In case someone from our internal revenue service is reading this, we’d gone to London on business (New York and Paris too for the record). I am a member of a consulting network based there and we had projects to discuss. We also were due to present a workshop in Paris a few days hence so there was that to work on too. And yes, we’d also gone to see the art.
Art has also become a business for my wife and me. Big cities like London are a trove of small galleries and artists to be researched for ideas and markets. And of course, they are also home to fantastic collections in places like the Whitney, Guggenheim, Met, and MOMA in NY, The Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, and the d’Orsay, Louvre, Pompidou Center, and Picasso Museum in Paris to name just a few. Although we didn’t see it all, we saw a lot of it. Many of the artists found in the modern collections of these great galleries are favorites and are sources of specific inspiration for projects my wife is currently working on.
For the record, and this will sound like one long inside joke if you don’t like art . . .
To digress, Cy Twombly was everywhere. The MOMA in NY has a gigantic and stunning example of the world’s most famous living scribbler’s work in the main gallery on the second floor of its stunning new facility. The Whitney featured an extensive series of his sketches, studies, and paper works (many of which are real head scratchers), and the Tate has a large four piece, four seasons series that to my eyes was sublime. Even Bergdorf’s had gotten into the act, showcasing Twombly art in its windows on Fifth Avenue.
Frank Stella, one of the living giants of modern art thinks that Tim Hawkinson is one of the few people doing really innovative stuff and as luck would have it, Hawkinson had curated and put up a sweeping installation of his art at the Whitney. His art is not easily described as he doesn’t have a particular look, feel, or size. The first piece you see fills a room that’s probably 25 feet in every direction. I don’t even know what you’d call it. It’s made of big paper tubes and other industrial materials and looks like a bunch of people in odd positions each at the end of one of the joined tubes.
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