|
Indepth Arts News:
"A Measure Of Art : Diane Althoff"
2009-06-17 until 2009-08-22
Cain Schulte Contemporary Art
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
CAIN SCHULTE GALLERY is proud to present "A Measure of Art", new digital paintings by Bay-Area artist Diane Althoff. This summer exhibition will be on view at Sagan Piechota Architecture, located at 315 Linden Street in San Francisco. In her current series of multimedia images A Measure of Art, Diane Althoff offers a cogent examination of the value of contemporary art through her conceptual artworks. By combining the visual language of prominent artists such as Tomma Abts, Marlene Dumas, and Damien Hirst with numbers obtained from auction sales prices, Althoff graphs art market data--legibly presented in line with Edward Tufte's theories on the graphical display of information-directly into the canvases.
By depicting in her images the monetary value that the auction market places on art, Althoff's artistic discourse illustrates how our perception of the value of art is informed by material evaluations. In view of today's economic crisis, by once again proclaiming that it's the larger economy that determines the rise and fall of the art market, Althoff's work brilliantly epitomizes on a very current debate about the value of art.
Althoff usually chooses her artists not by their sales graphs, but by a personal response to their work. Her personal selection already offers us an interesting chance to observe and speculate on the intrinsic and formal attributes that make art valuable and durable over time. The most recent pieces analyze the work and career of alternately Audubon and Abts, at either end of a 150-year span art historical spectrum. Althoff avails herself of graphic design software to create her images. In a large sense, she relies on science rather than emotion. Also, Althoff's decision to operate via digital manipulation could equally be interpreted both as an avoidance to compete or critique (Althoff is originally trained as a photographer), as well as a deliberate act to distance herself from the art she analyzes.
Her work can be interpreted alternatively as witty, clever, or redundant, depending on the aspect we ponder. While we might interrogate the artistic decision to analyze the work of a specific artist by reproducing or closely imitating in style, in reality the practice of recreating it can also identify a desire to own the works in the most intimate way. This desire inherently offers us a much more personal, if empirical, measure of the value of art.
Related Links:
| | 
|
