The Wit of the Staircase

The Wagstaff Mystique

The article below goes on to mention what a different world it was when curators like Sam and Frank O'Hara were more committed to artists and their milieu, as if they were artists themselves. There needs to be more of this again, and more artists writing criticism, to help combat the tide of blood money and uneducated taste now so prominent in the art world.....

"Tall, handsome and rich would be one way to describe Sam Wagstaff, a legendary figure in the international art world of the 1970s and ’80s. Urbane is another. Iconoclastic, certainly. And glamorous, without a doubt. But the word that keeps cropping up in Black White & Gray, a new documentary about Mr. Wagstaff by a first-time director, James Crump, that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival next week, is 'visionary.'

Mr. Wagstaff was one of the first private art collectors to start buying photographs as early as 1973, long before there was a serious market for them. His photography collection came to be regarded not only for its scholarship. It was also original and unorthodox, and turned out to be extremely valuable. Mr. Wagstaff sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 for $5 million, a fortune at the time, establishing that institution’s collection of photographs, now among the finest in the world. But the Wagstaff mystique deepens around his relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, his lover, to whom he was also mentor and career impresario...."

Link: The Man Who Made Mapplethorpe - New York Times.

Jeremy Blake Comes Out For Dope And Guns Party, Creates Artwork Benefiting The Little Childrens

Free Arts, a charity benefitting arts programs for children, will auction off two Jeremy Blake artworks tonight. These were created on a large format Polaroid camera expressly for the occasion and measure about four feet by three feet apiece. The work "Dope And Guns Party Candidates" will be auctioned as one lot!!

High rollers are encouraged to click photo to enlarge.

Link: 5: Dope & Guns Party Candidates, 2007, by Jeremy Blake (end time Apr-23-07 19:30:00 PDT).

Below, linked info on author, philosopher and statesman Robert Anton Wilson's Guns and Dope party.

GUNS AND DOPE PARTY POSITION PAPER #23

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after
another. After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said,
"Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you
acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat."

"Little Tony replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old."

The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?"

Little Tony answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business."

Link: Robert Anton Wilson For Governor.

Black-Eyed Susans And Other Subjects

A friend of a friend, the most excellent artist Kristine Larsen, created a photo series based on the city of Blacksburg, VA several years ago. The photo at top is from this series, and her other great work can be seen below.

Link: Kristine Larsen.

May '68 Poster Gallery

The poster above says "Be Young And Shut Up" with silhouette of DeGaulle.

"May 1968 (in this context usually spelt May '68) is the name given to a series of events that started with a student strike in France. It turned into a general strike which paralyzed parts of the country and led to the eventual collapse of the de Gaulle government. Most of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, communism or anarchism, though most mainstream Leftist parties distanced themselves from the students and worked with the police and government to end the revolt. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up the 'old society' in many social aspects, including methods of education, sexual freedom and free love. While some of the same leftists who worked against workers and students now call 'May '68' a failure from a political point-of-view, it was a significant revolutionary moment in the 20th century."

Link: Utopie - Les sources de l'Utopie - Feuilletoirs - De Bry.

Link: May 1968 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Via Design Observer.

I Think I Love My Wife: An Artist's Happy Household

"Photogprapher Nick Knight’s restlessness is perfect for a constantly changing medium like fashion, but it’s confined only to his work. The antithesis of the playboy photographer, he leads a happy family life with his partner and agent of 21 years, Charlotte Wheeler, and their three children. 'There is a division between the way I work and the comfort and reassurance of the way I live,' acknowledges Knight, who is endearingly open about his love for his family, especially Wheeler: 'She’s everything to me. My inspiration, my mentor, my muse.' The couple seldom socialize, and on a rare occasion when they did, at British Vogue’s 90th-birthday party in November, they held hands all night.

....With mermaid locks and a rollicking chuckle, the curvaceous Wheeler is the physical opposite of the rangy Knight, but he won her round. 'I fell completely in love with her,' Knight remembers. 'I couldn’t think of a possible moment I wanted to be separated from her. When we first met, I was so aggressive, difficult, questioning and wronged. Charlotte calmed me'.”

Link: photography-Nick Knight - New York Times.

Springtime For Hitler

When even Bambi, the gentle faun, needs a six shooter.

From artists Deux Garcons...We love their fractured teapot sculpture too.

Link: artKitchen: Les Deux Garcons.

De Bellmer

"Hans Bellmer (1902 Kattowitz, Silesia – 23 February 1975 Paris, France) was an artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. He is also commonly thought of, in the art world, as a Surrealist photographer.

Since 1926 he had been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany.

Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925), [who carried around a life-sized doll of his lover Alma Mahler after she left him]...."

Link: Hans Bellmer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

L.A.'s Best Drive Thru Car Wash

"....The theme is announced in the entrance gallery of MoCA's Geffen Contemporary, where Magdalena Abakanowicz's massive red weaving in the shape of a vulva is suspended in space. An adjacent gallery bears Niki de Saint Phalle's model for a multi-hued sculpture of a woman's reclining torso where visitors would enter through the vagina. Hello!"

I thought victims entered the Los Angeles art world through Sean Regen's enormous vagina.

Link: PUSSY POWER - artnet Magazine.

Fight Fire With Fire

When the time comes for frivolity, none are more frivolous than the staff of Wit. In declaring style political we feel that loud is not loud enough. However, the serene turquoise pool outside the West Hollywood bungalow that houses Wit's Los Angeles office has two markings on its painted concrete rim: Deep, and Deeper.

So when the time comes to be serious here in the offices of Wit East in occupied New York City, none are more serious than we. So we must ask: Friends, is there ridicule enough in the world to meet the challenge of the New Museum's IT Factor conference, press release below?

We at Wit Of The Staircase have an answer to the question posed by this conference's subtitle, "What makes something hot?":

Dousing it with gasoline and putting a lit match to it makes something hot.

With this in mind, The Wit Of The Staircase offers $1,000 and the purchase of a battery operated bullhorn to anyone willing to shout down this conference with amplified cries of "9/11 Was An Inside Job."

We'd do it ourselves, but we're directors here, not performers.

Contact info in upper right corner of this page, and don't miss the documentary, linked below, on the mysteriously hot fires of 9/11. Thermite makes things hot, too.

"The IT Factor: What Makes Something Hot?
A Hot Button! Panel presented by the New Museum

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
6:30-8PM

The Great Hall at The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street @ 3rd Avenue, NYC

Free for New Museum members and Cooper Union students and faculty.

Join the New Museum and five legendary tastemakers as they break down the cult of cool and give insight into their participation in its creation: Clarissa Dalrymple, talent scout; Mayer Rus, Design Editor, House & Garden; Francesco Vezzoli, artist; Anthony Vidler, architectural historian; and Irma Zandl, trendspotter and Principal, The Zandl Group. This panel will be moderated by Laura Hoptman, Senior Curator at the New Museum. The panel will also feature the first U.S. viewing of Francesco Vezzoli‚s newest video, Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story! (2006, Courtesy Collection François Pinault).

The IT Factor: What Makes Something Hot? will take place on Wednesday, March 28, 2007, from 6:30 - 8PM, and address the zeitgeist, charisma, and the herd mentality in the worlds of art, architecture, design, and fashion.

The IT Factor is the third in a series of popular Hot Button! panels, presented in anticipation of the reopening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery in late 2007, and represent the spirit of an institution dedicated to new art and new ideas, and ready to embrace debate. The Hot Button! panels are designed to encourage frank conversation on issues widely discussed in private but less candidly so in the public arena.

Organized by the New Museum in association with the School of Art at The Cooper Union, these panels are held in the Great Hall at The Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue. Tickets will be available for purchase at the door. More information can be found at< http://www.newmuseum.org> http://www.newmuseum.org or 212-219-1222.

The New Museum's Hot Button Topic Panels are generously supported by Altria Group, Inc.

The New Museum receives lead general operating support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and the trustees and members of the New Museum. Additional support provided by American Express, Bloomingdale's Fund of the Federated Department Stores Foundation, Con Edison, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co., and May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation."

New Museum
210 11th Avenue, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001
212-219-1222

Link: New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Link: 9/11 Mysteries (Full Length, High Quality) - Google Video.

Away With These Bandages!

Artist John Heartfield's brilliant responses to the Third Reich at the link below.

Hitler was no surprise

"Willett's book Heartfield versus Hitler is an absolute refutation to the many who attempted to excuse their tolerance and/or support of Hitler's rise to power with the disingenuous claim:

'We did not know.'

As Heartfield's images from the 1930s make clear, Hitler's character and intentions were far from secret."

Link: John Heartfield.

Above, Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages! 1932.

Image via the always excellent ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".