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September 15, 2017 – Review
“The Space of Dreams”
Ingo Niermann
Earlier this summer, after a public talk between Elena Sorokina and my wife, Chus Martínez, the three of us were invited by Eduard Mayoral of Galeria Mayoral to dinner. We hadn’t yet reached dessert when Eduard asked us what to make of Salvador Dalí. They were about to open a group exhibition, “The Space of Dreams,” curated by poet Vicenç Altaió, that would include Dalí’s work. Last year the gallery had also exhibited a series of six of Dalí’s fashion sketches from 1965, with elegantly absurd designs for beachwear and evening robes. These drawings were still for sale for 100,000 euro each.
Apart from his major paintings, the market for Dalí remains murky. Not only did he flood the market by signing all and everything, his historical importance is also in question. When I interviewed Boris Groys in 2010, he used Dalí as a perfect example of an artist who didn’t manage to appeal to both “the mass public and the informed part of the audience.” “Dalí overdid it, lapsed too far into poor taste and did not stand in any central tradition.”
The typical counter-example of someone catering to the art elite and the masses equally (who Groys also mentioned) is …