Cindy Sherman "Untitled Film Stills" (incomplete) set sells...

[Darin Boville]

...for $6.7 million at today's auction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/arts/design/cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills-go-to-auction-.html

Apparently these were the duplicates from the owners collection. Only one bidder.

--Darin

[Alan Gales]

That's some expensive selfies there!

[William Whitaker]

My auctions with only one bidder usually close a bit less than that.

[Drew Wiley]

Guess some people have nothing better to do with their time or money. Might as well be collecting designer corn husks as far as I'm concerned.

[Michael Graves]

Guess some people have nothing better to do with their time or money. Might as well be collecting designer corn husks as far as I'm concerned.

I'd rather have the corn husks.

[Ari]

I didn't know Cindy's mom was so rich.

[Drew Wiley]

Hmmm..... If want to see some neurotic gal biting her fingernails, do I go to a museum or just watch reruns of Oprah and Dr Phil?

[Tin Can]

how many editions?

[jp]

i was in a workshop, the Tillman/Russ soft focus one, and the class was half women or close enough.. One meal the conversation turned to Cindy Sherman. Men/Women were like oil and water on their respective general opinions of her and her work.

[richardman]

... the conversation turned to Cindy Sherman. Men/Women were like oil and water on their respective general opinions of her and her work.

Which one is which?

[jcoldslabs]

I'm not a fan of all of her work, but I've always found the Untitled Film Stills compelling in both concept and execution.

Jonathan

[Tin Can]

I'm not a fan of all of her work, but I've always found the Untitled Film Stills compelling in both concept and execution.

Jonathan

I agree. There are only a few of Cindy Sherman's images I really like. She is very good at what she does, she is influential and every art student knows her. I prefer Cathy Opie and I even bought her deck of cards series. I never buy the art, so that says something. It was affordable and I can always play cards. But I don't play cards. Looking at the deck right now. I sincerely doubt it will ever be worth more than any other deck of cards.

I saw both at Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

If we are talking about image manipulation, I prefer Robert Irwin's work. Is it photography? Most likely not, but it's real close. Studies in light.

[DrTang]

I like her stuff..in a kind of non 6.7 million dollar way

it's conceptual..it's well executed..

I might even stick one or two on my wall if I could pick one up for like 20 bucks


but I never got the BIG OL WHO-HA she got for doing those

they were nice..but.. really?

[Drew Wiley]

... kinda like the subject of shoes.

[paulr]

She's exerted so much influence on her contemporaries and followers that there isn't much more to say. You can either acknowledge her importance or be a revisionist. Opining about liking or disliking her work isn't very interesting. It's like saying yay or boo to a historical event.

[Drew Wiley]

"Important" today might equate with "who???" tomorrow. Her "contemporaries" won't be around for long, and the next generation might only be interested in Drone Art, until that itself gets boring after two years. So what's so "historical" about any of this? Parakeets can be influenced too, but it doesn't mean they understand a word they are repeating. Just another corny pop art fad that should enjoy the sunlight until its is inevitably forgotten by another generation. And it will be. Time is the ultimate revisionist. Cindy is certainly no Vermeer or Van Gogh. People collect all kinds of things: baseball cards, barbed wire, various beer cans. It's their money. But you can't melt all these things down to get troy ounce gold value or anything like that. So what gives my opinion any less credibility than a bunch or NYC curators in their stuffy back rooms? If my eyes regard something as corny, that's good enough for me. You're welcome to your own opinion. But I simply don't buy the argument that if four thousand green-haired, tatooed, nose-ringed art school students are all chattering on the same wavelenths, they understand what they are saying. Heck, they even look like parakeets!

[paulr]

Important means she's had a significant impact on the history of the medium. She more or less created a genre. You don't get to call something a fad when it continues after 40 years.

Marcel DuChamp is also no Van Gogh, but we're feeling his influence very strongly a century later. Like him or not, it doesn't matter. Insulting whole classes of people likewise doesn't support your point.

[Drew Wiley]

Forty years ain't very long in the overall scheme of things. I'll agree that in one sense the bigger the collective footprint in terms of public exposure, the more
conversation validity there might be in an art class, for instance. But let's also remember that that entire generation of painters and artists was basically poking
their thumb in the eye of the previous haute art regime, just as DuChamp was doing to his immediate predecessors. And from the very first time I ever stood in
front of a set of Cindy prints, I felt the insulted by the mere fact of this kind of visual mediocrity being shoved into my face on a museum wall. So I feel perfectly comfortable making my own very minor contribution, in return, to the long-recognized fine art of insulting the extant regime. She poked her thumb in my eye first!

[paulr]

40 years is a long time in art. How many movements since 1800 lasted much longer than that? Impressionism, pictorialism, Cubism and all the early-modern European isms ... they fizzled faster than that.

As far as assaulting your tastes, I think that would be the minimal requirement for any work I'd take seriously. There are things I don't like about Sherman's work, but I give it a thumbs-up for poking conservative cranks in the eye.

[Darin Boville]

She's exerted so much influence on her contemporaries and followers that there isn't much more to say. You can either acknowledge her importance or be a revisionist. Opining about liking or disliking her work isn't very interesting. It's like saying yay or boo to a historical event.

I suspect you are mostly talking here about the film stills and the color work just after. Of course, Sherman is still producing work and recently had a big show in San Francisco. At the big show in NYC a year or so ago top critics called praised her work--including her new work--as among the best stuff in all of art.

So she's not quite a historical event yet... :)

--Darin

[paulr]

I suspect you are mostly talking here about the film stills and the color work just after. Of course, Sherman is still producing work and recently had a big show in San Francisco. At the big show in NYC a year or so ago top critics called praised her work--including her new work--as among the best stuff in all of art.

So she's not quite a historical event yet... :)

--Darin

Ha! I don't doubt it. No intent to toss her into the historical dustbin. I'm just not familiar with her newer work (or with what people have said about it) so I haven't commented on that.

[Drew Wiley]

Maybe we have different expectations. If some image of hers would ever appeal to me, it would have to be compellingly printed in some manner to reinforce its
message. I'll be the first person to admit that I admire finely done prints. And a generic lab C-print (starting to conspicuously fade well before 40 years) hardly impresses me as something to be coveted for obscene sums of money. Yeah, chromogenic prints are improving; and in this case we're talking about a few black and whites. But guess I'll never dovetail with the current generation's mantra that "just the image counts, not the print". That's about like trying to play Purple Haze with a kazoo; or if I was Fred Picker, of trying to play Beethoven with a gut bucket. The web as the primary means of visual communication these days has only made things worse. A "steak" served via the skill level of Jack in the Box is still just a greasy fat-kid burger in my opinion. No, not every famous painter was good with a brush. But I don't have to admire every famous painter either. But spent money and sheer popularity sometimes only prove public stupidity. Just look at how much money methheads spend. Maybe a bit more disgusting than conspicuous consumption; but either way I call it waste.

[Drew Wiley]

Figgers.... SF ... our own little bit of NYC mentality. There's a reason I rarely cross that bridge any more.

[paulr]

Maybe we have different expectations.

Yeah, on a very fundamental level. You're still talking what does/doesn't appeal to you. I don't care what appeals to you. I'm not talking about what appeals to me, either, if you happen to have missed that.

I'm not a big fan of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, either, for whatever that might be worth, but I don't question that it had a big effect on what came after.

[Drew Wiley]

OK. That's logical, and I agree in principle. But I'd hardly term Cindy Sherman an artistic Pearl Harbor. Maybe Disco music was, for example, a few decades ago; but it has about as big a following as the average earthworm today. Just a fad, all things considered, worthy of a few Brownie points for creativity, but not worth
much in the long haul.