Arts news

• What The Basquiat Sale Says About Today's Art Market

  19-05-2017 23:54 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The high price reflects the fact that 20th-century art increasingly dominates the list of the world’s most expensive paintings, partly because such works are more likely to be available for sale – with classics such as the Mona Lisa unlikely to come on to the market. Only three of the top 10 most expensive paintings are pre-19th century, with most of the highest prices attached to works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Gustav Klimt."
  
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• How Consumer Culture Took Over Everything

  19-05-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Both “Less is more” and “More is more” are the catchphrases of a consumer society faced with unimagined plenty. Following World War II, “Less is more” suggested unease with mass abundance: restraint became an emblem of refinement. Two decades of uninterrupted prosperity later, “More is more” poked fun at its abstemious parent. It is also a fitting description of the way we live now.
  
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• Stedelijk responds to the refugee crisis

  19-05-2017 23:00
  The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is also taking on forced migration as a theme in a series of five exhibitions this year. This month, it opens Solution or Utopia? Design for Refugees (20 May-3 September), which deals with the thorny problem of how designers can best help those fleeing war and disaster. Clothing, shelter, food distributionthese are some of the problems that collectives like Cucula, which was established specifically to work with refugees in Berlin, have tackled. The show is int
  
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• Richard Serra shows his hand

  19-05-2017 23:00
  Richard Serra has not made a film or video since 1979, which may help explain why this aspect of his work is sometimes overlooked, says Sren Grammel, the curator of Richard Serra: Films and Videotapes at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which opens this month (20 May-15 October). The show presents 15 works on 16mm film (copied from fragile originals) and videotapes made from 1968-79, including ten from the museums collection. Serras interest in process and materials, which drives his sculpture, also figu
  
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• Five Atlanta Ballet Stars Split Off On Their Own To Form New Company

  19-05-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Before Terminus Modern Ballet Theater even puts a pointe shoe onto a Marley floor, it is already one of the most prominent dance troupes in Atlanta. First, there’s the star power of their five company dancers — perhaps the most recognizable faces in the Atlanta dance community from their tenures at Atlanta Ballet."
  
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• Canada Reduces Canadian Content Minimum Spends For Broadcasters (Producers Fear Reduction In Canadian Shows)

  19-05-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The CRTC got it right when they said that, in the digital world, broadcasters need to invest in innovative content that stands out in a global marketplace. So why let broadcasters slash their investments in distinctive, original content by $200 million over five years?" Directors Guild of Canada national president Tim Southam said in a statement.
  
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• Not Long Ago Personal Essays Were Everywhere. Now, They've Disappeared...

  19-05-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  By September, 2015, online first-person writing was so abundant that Laura Bennett, at Slate, could refer to a “first-person industrial complex” in a takedown of the genre. “Every site seems to have a first person vertical and a first-person editor,” Bennett, who also cited Gould’s Times story as a turning point, wrote. The market, in Bennett’s view, had overinflated. She was right: a year and a half later, it barely exists.
  
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• What Are Young People Thinking? It Might Surprise You...

  19-05-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Youth Index recently reported that 44% of young people said they didn’t know what to believe in the media, and here I was learning how they are creating their own theories of who holds power and control in contemporary society and over individuals’ lives.
  
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• Why I'm Grumpy About Pondering Existance

  19-05-2017 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In physics, it’s dangerous to assume that things ‘exist’ in any conventional sense. Instead, the deeper question is: what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion) that something exists? For example, Isaac Newton explained the physical world in terms of massive bodies that respond to forces. However, with the advent of quantum physics, the real question turned out to be the very nature and meaning of the measurements upon which the notions of mass and force depe
  
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• Art As Personal Catharsis?

  19-05-2017 20:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Can art – in any form – provide a cathartic experience for its creator? How do artists negotiate the landscape of their own trauma to create a work that stands independently of that experience? To distance his creation from his cataclysmic personal loss, Jonathon Young began to research post-traumatic stress disorder. He was not diagnosed with the disorder, and maybe there was relief in other people’s stories. But as his research deepened, he came across a phenomenon known as p
  
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• Jeanne Button, 86, Award-Winning Broadway Costume Designer

  19-05-2017 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "If Mark Twain was right that clothes make the man, then Ms. Button helped define hundreds of characters in Broadway and Off Broadway plays, operas and films. ... As a designer, Ms. Button was often lauded for her range and the breadth of her imagination."
  
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• Jean-Michel Basquiat breaks US art record with £85m sale

  19-05-2017 19:40
  
  Painting by Basquiat, who died aged 27, is most expensive at auction of any US artist, also breaking record for a black artist
  A painting by late graffiti artist-turned-expressionist painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, has become the most expensive at auction of any US artist, fetching $110.5m (£85m) in New York.“Untitled”, a 1982 work in oil stick, acrylic and spray paint, depicting a powerful crazed face shaped as a skull, also broke the salesroom record for a black artist, and is
  
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• Vintage Buildings Turned Into Museums

  19-05-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The obvious incentive is financial. While structural changes to meet earthquake codes can throw an expensive wrench into the works, museums can get a better price per square foot by adapting an existing building if its bones are good.
  
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• Ben Franklin Didn't Write Most Of The Aphorisms In 'Poor Richard's Almanack' - He Stole Them

  19-05-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  What's more, most of them weren't even American. (We're crushed.) Daniel Crown explains - and basically exonerates the dear old fellow.
  
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• Crystal Bridges Museum Receives $15 M. for Education Initiatives

  19-05-2017 18:53 via artnews.com
  The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has received $15 million from the Windgate Charitable Foundation. The gift will go toward the creation of the Windgate Educational Excellence through the Arts Endowed Fund.Crystal Bridges, which was opened … Read More
  
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• Slice and Dice: Jane Benson Cut Up a W.G. Sebald Text to Create Music Between the Words

  19-05-2017 18:47 via artnews.com
  March 31–May 7, in New York Read More
  
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• From the Archives: Glenway Wescott Defends Florine Stettheimer, in 1947

  19-05-2017 18:40 via artnews.com
  At the opening of Florine Stettheimer’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1946, her sister, Ettie Stettheimer, reportedly said, “I feel that this is the beginning of something.” For a while, it seemed as if Ettie would be proven wrong, as … Read More
  
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• Why The Huge Drop In UK Asians Attending Theatre?

  19-05-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “This points to the effects of decades of a lack of equitable representation on the stage and media, as much as a disparaging perception of Asians generally in the 'age of terror'. It presents some real challenges for venues, producers, funders, schools and philanthropists to make a concerted effort to draw attention to the centrality of arts in national life for everyone, not least Asians.”
  
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• ‘Photographs Become Pictures: The Becher Class’ at Städel Museum, Frankfurt

  19-05-2017 18:25 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• We've All Totally Misunderstood Murphy's Law - It's Really A 'Call To Excellence'

  19-05-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. "The phrase has a dour fatalism to it - if everything's bound to fail, why bother trying? But time has distorted the law's intended meaning entirely. There really was a Murphy, and the law that bears his name is not an admission of defeat. It is a call to excellence." Corinne Purtill explains. (Has she ruined it for the rest of us?)
  
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• Albee Estate Pulls Permission Over Casting Of Black Actor

  19-05-2017 17:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "From what we can gather from statements from both parties is that the Albee Estate wanted full approval of the casting of this show. Once they saw that an African-American was cast as Nick, they requested that he be recast as a white man, when the director refuses, the shows rights are revoked. While the Albee Estate is using the ADVERTISING(probably casting notice) with a black actor as the reason they are stating a violation of the agreement, it's pretty clear that the reason is because of th
  
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• David Lynch, Mark Frost, And The Cast On How ‘Twin Peaks’ Lost Its Way - And Found It Again

  19-05-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Finn Cohen talks to the showrunners and actors about how the second season of the original went so bad and what led to the decision by all the parties to revive the show after 25 years.
  
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• 'Wait, Is That Really A Word?' How Do You Figure Out The Answer To That Question?

  19-05-2017 16:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In the English language, that effort is just about futile, argues linguist John McWhorter in this Lexicon Valley podcast.
  
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• Scientific models in the spotlight in Manchester

  19-05-2017 16:29
  
  Conservators from the Manchester Museum painstakingly removed a century of grime from around 25 objects used as life science teaching aids ahead of an exhibition opening this month that presents them as works of art. The treated pieces, many of which have never been on display before, are from the University of Manchesters collection. They will be exhibited alongside pieces from Liverpools World Museum and those collected by George Loudon, a retired UK banker who amassed a sizable collection of
  
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• Laura Linney And Cynthia Nixon Talk About Exchanging Roles Every Night On Broadway

  19-05-2017 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In the revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, the actors alternate between playing the lead role (the cunning, assertive Regina Giddens) and a supporting one (Regina's timid, abused sister-in-law, Birdie). ... In a free-flowing conversation at BuzzFeed's New York headquarters, the actors talked about taking on this unique challenge, as well as their thoughts on the theater at large, aging, and roles for women over 40."
  
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• Ice cream, flayed statues and The Great Wave – the week in art

  19-05-2017 15:57
  
  Hokusai’s poetic landscapes arrive at the British Museum, while Canaletto’s Venice cityscapes also go on show – all in your weekly dispatchHokusai
  The man who painted The Great Wave is one of the world’s most passionate and poetic artists. This promises to be a captivating encounter with his genius.
  • British Museum, London, 25 May–13 August Continue reading...
  
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• Why Turning The Play 'King Charles III' Into A TV Special Just Didn't Work

  19-05-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Mind you, this wasn't a telecast of the theatre performance; decades' experience has shown that those can be just dandy. (Yes, yes, it's not the same as being there. Not everyone can get there.) This was a BBC television adaptation, with television conventions. Yes, sometimes that can work; Time Out London theatre editor Andrzej Lukowski analyzes why, for this play in particular, it did not.
  
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• Why Does This Enda Walsh Play Have A 20-Minute Dance Solo In The Middle Of It?

  19-05-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "It's an unusual choice for a playwright, especially one prone to having his characters gush torrents of words. Speaking over the phone from London last week, Mr. Walsh said he knew early in the writing of Arlington that the middle segment had to be dance." Brian Seibert reports.
  
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• Is Fort Worth's Classical Music Scene On The Mend? Well, ...

  19-05-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Things weren't pretty on the classical music scene in Cowtown this past season. The Fort Worth Symphony went through an ugly strike; Fort Worth Opera's board fired the company's very successful general director without warning; the Symphony's venue, Bass Performance Hall, threw out the music director because he was carrying his kid's violin, for crying out loud. Peter Simek surveys the damage, talks to the orchestra's CEO (who's now quitting and leaving the music business), and finds out that th
  
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• Morning Links: Lucky Man Edition

  19-05-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Fort Worth Symphony President Who Led Management Through Strike Resigns

  19-05-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Amy Adkins, whose six-year tenure included a bitter 3½-month labor dispute at the beginning of this season, departs in July to head a hospital foundation.
  
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• Basquiat Painting Sells For A 'Mind-Blowing' $110.5 Million

  19-05-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Gasps escaped from the crowd as the final bid came in for the 1982 untitled depiction of a skull. The price is the highest ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist; indeed, it's the sixth-highest price paid for any artwork at auction. As Jeffrey Deitch said, Basquiat is "now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso."
  
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• Is this Basquiat worth $110m? Yes – his art of American violence is priceless

  19-05-2017 14:06
  
  An untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat work has sold for $110.5m, becoming the most expensive American painting ever – thanks to a combination of romance and sheer nightmarish visionIt is a painting that bleeds history. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) portrays a black skull scarred with red rivulets, pitted with angry eyes, gnashing its teeth, against a blue graffiti wall on which someone has been doing their sums. Perhaps the street mathematician was calculating how many Africans d
  
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• Hokusai: the Great Wave that swept the world

  19-05-2017 13:51
  
  He called himself Old Man Crazy To Paint and made his best work in his 70s. As his dragons, deities, poets and wrestlers go on show, we look at the obsessions of the poster-boy for Japanese artHad Katsushika Hokusai died when he was struck by lightning at the age of 50 in 1810, he would be remembered as a popular artist of the ukiyo-e, or “floating world” school of Japanese art, but hardly the great figure we know today. His late blooming (the subject of an exhibition, Hokusai: Beyon
  
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• Bish-bash-bosh: how Phyllida Barlow conquered the art world at 73 – podcast

  19-05-2017 13:32
  
  After overlooking her for decades, the art world has woken up to Phyllida Barlow’s audacious, gargantuan sculptures. Now she is representing Britain at the Venice Biennale – but why did it take so long for her to be “discovered”? • Read the text version here Continue reading...
  
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• What $110m for a Basquiat painting tells us about the art market

  19-05-2017 13:24
  
  High prices for famous 20th-century artworks driven by wealthy collectors from the US, Russia and the Middle EastA painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat has sold for a record $110.5m (£85m) at an auction in New York, in the latest display of the art market’s attraction to super-rich speculators and art lovers.The sale of Untitled sets a new high for a work by a US artist and is the first work of art created since 1980 to sell for more than $100m. It lags behind the most expensive painting
  
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• Philip Guston’s Untitled: charting the decline of Tricky Dicky

  19-05-2017 13:00
  
  Created shortly after Richard Nixon was pardoned over Watergate, this sketch shows his leg swollen by phlebitis – and the guilt he drags aroundFaced with the 60s and 70s’ political turmoil in the US, Philip Guston ditched abstract expressionism for a cartoonish style that mined the darkness of his day. Going to the studio to “adjust a red to a blue”, as he put it, no longer cut it. Continue reading...
  
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• Anti-colonial Australian works among new acquisitions made by Tate and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

  19-05-2017 12:27
  
  The Tate in London and Sydneys Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) have acquired five works, including three paintings by the emerging Melbourne-born artist Helen Johnson, as part of a joint acquisition programme backed by Qantas, Australias national airline. Five pieces by Australian artists were also acquired last year under the initiative. The new joint acquisitions include three paintings by Johnson (Seat of Power, 2016; Bad Debt, 2016; and A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul,
  
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• Dr. Oetker compensates Jewish heirs for silver windmill cup in collection

  19-05-2017 11:35
  
  Dr Oetker, a family-owned German manufacturer of food products, says it has reached an agreement to compensate the heirs of Emma Budge for a 17th-century silver cup in the shape of a windmill that was sold by the Nazis in 1937 and wound up in the companys art collection.Dr. Oetker acquired the silver cup for the company collection from a Swiss dealer in March 2009, after it was on display at the Tefaf fair in Maastricht. In 2011, the lawyer for Budges heirs published an image of the silver cup
  
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• Eimear McBride: ‘I’m generally left cold by art with no sex in it’

  19-05-2017 11:00
  
  In art and literature, why is the study of sexuality relegated to a lesser status than an exploration of emotions? And why are good sex scenes notoriously difficult to write?I’m generally left a bit cold by art with no sex in it. Not that every work of art need preoccupy itself with meditations on the subject or be confined to representations of the various physical acts. Quite the contrary; the world is already overstuffed with cliched recreations of the blunt and bland doings of the fles
  
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• Senior Curator of Asian Art

  19-05-2017 10:36
  Senior Curator of Asian Art
  Executive Level 2
  Position No. 4349
  $111,051 - $126,917
  The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) holds the nations most broadly representative collection of historical Asian Art, comprising around 5,000 works of art in a range of media from Southeast, South, East and Central Asia. Strengths of the collection include Southeast and South Asian textiles, Hindu, Buddhist and animist sculpture, Central Asian costumes and Japanese art
  
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• Hokusai and Graham Fagen: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  19-05-2017 10:30
  
  The British Museum goes beyond the Japanese artist’s famous wave print, while slavery is considered from the point of view of an 18th-century AfricanWhile Constable, Turner and Goya were at work in the west, exhilarating Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai was creating indelible images of mountains, the sea, a gust of wind and, above all, people. Hokusai’s art combines a passion for natural beauty with an eye for human comedy in a way that makes him one of the most engaging of all
  
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• Senior Curator International Paintings, Sculpture and Design

  19-05-2017 10:16
  Senior Curator International Paintings, 
  Sculpture and Design
  Executive Level 2 
  Position number 4319
  $111,051 - $126,917The Senior Curator has responsibility for International Paintings, Sculpture and Design, focusing principally on European and American art. The strengths of the NGAs globally renowned collections are 19th and especially 20th century modernism. 
  The successful candidate will be responsible for the collection, including a key role in developing a successful
  
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• Val Kilmer: 'Lord, I'm never going to read this tripe!'

  19-05-2017 10:00
  
  After topping the A-list in the 90s, the actor retreated – but he’s back with an unlikely interest in art and a Twitter account filled with star-studded anecdotesFew actors capture the myth of the mysterious artist better than Val Kilmer. He’s a southern California kid who grew up to become a poet, a playwright, and an A-list star. He’s also a hard man to get hold of. For months, I had been trying to track him down for an interview, only to discover that he rarely speaks
  
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• Fashionably lit: William Klein's Vogue experiments – in pictures

  19-05-2017 08:00
  
  William Klein used double exposures and painting with light to create this witty, striking and influential 1962 Vogue photoshoot Continue reading...
  
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• Record-Breaking $110.5 M. Basquiat Shocks Attendees at Sotheby’s $319.2 M. Postwar and Contemporary Evening Sale

  19-05-2017 05:01 via artnews.com
  As auctioneer Oliver Barker put it, “Now he goes into the pantheon.”Jean-Michel Basquiat became the most expensive American artist ever sold at auction Thursday when an azure-and-black untitled skull painting from 1982 was bought by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa for $110.5 … Read More
  
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• Basquiat Painting Sells to Yusaku Maezawa for $110.5 M. at Sotheby’s Auction, Shattering Records

  19-05-2017 02:49 via artnews.com
  Earlier this evening, Sotheby’s sold an untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting from 1982 for $110.5 million, inclusive of auction house fees. It marks a world auction record for the artist, who died at age 27 in 1988. It is also the … Read More
  
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