I Catch a Glass Grenade For You

Posted: January 15th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: art | Tags: art, artists, British style, decorating, sculpture, shopping

It seems like every day there’s a new online site for buying art.  And suddenly incredible art, from both established and emerging artists, is available to the average would be art collector.  Not surprisingly, since they are the most easily and cheaply reproduced art forms, these sites generally deal in prints and photographs.  Which is lovely and all.  Really it is.  I’ve bought photographs from 20×200 and had plenty of fun doing it.  But I think for a low to moderate level art lover, who is really just amusing or pleasing himself and not actually trying to assemble a valuable collection, other kinds of objects can be a lot of fun.

My inlaws recently purchased a video by an artist with whom they and we are enamored.  And it’s awesome.  But unless they figure out a good way to install it and run it on a video loop, it has the drawback that you actually have to take it out and play it in order to interact with it at all.  It’s amusing, and great at parties, but obviously somewhat limiting.  But contemporary art objects come in a number of great forms which include, but also move beyond conventional sculpture, and a few of these online sites do offer some great objects at moderate (or at least slightly more accessible) prices.

The Saatchi Gallery, long an established and well respected fixture in the art world, now has an interesting online shopping gallery.  The works range in price from a few hundred dollars to you-really-don’t-want-to-know-how-much-this-costs.  At the upper edge of my sense of what-is-reasonable-but-sadly-more-than-I-can-spend-on-art is this incredible plastic figure by Mattia Biagi:

The actual object is 12″x12″x16″ -so not prohibitively big – but can you image having that in your house?  I love him. Sadly, at $3500 I can’t have him.  Saatchi has a number of other very cool pieces by Biagi, but the prices only go up from our little friend (above), so we’ll try to forget they exist.  But they also have some more affordable works, like Sivan Sternbach’s Catch the Dream 1, which at $450 is suddenly looking like a bargain.

And of course my love affair with Artspace.com continues …  It is really an awesome site.  Like Saatchi, Artspace carries works at a wide range of prices.

Jenny Holzer’s Money Creates Taste (above) is $1500.  A lot of money, and admittedly it’s an edition of 100, but from a major artist it kind of seems to me like a steal.  Another option for the same $1500 is Kristin Oppenheim’s Glass Grenade.

That would be a conversation starter sitting on the sideboard.  It’s a really interesting piece, having turned a weapon into something fragile, transparent, vulnerable.  If your budget is more constrained, there are other choices, still very cool:

Pinocchio is on Fire is fun as something a little different.  The object pictured above is actually an LP in a box.  The one caveat is, to really get much out of the piece you have to have a still-working record player.

Another interesting option at a slightly lower price point is the British website Eyestorm.com.  Jacqui Chanarin’s porcelain objects, ranging from £220-£880, are quite charming.

(At £355.74, House on Fire  is the most oddly priced art object I have ever met.)   In an entirely different spirit, Eyestorm also offers Yana Elkassova’s witty riffs on the traditional Russian matrioshka doll.

As a final note, I couldn’t resist including a few of Mark Hayward’s little drawings.  Yes, they are works on paper, and therefore not remotely what I’m talking about in this post.  But, drawn with pencil and crayon on pieces of Japanese and Korean hand-made paper, and some as small as 16.5 cm x 19 cm, they’re hardly what you think of when you consider buying a painting to hand on your wall.  That’s my excuse.  They are absolutely wonderful, and generally £100-£150.  Tell me you don’t want that little guy in a gas suit.  You know you want it.

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