and academic visual culture. By contrast, the avant-garde was seen as a “bohemian” outpost of bourgeois high culture. Nowadays, kitsch is seen as a phenomenon of jokey bad taste and retro-inspired fashion, and the avant-garde is primarily dependent on its institutional and museological contexts. These are the contemporary meanings that enable Clement Greenberg’s original title, the dialectic of which once appeared so contradictory, to have become perfectly reconciled in Hirst’s practice. But don’t feel sorry for the poor investors, they’re well protected – by the men in black.

Or does it? This from The Daily Telegraph, Friday 17 February, Business pages. The sub-title reads: “Just history repeating? The Massacre of Chios, Delacroix’ painting of the slaughter of tens of thousands of Greeks by Ottoman troops during the Greek war of independence in 1822, which provoked international outrage.” So there. As if.

And this inspired piece of journalism owes a little something to (guess who?) Uncle Wikipedia, who says, coincidentally: “… the slaughter of tens of thousands of Greeks … by Ottoman troops during the Greek War of Independence in 1822 … provoked international outrage.”

Perhaps because it adds content. At Gagosian, photography of the Damien Hirst paintings is permitted only if there is a person in the frame… Now there’s a twist… And there’s more, here. And listen here to Peter  Schjeldahl at The New Yorker… And here‘s Ben Davis, in “reluctant” defense…

(top) #15 Controlled Substances Key Painting, 1994, 61 x 61, 2 inch spot.

(above) #7 Cesium Bromide, 2009 965 x 106.7, 5mm spot.

Marc Newson fork for Qantas.

Put your critical eye to the test! Found at Anonymous Works…

Nobody knows just when a board game titled “Safe Travel through Afghanistan” was invented. Most likely, it was some time in the 60s or 70s, when it was safe to travel in Afghanistan.  Not earlier, given the presence of the Ariana Boeing 727 in the center of the image. Nevertheless, here it is, reproduced in the form of a carpet, probably made in the last few years.

Perhaps it was some mad spirit of ironic optimism that caused this to be transformed into a furry picture?  Or some lost-in-translation lack of understanding of the contemporary implications of the original graphic? Whatever, it certainly confuses one’s understanding of the emblematic use of the map of Afghanistan in all its other different political contexts. No matter what was its makers’ intent, iconophilia here shares it with you (wherever you may be) in our well-intentioned and peaceful tradition of greetings for the festive season…

(and thanks to Rob Little for the photograph).

Move over NY subway grafitti style! Here comes dot-painting…  And if you want to bulk-order your boomerangs, you can go here. These treasures (and the background research) is thanks to Bill Kruse, in Djakarta airport.