Sunflower Tate modern fiasco update. Seeds of doubt!

Stolen from Tate Modern?

As usual Jan Nieupjur was on the button... Of course the Health & Efficiency people are going to kick up a stink over opening a giant hamster cage full of unhygenic foreign detritus to the public.  
Jan suggested via Skype this morning that they should have filled the space with all the brown M&N's that prima donna rock stars insist out of their riders. Of course then it would look just like a rabbit hutch... Same problem.


Jan went on to say that soon we will be asked to don surgical gloves before wiping our arses;  try calling that 'ART' Mr Serota.

Yoram Savion interview & poem (Stop Youth Violence Project at Youth UpRi...

Club 21 - Remaking the scene, something new is going to happen and Andy Warhol without a wig.

To the club 21 private view/launch party last night at No.1 Marylebone (you know the one time church that now has a valid use).


A refreshing antidote to the Freize rubbish down the road and for once an enjoyable 'Art scene'


Jan Nieupjur writes:


CLUB 21


Shit, me and Andy were always in that place; him to be seen and me to be styling him. He had really got into my wigs by then; he stopped me wearing them in case confusion set in. Bianca Jagger was always there deep in conversation with her lawyers (she had some cute lawyers back then) Claus Nomi would sing occasionally while Grace Jones watched attentively.


I have dug a couple of old photographs out; I am not in them because Andy had me airbrushed out of everything since the incident with the monochrome prints : http://jannieupjur.blogspot.com/2008/08/guggenheim-and-warhol.html

                                        Andy Warhol (without wig) and Marcia Mercadante

Andy Warhol(without wig), Stephen Torton, Jean michel Basquait & Marcia Mercadante 

                                          Madonna


Club 21: Remaking the scene.
One Marylebone, London NW! 4AQ
October 13 - 23, 2010


Something new is going to happen every day.

As usual Book prize goes to one of my mates!

London author and columnist named winner

12 October 2010.  Jan Nieupjur is tonight (Tuesday 12 October) named the winner of the £50,000 Nieupjur prize for Fiction for The Pentimento Question, published by Blogger.

London author and columnist Jan Nieupjur has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Oi vey Missus and in 2002 for Is it cos I is going to the right parties, but has never before been shortlisted.

The Pentimento Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be old hat today.

Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Pentimento Question has been described as ‘soso' and ‘written by my mate' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and networking'.

Blah blah exquisitely written blah!

Amazing facebook fact discovered.

Doctors have discovered that only 7 words are neccessary to comment on facebook.


These words are: Look how clever I think I am!


They go on to say that the exclamation mark is optional

Freize Art Fair 2010: Puckering up both ends!

Yawn.


Yes it is that time of year again when the pretentious art world puckers up both ends for a collective arse kissing at Freize.  It is always the same old bollocks; I shall enter the spirit of the moment by posting a previous years review....


No one will know the difference; all too busy attention seeking!

Frieze... But is it art...

As I stolled through 'Frieze' last week a chill cut me to the bone.

I came away from the thing feeling depressed and dissappointed Yet at the same time I was elated by the fact that, as I inspected the fornicating, gold plated pigs, my muse had sashayed up to me, giggled, and whispered in my ear. Showing me the direction I must now take.

Some of the pieces on show were good, some were even very good but they were in a small minority. surrounding this nucleus of work by established (Old School even) Artists was a bish bash bosh of dross. an assemblage of the most tawdry, lazy and crass objects I'd ever care to shake a stick at. One enormous tin of poo. It reminded me of nothing more than the wind blown detritus in a roadside hedge. This is when the muse opened my eyes to what I was looking at; this was not Art, this was at best a collection of half resolved observations on the state of art today, a drunken 'undergraduate' discussion informed by todays obsession with 'why' rather than 'what'. 

Teachers in Art schools have become preoccupied with the thought processes with little interest in the quality of the finished work. The journey is all important, the destination irrelevant. Sadly what I saw leads me to believe that most of todays 'Art Travellers' are bogged down in a scuzzy camp-site in an unknown land. 

It is not the fault of the artists. The blame must be equally shared between the cynical Art establishment and those that teach students to believe the hype. A fraction of Art school graduates have got what it takes to achieve even a mediocre greatness and they are being churned out lacking even the basic skills that might allow them to work in the commercial sector.

Is it a coincidence that a great number of young british Artists live and work in Hackney? their work is certainly hackneyed! 

At Frieze one of the works on show was a large piece of old rope snaking accross the floor... Yes, they wanted money for it! 

This article first appeared in the blog in 2008.

Sunflower seeds at Tate Modern.

About the exhibition

Ai Weiwei, one of China’s leading Conceptual artists and an outspoken cultural and social commentator, has undertaken the eleventh commission in The Unilever Series.

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands.

Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape. Sunflower Seeds is a sensory and immersive installation, which we can touch, walk on and listen to as the seeds shift under our feet. The casual act of walking on the work’s surface contrasts with the immense effort of production and the precious nature of the material. Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.

Jan Nieupjur, in a bit of a state, demands: Since when has the bottom of a fucking hamster cage been art?  Oi Serota; No!

Banksy does the simpsons. there or square be.

Or is it 'Simpsons does Banksy'? it is hard to tell these days who is spoofing who.


Anyway this is fun!  D'oh.

Turf; part of the solution.

Since posting the Yak Films turf dance video things have gone a little crazy for all concerned; the video has gone viral; The Huffington Post covered the story linking to this blog, the Guys involved have been getting a lot of attention (quite deservedly) and long may it last.


There is a serious issue here.


Turf dance is being used as a means of resolving disputes where a gun might once have been used; the Dancers, musicians and film makers are openly anti gun crime. Turf is drawing positive attention to a much criticised section of the American population. Turf dance is also being used to express dissatisfaction, grief (R.I.P. 211) and much much more.  


These guys are not the problem; they are part of the solution!

Rotten Hill Bar & Grill.

Anish Kapoor in Kensington Gardens. London and Playlister.

Culcher in the park!


Being housebound; if not housebound then certainly immediate vicinity bound I have to get my culture vicariously. Dan Lywood; top DJ and often recipient of a Cow hello posted this in facebook today. I nicked it... such is the wonder of the interweb.  Thanks Dan!

                                          Photo: Dan Lywood

Check out the playlister website:http://playlister.wordpress.com/

Turf Dance explained.

Nicked this from wikipedia; means half of it will be wrong but WTF:

Turf dance is a form of street dance associated with hyphy music. The term, which originated as an acronym for Taking Up Room on the Floor,^[1][2] was created by the influential turf dancer Jeriel Bey; the dance form was originally known as “hittin’ it”. The dance form had its earliest influences in the break dance movement of the 1980s. It developed into a distinctive dance style  in Oakland California.

Kirsty MacColl.

Brian Nevill wrote the following this morning:

My mate Kirsty, who would have been 51 years old today. Taken from us ten years ago this coming Christmas. I still can't really believe it sometimes. This was taken in Croydon in 1979, at the start of her 'pop' career. A precocious talent lost before full bloom. Amen.