“CUSTOM-MADE FOR MONEY LAUNDERING”

If businesses like casinos and gem dealers must report suspicious financial activity to regulators, so should art dealers and auction houses. But to dealers and their clients, secrecy is a crucial element of the art market’s mystique and practice.

Have you ever accidentally told the customs authorities that a painting you own is worth $100 when it’s really worth $8,000,000? It’s an experience we can all relate to, I’m sure. It’s such an easy mistake to make, isn’t it? The quotes here are from a relatively shallow but interesting article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, on money laundering through art, which is the evil (or more evil) twin of high level art dealing as investment:

As other traditional money-laundering techniques have come under closer scrutiny, smugglers, drug traffickers, arms dealers and the like have increasingly turned to the famously opaque art market, officials say.

It is hard to imagine a business more custom-made for money laundering, with million-dollar sales conducted in secrecy and with virtually no oversight. What this means in practical terms is that “you can have a transaction where the seller is listed as ‘private collection’ and the buyer is listed as ‘private collection,’ ” said Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. “In any other business, no one would be able to get away with this.”

Though there are no hard statistics on the amount of laundered money invested in art, law enforcements officials and scholars agree they are seeing more of it.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html

Previously on this blog:

Money laundering, arms dealers.

IMAGINARY ARTISTS V: JOKER

“I kind of like this one, Bob. Leave it.”

 

“Barbed wire is the medium of the future, Mrs. Russelmeier… but that is no way to make a banana.” The Joker, 1966.

Two 1966 episodes of the Batman TV series– itself a masterpiece of Pop Art and camp– overtly call out to Pop Art and the (then) contemporary abstract expressionists with Pop Goes The Joker/Flop Goes The Joker, in which the eponymous lunatic vandalises an art gallery. When one of the artists whose works have been permanently wrecked with splashes of paint actually likes it and appreciates that their value’s been increased (“All I could ever draw was stupid looking farm boys”– a sly but spot-on dig at Norman Rockwell), the Joker wastes no time in getting himself into Gotham City’s art world. He starts by winning an art competition against the likes of Jackson Potluck, Pablo Pinkus, and a paint flinging monkey. After an all-too-accurate satirical  exhibition of what would generally be referred to as their “practice”, the Joker paints the prizewinning artwork; a tiny mauve dot on a blank canvas. One of the judges, however, notes that “I kind of like what the monkey did…”

In fact both episodes are packed with great quips or mordant observations about the general perception of contemporary art and artists. Some of them still strike a nerve, especially the Joker’s fraudulent art school (Joker: “Sorry, millionaires only, please.” Millionaire Bruce Wayne, after being instantly accepted: “Aren’t you going to give me a test to see if I have any talent?”), the crit session where anything can be justified and Bruce is castigated for earnestly sculpting fruit, and the art dealer surreptitiously upping the price tag of a painting by $2500 when Alfred expresses an interest on behalf of the millionaire Bruce Wayne.

As a bonus, both episodes are also packed with people in smocks and berets, and they get beaten up by Batman and Robin.  They’re generally just daft and fun to watch, as well. You remember fun, don’t you? It’s the thing that was completely forbidden and absent in Christopher Nolan’s pompous, pretentious iterations of Batman recently. “Why so serious?” indeed. Joker could be addressing Nolan and Christian Bale directly when he sums up the real appeal of Batman in Pop… “What can you expect from a man who appears in public in such a ridiculous outfit?” You can go dark with Batman and the Joker– Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison’s writing for these characters effectively if somewhat inadvertently provoked the whole dark and gritty superhero orthodoxy of the past twenty years, almost on their own– but the pair remain essentially daft fantasy figures and not realistic as human beings, despite or perhaps even because of their psychological and narrative potency.

Tim Burton’s brief recapitulation of Pop Goes The Joker, in the first of the 80s/90s cycle of Batman films, is clearly somewhat darker even though it still features comedy berets. And it’s inexplicably soundtracked by an incongruous, mediocre Prince song that has nothing to do with anything, but let’s ignore that for now. Joker and his cronies once again vandalise an art gallery. This time Degas and Rembrandt, among others, get a Joker détournement intervention. The Flugelheim Museum’s collection of Classical sculptures is smashed, or they get green hair and red lipstick. Only Francis Bacon is to Joker’s taste. The film’s an absolute bloody mess in almost every way except for its stunning techno-gothic-deco production design, but again there are a few sharply observed little details. Immediately following the destruction of the Flugelheim’s art works– and after gassing most of its patrons, possibly fatally– the Joker meets with photographer/journalist/Kim Basinger/eye candy/whatever Vicky Vale. I’ve always loved the way Jack Nicholson goes through her portfolio of trendy stuff, barely looking at any of it and dismissing every page with, “crap, crap, crap, crap…”; I’ve often been tempted to do the same with portfolios and in art galleries. Eventually he finds some photos of murder victims that he approves of. Fortunately I’ve never done that with somebody’s portfolio.

Nicholson’s Joker also has a bit where he portrays himself as a kind of outsider artist who’s just prepared to go that little bit further and mutilate or kill his public if necessary. “I make art until somebody dies.” This ties in nicely with the deranged intensity and strange obsessions of some real world artists, and with the Joker’s own fascinating imaginary psychology as a man who doesn’t think there’s any such thing as a joke that’s gone too far.

Under the break you can watch both episodes in full, and a clip of the Joker obviously having a profound influence upon the young Banksy at the Flugelheim:

IMAGINARY ARTISTS III: WARHOL

Even the “real” Andy Warhol was a fictional character, a fastidiously maintained Pop Art costume and distancing apparatus worn throughout his adult life by the lad from Pittsburgh formerly known to his Slovakian parents as Andrej Varhola Jr. After he was nearly shot to death by Valerie Solanas in 1968 it was almost as if the last vestiges of any real person really had died that day; all that remained was the character. On the rare occasions when he spoke of it at all, Warhol more or less admitted this was the case. He sometimes spoke of seeing himself as if he were a character on television.

Within a few years of his death in 1987 Andy Warhol started to appear as a character in numerous films and TV shows, including some (Austin Powers and Watchmen, for example) where he amounts to not much more than a kind of set dressing, a shorthand way of placing the action in trendy New York in the 1960s. IMDB lists a startling thirty appearances of the character since 1991. This means there were some years where Warhol was a character in several films simultaneously. I’m almost certain there are others that aren’t yet listed on IMDB or never would be because they’re outside its remit: TV dramas or feature films from non-Anglophone countries, adverts, comedy shows, pop videos, and so on.

Please enjoy this small gallery of Andys. I haven’t seen I Shot Andy Warhol for years though I seem to recall it being fairly good, but some of these films are bloody atrocious. Most of the ones I haven’t seen look pretty bad as well. I noticed that he’s frequently depicted with his work; this is true in five of the eight stills shown on this page alone. Perhaps it’s an unconscious realisation that the character of the real-world Andy Warhol himself was also in some sense as much a work of art, and of artifice, as his famous soup cans or his screenprints of Marilyn.

(Far too) animated Andy Warhol (voice by Hank Azaria) in The Simpsons, 1999.

Jared Harris as Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996.

David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Basquiat, 1996. To quote Andy Warhol in many of his interviews: “Um… No.”

Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol, Factory Girl, 2006.

Bill Hader as Andy Warhol, Men in Black 3, 2012. I did warn you that some of these films were shit.

Andy Warhol (voice by David Herman) in Futurama, 2011, talking to Zoidberg in a cravat and wig.

Bob Swain as Andy Warhol, Death Becomes Her, 1992. With Zoidberg in a wig again, sorry I mean Marilyn Monroe. I see what you did there, director of Death Becomes Her.

Greg Travis as Andy Warhol, Watchmen, 2009. Watchmen Pop Art in the background.

IMAGINARY ARTISTS I: LEBOWSKI

“My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal, which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina. Yes, they don’t like hearing it and find it difficult to say, whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his ‘Johnson’.” Maude Lebowski

You don’t need me to tell you that the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski is a classic; just ask the internet. It’s also remarkable for having two painfully accurate satires of contemporary artists in it. The art talk and Julianne Moore’s mid-Atlantic Sylvia Plath drawl, geometric hair and snotty attitude are all perfectly observed, and hilarious. In fact there’s three painfully accurate satires of contemporary artists if you count The Dude’s landlord Marty and his almost entirely unattended vanity premiere of a self-devised interpretative dance/performance art piece to Mussorgsky in a “nude” bodystocking and plastic vines. I’m sure many of us art lovers have been to those shows and regretted it.

SHOW ( ME THE MONEY ) ARTISTS

The filename of this image is “coolsm”, which I presume refers to the copy… but S&M is also cool. In this narrative I think the artists who submit work are the masochists which must make Show Artists the doms. THEY WANT TO SEE “IT” AND THEY’LL SHOW YOU, OH YES. The safe phrase is “get lost”.

Hello everybody, my name is DJ Artistair and when I’m not DJing at the coolest Chilean clubs (I specialise in Monkstep, but you won’t have heard of it yet because I’m cooler than you), or testing out new men’s hair products, or having laser eye surgery or posing for generic stock photography, I Exhibit & Sell [sic] my art, which consists of TV test cards and small obsolete racing cars. Because “cards” and “cars” sound almost the same, so my work is interrogating the po(li/e)tics of homonymy.

Not really. Actually I’m much more handsome than this and I haven’t worn a waistcoat since before the Second World War. What really happened is that Show Artists took it upon themselves to spam me with their spamming stick, so I thought I’d give them some of the publicity they crave. I think the appropriate cliché is “be careful what you wish for.” Sorry guys, I may have suffered every indignity as an artist except popularity but I’m not a moron and unfortunately for you I have considerably more sense than money. Not the first one of these I’ve been subjected to, but it’s as stupid as any of them.