Government Art Fun

The Tories may have been slashing the provision to deliver art to the public but they managed to find the best part of £20,000 to hang it on their office walls.

Tracey must be delighted to hear that Ed Vaizey has her tedious monoprints on his wall. Michael Landy (and others) we assume, less so. George Osborne has a Grayson Perry and a Hurvin Anderson. Baroness Neville-Jones (former spy) has a George Shaw. Jonathon Djanogly (another of the many millionaire ministers who claimed £25,000 in expenses for his au pair) has a Bridget Riley and a Ryan Gander. The sports minister has a Mark Wallinger of course. Lord Morland (Climate and Energy) has prints by Rachel Whiteread, Bob and Roberta Smith and Cerith Wyn Evans. Andrew Lansley (Minister for the Sick) Gilbert and George and Michael Craig Martin. Anne Milton (Sick also) has Michael Landy’s ‘Cor! What a Bargin’.  Eric bloody Pickles? A Hockney! Greg Clark (?!) a Peter Savile sculpture. Jeremy Cunt has (get this) Mark Wallinger, Sonia Boyce, Runa Islam, Camilla Lowe (a Norwegian living in Norway – someone has fucked up there), Tacita Dean, Grayson and Yinka MBE.

Picture That

Does the Arts Council not think it slightly strange, even a slight conflict of interest that Falke Pisano is showing at Picture This in Bristol – interestingly directed by the director of the gallery representing her in London?

Neat, if a bit narrowly focused from the Director of Picture This’ point of view?

It’s like we’re having our own mini provincial Jeffrey Deitch moment.

Empire Estate Of Mind…

Hey guys, what are you all up to tonight? Cathedral of Shit have got their cropped tops, hot pants, glitter eyelids and false eyelashes for Alison Jacques perplexing disco-pop band Scissor Sisters-curated Mapplethorpe-influenced gig. Groovy!
Fresh from making oodles of cash by selling work from the estates of artists too dead to object, this show is in AJ’s spanking new Clark-Oiticica-Mapplethorpe-Wilke-supported space. Can’t wait! Get your disco on! Get on down! See you there, disco-freaks!

Stranger Danger.

You know when there’s some weird old guy out there who sees how the kids love Robert Pattinson SO much, he gets on Facebook and starts up an account pretending to be him, filling it with facts, anecdotes, snippets of information, and pictures of him drinking coffee on Sunset Boulevard? He sets up an account and then they start getting emails from young girls. “Is it you? Is it really you?”. This develops to “you aren’t like all the other girls on Facebook, can we meet?”, and it’s suddenly creepy, and really just internet grooming, and parents, you need to tell those kids about the dangers of meeting Robert Pattinson in Bluewater outside The Gadget Shop at 2.30pm. Because it’s probably not him.

Now this has happened to us. There’s a Facebook account called ‘Cathedral Öf Shit’, and guess what kids? It’s not us. So if this so-called ‘Cathedral Öf Shit’, emails you, asking to be your ‘friend’ and to meet outside the Drive-In McDonalds on City Road, suggesting you go back to his flat to see his puppies, don’t say we didn’t warn you. If you end up in a comfortable room at the police station, pointing out on a teddy bear exactly where this Cathedral guy touched you, don’t come crying to us.

Big Cock

Who’s the biggest cock? Eshun? Boris? Grayson? Elmgreen? Dragset?

We Three Kings

We received some superb Christmas cards over the festive period, and have resisted the strong urge to scan and post images of gallerists and their wives and children frolicking in snow/at the wheel of Daddy’s Bentley/on the Eames furniture in their Aspen winter home… We’ve been VERY VERY restrained.
This, however, deserves to be out in the world. When you look at this picture, consider this – WHERE are they? And if they are indeed where it looks like they are (an art storage unit), then why are they in their pyjamas?
Was Simon de Pury’s child born in a lowly cattle-shed art handling unit?

Gregor Muir in da house…

We love Gregor Muir so congratulations to him and the ICA on his appointment as their Director. And we know that people are unkind about his books but we’re not.We love them! Let’s hope this one doesn’t come true!

Independent, woah man.

It’s just 2 months until the second edition of New York’s successful ‘Independent’ fair – the art fair which stole swept up a number of defectors from the Armory, alongside those galleries who never deigned to participate in the first place. The information regarding who has been accepted is out and about, though not actually on their website as yet.
A more concrete information leak is the method selectors Darren Flook and Elizabeth Dee are using to select galleries – two individual and rather different approaches. Apparently Dee likes to make a spreadsheet of pros and cons, giving all the galleries’ artists a score of 1-5 based on quality, quantity of solo shows, number of years since graduation and frequency of biennale participation, then averages the scores and plots them on a useful line graph, colour-coding to highlight the discrepancies.
Flook however, well, he’s been seen with a dog-eared list, and one of these.

Roll Up, Roll Up!

There we were innocently flicking through the jobs pages of Construction News when we were alerted to the splendid opportunity to tender for the running of that major visitor attraction, Anish Kapoor’s ‘AcceleratorMittal Orb’:

Fancy running the ticket booth, security guards, gift shop and earphones with increasingly paranoid-sounding tabla music to accompany you on that ascent up the tower? We certainly do! We want a lovely gift-shop that will sell mini AcceleratorMittal Orbs for a tenner and those weird limited edition splodge prints that Kapoor churned out a few years ago for twenty quid a pop. We also want ‘Action Man Anish’ figures wearing a cape and disappearing into his orb and also a profound experience of desolation and emptiness available for thirty quid. We also plan to stock t-shirts with amusing slogans like “Fuck off Gormley I WON” and “Who’s Sari Now Antony?” (both available only in extra large sizes for 3 quid each).

Not Rob Pruitt’s Art Awards

You may or may not have noticed that Rob Pruitt’s annual vanity ‘parody (honestly it’s a parody, please believe us! It’s KNOWING)’ Art Awards have taken place again, and it’s been a while since we been accused of being bitter/hypocritical/idiotic/bastards, so it’s also time for ours.
We’ll give you a couple of days to email or comment in to these finely crafted subjects – remember it’s cathedralofshit@ymail.com – and we won’t divulge any identities. Promise.

Your nominations, please.

The Bill Viola Worst Artist Award 2011

Award for the Most Irrelevant Hans Ulrich Obrist Project

Award for the Worst Collaboration

Award for the Most Tedious Website

The “They Got HOW MUCH?” Award for the Least Deserving of Revenue Funding

The “Ooooh, Poor Show Old Bean” Award for the Worst Gallery

Award for the Best Culture Minister

Heinz Beans Award for the Best Blog

Most Desperate Austerity Measure Award

The Non Event of the Year Award

The “Erm, This Is Embarrassing, I’ve Never Actually Been There” Gallery Award

The International Award for the Most Pointless Human Being.

We look forward to your numerous and swift responses.
CoS.