Friday Night Art Telegrams: From Sealand in the North Sea to Tahiti and Hong Kong

Some joyful and intriguing links for your weekend Art reading that ask, "Will you judge, or be judged??"

From around the interwebs come some spectacular art stories that are worth reading. Pull up a couch or a settee and sip that coffee and get to reading. You may also drink absinthe or brush your teeth with flouride toothpaste.

Who am I to judge you?!

Photographer Yuki Kihara takes Gauguin paintings and “upcyles” them to re-tell their stories more accurately. Gauguin never visited the places he painted, apparently.

Yuki Kihara “upcycles” Paul Gauguin Tahiti paintings by making them better than the originals.

Block 34 (51.895167° N, 1.4805° E), Robert Alice, on display at Sealand only a few weeks ago. The piece is now in Hong Kong for auction on April 27 at Sotheby’s.

Robert Alice has produced a stunning visual display for his contemporary ode to Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain codebase, Block 34 (51.895167° N, 1.4805° E), putting on a wonderful concept display at Sealand, the world’s oldest self-proclaimed nation, located on the North Sea. Read the story. It involves a helicopter flying at dawn to the abandoned gun platform and a team of 13 people putting up the display so that basically nobody would see it. But it is amazingly beautiful. And surreal.

Block 34 (51.895167° N, 1.4805° E) will be auctioned at the Hong Kong Contemporary Evening Auction on April 27.

The 59th Venice Biennale is happening and Chloe Stead is going to tell you all about it, part 2.

Complete coverage of the above art event is here.

There’s a great show about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contemporary heralding of the the emergence of hip-hop’s cut-and-paste aesthetic during the 1980s in New York.

It reminds me that my favourite mentor, RIP, Roland Legiardi-Laura, took over a penthouse apartment in the squatter and punk-filled Tompkins Square Park area in late 1970s and over the next three years made it his own lux palace of poetry and love-song through blood sweat and tears because the landlord couldn’t be bothered to spend money on it. I took a tour of this place once, in 2014, when Roland had me come up to talk about a poetry project he needed help on, and I was amazed at the floor to ceiling windows, the views of the park, the shining copper roof of the church next door and the understanding, given to me with approving head nods, that Charlie Parker the jazz saxophonist himself was a heroin junkie maestro magic dream right on the corner, there, down there, you dig?

The 1967 ArtForum Essay by Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” which is important for so many reasons, but most of all today for looking, I think, at how digital and NFT art and “art” are relaxing norms and creating new norms in aesthetic judgment and appreciation.

Rachel Wetzler looks at the art world tropes appearing in contemporary fiction.