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breaking news in the art world
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May, 16, 2013 A Warhol Painting Is the Star of a Modest Auction After the historic $495 million sale of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, there was considerable curiosity surrounding Phillips’s far more modest one on Thursday evening. Could the third contemporary art auction of the week do well, considering that at Christie’s on Wednesday night, paintings by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat smashed all previous auction records? Although the struggling boutique auction house managed to win pricier materials than in recent seasons, it had only one real star — Warhol’s “Four Marilyns.” The 1962 painting of Marilyn Monroe, times four, sold for $34 million, or $38.2 million with fees. (Its estimated sale price was $35 million to $45 million.) The buyer, Victoria Gelfand, a director at the Gagosian Gallery, beat out three other bidders.
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May, 11, 2013 Hong Kong artists emerge from the shadow of China in new show Some artists suffer more to create their work than others. Angela Su certainly has.
In her nude photographic series titled “The Hartford Girl and Other Stories,” she had lines of text tattooed — without ink — onto her back to produce red welts in a nod to the 39 lashes of Christ.
Su’s work is one of the more arresting pieces in “Hong Kong Eye,” an exhibition of 24 local artists at ArtisTree gallery in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. The works range from traditional Chinese ink paintings to conceptual pieces such as an installation of empty subway turnstiles rotating automatically, to the downright wacky — a furry 3-meter-long tuber controlled by animatronics that rolls around emitting a non-stop stream of “ums” and “ahs.”
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May, 11, 2013 Artists from ‘The Roving Eye’ nominated for Turner Prize “How many portraits are made each day now, because of these?” asked Dick Goody, director of the OUAG and acting chair of the university’s Art Department.
“The Roving Eye: Aura and the Contemporary Portrait,” was an exhibition formally opened at Oakland University’s Art Gallery in January. Two artists who showcased their work at the exhibition have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
Awarded to one British artist under the age of 50 each year, the prize holds a prestigious rank in the world of art and design.
Curated by Dick Goody, this past winter’s exhibition explored works of international contemporary artists fixated with portraiture, either temporarily or permanently.
“What initially compelled me to do the portrait show was the idea of how we look at a work of art in a different way, when it’s making eye contact with us,” Goody said.
“I’m looking at you and your eyes, and you’re looking back at me. When you do that with a portrait, it closes the circle in a way. If the person isn’t looking at you, you can become a voyeur. But if they’re looking at you, you’re having a different experience with a work of art, than when you’re looking at a ‘regular’ piece of art.”
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May, 11, 2013 Santa Monica Museum celebrates ahead of annual art sale InCognito The great opera and theater director Peter Sellars draped a chain of Lithuanian amber around his neck for PreCognito, something he does, he said, only for very special occasions.
That special occasion, Thursday’s gala dinner, celebrated the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s 25th anniversary by honoring Sellars and pioneering art gallery owner Margo Leavin. Noted artists Bill Viola and John Baldessari delivered the introductions.
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May, 07, 2013 Interior Decorator Michael S. Smith on His New Book, The Alchemy of Design, and Decorating the Oval Office Since he was invited to update the White House’s décor in 2009, Michael S. Smith has been knighted with a rare and coveted interiors title: the President’s Decorator. But the Southern California native has kept busy since his foray in the Oval Office, adorning his own Manhattan condo with French-made panels while also slowly crafting what he calls the perfect American country home. Smith documented the latter in his fourth book, Building Beauty: The Alchemy of Design, a fantastic, step-by-step look inside Smith’s method for combining European classicism with American modernism (released today by Rizzoli). West Coast editor Krista Smith recently caught up with the designer about scavenging limestone from Italy, his love of high-low decorating, and his best memories from the White House
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May, 07, 2013 Visiting artists need tax breaks like sportsmen While the cultural sector is being urged by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to increase its economic impact in return for public investment, its ability to do is being thwarted by a tax regime that is discriminatory and intensely bureaucratic. International tax conventions adopted by the British Government arbitrarily treat artists and musicians as well as sportsmen and footballers differently from other categories of taxpayer. However, this is compounded by the Government choosing to exempt foreign sports personalities from withholding tax, to encourage major sports events to take place in Britain, while leaving in place an aggressive tax regime for visiting musicians and artists.
In many cases Britain’s cultural organisations are forced to undertake arduous and time-consuming paperwork only to demonstrate that no tax is due at all. We would support any move that enabled British orchestras and concert halls to continue to attract the world’s finest musicians and to compete in the global marketplace, so enabling them to survive during these difficult times.
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May, 07, 2013 Man FBI tied to art heist faces sentencing HARTFORD — Robert Gentile is either a dangerous mobster who should remain locked up for illegally possessing weapons and selling prescription drugs or an ailing old man with no proven mob ties who poses no danger to society and should be released from detention, according to federal court documents.
The dueling depictions come from legal briefs filed by the prosecution and defense ahead of Gentile’s sentencing scheduled for Thursday in Hartford.
Prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of about four to 4½ years, while Gentile’s lawyer said he should be sentenced to time already served and be released on probation or home confinement.
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May, 07, 2013 When Museums Decide to Return Looted Art “The Met Plans to Return Art to Cambodia” illustrates how far American museums have come from the days of litigation over cultural artifacts, such as that involving the Lydian Hoard looted from Turkey in the 1960s and returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, and the Met’s contentious relationship with Italy in the early 2000s over antiquities such as the Euphronios krater. The Met is leading the way, along with other museums including the Getty, Dallas Museum of Art and University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in deciding that restitution accompanied by cultural property agreements establishes mutually beneficial relationships that allow the world’s cultural heritage to be shared with the American public in ways that ensure the objects’ authenticity and impart knowledge as well as beauty.
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May, 07, 2013 House Painter Is Charged in Long Island Art Thefts He painted houses for a living, but prosecutors say Joselito Vega had a discerning eye for the more rarefied practitioners of his craft — Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet and Frank Stella.And Mr. Vega had the good fortune to be hired to paint not just any house, but an estate in Kings Point on the North Shore of Long Island owned by the family of two of the world’s great collectors of 20th-century art, the late Rudolph B. and Hannelore B. Schulhof. The home is a virtual museum, with more than 300 paintings worth many millions. When three paintings vanished from the estate a year ago, prosecutors said, one of them, Dubuffet’s “Armchair II,” was soon found to have been sold at auction by a gallery in Oakland, Calif., to a buyer in Monaco. The check used to pay the seller was delivered to a private mailbox in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, belonging to Mr. Vega, prosecutors said.
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May, 01, 2013 Landmark art project under threat after Scottish Coal crisis THE future of Scotland's largest land art project – a massive multi-million-pound sculpture by international artist Charles Jencks on the site of an old mine – is in doubt after Scottish Coal went into liquidation.
The restoration of the 665-acre site that is being designed by world-famous Jencks at Kelty in Fife is in jeopardy, along with other sites around the country, after the firm hit financial difficulties.
Friends of the Earth Scotland estimates it costs about £10 million to reinstate a basic landscape and it is thought the overall Jencks project could be priced at considerably more.
Scottish Coal, which runs six open-cast mines in East Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire and Fife, announced it was in provisional liquidation just over a week ago, with the loss of almost 600 jobs.
Jencks, the American environmental architect behind the celebrated landform at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and Maggie's Centre in Glasgow, was hailed for his designs for the work, called the Scottish World Project.
A sculpted landscape park representing the continents of the world, celebrating Scotland's diaspora, and how they have influenced history is planned, and located between the "continents" is a loch in the shape of Scotland – with further water features surrounded by cliffs.
Jencks, whose mother was from Fife, could not be contacted yesterday
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artists in the spotlight
Cathy Locke San Francisco, CA
Paul Pitsker Los Angeles, CA
Cheryl Kline Los Angeles, CA
Ronald David Erskine Wenatchee, WA
Charlie de Mar Greenwich, Connecticut
Ron Zheng Nishinomiya Hyogo, Japan
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