Smithsonian.com

What caught my attention about Yeondoo Jung’s work was the color. Saturated and rich, the images capture high-octane hues that, coupled with the stylized appearance of the photos, make for surreal viewing. But the effects are honestly achieved—digitized retouches and glossy alterations hold no allure for the artist. With an approach that shows how truth can be guised as a lie and vice versa, Jung has earned a reputation for visually exploring fabrication, amplification, could be and never was.

As a mid-career Korean photographer and filmmaker, Jung delves into altered realities or dreams made real. His 2004 series, Bewitched, gave individuals whom the artist came across in everyday situations—a waitress, a student, an art collector—the chance to realize their innermost dreams, at least for the time it took to click a camera shutter. Dreams ran the gamut from a trip to the South Pole, to becoming a hotshot chef, to teaching art education in war-torn Afghanistan, and Jung staged them all. The photos document impermanent incidents that are simultaneously false and true.

Jung’s latest photographic series, Locations, contains photos so over-the-top that at first the viewer looks for a hidden meaning, only to realize that nothing is disguised or simulated. All is as it, incredibly, appears. Contrived, brilliant and a dynamic mix of lie and truth, these works attest to the skill and unusual sensibility of an artist who is a storyteller most of all.

(Image: Yeondoo Jung (b. 1969). Location #8, 2006. C-print, 48 x 62 3/5 inches, 122 x 159 cm. Edition of 5. Courtesy Tina Kim Gallery, New York.)

This week brought the passing of Robert Rauschenberg, and with it the customary obituaries. Some are obligatory chronological inventories of milestones, neatly encapsulated with birth and death date bookends. Most are kind and reverent, hailing Rauschenberg’s genius, describing an important work or two, and drawing a line in the family tree of art movements to help us understand his place in the lineage. (You can read pieces in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post). The week also saw a record-setting $14 million sale of Rauschenberg’s Overdrive by Sotheby’s.

Amidst the flow of misty tributes are a couple of dissenting voices: Jack Shafer at Slate, and Jed Pearl at The New Republic. Both take on the less popular task of speaking prickly truth about the dead and questioning the significance and quality of the artist’s work.

As I read through the reports, tributes and criticisms this week, what came through for me was Rauschenberg’s work ethic. He made art through fame, unpopularity, age, and the infirmity of a stroke. He showed up, even in a wheelchair. Good art or bad, hits or misses, he just kept making art.

It’s hard to know which version of Rauschenberg’s story will persist through time–the one that plants him firmly in the history books as a Dadaist innovator, or the one that elevates his failings as larger than his accomplishments. Whichever version persists, I hope that it includes the fact that he made art right up until he died. This, I think, is the essence of an artist.

(Photo: Reservoir, Robert Rauschenberg, 1961. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum)

A few weeks ago, I spoke with an art collector who is more than comfortable buying works (in his case, photographs) via the Internet without seeing the prints in person. For many collectors, this is the norm, especially if thousands of miles separate the work from the buyer. The owner merely sends a jpg, the collector takes a look, and the sale is a matter of a few exchanged emails.

This kind of hands-off sale makes sense if you know the seller; the quality of the image; and have a good deal of background knowledge in terms of the artist and the provenance of the work. But that’s not always enough in the cyberspace art world. You also need a bit of art counterfeiting savvy because the presence of fake works sold online has skyrocketed in the past several years.

In 2004, the FBI started a division dedicated to art crimes, and one of the trends they have witnessed since then is the wholesale increase in art fraud, up as much as 300 percent. The latest indication of this came in March, when an FBI inquiry led to the prosecution of an international counterfeit ring that had pocketed over $5 million by selling fake prints—works supposedly by Chagall, Miro, Warhol and Picasso—on eBay.

Most vulnerable are art prints, which are perhaps the easiest works to counterfeit, especially with the use of modern technology like laser printers and scanners. There’s no surefire way to avoid getting swindled by a seller bent on deceit, but buyers can protect themselves by verifying the identity of a seller or source of a work, and walking away if a deal seems too good to be true.

If you used Google to research anything over the last couple of days, you may have noticed that the icon above the search bar has been replaced with a sculpture of multi-colored chrome tulips. Artist Jeff Koons crafted the work specifically for the search engine as part of a larger effort to bring homepage personalization to an artistic level.

iGoogle Artists, as the collaborative project is called, offers a wide range of themes created by artists for users who want to update their internet pages with a bit of high art. It is as easy as clicking on the suite of your choice, and the chosen design will decorate your Google taskbar until you change or deactivate it.

An international group, over 70 artists from 17 countries and six continents, has been amassed. It is an interdisciplinary group as well. Designs from visual artists like Koons, Mario Toral and Dale Chihuly are available, as are those from cartoonist Robert Mankoff and Korean illustrator, Snowcat. The choreographer and opera director Mark Morris is represented, as is architect Michale Graves. Fashion designers Marc Ecko, Fátima Lopes and Dolce & Gabbana have also participated. Musicians such as Coldplay and the Beastie Boys have submitted works as well.

Gregor Schneider works in peculiar ways. A German sculptor and installation artist, he came on the scene in the mid-1980s for spending almost a decade dismantling, recreating and exhibiting, down to the slightest detail, the rooms in his home. The mere reconstruction is a fairly prosaic exercise, but the attentive focus on recapturing every last cracked ceiling tile, stained carpet or water stain, comes off as a perverse compulsion and taints the viewer’s visit with unease; very likely the artist’s intention.

In a similar response to architecture, Schneider used white or “clean” torture (interrogation tactics that leave no physical mark on victims) and images of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as inspiration for building interrogation rooms or holding cells, and inserting these environments into a museum context.

The artist is also known for “Cube Venice,” his contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale in the form of a 50-ft.-sq. scaffolding, draped in black and erected in the middle of touristy San Marco square—a play on the Ka’aba in Mecca.

Schneider’s sculptures also evoke psychological anxiety. “Mann mit Schwanz” (Man with Cock) (2004) is a prime example. The top half of a plaster cast of a man’s body is swathed in a black trash bag, obscuring identity or expression. The lower half of the body is dressed in sweat pants and fitted with an erection. Perversion and death are inextricably intertwined, as the viewer is not sure if this is a disturbing murder scene or sexual tableau.

All that being said, it is still startling to hear that most recently Schneider announced his plans for a performance piece that includes a person dying or the body of someone who is recently deceased. He aims “to show the beauty of death” as quoted in The Art Newspaper. Schneider has teamed up with a physician who is apparently willing to help him find volunteers who think art is worth dying for.