My Birthday In November!

Well, not really. I was born in April, same day as Nabokov, Kant and Lenin so I was doomed to dabble in lefty politics, lofty philosophy, highbrow literature, and maybe destined to live in LA too since Jack Nicholson and I also share a birthday.
Unfortunately, no famed artist or art historian was born on the same day, so that part is unexplained, so far. Maybe I landed in the wrong cultural industry?

So, why then announce Frenchy's B-Day in November, will you be asking, you my smart and observant FBC! readers? Well, for 3 reasons.

a) Because I feel like it, nan mais alors!
b) Back in April I didn't get to throw myself the huge party I usually do, for cause of too much exhaustion. But I still need a celebration, what if it's 7 months later? I don't care!
c) In case you haven't noticed, Thanksgiving is next week. Yay!

If you have just joined FBC! (welcome!) you don't know yet my regular monthly feature, Thanksgiving In [Insert Month Here]™, created to celebrate just anybody I feel like celebrating, though if you wish to join the list it's better to know me personally - it helps greatly - and generally speaking be nice. For real, everyday of your life. Otherwise, nixt. Pretend nice? Out of the way!

But this being November and the real Thanksgiving being just around the corner, I needed to do something else. And , I kinda wanted someone to celebrate me, just for once.
In person I am very, very nice, if a bit challenged in the humility department, not to mention vertically, so yeah, maybe I could be celebrated a tiny, tiny bit.
Anyway, since no one else is going to celebrate me and my B-Day was spent doing nothing, here it is.

'nuff said about my Frenchy self, I'm not going to praise myself any further, and I'll be spending Thanksgiving with lovely friends (Hi Austen and Jonathan!).
But, being an impoverished Frenchy vapidly looking for a job in these uncertain economic times, I have a bit of a wish list. I figure, if I saved you $25 (+tax) and probably a bit more by reading bad books so you don't need to, you guys could maybe pool your resources and get me presents. No? Yep, I knew you were a bunch of cool people!

So here's my list, dear Santa Claus readers. I truly need these, I swear, to keep company to my garden gnomes salt and pepper shakers. Speaking of which, this little fellow would be a welcome addition to my home. I could grow cat grass in the wheelbarrow for Pomme. She really enjoys watching me cooking, in case something would fall on the floor, and since winter is coming I need a cocotte to make stews. I'd like the 7q in yellow, thanks!
I tend to be very blue in winter (not enough daylight, and blogging doesn't help), and when I was a kid I was reading the stories of Moomin when in need of comfort. I didn't know there was a 2-volume comic-strips publication. I'd like both, please.
My nerdy self would really enjoy this translation of one of the greatest art historian in the Universe. I have a French edition but it is not complete (BTW, if someone at the Getty reads me: please put together an edition of Julius von Schlosser's complete writings. Many thanks in advance!).
I don't have a fireplace, but I do have a cat to sit on my lap when reading my Moomin books this winter, and I guess some melancholic soundtrack would be in order. I'm pretty much into Elliott Smith at the moment but don't own any of his records (I'm streaming music from here ). Any album would do, really, or better yet, the entire collection!

As much as I like being home, reading, writing the blog, cooking stews, baking cakes and cuddling my cat, sometimes my little Frenchy self needs to venture out in the big bad world, to see some exhibitions or even, the horror! attend openings. It's usually an opportunity eagerly awaited by idiot or otherwise fairly distracted drivers to hit me. It's not that I don't enjoy whiplash and other resulting debilitating back pains,really, but it is starting to grow very stale and feel a tad unfunny. So I'd like one of these, complete with driver, when I absolutely have to get out of the house.
Failing this, maybe a scapulary, a rosary, a St Christopher medal or two and one Fatma's hand could help, as well as some Jewish and Buddhist lucky charms if these exist (apologies to my Jewish and Buddhist readers for not knowing what these might be).

Aside from this, I'm fine. Of course I could do with one of these, or maybe with the entire catalogue from this place or some choice items from this one, but I don't have enough shelf space at present. I would also very much a curator's job here, but not until March as I need to finish some project first. I don't need anything from this place either, but the website is too cool and reminds me slightly of Fischli and Weiss.
My new expanded readership could also help me find someone who's an auditor at Deloitte and Touche, if possible (Accenture would do too). I need to interview someone from there to figure out what job they really do for this thing I'm writing.
Which leads me to the following:


Because, as I was telling you earlier I am very, very nice (and modest, cela va sans dire), if you do not wish to contribute to the fund to lift my little Frenchy but nevertheless chic spirits (you, cruel and mean you), I suggest you do something even kinder and more generous!
Adopt a striking writer!
Go drive by a picket line, select the most malnourished-looking one, try to lure him (did you see the pictures? They are 80% male picketers!) with some bait (beer, Groundworks coffee or such-like, In'N'Out burgers, macarons from La Maison du Pain for the sophisticated types), pick them up in your car and take them to your home. They need nourishing food, warm clothing, some place to sleep (your couch is fine) and wash (try to pick up a house-trained one), and lots of cuddling since these disenfranchised souls cannot write and occupy themselves outside of the picket lines. If you're lucky, maybe you'll even spot a cute one!
For the moment these poor stray cuties just need a foster place, but if the WGA strike prolongs itself well into the winter, it is likely they will need to find their loving forever home.
Don't let these poor innocent writers be sent to the pound redlisted by the cruel and insensitive studios and producers!
Adopt a writer today! And Jesus will thank you when you get to heavens (unlike Uncle Sam, since adopting a WGA cutie is not tax-deductible yet). If you are not a believer, the writer will thank you himself (or herself, if you pick one of the 20% female picketers) by warming your bed this winter, a more immediate reward when you see what energy prices are, no?

No Psychic But Chic!

Dear old and new readers alike (Hi Paul! Hi Ondine!),

This blog was started for no good reason at all but to fend off boredom, after sustaining some non-life-threatening but nevertheless painful injuries in a car accident. It's been growing up nicely, thanks to my nice core of faithful readers, and it is now expanding in a weird way. I mean, as an art writer I'm used to nobody ever reading my catalogue essays and so forth, so it's puzzling to see the response I get from my slightly non copy-edited, wholly un-researched but always totally whimsical statements.
It's all the more mind-boggling to me, since I'm trying not to be too reactive to the art actuality, hence the food, books and other type of posts on FBC! Also, let's face it, the artworld is a pretty boring place to be most of the time.

So much of the so-called art information mill is artificial and unnecessary. If any one of you has ever done research in old issues of Arts Magazine (remember Arts Mag?), Art in America, Artforum or even Art News*, just think for a minute about the gossip pages of 20 years ago. Or even 5 years ago.
How many of those urgently important snippets of info do you remember now?
So-and-so jumped ship to join newish brash art gallery! Nerdy curator quoted on the number of new museums being build! Many US museums looking for directors! The market is out of control!

I'm pretty certain roughly 70% of the names quoted then are forgotten now, and many of the events listed don't make any sense at all. I understand the necessity of stirring the soup for some people to feel they exist, and I find it very sad, but if we look back at these old magazines, what do we see? So-and-so has disappeared entirely from the scene, newish brash art gallery has gone bankrupt (with drug addict director disappearing abroad with the most valuable assets from the stock), nerdy curator has joined Academia, new museums have been build (or not), market stars from yesterday are, well, duds now. Or they have become film directors to get respect.

I'm also pretty certain that most of today's brouhaha is going to join that same cohort. So when I see that kind of headline, I'm wondering how short the memory of art journalists is. I'm not going to shoot the ambulance, first of all because Tyler Green spends a fair amount of time deriding Carol Vogel, and secondly because I think the NYT at large needs a good shake-up, not only the arts section.
I just want to remind our very own Cultural Industry what every one over 30 should know: each time there's a recession coming up, the art market crash follows 6 to 12 months later. Remember the late 1980s? Or the dotcom crash? After the 1980s the market took almost a decade to recover, with galleries closing one after another, art magazines folding for lack of advertising revenue, museums being unable to raise money to expand, and artists after artists, writers and curators leaving the scene completely. The recovery from the dotcom crash was much faster but they were casualties nonetheless.

Usually, when the markets start to underperform or slide completely, whatever money that's still available finds refuge in the art market for a few months. And then, after some extended period when Wall Street's electroencephalogram seems to go totally flat, the former art buyers need liquidities, go sell their stuff at auction and discover that estimates are now really, really low and the masterpiece that was flipped 7 times over during high tide is suddenly bough in.

Now, I'm no Nostradamus, merely Frenchy but chic! So I cannot foresee what's going to happen, but I've never seen a bull market growing exponentially forever when there's an unmistakable smell of recession in the air. Wild swings in the stock market, gold shooting through the roof, oil ditto, massive losses in the credit industry, etc. don't bode too well for our future.
I'm waiting for the moment when the same art dealers and other art people who were bragging about how the market was never going to crash are going to rejoice because, finally, we are only between ourselves. Let's be optimistic, maybe then someone is going to care about the art, after all.

The picture above is by Ramy Majouji, licensed under Creative Commons.




*For my growing non-art readership, Art News is more or less the equivalent of People for the art world. Risible.