John Drury on Studio Glass's Coffin

2009 John Drury:

..."The products of factories, because of their reproducibility, were long barred from the sacred realm of unique fine art objects. Studio Glass artists, having reclaimed a factory process as a means of making sculpture, have fought to overcome this bias with an emphasis on the personal creation of their own work, arguing that their complete authorship puts it on par with painting.

What, then, to make of the February 2008 sale of the Jeff Koons fabricated glass sculpture Violet Ice (Kama Sutra) (1991) for the equivalent of nearly $2.5 million at the auction house Phillips de Pury in London? It makes the Studio Glass movement's emphasis on the importance of a lone creator seems [sic] painfully out of step with trends in the art world itself (if we can assume that early 2008 trends will continue). Not only didn't Koons personally craft the work in question, it was one of a series of three. And the irreverent subject matter--sexually explicit poses rendered in Venetian glass--made it absolutely clear that it is not the medium, but the strategy and name attatched to it, that matters most...

...The biggest names in glass have long had their work fabricated by outside sources, by generally unmentioned and often unkown others. The craftiest of these facilitators are able to springboard to lucrative careers of their own, a la Billy Morris by way of Dale Chihuly, though the vast majority will generall go unheralded (in fact Dale Chihuly has been exceptionally generous in acknowledging and documenting his teams)...

...Though it is generally known in glassmaker's circles that Pino Signoretto was the hands-on guy in the case of the Koons tabletop sculpture, it is rarely mentioned outside of the glass community...

...While teamwork allows great excesses and successes, there is a monkey-see, monkey-do tendency to run with the pack. One must allow oneself permission to take the controls, to bloom, to go beyond. As it should, technical expertise becomes cheaper and cheaper, less the reason (if indeed there ever was one) than a means to an end. Without an explicit purpose, when not in service to a larger idea, work in glass is just another work in glass. Jeff Koons takes creation back to the factory and yet shows us that with a strong conceptual base to build upon, any and all media and subject matter can be suitable to the creation of art. Driving the last nail into the coffin of categorization, we see that it is the vision, however base or uber-personal, and not the action that in the end will be valued."

Drury, John. "Factory Work: a top price at auction for a fabricated work challenges a basic premise of Studio Glass." Glass Quarterly. Spring 2009. No. 114. page 68. Photo Credit: "Ilona on top-outdoors" glass. 16 x 27 x 15 1/2 inches. Edition of 3 plus AP. 1991
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