Arts news

• Sotheby’s Contemporary Sale Nets $59.6 M., Beating High Estimate, With $13.1 M. Basquiat Leading the Way

  07-10-2016 23:23 via artnews.com
  Solid if muted bidding at the outset gave way to a slew of huge lots at Sotheby’s New Bond Street salesroom in London Friday night, bringing the contemporary art auction’s total to £47.9 million ($59.6 million), comfortably over its high estimate of … Read More
  
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• On-Demand Culture Means You Don’t Own That Book, Movie Or Song You Think You Just Bought

  07-10-2016 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “With the move to cloud computing and streaming content, the concept of “copy ownership” is now disappearing from entertainment as well. Software, motion pictures, and even music are increasingly a service provided to you. Streaming services and cloud content have their own worries. For example, what happens when you’re traveling somewhere with no reliable internet access? What happens when the service provider’s servers go down for days and you are paying for a ser
  
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• The added value of an A-list owner

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  As many collectors grow increasingly risk-averse, works previously in the possession of respected, trusted or famous owners are in demand.At Frieze Masters, the star piece on Dickinsons Surrealism stand is Ren Magrittes LEmpire des lumires (1949). The works previous owners include the late billionaire collector and former US vice-president Nelson Rockefellera factor that contributes to its $25m price tag. Also on the gallerys stand is Yves Tanguys Sans Titre (1935, 1.2m), which was once owned b
  
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• Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale vaults over estimate

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  A trio of strong paintings helped Sothebys contemporary evening sale vault over its pre-sale estimate of 24.1m to 32.7m to fetch 41.2m, or 48m with fees on 7 October. The sell through rate was a strong 91%.
  An early and unusual Richter painting in two parts, Garten (1982), sparked a telephone bidding contest, eventually selling for 9m, or 10.2m with fees (est 3m-4m). Richters paintings from the early 1980s have been undervalued for a long time, Alex Branczik, Sothebys head of contemporary art in
  
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• Royal Academy's Ab Ex show is about more than just men and pigeonholes

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  The survey of Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts includes an avalanche of works by the principal trailblazers of the post-war movement, which is characterised by bold, gestural brush strokes and expressive, intense content.
   
  Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are the pillars of the exhibition, which is the first major UK show on the movement since 1959. Nineteen paintings by Pollock, 15 works by Rothko, 18 pieces by de Kooning and 12 p
  
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• Read Hillary Clinton's hacked emails

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  If youre feeling peckish at Frieze London, head to Canada gallerys stand, where visitors are mesmerised by Samara Goldens tables and chairs suspended from the wall. Scrumptious Styrofoam cakes, wine glasses and cutlery hang on their sides like a bizarre, head-spinning feast straight out of Alice in Wonderland. People are perhaps a little too keen to sample the eat-me art, with a flood of selfie-seekers swamping the stand. Canadas Phil Grauer points out that the piece would not have been complet
  
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• Mad about the girl

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  Once upon a time in New York, the New Museum organised Bad Girls, a group show that has gone down in feminist art history. Numerous artists in 1994 confronted gender stereotyping and the patriarchy in colourful, subversive and often humorous ways. Portia Munson put feminism into found objects, launching her ongoing Pink Project with a table groaning with pink plastic objects designed to appeal to women. She told us about restaging Pink Project: Table (1994/2016) on New Yorks PPOW Gallerys stand
  
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• Mad about the (bad) grirl

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  Once upon a time in New York, the New Museum organised Bad Girls, a group show that has gone down in feminist art history. Numerous artists in 1994 confronted gender stereotyping and the patriarchy in colourful, subversive and often humorous ways. Portia Munson put feminism into found objects, launching her ongoing Pink Project with a table groaning with pink plastic objects designed to appeal to women. She told us about restaging Pink Project: Table (1994/2016) on New Yorks PPOW Gallerys stand
  
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• In pictures: Frieze Masters

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  Dieter Roth, No title (Cheese Painting) 1975)
  Hauser & Wirth
  I love Dieter Roth. This is the most visceral piece in the fair. Its a slab of cheese trapped behind glass, decomposing. Resembling an Old Master painting of a sublime landscape, it has this epic emotionality. Some of the cheese is still miraculously white. Its heaven and hell. You can see people doing a double take, because the cheese must smell bad but you cant smell it because its behind glass. Its a precursor to DamienHirst an
  
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• Home is where the art is: the rise of living room galleries

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  A rented flat above a bed shop in Peckham may be the last place you would expect to find innovative contemporary art shows, but Luke Drozd, a graduate of the Chelsea College of Arts, and his partner Eva Rowson have been using their two-bedroom home to put on displays of new art for the past six years. I missed having fellow students see my work and give me feedback on it, Drozd says. So he put his own recently completed sculptures in his living room and invited friends over to see them. Then th
  
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• Guerrilla Girls take Frieze to task

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  The US-based activist group the Guerrilla Girls told The Art Newspaper that they would infiltrate Friezeand on Thursday they did. Co-founders Frida Kahlo and Kthe Kollwitz (members adopt the names of dead female artists) wore gorilla masks and gave out just a handful of stickers protesting against billionaire art collectors before they were stopped by security staff, Kahlo says. One sticker stated: Art is sooo expensive! Even for billionaires! We completely understand why you cant pay all your
  
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• Galleries open for business

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  A raft of galleries opened new spaces in central London in time for Frieze week. The French dealer Olivier Malingue inaugurated his new premises in Mayfair with a show on the Korean artist Cho Yong-Ik (until 16 December). Malingue says: I dont think Brexit will have a negative effect on us, considering that the art world operates in such an international market.
  The Paris- and Brussels-based dealer Almine Rech launched her second London space at Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair with a Jeff Koons show
  
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• Daddy issues

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
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  Just when you thought the US presidential elections horrible sexual undercurrents were all reserved for women: on 8 October, conservative agitator and photographer Lucian Wintrich opened a show at a pop-up space in Manhattan titled Daddy Will Save Us. The bulk of the works are in Wintrichs Twinks for Trump series and feature hairless young men posing with symbols of Republicanism. Think Ryan McGinley but without any sense of balance, colour depth, technical acuity, te
  
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• Ancient disc, the look of maternal love and treasures of the sea attract buyers

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  Mikhael Subotzky, Samuel (Standing), Vaalkoppies (Beaufort West Rubbish Dump) (0257) (2006)
  Goodman Gallery, Frieze London, $15,000
  Subotzkys Beaufort West series of photographs captures the poverty and squalor of the South African towns residentsincluding Samuel. The works were first shown in New York in 2008, in the Museum of Modern Arts New Photography exhibition. Since then, Subotzky has intervened to dramatic effect by smashing the glass of some of the pieces, including this one, which was
  
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• Africa comes to the Home Counties

  07-10-2016 23:00
  
  The artist Zak Ovs army of Nubian masked figures, installed at Somerset House for the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, is destined for the Saudi Arabian-born collector Hussam Otaibis planned sculpture park in Berkshire, west of London, which is expected to open in two years time. Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and The Masque of Blackness (2016), which was bought for 300,000, will join works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Nathaniel Rackowe and Piotr Lakomy in the park.
  
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• Austin City Council Says Arts Groups Who Get Public Money Must Work With Union Workers Or Lose Funding

  07-10-2016 22:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The changes to the city’s cultural services agreement require organizations that take city money or use city property to recognize any labor organization designated via a card-check method and cooperate with it. If not, they could lose funding in future years.”
  
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• Creating Online Rituals For Our Online Lives

  07-10-2016 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “There is a reason that ritual is such a pervasive part of human experience that it appears in every culture, and dissected by a wide range of disciplines. … [They’re] ‘the symbolic codes for interpreting and negotiating events of everyday existence.’ In the absence of online rituals, we lack the signposts that can help us navigate difficult online experiences – or mark and appreciate the great ones. Rather than wait for rituals to gradually and organically e
  
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• A Shock to the System: At Team Gallery, Max Hooper Schneider Lets Electric Eels Control the Lighting

  07-10-2016 22:00 via artnews.com
  The first thing you notice when you walk into Team Gallery’s show “Dolores,” on view in New York through Sunday, is how dark it is. Only occasionally will the lights briefly flick on. The person who’s flipping the switch isn’t … Read More
  
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• The Death Of Movies Meme Is Just Silly

  07-10-2016 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Come December – once the likes of Moonlight, La La Land, Arrival,Manchester by the Sea, Elle, Loving and a dozen more all-time classics hit theatres – it will be impossible to argue that film is dead, and everyone who advanced such a click-friendly theory will feel pretty foolish. But it would surely help if studios decided that audiences didn’t have to wait until the end of the calendar to realize that the medium would live to see another year.”
  
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• Berlin art dealer 'surprises' city's museums with gift of house

  07-10-2016 21:30
  
  The Berlin art dealer Heiner Bastian and his family announced they will give their house near Museum Island to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the organisation that oversees the citys museums.The house, designed by the British architect David Chipperfield and completed in 2007, currently showcases contemporary and modern art as the home of Galerie Bastian and of Contemporary Fine Arts. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation plans to use it for education purposes.We are really surp
  
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• To recover history from peril: on the dealer Paul Rosenberg and the Nazi seizure of Modern art

  07-10-2016 21:26
  
  Woman in Blue in Front of a Fire, which was painted by Matisse in March 1937, has an interesting history. From the year it was painted until the Nazis invaded France in 1940, it was in the possession of the influential art dealer and collector Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959). To save it from lossor worse, destructionRosenberg locked the painting with others in a bank vault in Libourne in southwest France, but in March 1941, the Nazis seized its contents. Soon after, it entered the collection of Herm
  
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• How Amazon Is Remaking The Half-Hour TV Show

  07-10-2016 21:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “At most studios and networks, [Joe] Lewis would be thought of as the head of comedy. At Amazon, he’s in charge of what the streamer more vaguely characterizes as half-hour programs – perhaps a more accurate descriptor, given how blurred the lines are between comedy and dramas these days. … Vulture recently spoke with Lewis for nearly an hour about how he approaches series development … and why the definition of an Amazon half-hour is likely to evolve over the nex
  
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• Our Diversity Debate Has Been Going On For Decades. So What’s Changed?

  07-10-2016 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Again and again, the same answer: maybe it’s not fair to say that nothing has changed, but here we are, answering the same fundamental questions about diversity. Very few people seemed wholeheartedly optimistic about change.”
  
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• When Her Best Friend Was Killed, She Had AI Engineers Create A Bot Of Him

  07-10-2016 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, [Eugenia] Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda ha
  
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• Weddings, ovens and Jesus in heels: the savage wit of the avant-garde feminists

  07-10-2016 19:58
  
  From the wearable oven to the all-female Last Supper, this hard-hitting and hilarious collection of feminist avant-garde photography still packs a punchThere are, inevitably, vaginas. Of course there are; it wouldn’t be a show about the 1970s feminist avant-garde without them. But the vaginas are not the central focus of the new exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery showcasing 48 international female artists over 200 major works from the Verbund collection. There is, after all, mo
  
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• Kissin’ and collectin’ cousins

  07-10-2016 19:32
  
  Bismarck once called the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha the stud farm of Europe. As junior members of the Ernestine line of the House of Wettin, they were extraordinarily well connected, marrying into royal families across Europe from London to St Petersburg; three Ernestines became respectively kings of Belgium and Portugal and Czar of Bulgaria. The widespread affiliations of the British royal family owed much to the Saxe-Coburgs. Queen Victoria was the daughter of a princess of Saxe- Coburg-Sa
  
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• How The Frieze Art Fair Ate London

  07-10-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The sprawling scale of the event, centered on a five-day fair here, in Regent’s Park, that opens to the public Wednesday, reflects how dramatically London, and its commercial relationship with art, has changed.”
  
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• Shepard Fairey makes Idiocracy-inspired election artwork

  07-10-2016 19:15
  
  The street artist whose Hope artwork became one of the defining images of the 2008 presidential campaign has turned his attention to Donald TrumpIf you’ve seen the hashtags #IdiocracyToday and #PresidentCamacho, you’ll have realised that the 2006 box office flop Idiocracy is being embraced anew. Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy about a genetically dumbed down America is now being celebrated as prophetic cult classic. Or as Etan Cohen, one of the screenwrit
  
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• Can Audiences Enjoy New Dance Pieces More If They Know *Nothing* About Them In Advance?

  07-10-2016 19:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The idea goes against the grain in arts marketing, as venues increasingly provide preview trailers, rehearsal clips and artist interviews for audiences to watch in advance.” But London’s Dance Umbrella festival is giving it a try. “A lack of knowledge about the art form can stop audiences from coming to dance, so [festival director Emma] Gladstone wanted to free them from worrying about what they didn’t know.”
  
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• Sales Abound at Frieze Focus, Where Marguerite Humeau’s Elephants Meet Jon Rafman’s Snake

  07-10-2016 19:00 via artnews.com
  Frieze Focus is a sector here at the fair in London that can often be something of a respite from the citadels of mega galleries under the two gigantic white tents. It’s a collection of 36 galleries, all younger than … Read More
  
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• Richard Serra, Gagosian, London — review

  07-10-2016 18:41
  These new works speak a familiar sculptural language, yet their sheer presence is hard to resist
  
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• Kadar Brock at Vigo Gallery, London

  07-10-2016 18:35 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• How Natural History Museums Got Hijacked For Kids. Time To Give ‘Em Back To Adults

  07-10-2016 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Museums were originally meant to be places of inspiration, literally the ‘seat of the Muses’. In our 21st-century interpretation, however, we expect them to function as providers of kid-oriented entertainment more than anything else.”
  
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• Frieze satellite fairs 2016 — review

  07-10-2016 18:29
  Sunday Art Fair is everything Frieze is not: intimate, edgy, unconcerned with market forces
  
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• Life Is Heavy: Matthew Weinstein on Bruce Conner and ‘Mr. Robot’

  07-10-2016 18:20 via artnews.com
  The late Bruce Conner’s ecstatic experience of film editing makes his decades-long exploration of it a slow motion spiritual revelation. And so, seeing Conner’s major films together at the Museum of Modern Art is itself a revelation.Conner was a heavy-handed … Read More
  
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• Taj Mahal’s Dome, Long Yellowing, To Get A Mud-Pack Beauty Mask

  07-10-2016 18:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Scaffolding will cover the Taj Mahal’s main dome next year while a ‘mud pack’ is applied to its yellowing marble, authorities said Thursday as they battle the effects of smog on the country’s top tourist attraction. The famed monument to love, which attracts millions of visitors, has for years been acquiring a yellow tinge despite a ban on coal-powered industries in the area.”
  
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• Robert Therrien, Parasol Unit: ‘Enchanting’

  07-10-2016 17:57
  Childhood wonder meets modernist abstraction in the Californian sculptor’s work
  
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• Art Market: London hosts Frieze and 1:54

  07-10-2016 17:20
  Buyer found for Zak Ové’s masked men installation; Ordovas expands in New York
  
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• Then and Now: Picabia, Grasshopper of Modern Art

  07-10-2016 17:01 via artnews.com
  Experimenting first with Impressionism, then Pointillism, and then Cubism and Dada, Francis Picabia (1879–1953) made himself impossible to categorize. On the occasion of his October retrospective at MoMA, we try to take his measure in the pages of ARTnews. Was … Read More
  
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• Museum Staffer Assaulted In St. Louis Over Controversial Exhibit

  07-10-2016 17:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Amid an ongoing controversy surrounding the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis’s Kelley Walker show, which includes works that some have alleged are racist and offensive, a staff member was verbally, and nearly physically, attacked Monday morning.”
  
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• Wolfgang Suschitzky, photographer and Get Carter cameraman, dies aged 104

  07-10-2016 16:50
  
  The celebrated photographer helped establish Britain’s first film cooperative and was a noted documentarist of London lifeThe photographer and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky has died at the age of 104. As a photographer he was best known for his portraits of London life in the 1930s and 40s, especially the series of photographs he took along Charing Cross Road, the centre of London’s bookselling trade.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Julia Donat. Continue reading...
  
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• Snapshot: ‘Intimate Distance’, by Todd Hido

  07-10-2016 16:44
  Photographer’s unconventional portraits and domestic settings frame a fractured American dream, and speak of home, loneliness and loss
  
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• Picasso, Caravaggio and quantum physics – the week in art

  07-10-2016 16:31
  
  Caravaggio’s contemporaries arrive at the National Gallery, while Yinka Shonibare unleashes kaleidoscopic new work – plus the rest of the big shows this weekBeyond CaravaggioOne of those artists who blast his rivals off the walls, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio nevertheless inspired a legion of followers in early 17th-century Europe. How do their works compare with his?• National Gallery, London, 12 October-15 January Continue reading...
  
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• How Donald Trump Is Like Jay Gatsby

  07-10-2016 16:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Political scientist Amanda Friesen: “[He] is always flying around in his private jet. That must seem like a dream come true for some folks! By jetting off to Vegas, he’s doing things people are familiar with  –  things they might do if they had the money. In some respects, Donald Trump is Jay Gatsby, throwing the party and drawing people in with his excess and opulence. He’s Gatsby without the earnestness.”
  
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• Lady Jane: Oscar Wilde Totally Took After His Mother

  07-10-2016 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Jane was a living, writing, talking paradox. She was an elitist who championed the undergo, a lover of ceremony and ritual who wanted to destroy the status quo, a republican who relished her peerage, a rebel at home in the realm, the barricades and the drawing-room were her natural habitats. … Oscar revered his mother and father, but his resemblance to his mother goes to the core of what made both of them remarkable, and prone to calamity.”
  
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• A look at Bowie’s star-dusted collection coming to auction

  07-10-2016 16:00
  
  Sothebys revealed today, 7 October, the full slate of more than 250 works of art and 100-plus furniture and design pieces from the estate of the protean rock star David Bowie, which will be auctioned in London from 10-11 November.
  Around 30 previously announced lots have toured to London, Los Angeles, and New York; the full catalogue displays further gems, including works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tintoretto, and Francis Picabia, vintage design pieces by the Memphis group that look like they cam
  
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• In Praise Of Shorter Performances – And Even Abridging The Text

  07-10-2016 15:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Terence Rattigan, England’s master of the well-made play, predicted back in the ’50s that younger playgoers conditioned by movies and TV would eventually start to chafe at the three-hour-two-intermission running time that was then the theatrical norm.” Terry Teachout praises the trend toward shorter, no-intermission plays, and suggests that we should feel free to make cuts in longer works by the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Richard Wagner.
  
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• Is Michael Grandage About To Become The Next Julie Taymor?

  07-10-2016 15:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “From 2002 to 2012, director Michael Grandage was the head of London’s Donmar Warehouse. The position he inherited from Sam Mendes was long on prestige, artistic achievement, and honors. But money? Not so much. But now the director, who long labored in the not-for-profit world, stands to enter the big money as the newly-tapped director of the forthcoming Broadway stage adaptation of the Disney film Frozen.”
  
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• Now Visitors To The Statue Of Liberty Will Finally Have Something To Actually Do

  07-10-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It is time for a backyard construction project on an island with a resident population of one and a transient population of 4.3 million. … The project, a $70 million museum, is intended to make the visitors’ time on Liberty Island more meaningful, more enjoyable and perhaps less crowded.
  
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• ‘The Sidekick In His Own Movie’: Anger Over ‘Whitewashing’ In New Bruce Lee Biopic

  07-10-2016 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Audiences of Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon have criticised the film’s portrayal of the martial arts star, as well as the extent to which it relegates his story below that of a white co-star. … IMDb users who have seen the film protest that it actually focuses on a fictional white friend, Steve McKee, who learns kung fu and romances a Chinese woman.”
  
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