Stupid Krap!

MurmurART

We featured online contemporary art gallery MurmurART recently and thought it was time to catch up with co-founder Donald Eastwood and ask him how someone like Damien Hirst can get £95.7 million for a bunch of pickled animals and stubbed out cigarettes: ‘It’s funny that pricing of art is always treated with much more suspicion than the pricing of other art forms. When you buy a painting, you are buying a one-off, original artistic creation, plus the cost of the materials used to make it. It’s not like buying a book or a song on iTunes, because they are just reproductions of a moment of artistic creation. When you pay 79p for Britney’s new single, you are in fact agreeing to a price for that piece of “artistic” creation that is 79p multiplied by the several million people that will buy it, and you are only getting a reproduction of a song that should, but probably won’t, be better heard live. Now frankly, why aren’t people asking how someone can sell meaningless lyrics and a banal tune for several million pounds?’ Read more

MurmurART

I went to a concert earlier this week performed by musicians who had spent years in training, many at some of the UK’s most prestigious music colleges, but now, given the fierce competition they face, rarely perform any more. Many are forced into completely unrelated jobs. Luckily, his regular hour-long session at a church in London gives them the opportunity to play to crowds and remind them of why they grafted so hard to achieve those skills. It reminded me of this website which provides a bit of a refuge and a sign of hope for new artists, photographers and sculptors. The basic idea is to give emerging talent a platform on which to both exhibit and sell their work and, on the flipside, engages a wider audience in contemporary art. In such a competitive field, too much good material inevitably goes unnoticed and the artist, for all their potential, quits the game. So these platforms are wholly necessary. In May, they’ll host online exhibitions of work selected by both established and emerging curators. Read more

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Kelly Smith

Beautiful, delicate, fragile, a little bit collage, a little bit sketchfull. This is the work of Kelly Smith. Combining several mediums in a collaborative expose between pencil, paint and print to create timeless works of elegant splendour, it is easy to compare Smith’s works to the last snowflake of winter, fleeting but real, avoiding the brash bright mercantile world for the prettier climes of illustrative pleasure. Smith has a twelve-day exhibition on at the 696 Space in Brunswick, Melbourne, opening November 14.

Brandt Peters

Trapped in a time warp between then and now, the work of Brandt Peters combines an old school aesthetic with a modernity bordering on futuristic fantasy, with a touch of morbid fascination thrown in for good measure. In other words, he creates wonderful imagery combining cartoon-like pin-ups with sometimes freakish attributes (large skulled beings, for instance), and every now and then seems to throw in a nod to sci-fi — such as a mechanical glass jar — for good measure. Muted tones replace the bawdy colours often associated with such mediums, giving his pieces a whimsical, dream like quality. He must live in a delightfully wispy world.