RENTAL is proud to present DON’T PANIC! I’M SELLING THE COLLECTION, a group show of works drawn from the private collections of a number of leading art collectors. The exhibition features work by: Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, George Congo, Ryan McGinness, Barnaby Furnas, Marilyn Minter, Hope Atherton, Jim Shaw, Mr., John Wesley, David Salle and Ingrid Calame, among others.

Great quotes are like great paintings; the best ones are unforgettable. Clement Greenberg once said “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” Leo Steinberg said “Modern Art…is always born into anxiety.” And I must have read somewhere, someone saying that good artworks are never neutral. Art should pull you in but make you squirm.

People might call our contemporary era the Diaspora; Hirst interchangeable for Nebuchadnezzar, MOCA likened to destruction of the Temple. During the boom the chic comingled with the new and a habit formed of mistaking hipness for ingenious. However today, if you give us another shark in a tank, we won’t let it bite. If you give us a chrome balloon animal we may not play. The era of bottomless pockets, of trends, of hoarding are numbered. But in all honesty the art world needed the excitement of the market, otherwise, that world known for its pizzas, would have been utterly dull.

Collectors, who once imagined they’d enter art history by spending exorbitantly, now realize what is really important. What art is asking for is an active and critical looker. This exhibition is a collaborative curatorial display of work that collectors, at this extremely crucial moment in the art-world, have chosen to detach themselves of for multiple reasons. It is imperative to realize the multi-faceted features that are present, beginning with the context in which the works are exhibited. Another facet is the power and importance of the attenuated viewer and their patience in simply performing the labor of looking. As the great Henry Geldzahler would say, “Words can point…but they can never be the substitutes for looking at works of art.”[1]

Lastly, as we said before, this show is not a landfill; each piece is present for individual reasons. Whether it be a financial victim burdened to choose which prized work to part with, over-zealous pistols who bought too much too fast, or gullible greeners who acted on impulse, viewers will now have to be active, skeptical and aware of all these possibilities when looking at each mysterious piece. Don’t Panic! Is anonymous, in that no collectors name is exposed, but simultaneously we are withholding information from the viewer. The viewer should not panic, but focus on why this piece is here: if it makes you “anxious” if it makes you squirm and if it’s truly “ugly” then hell, it might just be great.

[1] Geldzahler, Henry. Making it New (A Harvest Book: New York, 1994) 21.

-Claire Distenfeld