Now, your foundation needs to be visible since this is not about you, but about the ARTS. And you always totally loved Venice. Venice, la serenissima, the only city in the world that is in itself a Gesamtkunstwerk, the only city worth your efforts except your hometown that's already stuffed, stuffed, stuffed with a Lisa Hooksey museum (that's your name), and a Lisa Hooksey wing of the local hospital, and a Lisa Hooksey conference room at the local college, and so on, and so it's Venice.
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| Venice, Grande Canale, home to the grandest art foundations |
How to move from here? A foundation has a board, and you might preside over it, or you're too busy, swamped, obligations, causes everywhere, so there's professional help being hired. People who really understand (about art).
Your's truly had been superficially in touch with some of these people and he can tell you they won't come cheap, because you need the best, the best, the best, and in our market society bestness has its price (15 years ago, the beginning salary for a beginning charity foundation person was around 100k annually in Geneva, Suisse, but perhaps they charge less in Venice). Also from memory: an international foundation is lucky if it has an efficiency quota of 20%, meaning that 80% of your money will go to the people who deserve it, ie. the best, the best, the best.
The board will meet and wonder what to do with the remaining 20%. You may or may not preside over the meeting but it doesn't matter. A part of it will got to the Lisa Hooksey Award, which is like the Nobel Price, except that it's dedicated to a new and extremely talented artist who excels, really, and has shown vision, and doesn't smoke, and is so new, new, new, and has surprised the art world a great deal, recently, totally, everybody, and doesn't beat up her wife, because that (the beating) was the reason that Norman Mailer never got the Nobel Price. And her work means a paradigm shift, except that paradigm shifts are so yesterday and revolutions are so yesterday and subversion is so yesterday, so somebody has to fill in the blanks, and that will be the artist herself, the recipient of the Lisa Hooksey Award, as noted, which will go this year to N. N. (nomen nominaturem), who happens to be a niece of the vice president of your board.
Then there's the the Lisa Hooksey Stipend. Idem.
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| The universe of unreality (click for enlargement) |
And then there's the show in Venice. The Lisa Hooksey Foundation Exhibition that will present to the world the work, work, work of an absolutely renowned artist who's totally incredible and terrific and lateral and whom every tourist needs to see. Like Damien Hirst, say, who declines politely through his publicist. Or Natascha Ungeheuer, about whose ontological status we're somewhat iffy. Or, wait, Zhong Biao, who has done this totally terrific work about visions, and art is about visions, too. Or it's another N.N. with a German name, if memory serves, who has this sense-challenging exhibition about "Solving the Problem of Measuring the Width of a Circle." You have to trust us on that one, we're not extemporizing, we just failed to take a picture and totally lost our way the next day when trying to return to the scene of the crime.
Or another German name which is on the placard for the Monument to a Monument, because, you know, reflexivity, the little sister of revolutions and paradigm shifts and subversions is back, back, back since Damien Hirst gave an interview on his own web site where he mentions reflexivity exactly 3.141592... times.
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| The Monument to a Monument |
That's it, folks, that was our first post about Venice. Apologies. Yes, you've guessed right, we visited Venice this week.
Next post here.
