I always feel existential when I finish bodies of work and I’m in the pitching phase. Not only looking forward to making new work, but the angst of showing it to art dealers and gallerists. It’s exciting to be on ArtNet and work with Martha Takayama. I’ve also dropped off packets around town. I’m waiting. Hoping for a call. I really don’t know what I’m waiting for. I know I want some sort of gallery with some sort of sales record. I don’t just want to put up the photos on a white wall and find out later that nothing at the gallery has ever sold, or that the gallery doesn’t have any collector base.

Friends keep on reminding me that I shouldn’t be so focused on the business of art. I should just make the work. Yet I’ve constantly found myself in a place, where I can’t make the work, because I haven’t focused on the business.

Art is commodity. Now more then ever. I don’t even think anyone buys anything because they like it anymore. I feel like art just goes in drawers or hermetically sealed warehouses or in some magical vault somewhere after it’s been purchased from a jpg, does a collector even look at the work anymore or just listen to their blond hair, doe eyed consultant. This will be the year of Koons as New York Magazine points out. With two gallery shows and a massive retrospective. He was a Wall Street guy turned artist. He bought up old masters so he could study them and merge himself into the history of art. Almost like he’s afraid of being passed up by it. Creating plaster monuments that will, maybe – stand the test of time. I don’t think art should always have meaning. Or stand for something. It should be pretty. But I do think the artist should actually make the art. Koons always feels like an art director. From having someone else shape his balloons to a team running the CAT scan.

Yes, the eye is important. But sometimes I feel sidelined because I actually believe I should make the work. That I have to use my gumption to build and craft it – that I hit the very limitations of my reality and have to push them forward. Studios have always existed and even the old masters hated painting hands. Yet I feel like they never grew to employee hundreds of people, who all made the work. Then plugged it into the consumer behemoth.

I’m almost obsessed with being on ArtSpace and have not figured out how to open that door. Surfing it’s cyberwalls – I’m not only shocked by the breath of the art world, but how much they sell.

Above I took two of the most enduring images in art, a skull and fruit, mixed them up and snapped with my iPhone. Converted them in photoshop, added a filter. It took me half an hour max – while I was thinking of other things. I’m not in love with it. But it’s fine. It looks just the same as a ton of other stuff I’ve seen, there’s nothing new, it’s safe. It’s art. It’s easy to understand. So is some of the stuff I see in galleries. Up on white walls. Some of it took moments to create, with hardly a thought. Yet the artist statement feels enduring.

I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. Because it’s not that interesting, the art I see, constantly, or am I so simply full of myself, thinking I can make something good. Someone posted deer beds on my wall ….. really, dear beds. Patches of grass in the middle of nowhere. That once had deer in them, this is art … I’m a little upset sometimes. At what passed for art. It seems like the consumer is just being conned. That deals get made in smoky rooms and the art just passes from one vault to another. And is only managed by the same ten people, transferring the same money to different bank accounts.

So as I struggle to find out what my next series will be about. I’m trying to figure out, what doesn’t make me cringe. What inspires me? I have to stop thinking; that some day Peggy Guggenheim will walk into my life and take me out of my drunken art stopper. Instead. Just show the work and make something that’s true to myself. That’s so much harder then being a Wall Street art director.

I loved making this picture of Fern Mallis and Vera Wang at the 92Y for Nike Communication’s client Martini and Rossi.

I feel like the many months of hard work, learning to connect with photo editors has finally paid off !!! Super excited by my Nylon page.

My friend Angelina Lippert on the the dance floor at GLAAD.

on the street

Very excited to have a few pages in today’s Daily.

The Butter London Fall Collection

So excited to have my name on the official Gant by Michael Bastian press release.