#Famous ephemeral art how to#

Patricia Ellis: I think Britain’s unique when it comes to art and celebrity. Richard Noble: Is there such a thing as a cult of celebrity in the contemporary art world and does this somehow compromise the aesthetic and ethical integrity of contemporary art?

#Famous ephemeral art how to#

Where else could artists like Richard Wentworth share a platform with maverick author Julian Spalding – a man who over the course of the weekend branded Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Joseph Beuys “worse than junk' – and stalwart art critic and BBC personality Godfrey Barker learn how to deface public property with graffiti artist Felix Braun?įor those that missed out on last month's art extravaganza, this edited version of the Ephemeral Art And The Cult of Celebrity debate, in which Saatchi Gallery curator Patricia Ellis was joined by film-maker Ben Lewis and legendary art commentators Anthony Haden-Guest and Godfrey Barker should prove enlightening.

Where can I see him: Sadie Coles, Audley Street, London W1, to 16 June.With ephemeral art hitting the headlines because of Turner Prize-winner Richard Wright's bold anti-art market statement, we bring you a debate from Crunch 09: The Art Festival at Hay, an event that is something of an art world anomaly. Street art: Bell finds many of the old paintings he uses at Mauerpark, the legendary flea market in his native Berlin. He transforms his fake of a fake into a trippy evocation of introspective reverie, fusing the original dark figure with a spectral waif based on a photo of a Pina Bausch dancer. Why we like him: For Untitled 2012, a reworked reproduction of what was once considered Rembrandt's greatest achievement, The Man With the Golden Helmet, before it was attributed to one of his students and denigrated as an art historical also-ran. Images and ideas shimmer and dissolve everything seems in flux, uncertain, just out of reach. At the drawing's centre stands a Blakean figure, beneath occult symbols of an eye and a crescent moon.

Here the chequered pattern of the couch resurfaces, dissolving into Bell's Love icon as it unfurls across the paper. (One of Bell's references here is Tarkovsky's 1972 metaphysical sci-fi film Solaris, in which a space traveller meets the double of his dead wife.)īehind this, a huge drawing hangs, its layered forms coming in and out of focus. Swirling shapes coat its body in a silvery graphite skin, while two red teapots are positioned like planets orbiting the sun of an old lamp. A bald, partially-limbed mannequin reclines on a gutted black leather couch, rescued from the street. Its centrepiece is an idiosyncratic constellation of found detritus and the painstakingly hand-worked. References and symbols might resurface across eccentric assemblages of junk-shop finds, light works and, most recently, industrial-looking metal text sculptures and paintings that fold the letters of the word 'love' into a self-enclosed logo like the VW icon.īell's current London show, Soft is Hard (Work), explores the real and the fake – be that an original artwork and a digital reproduction, an event and its memory, or a beloved and our fantasies.

The mood shifts rapidly, from the gentle touch of gauzy drawings to the harsh slap of bright, messy paint.