Urban Art Association

Nobody knows what the art market will be by the time the resale agreement expires (I assume it's 2-5 years) and how many editions he makes in the meantime.

So we just need a release that's his very best image, signed, priced at below market value, and then no more releases afterwards, and we're laughing.

Brains Trust, let's talk resale prices.
Can we see these go for $20k-$25k easily?
Discuss.

i committed to a lot of acts for this print...
curtis from AA was a very happy man

Feeling exhausted from the unavoidable fomo about the prints?

Take a minute and read this Jerry Saltz’ piece. Its good and true.

www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/george-condo-vip-art-fair-2-14-10.asp

Dear Jerry,
Can you explain why so many people love the George Condo exhibition at the New Museum?

-- Aaron Holtz

Dear Aaron,
Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be. The Times called his New Museum show "sensational." That was just the beginning. Collectors love Condo’s paintings and buy them by the hundreds. New ones go for upwards of $450,000, and everything he makes sells. A recent New Yorker profile mentioned that Condo lives in luxury, collects Louis XVI furniture, hangs out with Kanye West, has two Upper East Side townhouses, loves expensive wines, gambles huge amounts of money and has a chauffeur-driven limousine. Curators love Condo, too. He’s one of the few painterly painters included in our usually painting-bereft biennials.

I’m thrilled that the New Museum is having a success, and I admire the curators of the show, Laura Hoptman and Ralph Rugoff; however, to me, Condo is a zombie -- a very limited, ironic, art-about-art artist whose work sounds the same visually derivative, technically generic notes over and over again. He provides almost no internal or psychic depth, instead giving people a sense of being in on some art-world in-jokes about style, tradition, kitsch and appropriation.

The top floor of Condo’s show is the better of the two, because it blatantly imparts his deep content. More than 50 portraits hang here, floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Your eyes dart from one to another, checking out his repertoire of creepy creatures, loony goons, naked ladies and art-world knockoffs. Many of these pictures look like the sort of neo-surreal work that was typical in the East Village in the 1980s, or the cartoony paintings of Kenny Scharf. A few are good, like Spanish Head Composition and a number of earlier, denser small works. But mostly you don’t have to look at any one painting here for more than a few seconds. That’s all they demand.

People always say Condo is a "virtuoso painter." The second-floor display gives the lie to this claim. Condo is an enthusiastic confident drawer who paints in high-keyed funky color with flourish. But he is simply deft and dexterous, aping R. Crumb and Philip Guston without any of the gutsiness or exposed inner life of these artists. Mainly you get the same fiendish figures in various styles. Condo does have a feel for grotesque in human physiognomy. I often find myself at cocktail parties, fantasizing that the person I’m talking to is some sort of Condo monster. Yet because Condo’s monsters turn into a cast of characters, they are defanged. Any idea of the grotesque is replaced by burlesque and shtick.

Condo’s is well-done work for a time still jittery about painting, weaned on idiotic ideas that it’s somehow suspect, that it can only be good if it makes jokes or comments about itself. This sort of deconstructionism has been done to death, and is so familiar and enfeebled that it can barely lift the gun to its own head. At his best, Condo is not much more than Koons-lite, a safe Schnabel, a more ingratiating Richard Prince.

But there’s a wonderful surprise ending to this show. Downstairs from Condo’s show at the New Museum is the radically fabulous survey of Lynda Benglis -- whose work from 1969 to 1975 is so fecund, fresh, relevant and prescient that she saves the day, letting you see that she predicts numerous contemporary artists from Urs Fischer and Isa Genzken to Rachel Harrison and Franz West. Among the mounds, glow-in-the-dark wall protuberances, and Mardi Gras-like peacock headdresses, don’t miss the large bronze, curved, double-headed, and veined dildo nailed to the wall, titled Smile. I wore one (the smile, not the dildo) when I left the New Museum.

The one with the biggest ROI.