Herman Rosse, Untitled, circa 1930, watercolor on board, 11 x 13.5 inches, gilded oval frame I bought this trompe l'oeil watercolor on masonite the other day at the Alemay Flea market. The artist is Herman Rosse (1887-1965), a dutch-born painter, who worked in America for much of his life. He's not a household name, but more about him in a minute. The painting appears to date from the 1930s. It's in the trompe l'oeil tradition, which in Holland goes back to Vermeer; in America, the technical prowess to support the style doesn't appear until the second half of the 19th... Continue reading

The line dividing professional artists from their self-taught counterparts is heavily policed by curators, critics and the professional artists themselves. Few collectors have the nerve to cross it. Most remain on one side or the other as though it were the 38th parallel. Like a child driven to test boundaries, I still get a thrill by mixing the two worlds, dealing in them both. So when I sauntered into my favorite San Francisco thrift store recently, and glimpsed the wrongness of outsider activity peeking out from plastic bins on the floor, I knew I was in for an adventure tailor-made... Continue reading

Like many things done at marathon length, a trip to the flea market can turn into an fever pitch death march, a flaneur's heroic odyssey amidst a sea of curiosities, human and object, in which you're blown about by your interests and hunches, until just getting back to your car with your mind intact, if not some captured trophy, seems a triumph. During six hours under the hot sun at the once-monthly Alameda Flea Market last week, I carted off a succession of things, whose warped eccentricities fun-house mirrored the event's twisted dreaminess. I got there early, and before light... Continue reading

Before I ever went to Hawaii I learned about it at the flea market through the incredibly loud shirts and Polynesian-style menus people brought home from their vacations. I envisioned the archipelago as one interminable Elvis film with a giant Tiki bar on the beach selling hula-dancer lamps and the other tchotchkes of colonialism to fat pink tourists. Then after a few years of living in California, I began visiting the islands myself: first Maui, then Kauai, and finally the Big Island. I remember sitting on the beach in Maui where the trade winds would role in at 3pm everyday... Continue reading

I’m a Disney hater. I admit it. I’m one of those people that takes pleasure in the ridicule and abuse of the magic kingdom. I find the parks sterile and controlling, and the uplifting movies deeply false and saccharine. The whole Disney project, which grew from the brain of a penny pinching, union busting control freak, is a tidy, retro spinster’s fantasy that I find alien and life-sapping. It reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” another ridiculous, upbeat Hollywood vision drenched in lies, and designed to hide shadowy prejudices and purposes. When you add in Disney’s lopsided influence... Continue reading

There are precious few ways to improve an Eames 670 rosewood lounge chair, especially when your cherished example is a down-filled, early production model. But there are even fewer chances for a heterosexual man slightly insecure in his masculinity to publicly buy a vintage pillow to decorate his house. I managed to do both this morning with the purchase of a 1981 trompe l'oeil paint tube pillow manufactured in Japan by a firm called Petit Loup, Co., Ltd. I hadn't put the pillow and the chair together when I was examining the thing at the flea market. Mercifully my mind... Continue reading

Marguerite Blasingame, undated, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches Because I gravitate to obnoxious, political, bad boy art, I would normally not pursue Marguerite Blasingame's gloomy, child-like, pacific surrealism. But that's why I love the flea market. It's like a chat roulette for objects. It gleefully imposes on my intellectual and aesthetic patterns it's own. So now I am the owner of this funereal Hawaiian flatland. Is it dusk or is it dawn? The artist died very young. Could it be her prophetic fear of the impending darkness? Or could it be the nuclear dawn trying to crack the... Continue reading

In my gallery practice I am hyper-conscious of the so-called death of the avant garde and its repressed desublimation. That pretentiously describes a situation in which we no longer rage against the machine but sell each other artifacts made by people who once raged against the machine as a way of staying slightly miffed at the machine or accoutred for a battle with the machine that we never intend to fight. I am both a victim and a perpetuator of this practice, as is most everyone in the art world, and my pennance is to program shows in which the... Continue reading

Rarely do the flea market gods dangle success with such promise, only to yank it away, as they did to me one recent weekend at Alemany. By not counting my chickens, I've generally innoculated myself against the emotional highs and lows that haunt the intrepid investigator who seeks his fortune among the soiled piles and broken dreams of this recycled, second-hand world. This time, unfortunately, I broke my own rule. The egg in question is a white glazed ceramic pitcher or tea pot designed around 1937 by Paul Schreckengost for the Gem Clay Forming Company in Cleveland. Paul Schreckengost is... Continue reading

There are so few accessories that a man can get away with without seeming affected, and an umbrella is one of the really theatrical ones. I find umbrellas to be strange, spidery, web-like things. Especially the old-fashioned kinds with pointy noses and u-shaped handles. They are artifacts from the past, and yet we still use them; spiky phallic vectors when closed, vaginal demi-spheres of protection when they blossom. No wonder the surrealists found them useful in conveying the uncanny. Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, 1958, 61 x 50 cm, private collection. I always feel better defended when I go out with... Continue reading

 Junior used to enjoy the flea market. But he's eight now, and if I request his presence he sticks his hand out and demands $20. Usually I just let him sleep in. Not because his price is too steep—what's 20 bucks for a day of surly, pre-teen silence punctuated by beginner's sarcasm and out-of-the-blue references to Sponge Bob Square Pants—but monitoring a small child amongst an unpredictable rabble is distracting. Flea market people are mostly a joy to be around but they can occasionally bite, and I realized with 10 percent of my brain focused on junior, I was... Continue reading

I've always wanted to say that. I have found lots of amazing things at the flea market over the years: Warhol prints, Edward Weston photos, innumerable pieces of Charles Eames furniture. But there is nothing quite like speaking the words, I found a Picasso at the flea market for $30. It has an incantatory quality that make one's eyes enlarge with dreams of treasure. Mine is not even a great Picasso. Just a 1927 etching from Chef's D'oeuvre Inconnu, edition 99. But a Picasso nonetheless. I like the image of the shirtless older artist painting the young bohemian model but... Continue reading

I bought this anonymous painting of black youth playing dice from the '70s at the Alemany Flea Market the other day. It's a bit naive but undeniably entertaining, probably done after a snap shot taken by the artist, and discovered by an estate liquidator in the East Bay. My intuition tells me it was painted by a black artist. I'm sure any attempt to rationalize that will make me sound racist. So I'll just say it looks more like other paintings I know by black people than those I know by white people, and that there is a high level... Continue reading

For years, my wife mocked me for not seeing lost objects that were directly in my field of vision. Then her friend told her that, as hunters, men evolved to see moving targets not stationary ones. The mockery only diminished to a thinly-veiled exasperation, but I finally had an explanation for why I miss small, hidden or hard to see things at the flea market. For years I blamed it on laziness and a mild case of mysophobia, which kept me from getting too close to the dirty boxes with the hidden jewels. Now I realize I'm looking for things... Continue reading

People in charge of art spaces are more and more reluctant to embody the elitism that historically has been at the core of their mission. Unlike their predecessors who reveled in materializing the sign of class and cultural dominance through a church-like grandeur, today's curators try to democratize the space with programming that focuses more on the experience than the object. It's as though they are saying, it's not about us, it's about you! The result of these experiments is often a stilted facsimile of social interaction in which you're not sure if you're being directed in a performance or... Continue reading

Julian Meyers, the art historian, had a wicked little dialectic going in Riot Show, a discussion he hosted last week at SFMOMA, about his archive of music performances disrupted by rebellious crowds. Myers envenomed the room by juxtaposing archival scenes of audiences rioting against the passivity of a live audience watching scenes of audiences rioting. People could be seen nervously scouting each other, sensing their own submissiveness, as Myers played audio of an attack on John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) during a 1980s performance of Public Image, Ltd. Myers even toyed with the energy, goading the crowd at times to... Continue reading

There were two good story lines in the Fall sales and both involved Phillips, the perennial also-ran of the big three major auction houses, and the one that usually supplies the bumpiest ride. First, the smudgy, inky early Warhol that sold for some $70 odd million at the contemporary evening sale organized by Phillipe Segalot. According to news reports, Segalot procured the painting from the Mugrabi family, one of the largest—if not the largest—holders of art by Warhol. He put it up for auction, then declared that it was bought way over the high estimate by one of his very... Continue reading

This will tell you what it's like to be on the east side of San Francisco in August. Continue reading

I bought an unusually homely painting, even for me, at the Alemany Flea Market recently. It’s a drab WWII scene of amphibias transports, ferrying troops to the beach on D-Day, as artillery shells explode around them. The men’s magazine genre is generally not my thing unless it features Nazi midgets and bare-breasted amazons. But I got sold on the possibility that, given the age of the board and the artist’s point of view—which we would now describe as embedded—the picture could have been done by someone who was actually there. Even so it was half way to the graveyard, which... Continue reading

The flea market is a hyperactive space filled with underachieving entrepreneurs whose moral world is painted in subtle shades of gray. It’s a graveyard of unloved and cast-off things that are often broken, fake or stolen. A hard place to make a buck but an easy place to piss one away. I know this, having been burned many times. But the dream of a big score dies hard. I still have to give myself a pep talk on self-discipline before I enter its gates if I don’t want to get in trouble.This I neglected to do last Sunday and predictably... Continue reading

Entry, SF Fine Art Fair Of the twin art fairs at Fort Mason last week I vastly preferred the San Francisco Art Institute MFA show to the San Francisco Fine Art Fair. The MFA show was less predictable and in some ways better curated. There were no lines to the food and drink at the opening; the art fair was a madhouse by contrast. And the one-artist per booth rule at SFAI made the whole thing more digestible than the flea market/salon vibe that accrued next door. Everyone I talked to said the art fair, which debuted this year despite... Continue reading

I guess TV wasn’t as good in the '60s and '70s as it is now so when people got stoned they had to do something. In Northern California, at least, they sometimes got off the couch and customized their furniture.... with hallucinatory paintings. These are usually hippie abstractions of some kind depicting the cosmic dawn of a new day that was to darken shortly after on us nihilistic children of the late 70s. If these paintings were made to be wall art I would probably sort of hate them. But somehow the modesty of the furniture medium allows for their... Continue reading

These images fell into my lap recently at the Alemany Flea Market. The author is a recently deceased photographer named Emily Heron Bour, who experimented with abstract and street photography in the 1950s when she lived on Telegraph Hill, then a local art center. Heron Bour graduated Smith College in the '40s, worked with art historian Walter Hovey, then wised up and went into education. She never really had an art career. The hundred or so photos, maybe 25 of which are abstract, left in my capable hands by a twist of the fates may be all that’s left. Given... Continue reading

The dialogue in Harrell Fletcher’s work between kumbaya campfire spirit and its descent into bathic self parody defines for me what social practice art should be. A rollicking journey between heartfelt sincerity and knowing parody. If only radio call-in shows functioned like that the world would be a better place. You would think because Fletcher often works with non-artists that his projects would be unpredictable, chaotic. That’s why you introduce the outside world into the art world—to shake things up. But somehow he manages to spoon off the same oleaginous delicacy regardless of who goes in the pot. I guess... Continue reading