I love the blog 3 Quarks Daily. The best part is that I don’t have to read it – Amy obsesses over it and sends me all the stuff she knows I’ll like (at least a half dozen a week – sometimes a lot more). Today’s (actually from March 30th) is a magnificent work of art by Helmut Smits tilted Dead Pixel in Google Earth 2009.
Absolutely fucking brilliant.
Amy and I are huge fans and collectors of Rick Dula. We’ve got a number of pieces of his art of the construction of the new Denver Art Museum hanging in my office at Foundry Group that we bought from the William Havu Gallery in Denver.
Our anniversary was June 21st and neither of us managed to get the other one a gift. So – on June 21st we went trolling around the web for a piece of art to buy. We each bought one and then decided to buy two more for our life dinner gifts on July 1st. The two that we bought on our anniversary were Rick Dula’s – the first is R.I.P. Rocky Mountain News Building.
My world is all about innovation. In the mid 1990’s, as the commercial Internet started to emerge and the World Wide Web became something that people both knew about and used, it seemed like the traditional newspaper (and traditional newspaper business) wasn’t long for the world. While it took fifteen or so years for the real end game to emerge, I’ll definitely hang this one in my office as a reminder of how creative destruction works.
The other Dula that we decided to buy was D.A.M. Building Progress.
This one is a big one – 41.5” x 55” – so we aren’t yet sure where it’s going to go. Since we love to support local living artists, we’ll definitely try to find a spot for this other than “storage.”
I have three major hobbies – reading, running, and collecting art. On my run today, I realized that I occasionally blog about reading and running, but I rarely blog about art. I’m pretty sure this idea got lodged in my head yesterday while Amy and I were looking around the web for a new piece to “buy each other” as our anniversary gift. While looking, we stumbled upon this incredible painting from Don Coen titled Prairie Rattler.
We are huge fans of Don’s and have a number of pieces of his work. If you’ve ever been in the small conference room at Foundry Group, you’ve seen a version of Chairman of the Board that I commissioned for us after missing buying the original. We’ve named the cow who looks over at Kelly during the day “Bessie”.
An important thing to realize about Don’s work is that his paintings are large. Prairie Rattler is 6’ x 7’. We talked about buying it for a few minutes but then decided that it didn’t feel right for a joint anniversary gift. But we still both thought it was amazing and it inspired me to start periodically posting about some of the artist we love (in addition to my mom) and collect.
My mom just hung a new exhibit of her photographs titled Japan and India: Faces and Places.
The images are spectacular – take a look at the slide show if you have any interest. The show is up at the Mesquite Art Center, 1527 N. Galloway, Mesquite, Texas (972-216-6444) until May 3. Congrats Mom on a beautiful looking show.
I’ve been told that my blogging pace is often a hint as to what I’m up to. When my pace stalls, it either means I’m on vacation or deep into a deal. To those that notice, I say "good observation."
I’ve spent the last three days running around Dallas with Amy and my parents looking at art. Amy and I are patrons of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College where Amy went to college. Every year they have a Patrons Trip to a major city to see private collections as well as the local museums. This year’s trip was to Dallas (where I grew up) so we "patronized" my parents and included them on our trip.
Amy has a nice post up about what we did on Wednesday. Yesterday was a trip to Ft. Worth to see the museums – we skipped out on the tour and did it ourselves. Today was an awesome visit to the Rose’s house and the Hoffman’s house – two of the three amazing collectors and Dallasites who have donated their entire collections (over 800 pieces) to the Dallas Museum of Art when they die.
That’s my dad and Amy at the Rose’s pump house. In addition the great art, we got to see some incredible architecture. We’re now both wasted (I’d take a picture of Amy fast asleep in a chair next to me at the Admirals Club waiting for our two hour delayed flight from DFW, but I might wake her up) from a whirlwind three days as we get ready to head to NY for the weekend.
Micah’s tweet led me to Phil Hansen, an artist who is a master of playing with his food.
Phil’s Goodbye Art series is awesome. For a taste of what he is capable of doing, take a look at the Christmas Cheese Log.
If you don’t have a vice, I recommend it.
My good friend and fellow VC blogger Fred Wilson has a music vice. His blog mixes his passion (ok – kind word for vice) for music with all the other stuff he thinks about, works on, cares about and loves. When he first started writing about music I tended to skim the posts – now I read every one of them and learn more about music from them than I do any other way.
For some people it is music, for some people it is wine, and for some people it is – well never mind. My vice is art. I grew up with art all around me. My mom (Cecelia Feld) is an artist and as a kid I was dragged from gallery to museum to gallery. I acted like you’d expect an 11 year boy to act (mom – where is the soccer ball – I don’t want to go to the stupid gallery) but by the time I got to MIT it had sunk in. MIT doesn’t really have “minors” (they call them “concentrations” just to be different) – one of my concentrations was in Art History. I now even enjoy going to Santa Fe for the weekend.
Amy and I love to wander around galleries and museums. Our pace is the same – we are skimmers (people that move briskly through the museum absorbing everything) rather than people than stand and stare at the art. We learned a long time ago (from a wise art collector) that you should “buy what you love to look at.” It’s a simple strategy that has served us well over the past 15 years of evolving from beginning art collectors (I remember the agony we went through when we bought our first $1,000 piece since it was a meaningful percentage of my net worth at the time) to what we are today.
On Saturday, we bought our first Julien Stanczak piece while hanging out with our friends at the Danese Gallery in Chelsea. It’s called Continuum (1995).
It’s a big boy – 70 inches by 70 inches. Stanczak is an early practitioner of Op Art and is less well known than artists like Bridget Riley (and therefore much more affordable.) Op Art is short for “optical art” and is typically a painting that takes advantage of optical illusions. Standing in front of a piece like Continuum is mind blowing (and can quickly turn you into a zombie.)
In a couple of weeks, I’ll have Continuum hanging in our office in Boulder. Please feel free to stare at it. If you enjoy the art posts, or want to learn more, follow the Wikipedia links above. I’ve been pleasantly amazed with the quality and depth of information on Wikipedia around art and art history. It’s a great (and safe) way to satisfy a vice.
I spent seven years at MIT and managed to pick up two degrees before they kicked me out. I describe the place using the 10/40/50 rule. 10% of the people there are off the chart brilliant and nothing phases them. 40% of the people are extremely smart, figure out the system, and make it through with moderate but not life threatening scars. 50% of the people are extremely smart, but never figure out the system and their experience at MIT is a "daily assault on their self esteem." Fortunately, I was in the 40%.
In 2004, Frank Gehry’s amazingly designed Stata Center (home of the MIT Computer Science AI Lab) opened to much fanfare. It’s as fascinating inside as it is outside. Lots of really interesting people have offices there and wandering around in the place is like living inside a Dr. Seuss book (while looking at it is like staring at a Dr. Seuss world.)
The first time I actually saw the building (in the winter of 2004), my first thought was something like "man – this thing is going to be trouble." I love architecture (I’m an architect in a parallel universe), but I lived in Boston for 12 years and all I could think about was stuff like "so – what happens when the ice falls off the roof and breaks through a window."
Apparently that question is currently being addressed. On 10/31/07, MIT sued Frank Gehry (and Skanska USA – the construction firm) claiming negligence and a breach of contractual obligations. I’m not big on lawsuits, but I loved Joanne Wilson’s post on it titled M.I.T. and Gehry. If you’ve ever done a big construction project, I’ll bet you can identify with what Joanne said.
At the same time, I also loved John Maeda’s post on it titled Leaks Are To Be Forgiven. Maeda’s office is in the I.M. Pei designed Media Lab, the "bathtub building" that was built while I was in school there but that has nicely stood the test of time and is now being expanded by via a design from Fumihiko Maki.
It appears Frank Gehry is having his "MIT 50% experience."
While Amy and I were sitting in the San Francisco Airport reading the Sunday NY Times, we came across an article titled Looking for Inspiration in the Melting Ice. It discusses a great new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art titled Weather Report: Art & Climate Change. BMoCA is one of our local gems – if you happen to be in Boulder, swing by the museum on 13th Street and check out the exhibit. Have lunch at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse while you are at it.
Sotheby’s is having a huge Contemporary Art auction tonight – you can watch it live online. The Rothko (White Center 1950) is unbelievable. Sotheby’s minimum price guarantee to David Rockefeller (owner of White Center) is $46m (Rockefeller paid less than $10,000 for it in 1960.) Now that’s “art investing.”
My favorite picture in the auction is Christopher Wool’s FUCKEM.
Way out of my league, but fun to fantasize. I used to call these things “paintings”, but it seems to be in vogue to call them “pictures”, so I’ll give it a try.
