Artlog / In Focus

Phillips de Pury Limps to the Finish With a $7 Million Total by staff

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:27:14 -0500

“The evening sale of contemporary art at Phillips de Pury brought a vibrant week of auctions to an anemic close on Thursday night.

Phillips, the struggling Chelsea auction house, was offering less-than-stellar examples of trendy names like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, making the event seem like an average day sale at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, with prices in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions. The auction totaled $7 million ($5.8 million before Phillips’s fees are added in), in the middle of its $5.8 million to $8.3 million estimate. Of the 39 works on the block, 8 failed to sell.

‘They did pretty well with what they had,’ said Edward Tyler Nahem, a Manhattan dealer. ‘The offerings were pretty skimpy.’” ...

Contributed by Danielle Mund

Umberto Eco: master of the list by staff

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:14:11 -0500

“After Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer and Pierre Boulez, Umberto Eco is the next special guest curator of the Louvre. A noted historian and semiotician before he brought these sensibilities to bear on major novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco has spent almost two years in residence at the Louvre. His chosen subject is “The Infinity of Lists”, a tour through art, literature and music based on the theme of lists and motivated by his fascination with numbers (until 13 December). “The subject of lists has been a theme of many writers from Homer onwards. My great challenge was to transfer it to painting and music and to see whether I could find equivalents in the Louvre, because frankly when I suggested the subject I had no idea how I would write about visual lists,” says Eco.” ...

Contributed by Danielle Mund

VOLCANO LOVERS - From Iceland and Japan

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:04:24 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-13

Volcano Lovers is a group show of Japanese and Icelandic conceptual artists curated by Shinya Watanabe and Birta Guojonsdottir. Supported by the Consulate General of Japan, as well as Iceland, this grounbreaking show will bridge together artworks from two distinct volanic island nations.

Friends of the Arts Party (Alliance for the Arts)

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:20:08 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-13

Come celebrate The Alliance for the Arts at its annual benefit. The organization serves the entire cultural community through research and advocacy and serves the public through cultural guides and calendars

Warhols Help Sotheby’s Auction Top $134 Million at Auction by staff

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:42 -0500

The following article really is news, but whether good or bad I’m not sure. Whereas we’ve all been happily surprised to see that art has been selling straight through our current recession, it has for the most part been works in a somewhat lower price range. True, Warhol is a pretty safe investment if one is to buy at the higher priced end of things; but quadruple Sotheby’s high estimate? Might this be the first signal of a return of the crazily overpriced art market?

“It was the sale of the season. When a seminal Warhol — one of the artist’s first silk-screen paintings — came on the block at Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art on Wednesday night, the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, opened bidding at $6 million and was stunned when a bidder instantly doubled it.

The price rose at breakneck speed as five collectors vied for the classic image, “200 One Dollar Bills.” It ended up selling for $43.7 million (including fees to Sotheby’s), more than three times its high estimate of $12 million. The buyer, whom Sotheby’s refused to identify, bid by telephone through Bruno Vinciguerra, the company’s chief operating officer. Sotheby’s would also not identify the seller, although people familiar with the collection said it was Pauline Karpidas, a London-based collector.” ...

Contributed by Danielle Mund

The Art World Rejoices to the tune of $140M at Sotheby's Auction by staff

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:50:40 -0500

“In a gear-changing sign that the art market is shaking off the recession, Sotheby’s auctioned off $134.4 million worth of post-war and contemporary art earlier tonight at its Manhattan salesroom, including a smoky sheet of dollar bills by Andy Warhol that sold for $43.7 million. The sale total surpassed the auction house’s own goal of $67.9 million to $97.7 million – and outperformed its $125 million sale of contemporary art last November. After a year of cautious bidding, the mood in the salesroom Wednesday night grew increasingly upbeat, with fashion designer Valentino Garavani and jeweler Laurence Graff among the winning bidders. The night unquestionably belonged to Warhol. The Pop artist is a household name, but his early 1960s silkscreens rarely surface at auction. That’s why at least five bidders, including dealer Jose Mugrabi, chased after the artist’s “200 One Dollar Bills,” a seminal 1962 piece that Sotheby’s last sold more than two decades ago for $300,000. A telephone bidder got it tonight for $43.7 million – over three times its $12 million high estimate – or $218,812.50 for each silkscreened dollar bill in the painting.”

With Panache, Christie's Pulls in $74 Million by staff

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:13 -0500

“In a remarkably successful auction of post-World War II and contemporary art, 39 paintings, drawings and three-dimensional works sold on Tuesday at Christie’s for $74.15 million. The total nearly matched the middle estimate and only seven lots failed to find takers.

The enthusiastic response elicited by works of every possible description was reminiscent of pre-recession days.”

Contributed by Danielle Mund

Dakis Joannou’s Show at New Museum Raises Ethical Flags by staff

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:03 -0500

“One day in the mid-1980s, Dakis Joannou, a Greek Cypriot industrialist, was exploring the art galleries of the East Village in Manhattan when he came upon a basketball suspended in a tank of liquid. Captivated, he invested $2,700 in “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” by a little-known artist named Jeff Koons. It was, he said, as if a whole new world had opened up to him.” ...

Contributed by Danielle Mund

Connect Weekly – Art Date Spots by staff

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:56:00 -0500

Hey Artloggers, welcome to the Weekly Connect Newsletter . This week we highlight the Top Five Art Date Spots in NYC which include the Rubin Museum of Art, The Modern/MoMA, New Museum Thursdays, The Met/Cloisters and finally The Highline (photographed above by Paul Kelley and its surrounding galleries. Benefits are also great date events and this week happens to be jam packed with the iCi. Met and L.E.A.D Uganda benefits Thursday (11/12) and Alliance for the Arts on Friday (11/13).

iCI Fall Benefit: Future Tense

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:23:42 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-12

iCI (Independent Curators International) which produces incredible exhibitions around the world holds its annual benefit at Marquee in New York. Instead of the typical art auction, iCi presents an experience auction with items such as: play tennis with Eric Fischl; have a handbag personally designed for you by Carter and Matt Murphy; take a private tour with Jeff Koons of his studio; have your child or grandchild’s portrait drawn by Robert Longo

Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:42:06 -0400

Picked for: 2009-11-12

“Music For 16 Futurist Noise Intoners” is an evening-length concert of original scores and newly commissioned compositions for the intonarumori, or “noise-intoners” As part of its celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism, the Performa 09 biennial, in collaboration with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and SFMOMA, has invited Luciano Chessa to direct a reconstruction project to produce accurate replicas the legendary instruments (8 noise families of 1-3 instruments each, in various registers) that Russolo built in Milan in the summer of 1913. As the first instruments capable of creating and manipulating noises through entirely mechanical processes, the intonarumori can be considered to be the original analog synthesizer, and the ancestors to the latest electronic synthesizers used today.

Book Review: ART/WORK by staff

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:02:11 -0500

There’s no doubt in my mind that the art world is a treacherous place. On the one hand, it’s a cranky old establishment with a severe hierarchy of reputations and tastes; on the other, it’s a fickle young thing that claims no hard-and-fast rules.

But although the art world could not exist without the artist, it is somehow the artist who often seems most lost in this tangled-up web. As an artist, you have beans to your name until you’re on your deathbed, other people’s crap gets hooked up at David Zwirner while you can’t get a lazy eye to look at your masterpieces, and there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything you have to do. Then, of course, there’s the reputational hazard.

Luckily, ART/WORK: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art Career, a new book by power duo Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber, provides a ton of valuable information for the artist who, for lack of a better expression, hasn’t yet “made it” in his or her career.

LoCurto/Outcault markingtime

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:15:43 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-11

In their work, collaborators Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault focus on the frailty of the human body along with issues of perception, both visual and psychological. Employing a three-dimensional whole body scanner and using it as a camera, the artists capture, abstract and re-visualize the human figure. The scanned figures are hollow, skin deep and, when rendered topographically, can be sectioned into thin slices, turning them into ribbons of flesh. These calligraphic shards of sliced figures become painterly abstractions, at times like brushstrokes, of varying weights and intensities. With this combination of the hollow figure and fragmented sections of skin, we are confronted with elements that are simultaneously familiar and unreal, anonymous but universal, vulnerable yet thriving.

Joan Jonas

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:29:57 -0400

Picked for: 2009-11-10

“Reading Dante,” a large-scale performance by video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas, is based on elements from Dante’s epic fourteenth-century poem “The Divine Comedy,” collaging footage shot in four locations—the Canadian woods, 1970s New York, a ruin surrounding a lava field in Mexico City, and a shadow play in Italy—together to translate Dante into Jonas’s own remarkable “infernal paradise.”

William Kentridge

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:49:17 -0400

Picked for: 2009-11-09

A comic and visually dazzling performance by renowned South African artist William Kentridge, in “I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine,” the artist himself gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera “The Nose,” based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.

William Kentridge is best known for his drawings, prints, animations and theatrical designs addressing apartheid in his native South Africa. A new major traveling survey—currently at SF MoMA, and coming to NewYork’s MoMA in March 2010—considers themes that have engaged Kentridge over the course of his career, including his interest in studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia and, most recently, post-revolutionary Russian history. His work tracks a personal route across the fraught legacy of apartheid andcolonialism through an innovative use of charcoal drawing, prints, collages, stop-animation, film and theater.

Nicolas Pol: The Martus Maw

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:05:21 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-09

The Martus Maw is an exhibition of new works by French artist Nicolas Pol. It will feature sixteen never-before-seen works which the artist describes as “wild & raw,” and created through a process that is “conceptual but thoughtless.”

Play With Fire Festival

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:01:53 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-07

Coming from as far as Italy, Switzerland and Germany these artists are celebrating the breadth and depth of video possibilities through art. @Harvestworks in SoHo Saturday!

The Lust Weekend

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:55:48 -0400

Picked for: 2009-11-07

Avant-garde dances, sensual songs, mysterious avatars, and intimate confessions: Performa pays tribute to Futurist poet and dancer Valentine de Saint-Point, author of the “Manifesto of Lust” (1913) and the only Futurist to perform in New York (in 1917), with an enticing program of events at University Settlement and a variety of galleries on the Lower East Side, designed to coincide with the Feminine Futures exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute.

Let yourself be tempted…

Tom Wesselmann 'Draws'

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:51:28 -0500

Picked for: 2009-11-06

Tom Wesselmann ‘Draws’ will be the most comprehensive exhibition of drawings by the artist that has ever been assembled. the exhibition, which was originally organized by the artist in 2003, will cover drawings from his entire career 1959-2004. Most of the works come directly from the estate and the family of Tom Wesselmann.

Guggenheim Announces Short List for the Hugo Boss Prize 2010 by staff

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:41:40 -0500

“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and HUGO BOSS AG have announced the short list for the Hugo Boss Prize 2010. Established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art, this biennial award is administered by the foundation and juried by an international panel of museum directors, curators, and critics. The finalists for the eighth presentation of the prize are Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondák, Walid Raad, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art, the Hugo Boss Prize sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, race, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. Previous winners include Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), and Emily Jacir (2008). The 2010 prize carries with it an award of $100,000.” ...

Contributed by Danielle Mund