I Am Still Alive
Findings by dylan
Sotheby’s Lost $15 Million Paying Guarantees
by dylan / 23 days ago / Source: www.bloomberg.com
“Disappointing art auctions in London and Hong Kong this month cost Sotheby’s $15 million in losses on guarantees it provided sellers. The losses occurred because the artworks either sold for less than the minimum price the auction house guaranteed to sellers, or not at all, Sotheby’s said in a filing late yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Sotheby’s agrees to pays some consignors a guarantee regardless of whether a property sells or at what price. Auction houses use guarantees to encourage art owners to sell through them. “
Adam Parker Smith "Sunset Now"
found by dylan / 29 days ago / Source: adamparkersmith.com
“Constructed from colored Plexi-glass, fiberfill and lights this sunset is controlled by a dimmer switch. The viewer adjusts the rising and setting of the sun at their own desired speed.” via vvork
Waterfalls Public Art a Boon to NYC Tourism
by dylan / 29 days ago / Source: www.wnyc.org
“Officials say the falls generated $69 million dollars in economic activity, exceeding the initial expectation of $55 million dollars. Seth Pinsky of the Economic Development Corporation says the Waterfalls drew 1.4 million viewers.”
“On the citywide level, this impact included some 79 thousand people, who otherwise would not have done so, to visit or extend their stay in New York.”
Easy Credit Days Are Over For Emerging Artists
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.imasellout.info
Sellout posts about how the financial crisis will impact emerging artists:
“The playing field for emerging artists is about to radically change because access to credit makes being an emerging artist possible.”
Financial crisis reaches world of high-end art
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.sfgate.com
“The mood was frosty at London’s Frieze Art Fair. Bidders were sparse at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Even Andy Warhol’s multicolored skulls failed to lift the art world’s gloom.”
“Place (Village)” (2006-8), by Rachel Whiteread.
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
The NYTimes reviews Rachel Whiteread at the MFA in Boston:
“The appeal of her art is that it grounds Minimalism in the world of everyday things. A cube might look like one of Donald Judd’s “specific objects,” but it represents the inside of an ordinary cardboard box.”
The Inner Life of Trees
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.sfgate.com
SFGate profiles Judith Belzer and highlights her current show, “The Inner Life of Trees” @Room for Painting Room for Paper in San Francisco:
“Belzer doesn’t see her nature paintings as political – as an advocate for environmental sensitivity – but she believes passionately that people needs to re-establish ‘a direct connection to our natural world. Unless we do that, we’re just going to continue living as if it doesn’t matter – as if it’s just always going to be there the way it is now.’”
TH.2058 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Charlotte Higgins reviews TH.2058 @Tate Modern:
“To walk into Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s new installation at Tate Modern is like walking into a sci-fi movie – a deeply disturbing, rather dark experience in which you the viewer project your own narrative and your own anxieties on to the piece. And, I suspect, with TH.2058 (as it is called), Tate has another Turbine Hall hit on its hands. Not only does it have at its heart the kind of “interactivity” that is so popular among visitors to Tate Modern, but also, with its apocalyptic vision, it seems deeply in tune with the times.”
Recreating Alexander Calder’s Tiny Circus at the Whitney
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
Kathryn Shattuck offers a dramatic preview of Alexander Calder: The Paris Years @the Whitney (opening this week).
“A robust man in a navy shirt, dungarees and worn lace-up shoes opens two suitcases and removes his wares. Kneeling on a black rug, he unrolls a circular red cloth and pieces together a wooden ring slightly more than two feet in diameter. With a tiny broom and dustpan he tidies up debris inside the ring and then places a tuxedoed figure in a top hat at its center. He blows a whistle, and a rollicking Sousaesque march begins playing on a gramophone, silenced momentarily when the ringmaster draws a megaphone to his mouth.”
Photography, Unveiled @the LACMA Blog
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: lacma.wordpress.com
LACMA’s blog sheds light on origins of the velvet curtains protecting more delicate works in A Story of Photography: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection
“This intimate, personal encounter was only amplified when I asked LACMA’s Charlotte Cotton, head of the Photography Department, where one finds protective curtains for photographs. Her response? She actually purchased the fabric, carefully choosing a shade of gray that complements photography’s grayscale, and sewed the curtains herself.” via Modern Art Notes
El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve - Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.artistsrespond.org
A lot of great work on the website for the Human/Nature exhibition, but this project stuck out for me.
“Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle first journeyed to the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve (also known as the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno) in February 2005. On that visit he was inspired to create an artwork that depicts the natural beauty and ecological importance of the area in addition to raising awareness of the industrial development that threatens it. He created a multisensory installation featuring a video projection filmed on location at the Mistubishi saltworks, which is adjacent to the reserve. In late summer 2007, Manglano-Ovalle returned to the region and completed filming, with the assistance of a local camera crew and access to the saltworks.”
King Of Kitsch Takes Over Versailles @NPR
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.npr.org
“The first retrospective exhibit of controversial artist Jeff Koons is on display at Versailles, just outside Paris. In recent years, only a few select works of contemporary artists have been displayed there. Now, Koon’s giant red aluminum lobster, vacuum cleaners and floor polishers display and giant balloon dog adorn the palace. Critics are calling it a sullying of French culture and identity.”
Last scene by Saatchi
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Jonathan Jones jumps into the fray with his review of the Saatchi’s new London gallery.
“He may have bought all the new art in China, but Charles Saatchi’s new gallery is pretty much irrelevant in today’s art world.”
Icebreaker Louis Saint Laurent in Resolute Bay, Nunavut Territory, Canada
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.boston.com
“Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand will bring his work back to the United States – to New York City for the first time in 2009. Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994 – and has produced an exhibit of over 150 4-ft. by 6-ft. prints which will be on display in New York City at the World Financial Center Plaza and along the Battery Park City Esplanade from May 1, 2009 to June 28, 2009. When completed in New York City, the Earth From Above exhibit will also move on to California in 2010. Photographs and captions all courtesy of Yann Arthus-Bertrand.”
Expansion Plans at Cooper-Hewitt Museum Will Spruce Up Museum Mile
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
“Having already finished more than half of the fund-raising, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum plans to begin work in January on the renovation and expansion of its ornate Fifth Avenue mansion. The project is aimed at energizing the Cooper-Hewitt, regarded in recent years as a somewhat sleepy institution, by carving out space for more ambitious shows and the display of works from its permanent collection.”
Visible absence Leo Fitzmaurice and the black hole of shopping
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: blog.eyemagazine.com
“In Craterforms, (above), Fitzmaurice subjects an Argos catalogue, the chief selling tool of a British retailer, to a cataclysmic or even eschatological event. The glossy volume seems to have been struck by a meteorite. In this way, the most mundane of commercial objects has been deprived of its purpose to become a sublime product of the forces of ‘nature’.”
Credit crunch crushes art auction in Hong Kong
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: news.bbc.co.uk
“Asia’s contemporary art market suffered a blow at the weekend as bidders failed to buy several paintings at a major Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong. Nineteen of the 47 prominent works under the hammer were left unsold, while others barely hit low estimates. It is thought potential buyers are feeling the effects of the current global financial crisis.”
How Poster Boy Turns Subway Ads Into Political Art
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: nymag.com
“The defacing of posters doesn’t sound particularly lofty, but Poster Boy—who, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain anonymous (vandalism is, after all, a crime)—has intentions that are surprisingly high-minded.”
Sotheby's Hong Kong auction tests art buyers’ courage @FT
by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.ft.com
“Sotheby’s, the auction house, will test global investors’ appetite for high-end works of art with a five-day sale of paintings, sculptures, jewels and watches starting on Saturday in Hong Kong, in the face of growing turmoil in the financial markets…The auction house is still optimistic the sale will bring in $256m (€186m, £145m), up from $200m last year. ‘I am not saying that the art market and the financial market go in opposite directions. But experience tells us that the art market usually survives a bit longer than the financial market,’ said Kevin Ching, chief executive officer at Sotheby’s Asia.”
Gilbert and George - At Brooklyn Museum, a Provocative Duo, Naked and Natty
found by dylan / about 1 month ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
Holland Cotter reviews Gilbert and George at the Brooklyn Museum (opening today and up through January 11) for the NYTimes.
“Then there’s the perversity factor. They have a funky sense of beauty and an appetite for unsightly things, things most people come to art museums not to see. They were using images of feces back in the 1980s, long before Andres Serrano got the idea. In the 1990s, when they had reached an age at which most exhibitionists put their clothes back on, Gilbert & George, then in their mid-50s, took theirs off. More recently, when the art establishment had declared blatantly topical political art to be anathema, that’s what they made.”
