Colin Davidson and the art of looking harder - Financial Times

Earlier this month, the real estate company 320 E 82nd Owner, LLC filed a petition seeking to compel socialite art collector Libbie Mugrabi and the auction house Phillips to turn over an untitled 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting in the latter’s possession in order to satisfy a $2.3 million judgment. New York County Supreme Court judge Linda M. Capitti pushed the petition forward last week, approving an order on October 14 preventing the sale or transfer of the Basquiat and compelling Mugrabi and Phillips to appear in court on November 17 to show cause for why the Basquiat—as well as Mugrabi’s 100 percent membership interest in Moo Moo Enterprises, Inc., which holds the work—should not be turned over to satisfy the debt. Mugrabi has yet to respond to the petition or the judge’s order.

When a major museum receives apainting on loan from a private owner, the first step is documentation: photography, examination, report-writing. But it’s surprisingly rare for collectors to do the same with their new acquisitions. Skeptics might dismiss the effort and expense of institutional loan protocols as a bureaucratic performance, done more to appease the insurance company and the lender than to benefit the art. Paintings aren’t plants, after all—why behave as if they’ll suddenly wilt? But (for better or worse) paintings have many more moving parts than the casual observer might suspect, and it’s easy to underestimate their capacity for change. What is paint, anyway? What might look like a simple dab of dark red can actually comprise, on the molecular level, thousands of particles of metals and stones, blended with extracts from plants, insects, and animals, all suspended together in the delicate equilibrium of the paint film. It’s actually hard to say whether a painting counts as flora, fauna, or mineral. If an artist mounted vines and beetles and chunks of iron to a wall, this would be considered a mixed-media sculpture.

Kiran Leonard presses the tips of his fingers together and looks at me solemnly across the table. “I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job,” he says, “But I’m trying really, really hard not to swear.”A decade ago, he explains, he was interviewed by the Guardian, got too drunk, and “swore all the way through the interview”. When the piece came out, his grandfather was thrilled. “But he couldn’t show any of his friends because I just sounded really aggressive,” he tells me sheepishly. It’s true that, the last time Leonard had a profile in this paper, he sounded a lot like a twentysomething trying hard to shed the preciousness of his former status as a teenage wunderkind. Hailed as a prodigy at age 16, upon the release of baroque, bonkers 2012 debut Bowler Hat Soup, a lot of Leonard’s early press plays up his age in a way that now reads as embarrassingly trite. “I think, unconsciously, I was probably quite defensive about how I was written about,” he says.

Name: Devil Woman. Age: 50. Popularity: Never bigger. Devil Woman, the song by Sir Cliff Richard? That’s right, his most famous song. Well now, that’s hardly fair. Cliff has been an icon since the birth of popular music. Yes, that’s true. His 68-year-old song Move It was potentially the first British rock’n’roll record. He’s had so many No 1s, too. True. Living Doll in the 50s, Summer Holiday and The Young Ones in the 60s, We Don’t Talk Any More in the 70s, Mistletoe and Wine in the 80s, The Millennium Prayer in the 90s. And what number did Devil Woman get to? No 9. So it’s far from his most famous song, then? I rebut this. In terms of pure cultural cut-through, Devil Woman represents the pinnacle of Cliff Richard’s career. Cultural cut-through how? The song formed the centrepiece of the video game trailer Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, which has gained 32m views on YouTube since it launched last month. Oh wow. What footage did it soundtrack? Variously: scuba diving, basketball, kayaking, stripping, VR pornography, kidnapping and armed robbery. And how does the famously Christian Cliff feel about his song being used for such depravity?