#line art is very prominent? yum

[xtwstedtalesx]

Ceraunophilia (noun) — Loving thunder and lightning, finding them intensely beautiful.

[clevelandinfo]

Cleveland Ohio Facts

Cleveland, officially named the City of Greater Cleveland, is the largest city in Ohio, and the county seat of Cleveland County. It's located in the northern part of Lake Erie, about 60 miles east of the state line and on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. The city has a population of over two million, making it the most populous city in Ohio.

Cleveland was named after the French-Canadian city of Montreal. The name was chosen because the area around Cleveland is very well connected with other major cities in the US, such as Chicago, New York, Columbus and Pittsburgh. The city is served by several air and rail routes to other cities throughout the world. The region also boasts an impressive array of attractions, including but not limited to:

-The KFC Yum Center is the home to Kentucky Derby Day. Thousands of people come from all around to participate in the event. They line the streets in cars and buses, as well as camping out along the bank of the street, just off the highway.

-Cleveland's Indians play their home games at Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. This baseball stadium was the home to the Cleveland Indians until it was destroyed by Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Today, it stands as a museum to the baseball teams past but also serves as an important place for events related to the Indians.

-The beautiful architecture of Cleveland makes it a popular tourist destination. Many of its historic buildings can be seen in films, TV shows, museums and on tours throughout the country. For instance, the stately limestone buildings of Cleveland's downtown can be viewed from The Cuyahoga RiverWalk or the Cleveland Zoo. The beautiful Horseshoe Bend House, a century-old historic mansion, can be viewed on the shore of Lake Erie from the Horseshoe Bend House Walkway.

-The Cleveland Zoo houses a number of exotic animals, including lemurs and penguins. The zoo also hosts a number of public exhibits, such as the African Safari, a huge indoor zoo that showcases four species of exotic animals native to Africa. -The Cleveland is also home to a variety of wildlife, including coyotes, foxes, raccoons and bears. -The Cleveland Zoo is home to a number of exotic birds. -The Cleveland has been the home to more than one species of bear, namely the Black Bear.

-A large portion of Cleveland's history can be found in the Cleveland Public Library. The library is home to many historic documents, such as the deeds of early settlers and letters written by prominent citizens.

-Many people who live in Cleveland commute to work in public transportation like the C-TRAN system, which serves the central area. Cleveland's Brown Line subway also runs through the city, serving a number of areas.

-Cleveland also has a number of shopping options. A number of independent retail shops, including several large department stores, offer unique items.

-One of the largest shopping districts in Cleveland is the Tremont. Tremont is also home to the Museum District, which hosts a number of prominent art galleries.

-The Cleveland is also home to the world-famous Cleveland Indians baseball team. They have won over a dozen World Series championships, but are not without their critics.

-The Cleveland is also a popular tourist destination for people visiting Europe. Its close proximity to the Atlantic Ocean means that visitors can easily reach other European cities.

-Cleveland is also a major center for arts and culture. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Music all provide great opportunities for entertainment and learning.

-The Cleveland is also home to a number of popular sports teams. Cleveland Browns, Cavaliers and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are just a few of the sports teams that call the city home.

There are also many cultural events that take place in Cleveland. These include festivals held at the Cleveland Botanical Garden and the Cleveland Art Museum.

[caveartfair]

Why the Auction World’s Top Brass Are Leaving for Galleries

Photo by Antenna.

It’s been a time-honored tradition for the monolithic figures of the auction world to eventually leave their perches at the rostrum and go off on their own, wading into the cushy, jet-set world of private advisory sales. Tobias Meyer left Sotheby’s to sell fabled estates such as that of the late Si Newhouse; Guy Bennett left Christie’s to secure nine-figure masterpieces for Qatari oil billionaires; and Simon de Pury—once described as the “Mick Jagger of auctioneers”—left the house he co-founded to start a firm with his wife, and on the side finds time to bang gavels at charity auctions during galas in St. Tropez and São Paulo.

But when Jeremiah Evarts, head of the Impressionist and Modern evening sale at Sotheby’s, announced he had left the house, it was revealed that he had taken a less-traveled but increasingly common route. He joined the Upper East Side shop Di Donna, a gallery started by a fellow Sotheby’s lifer, Emmanuel Di Donna.

He’s the latest in a series of fellow-travelers on the sales-room-to-white-cube migration route, pushed away by the auction world’s grueling pace and drawn by the opportunity to indulge their creative impulses with the support of back offices ready to take advantage of a reliably lucrative type of secondary market. Instead of buying cheap works by young artists and hoping they hit the jackpot (a risky approach, as recent booms and busts have shown), a growing number of galleries are taking a more sober strategy, finding underrepresented artists and building their markets based on internal scholarship and cataloging—the perfect job for an auction person.

As Clare McAndrew wrote in the 2017 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, “While historically dealers’ business models were based around finding inventory at very low prices and selling it for a substantial mark-up, in recent years many have based their competitive strategies on being able to find and access the best quality artists and works for their buyers and adding high-value services such as expertise surrounding the object, its maker, and its history, authentication and restoration.”

Who better to add those high-value services than a degree-laden Impressionist and Modern specialist such as Evarts?

“I was ready for a new adventure, and Di Donna seemed to me like a new idea for a gallery—to be wildly successful but also have the integrity and the quality,” Evarts said in a recent phone interview following the announcement. “That’s something I didn’t have time for in the auction world.”

The most prominent example of this trend is Christie’s rainmaker Brett Gorvy—the primary architect of the billion-dollar-plus postwar and contemporary department—who jumped ship for a white cube, Levy Gorvy, in December 2016. (Dominique Levy, the gallery’s co-owner who herself is a former head of private sales at Christie’s, made a deal to add his name to the door.) When David Zwirner needed to staff up his new Hong Kong outpost opened in January, he hired Jennifer Yum, a vice president at the postwar and contemporary department at Christie’s. A few months earlier, Zwirner had also poached two-decade Christie’s vet Jonathan Laib from the same department, and hired him to steer the ship of the Ruth Asawa estate.

“The larger galleries in particular are taking a larger interest in artists later in life or artists estates, as these large galleries refocus on this secondary market,” said Lock Kresler, who left Christie’s post-war and contemporary department after 15 years to open the London branch of Levy Gorvy. “In some capacities, the natural progression is for auction house specialists to gravitate toward the gallery world.”

Dealers such as Bill Acquavella and Larry Gagosian have long lured high-profile auction world gents from their perches—often bidding quite high, so to speak, to get them to come—simply because they wanted the best sales people present when collectors came to inquire about a piece. Eykyn MacLean—which was founded by former Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art department co-heads Christopher Eykyn and Nicholas Maclean in 2006—has galleries in New York and London and a robust advisory service. One notable client duo of theirs are the Las Vegas-based Fertitta brothers, heirs to the Ultimate Fighting Championship fortune; they were rumored to be on the phone with Nicholas MacLean as he chased the $110 million Basquiat eventually won by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

But the migration today is driven by different factors, particularly the market’s gravitation toward artists’ estates, which are being revived to bring out scads of inventory. This work then must be hung in shows and given context, through scholarship and criticism, that can make the case for its import to unfamiliar collectors. Thus, when Zwirner wanted to poach the Ruth Asawa estate, it had to poach Laib, too. At Christie’s, Laib had worked with Asawa’s family after the artist’s death in 2013 and convinced them to let Christie’s handle the estate exclusively.

As both galleries and auction houses seek to become “one-stop shops” for clients, offering private sales and other services, fluidity across the industry has grown more common. For example, Sotheby’s hired former Robert Rauschenberg Foundation CEO Christy MacLear in December 2016 to bring on artist estates.

“There’s more permeability between the various components of the art world,” Evarts told me, explaining his move, and that of others. “You see people making transitions that you wouldn’t expect. I’ve been in the art world for 15 years, and when I started, it wasn’t like this.”

To that end, auction world kingpins can transpose their business plan and build a mini-Christie’s in the offices behind the storefront, coaxing clients to consign works that they can still sell for significant sums, without the (sometimes unwanted) publicity of a live auction. Gorvy said his old clients not only followed him to the Madison Avenue gallery, but are more willing to work with him than ever.

“You just have much greater time to focus on the most important aspects: the client and the work of art, and building their trust,” Gorvy said. “The access point gives you a better authority in their eyes. And—frankly—the access points that you have, it’s just beyond.”

Gorvy said that, at Christie’s, he could only furnish his clients with what he had on offer in-house. In contrast, as an art dealer at a gallery, it’s common practice to secure choice seats at the evening sales for all houses—and bid indiscriminately on behalf of clients for work that comes up anywhere.

“I was talking to a client this morning, I was promoting just as much what was coming up in the Christie’s sale, in the Sotheby’s sale, and in the Phillips sale,” Gorvy said, adding that he feels better able to look after the best interests of his clients in his capacity as a private dealer.

Collectors have clearly warmed to the approach of bringing auction smarts to open minded, globe-hopping galleries. Case in point: When the billionaire collector Peter Brant wanted to offload Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom in 2017, to try and take advantage of the frenzy for the artist whipped up by the $110 million Basquiat at Sotheby’s, he put it up for sale in a public forum, but not at auction—he gave it to Brett Gorvy to stick in his booth at the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland. The price tag was $30 million.

Referring to works at the same price point as Baby Boom, Kresler said, “It’s not to say that these major pictures wouldn’t have come to Basel before people started leaving from auction houses, but I think in many ways it would happen with a call to Brett or Dominique, whether it’s for advice, or it’s for showcasing it in a major art fair.”

For Gorvy, the chance to get out of the stuffy, centuries-old auction house was also a change in attitude; former colleagues initially noted, with no small amount of shock, that he had started wearing sweaters to the office, a no-no in Christie’s corridors where standard dress for men is still Savile Row tailoring.  

“You aren’t wearing a corporate crown here,” Gorvy said. “If you’re at Christie’s, or Sotheby’s, you know—you’re a suit. That comes with a certain degree of authority, but it also comes with the idea that you’re basically working for the man.”

And there’s still an opportunity to make suit-level money at a gallery, of course. On trips to the back rooms at Levy Gorvy, one sees nearly a dozen dealers, many of them ship-jumpers who came with Gorvy from Christie’s, sitting in cubicles as the phone lines light up, clients on the horn. Sources say there is a lot of money passing through 909 Madison Avenue. When asked how the back-room private sales gambits have been paying off, Gorvy said that his reputation as a dealer rather than an auction house department chairman requires him to value above all else his discretion, but noted that, “We’ve had a very good year.”

And just a few blocks from Levy Gorvy on the Upper East Side, Emmanuel Di Donna has been building his own mini-fiefdom during his post-auction world life. He had come up through Sotheby’s mentored by the late Charlie Moffett and in 2010, after nearly two decades on York Avenue, Di Donna wanted out, and he didn’t want to ride the revolving door to the expected late-career pasture.

“I didn’t want to be someone’s adviser,” Di Donna told me on the phone. “When you leave, you can either, you know, do deals, or be somebody’s adviser.”

He paused for a second to collect a thought.

“Ooooor, the other option is to start a gallery—which is not an easy proposition, because it takes a lot of investment,” he said. “It takes commitment. Once you say you’re gonna do exhibitions of a certain standard, you have to keep to that standard.”

By 2017, he was looking to hire a director, someone who could bolster the shop’s reputation as one of the best places in New York’s most tony neighborhood to buy Impressionist and modern masterpieces. For a former auction big shot, the answer was to hire the head of the Impressionist and Modern evening sale.

“I knew that [Evarts] had the knowledge to fit into our business seamlessly,” Di Donna said.

At the end of the month, Evarts will man his first-ever fair booth at the Art Dealers Association of America’s (ADAA) The Art Show, which opens at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on February 27. When asked if Evarts had done a test-run of how to sell work in a box at an art expo, after decades of auctioneering, Di Donna said, “He’ll be ready!”

Fairs such as The Art Show are the money-makers that keep the lights on for galleries, where a few sales—sometimes to the billionaires who travel to fairs to check out booths, but not the actual gallery storefronts—can float the whole operation for months.

But for people who spent decades chasing the dollar at the auction houses, the main appeal of having a gallery, many of the members of the ex-auction house club said, was getting out of the rat race dictated by demolishing the competition, and instead putting on, for the public, vigorously and scholarly exhibitions of fantastic art. Even though Di Donna said those exhibitions also take a lot of work—publishing catalogues, doing historical exhibitions—they create a legacy that big evening sales, no matter how splashy, do not.

“I want to leave something behind, you know?” Di Donna said. “Having the exhibitions is a creative outlet, and that’s very important to me.”

from Artsy News

[dcmit3932-blog]

Prompt #6: Representation, Subjectivity and Food

                                            Giada in the Home

           The narrative of food and its relation to sexuality is common among media critiques. Representations of food in promiscuous ways is prominent in many marketing and advertising campaigns, as food is often shown promoting gender roles, or it is personified and sexualized. Warren Belasco discusses the sexuality of food in Food: Key Concepts, and how the consumption, preparation, and the food as an entity itself are much more sexualized than we initially may think. What is interesting is that I have always been aware of the ability to make food sexual in terms of how it is used in a visual sense, however, when you consider the actual food, and how it can be used to perpetuate sociopolitical norms I realize that it can hold much more meaning than I assumed. In terms of looking at specific kinds of foods, they are often gendered in terms of the social perception of what determines a “masculine” and “feminine” food, for example when I think of the ideal meal for a man it involves red meat, and when I think of the ideal meal for a woman it involves some kind of salad. This is because of socially constructed gender roles and norms that have been established and normalized in society, and these foods somehow fit into these categories. The notion of “sexual” food, and “nonsexual” food come into play when we think of sweet treats being romantic, buttery and smooth foods being sensual, or meat as connoting raw sexual pleasure, whereas sour or tough foods are unwanted and undesired (Belasco 37). Belasco expands upon this by saying, “joined with other eroticized high-calorie dishes- buns, biscuits, dumplings, whipped cream…mayonnaise-the foods of love certainly raise the heat” (37). We can effectively describe the level of sexual appeal or sexuality someone has by using food as a descriptor, as women and men can be directly compared to food as an object, or described as having similar qualities. Food to begin with is already sexualized on its own, and society only perpetuates this by using food in different settings and instances to promote certain ideological concepts regarding gender and sexualization.

         Chef Giada De Laurentii is one of the main chefs on The Food Network. She has had two television shows, and multiple cook books, and is often considered one of the leading chefs and faces of The Food Network. Giada has often been criticized, or it has been pointed out by many viewers that the sounds she makes when tasting the food, and descriptions she gives of the food are often very sexual in their nature. This brings us to Belasco’s point in saying that “when reading culinary literature, it is often hard to discern a clear line between kitchen and bedroom ‘tender,’ ‘creamy,’ ‘juicy,’ ‘moist,’ ‘smoking hot’” (36). The words she is using and phrases she is saying, like “yum” “oh my goodness this is so good”, or describing food as “creamy” or “juicy” does not necessarily have to mean anything sexual, but I would argue that because Giada is a woman, people are faster to judge her and pick up on sexual content, as women are often more sexualized than men are. Giada is considered very beautiful by many viewers, and it is clear that the producers of the show capitalize on this, as the counter tops are set low enough to be able to see her whole upper-body and there are often shots of the food that include her breasts in the frame. Belasco says that, “practices of preparing and eating food are…highly sensual and sometimes sexual…The simple point is that the hands-on encounter with food connects us with surfaces, textures, tastes, smells, insides and outsides” (36). Giada represents this idea that Belasco is discussing, as she is a perfect example of this inadvertent and natural occurrence of food preparation merging with sexuality.

          Giada at Home begins every episode with a little explanation of the moral behind the meal or item she is preparing. The little story or anecdote provided often involves her role as a mother, or a wife, saying something like it is her husband’s favorite food that she is preparing, or being so busy with life and motherhood that this is a simple meal to prepare. Motherhood and being a wife is capitalized on and emphasized, as it is a constant theme through episodes, cementing these things as pillars to her career. The atmosphere of the show makes it very clear that this is a female show, targeted towards women through the use of all light and soft colours and soft calming music. The name of the show, “Giada at Home” gives the initial statement that she is a female chef, so it is fitting that her show is set in the home, which is the historically gendered area for women. Additionally, the purpose, or motivation of the show is clearly presented as to provide for her husband and child. This motivation as a career for women is again, a very gendered expectation. Belasco says that, “increased expectations for food quality and creativity have raised the stress level in many kitchens, where cooks may find themselves having to perform before an ever more discriminating audience of family and guests” (49). This pressure for women to perform and provide is a form of oppression, but the work in the kitchen, as we can see from Giada, also allows for what Belasco calls the “food voice”, which he argues is developed through cookbooks and food literature, and offers “satisfying ways to communicate their experiences, preferences, observations, and desires” (44). This analysis is not to say that the show subordinates Giada, as it is true that she has become very successful and influential in her career of being a chef. She has found her voice in the kitchen and many people look up to that. Food is an art of self-expression and it is clear that Giada has found her own source of joy and has prospered through her talents as a chef. What is concerning is that instead of others viewing this as success, people instead go directly to sexualizing Giada and seeing her for her sex appeal instead of focusing on her craft.

      In contrast to shows like Giada at Home, we have show’s like Hell’s Kitchen, with chef Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay is constantly shown yelling, swearing, and getting angry at people in the kitchen. This presents Ramsay as using his cooking for establishing power over people and valuing the money-making side that his food brings. This is very different in comparison to Giada being perceived as using cooking to provide for her family. This comparison exemplifies the differences that we see in motivations for cooking between males and females, and also how that cooking strategy is carried out based on gender.

                                                Works Cited

Belasco, Warren James. “3 The Drama of Food: Divided Entities.” Food: the Key Concepts, Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 35–52.

Pictures are screenshots taken from episodes of the shows.