It’s been a tumultuous second half of the year for most of us. As the World’s economy collapsed in the Autumn initial signs that the art market may remain protected soon evaporated as the recession inevitably took it’s toll and sales for high-end contemporary art fell from their lofty peaks.

Though this has left it tough going financially for many involved in the art world, particularly the smaller galleries and Fair’s (though certainly touching the largest institutions as well evidenced by the job losses at White Cube for example), there is the sense that this was a correction that needed to happen and one that may just breath some vitality back into the scene.

In many ways 2009 therefore promises to be an extremely exciting one. Art and money have always had a curious relationship and in recent years money has seemed to take control. As the money evaporates the art will remain and freed from the financial carrot that has been dangling so temptingly for the last few years we may start seeing some really interesting work being made in the coming year.

There are a few varied predictions about what to expect from 2009 put together by Tom at Spoonfed here.

As for murmurART it has been a really exciting few months. The project is now underway and there is lots more to come: We have an exciting show lining up nicely for the Spring which you will hear more of in the New Year; the magazine is starting to take shape; and we have a host of new exciting young artist who we will soon be bringing to your eyes.

We’re off for Christmas but will be back in early January ready to take on what promises to be a really exciting year where the art world should lead the way in reaction to these difficult times.

Happy Christmas and a happy New Year

WGC

Three By Three is an exhibition held in Yinka Shonibare’s new space at Sunbury House, 1 Andrews Road, London. Utillsing an old office space just off Broadway Market as a temporary gallery until it is redeveloped, presumably sometime in the near future, the show managed to embrace the freedom for expression that the building offered. The concept for the space is that each month until its eventual development three selectors will each choose three artists to show in it.

The contrast between the cold and uninviting architecture and the engaging art and jovial atmosphere of the opening was a great success. Recently there has been a most welcome move away from the ‘white wall’ exhibition. This year for example saw the music and arts festival ‘Concrete and Glass’ which used several spaces in exciting and interesting ways. With so many dormant commercial spaces scattered about the city it is an exciting prospect and i expect to see a lot more shows like ‘Three By Three’ cropping up over the course of 2009. Let’s hope so.

What it is that excited me about this particular evening of art was the way it felt so open; essentially without boundaries. I found myself playing scrabble while being bathed in the howls of someone singing karaoke, it was like a Christmas office party gone way, way wrong and plenty surreal. Wonderful fun and a truly most welcome and refreshing experience to have at an art opening.

There will be more of these shows to come and I seriously recommend attending them since they are really trying to push emerging and exciting art. The selectors for this exhibition are Ruth Beale, Maria Marshall and JJ Charlesworth. The artists they chose to exhibit are Amy Feneck, Aurelien Froment, Neil Harvey, Brigida Mendes, Simon Perrotin, Michael Pinsky, Tim Roberts, Karen Russo and Bjorn Veno.

The exhibition will open on Saturdays 11am-6pm and Sundays 12pm-6pm until the 18 January 2009, excluding the 27th and 28th December.

Another good documentary to see over Christmas, when for galleries all is calm, all is closed: ‘Gonzo: The life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’ has been well hyped, almost as well as the journalistic style itself, but is well worth a look. Director Alex Gibney has a refreshing visual approach that weaves archive footage (both familiar and obscure), home videos, film clips and a load of talking heads.

These interviewees are drawn from broad sources and give some worthy insights. The fact that everyone from ex-Hells Angels and ex-Presidents are prepared to share both fond and fearsome memories shows that the man left his mark.

One of the most interesting things that I took from ‘Gonzo’ was Thompson’s relationship with the artist Ralph Steadman. They first collaborated on ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’, what is often seen as Thompson’s seminal work and the first piece to which the term ‘Gonzo’ was applied.

Steadman says that something happened at the Derby where ‘the evil’ started coming out through his drawings (this may have been something to do with the mescaline). Thompson also underwent a transformation; struggling to meet deadlines he started tearing out pages from his journal and sending them through to the editor raw. He later described the process as like ‘falling down a well and landing in a pool of mermaids’.

Of course Thompson went on to collaborate with Steadman on many of his major works. The now infamous Gonzo style of seamless real and surreal carries well from word to picture - few literary styles invoke such instant visual associations.

JJVO

Raconteur has produced a great section in the Times today entitled Investing in Art. Its well worth a read, not just because we are in it, but for the level of writers and interviewees they have assembled. More than anything it offers perspective positive guidance in an investment market that, like most others, is struggling for direction at the moment.

“For those approaching the art market for Profit first, the news is this,” writes Evening Standard arts correspondent Godfrey Barker, “Everyone has lost 20 per cent this autumn. This has put the highest priced areas of the market onto Himalayan summits inaccessible to climbers…

“The rest of the art market is not so pricey. Money goes far further in many other sectors and first rank paintings, artworks and objects are much more cheaply obtained.” Like any other sector it seems the bubble has burst for the over-tenacious, while the stable, knowable areas of the market, art that does not rely on speculation, has held firm.

He also highlights an interesting shift in confidence between art and money that is well-worth following in the coming year. “Art investment, despite the credit crunch, is alive and well. Art is ’safe’ and still worth having. In these grim times when banks cannot be trusted and cash is poison (interest rates are 2 per cent, inflation is 4 per cent so cash is self-destructive) people see artworks as tangible and real and they trust what they’re getting.”

“In the lower-priced solid and serious sectors of traditional collecting, buyers have no cause to stop and ask if they are paying too much,” adds James Rondell, from London dealers Simon Dickinson.

Also very interesting for collectors of emerging art is Helen Sumpter’s brilliant piece “Bright Young things” on page 14, in which she speaks to some of the sector’s biggest players such as Anita Zabludowicz (whose quote is the title) and Flora Fairbairn.

Check it all out online here.

DJE

‘The Economist’ and ‘contemporary art’ may seem worlds apart, but the magazine’s plaza provides a great venue for just that. The space has been given over to The Contemporary Art Society for over a decade now, creating the only outdoor public exhibition space in Central London with a continuous program of sculptural works; the latest being Tom Wilkinson’s ‘Light Wave’. Read more on The Economist’s contemporary art program here.

Central London on a mid-December evening will always provide two things: Baltic temperatures and gaudy Christmas decorations. St James Street had both in abundance last night, so The Economist Plaza provided welcome shelter. The space in itself is fantastic; a raised modernist platform designed by the Smithson’s in the early 60s. It is enhanced by Wilkinson’s kinetic sculpture undulating in the center, setting thousands of reflections to play across the glass and concrete.

The sculpture is a sine wave made up of 95 cut glass blades which slowly rise and fall in turn, set in motion by a tiny motor (the energy equivalent of a household bulb). This is kinetic energy and gravity in perfect equilibrium, making almost half a ton of glass and metal move effortlessly like a prehistoric ribbon-eel. Wilkinson’s interest here is in the ambiguous nature of matter, glass being the perfect paradoxical medium of a molten solid.

There is something inherently calming about ‘Light Wave’ - a clinking wind chime gone horizontal. Well worth a moment of reflection for the thousands of worker bees that stream through the Plaza every day. I would advise stopping by in the evening for the full glitter ball experience.

The exhibition will run until the 6th February, and for more on the artist go here.

JJVO

Were you one of the lucky ones to get hold of a Keith Tyson print at midday today?

Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson today gave away a free downloadable print of his work to the first 5,000 people to log onto his website after 12.00pm. An interesting idea from an artist whose work “deals with the interconnectedness of things and the interdependency of systems”.

Unfortunately The Guardian’s help in advertising this event left the server overworked as it was swamped shortly after midday, leaving many web hunters unhappy as the link failed to work and their free print never materialised… Read their coverage of the story here.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see an artist of Keith Tyson’s renown utilising the Internet as an artistic forum.

WGC

The excitement of the website launch was followed by a brief period of calm, but another storm of activity has definitely broken.

We have a couple of particularly exciting projects coming up in early 2009, one being the launch of our online magazine and the other being an exhibition showcasing some of the great talent that we represent.

Magazine design meetings are underway, drawing inspiration from our favorite blogs, websites and magazines as well as on the considerable expertise of our designers. The first magazine will be online early March, and promises to be well worth the wait.

murmurART will also be pounding the streets of east London later today in search of the right venue for our launch show, which will follow in early May.

Jerwood Photography Prize winner Martina Lindqvist has just joined mururART and will be up on the site as the new ‘artist of the week’ this coming Friday. We are hugely excited about this recent graduate from the University of Westminster. She received First Class Honours from her degree and as her award from the prestigous Jerwood Photography Prize clearly shows she is rapidly creating a stir.

Originating from Finland her work often addresses nostalgic memories of places and sights as she battles to frame them in her photographs. The series we will be exhibiting on murmurART is called ‘Ragskar Island’ and is the same one she won the Jerwood Photography prize with.

It is based upon an island that she used to spend holidays on as a child with her family. Stunning, claustrophobic and otherworldly light is a major feature in this series. What is so remarkable about the work is the way she blends both her photographs and her miniature models of the landscape together to make the final image.

The Jerwood Space is an excellent venue and one that supports emerging art passionately. Visit their site here for more details.

I went to see this brilliant animated documentary last night - a striking exploration of testimony, memory and trauma. Critical acclaim has rocketed it into the mainstream press, so you may have read a thing or two about it already…

The film opens with a pack of mad dogs tearing through city streets and overturning cafe stools. They are looking for one man; the first of director Ari Folman’s interviewees - a childhood friend who he served with in the Lebanese war. He knows the dogs are looking for only him because he killed them one night in 1982, to stop them alerting a Palestinian neighbourhood to an impending purge.

Folman himself is not hunted by memories but instead haunted by a total lack of them, and this film represents his attempts to piece events together, long since repressed by the trauma of the conflict. Treating memory as a work-in-progress rather than a carbon copy, Folman weaves frank interviews with feverish hallucinations (in one sequence a naked giantess boards a boat before swimming away with a soldier nestled in her crotch).

These fantasy interludes imbue the narrative with a surreal fiction that lies over the basic horror of the content - a distorting screen that is echoed in the vivid hand-drawn animation. It is a documentary style that anticipates the audiences long-nurtured hunger for fiction in cinema. Just as Foldman and many of his interviewees have escaped a traumatic reality by distorting their memory through fantasies, so too is the audience allowed relief through visually stunning animation and an often grim humour. This hunger sated, we join Foldman’s search for the seething underbelly of truth, constantly trying to enact the reality in our minds.

The inbuilt conflict between the real and surreal means that the Sabra and Shatila massacre comes as both inevitable and shocking. The comic book fantasy dissolves completely as hundreds of Palestinian refugees are executed whilst Israeli troops look on. As the film closes with real life news footage of the massacred Palestinians, the full force of Folman’s transformation from son of Auschwitz survivors to genocide overseer is brought home.

For more info about it look here.

JJVO

murmurART is on it’s way to the One Ton Art Show this evening in the fantastic venue that is the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall.

The East End Arts Club is a collective based in East London who, amongst other things, put on alternative art shows outside the gallery space. It’s a self-funded not-for-profit collective with any sales going directly towards the next event.

The One Ton Show exhibits the work of 100 artists, illustrators, printmakers, graphic designers and photographers. Featuring new and recognised names, artists have created work for the theme of ‘London Lyrics’.

Having had a quick breeze through the list of artists there should be some great work on display at affordable prices, with 100 original artworks / editions for £100.

As an extra bonus the East London Design Show is being held upstairs in the same venue, so double the reason to head down…

You can find out more here.

Admission is free

The Basement, Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London, EC1V 9LT

WGC