Art For Sale On The Interweb … Something For Everyone

Posted: April 7th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: art, stuff to buy | Tags: art, artists, humor, shopping

The following is a list of five art objects currently available online that you should buy if they are within your budget — do what you want, but I would certainly buy them were they within my budget.

Artspace has got to be one of my absolute favorite places on the internet. Whenever I am left thinking that maybe the interweb was not such a good idea after all, I remember Artspace, it takes me to my happy place, and all is right with the world. All five of the following images are available to purchase on Artspace at a wide variety of price points.

This goes without saying … at risk of sounding repetitive, I love this man. That fact that it is possible to go online and purchase a numbered Murakami print for a large but not genuinely preposterous sum never ceases to amaze me.

Since you can’t really read the words at this scale, I will let you know that in Doug Hall’s A Matter of Family Resemblance pictured below there is text beneath each of the portraits which reads, in sequence from left to right, “Or one could simply say,” “it’s a matter of family resemblance,” “and “leave it at that.” Right? God only knows what Hall means exactly, and yet I suppose that’s the point, since my reaction to the images is just to think, “don’t ask”. The whole set up is absolutely awesome — leave it at that, trying to ask more of it will just make your head hurt.

I have been a huge fan of Carroll Dunham for some time now. His work is generally sexual and suggestive, and at times violent. And yet his fabulous cartoon like style makes them seem simultaneously ridiculously innocent. Dunham says of his own work, ”I know that my art exists in this kind of tension between irrational, almost goofy, things and extremely tight, formal, organized things. That tension is where I live.” I love that description in large part because I can’t imagine many other artists using the word “goofy” about their work, it seems so trivializing, and yet it is the perfect word for Dunham’s work and is in large part what makes his prints so irresistible.

The negative space in between the man’s legs that takes the form of a penis — it doesn’t get much more brilliant, funny and twisted than that.

American photographer Ayana V. Jackson’s photographs revolve around themes of African and African American identity. Yet in images like Tables Turned, through the specific, she manages to touch on the broad connections in identity. The photograph was taken in Rwanda in 2008, and yet I think part of why I love this photograph so much the technical aspects of the image, its square format, the faded colors, the slanted composition, the architecture of the hotel, make it feel familiar. The location, the color of the girls’ skin, the context, may differ significantly, and yet this feels like it could be a picture of me and my sister standing in front of my grandparents’ apartment building in 1978. The expression the younger girl wears, the flowers she holds in her hand, each little detail is made more poignant because the image makes me feel as if I can identify with these girls, despite everything that separates us (even as I’m writing now, this image makes my eyes start to well up — I kid you not).

Confession, when my husband and I first moved in together, we hung a painting (for lack of a better word) by Clifford Ross in our little house which we had on loan from my now in-laws. (We lived in the cutest little miniature one bedroom house in Oakland, California. There was a little cluster of identical homes, six in total, attached side by side in pairs of two. The first floor of each house consisted of an attached garage, an eat-in kitchen and a living room, and up a short flight of stairs, the second floor boasted one bedroom, one bathroom. But I digress….) The artist was a friend of the family. In all honesty, I was not a huge fan of the painting. I figure that I can say that without insulting the artist since he has certainly received enough acclaim and recognition to suggest that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The description of Ross on Artspace begins by saying, “There are very few artists who are able to capture landscapes with the same elegance, precision, and sense of abandonment that is present in all of Clifford Ross’s work”. There is certainly a reiteration of both form and theme that connects the photograph below to that painting, so I am not sure whether I respond to the photograph more because the differences in medium are profoundly significant, or because my artistic taste has grown in the intervening years. Either way, I love this photograph. I find the blue absolutely haunting.