Vettriano gives critics the finger

The world's best-selling popular artist, Jack Vettriano, flips the bird to art critics and museums in an interview in The Scottsman (thanks AJ):

"I just consider myself a trader," Vettriano said. "I take my goods to the marketplace and try to get the best price I can."

The greater glory of art doesn't come into it, he confirms. "That's not why I paint," he said. "It's wall decoration for me, I don't regard it as this big meaningful thing. My subjects are men and women getting off, that's all. Mind you, some people don't think sex is serious, but I happen to think it's terribly serious."

Read the interview here.

Hirshhorn After Hours

This coming March 30, 2006 starting at 5:30 pm you can enjoy an evening of art and cocktails celebrating Hiroshi Sugimoto and his work. Join the artist for an exclusive film screening and discussion; experience the work of internationally renowned sound artists Richard Chartier (who is somewhat of a local as he's from Baltimore) and Taylor Deupree, and explore the photography of Sugimoto with co-curator of the exhibition Kerry Brougher, whom we're all hoping will one day look through the work of some Washington artists and DC area art galleries.

This event is free and open to the public and has a cash bar.

Schedule: 5:30 to 8:30 pm: Galleries open and then from 6 and 7 pm: Specification Fifteen: a live world premiere of a new musical work created especially for the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition, at the Lerner Room.

6:30 pm: Curator's tour with Kerry Brougher.

8 pm: Hiroshi Sugimoto will perform as benshi, narrating the beginning and epilogue of Kenji Mizoguchi's silent masterwork of early Japanese cinema, The Water Magician, 1933, at the Ring Auditorium. Please be advised that seating in the Ring Auditorium is limited, and the museum anticipates a high turn-out for this event.

Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis from the far end of the information desk in the Museum lobby beginning at 7:15pm. Guests may enter the auditorium beginning at 7:45pm. Entry to the auditorium will not be permitted after 8pm. Please plan your visit accordingly.

Is this a great date night for artsy types or what?

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: March 30, 2006

Keeping the Flame Burning to be staged at the JoAnn Rose Gallery, Reston Community Center at Lake Anne, 1609-A Washington Plaza, Reston, VA 20190. The exhibition runs from April 3 - 30, 2006.

Awards – Generously funded by Pat Macintyre: $300 1st Place, $200 2nd Place, $100 3rd Place and Honorable Mention awards to be chosen by the juror: Nancy Sausser, Exhibitions Director, McLean Project for the Arts.

An additional $500 will be awarded at the discretion of Pat Macintyre and announced at the Awards Reception. Entry fee is $15.

Mail entry form with check payable to LRA to:

League of Reston Artists
PO Box 2513
Reston, VA 20195

Entries must be received by March 30.

Art Deal of the Week

My second pick is this gorgeous seascape photograph by Colombian photographer Adriana Echavarria.


It is titled "In Dreams" and the photograph measures 17x23.5 inches and then it is matted in a white pH-balanced acid free 8-ply white museum mat and framed in a black metal moulding under plexiglass to a framed size of 27.5 x 32 inches. Photo is signed by the photographer. The price (including frame): $400.

To buy it call 301/718-9651 or email the gallery.

DC Blogsphering

Bailey has a new project going. He has created a Lenten Season inspired memorial photography art project and is posting one photograph per day during Lent of a flood-damaged home in New Orleans on a blog titled Perelli Drive - An East New Orleans Lenten Season Memorial Art Project. This memorial art project blog can read be read here.

Adrian Parsons is exploring the severe disconnect between local art museum curators and regional art galleries and artists' studios. If you are an artist who has been visited by any of our museum curators, Adrian wants to hear from you.

Alexandra Silverthorne has a really cool photograph accepted into the 14th Annual Phillips' Mill Photographic Exhibition. See it here.

Tracy Lee is pissed off that the man who sang about his Chocolate Salty Balls, and pokes fun at all religions, suddenly got offended when South Park poked fun at his religion. Read that here

Amy Watson hasn't posted in over two weeks (again!) and we're all wondering if she's still alive.

Huckenpahler has a really nice posting about the Anne Rowland exhibition at Hemphill. Read that here.

Teague Clare is still probably recuperating from his mugging in New Orleans and hasn't posted in over a month. I hope that Teague is OK and recuperates quickly!

Kirkland shows the power of the web and how it got one of his drawings in a Brooklyn group show. Read that here.

V for VeryBadetta

For some reason I'm in some studio's press invite list and I get free press passes to movies all the time, although most of the times I don't have the time to actually get down to the theatre.

But I had some time recently and went to see V for Vendetta as I am sort of a "comic books in the movies" kind of fan.

V for Vendetta was mostly a sleeper for me, as it borrows heavily from too many sources as diverse as Orwell, Batman and even Scary Movie.

For starters, at 132 minutes, the movie is too long.

For midlins, the whole masked hero versus the big bad neo-Nazi government goons is such a tired theme.

For endings, the whole Guy Fawkes tie-in was interesting, but the unfortunate resemblance of Guy Fawkes' masks to Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman sort of screwed it up for me (and it also sort of brought back into my mind the silly mask from Scary Movie).

In this film, they even use the "Why won't you die?" exasperated question that the Joker yells at Batman in the 1989 Batman movie in a very similar context, when the government's police has fired like a million shots at the hero and he's still kicking their ass using nothing but knives and karate kicks.

So essentially in a virusy, terroristic future world (25 years or so into the future) where America is in a Civil War (Red vs Blue I guess), England has been taken over by a neo-Nazi Tory dictatorship with a Chancellor who now rules through fear, a police state and large screen TVs; beer and booze seem to be plentiful, although apparently real butter is very hard to get.

That was hard to swallow for me. I lived in the UK for three years, and the Brits use a ton of butter on everything - imagine a sandwich with a quarter inch of butter on each piece of white bread, and a few slices of cucumbers in between, and you've got one of the prime British dishes on the planet.

A butterless England is impossible to imagine, no matter how sciencefictionish my mind gets.

In any event, our hero (known as V) rescues Queen Amidala from government goons who are about to molest her. V is (I think) some sort of genetic superman created in a government lab, and he is seeking revenge against his creators and also to bring down the English dictatorship by arousing the anger and fire of the English people.

Yeah...

Anyway, after he rescues her, he blows up a major London landmark to Russian music, takes over a TV station and runs his DVD infommercial on the air (I guess they still have DVDs 25 years into the future) telling Londoners that he'll blow up the Parliament building in a year, rescues Amidala from the goons a second time, then tortures her to teach her some sort of lesson about losing fear, and in the process incites an almost bloodless rebellion by thousands of Londoners dressed in the Guy Fawkes outfit that he has FEDEX'd to all of them a few days ahead of the one-year deadline for the rebellion.

The best visual part in the movie is when Padmé is in V's secret hideout, which is full of art treasures which he has "rescued" from the government's banned artwork list. I picked up a Turner landscape, a Vermeer painting, some Greek antiquities and generally pictorial, ah... traditional masters' work. Seems like V passed on attempting to rescue any of the YBA's work, as I didn't see any Emins or Hirsts in his hoard (unless the bed where Natalie Portman sleeps in while she's at V's pad was Emin's "art" bed).

Wait for the video.

Parsons on Wolov

DCist Adrian Parsons makes a studio visit to Nekkid with a Camera's Samantha Wolov.

Read the studio visit here.

See Samantha Wolov's erotica here.