Tuesday, 30th September 2008
12:23pm
Two unconnected events in the art world last week set me thinking about the relationship between art and politics. The first was the opening of the V&A’s latest exhibition, ‘Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70’, which was followed by Bloomberg's report that almost 50 per cent of the Gagosian gallery’s global sales are buyers from Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union.
According to the Bloomberg report, the Gagosian gallery had almost no Russian buyers four years ago but with Russia now the world’s second largest oil exporter, the country's number of billionaires has jumped from 36 in...
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Friday, 26th September 2008
4:04pm
Picasso auction:
One of Pablo Picasso’s most important paintings, Arelquin (pictured), will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, New York, in November. The painting, which was last seen in public 45 years ago, is expected to fetch over $30 million (£16.3m). Painted in 1909, it was bought by the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati during the 1940s. Arelquin will be exhibited in Sotheby’s, London, 3-7 October and Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 29 October-3 November.
Guggenheim announce new director:
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced this week that Richard Armstrong will become its next director. Richard Armstrong, who has...
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Friday, 19th September 2008
6:20pm
Hirst Triumphs
The Sotheby’s two-day auction of work by Damien Hirst fetched £111.4 million. The single-artist sale, entitled ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’, had been forecast to reach around £65 million. The centrepiece of the show, Golden Calf, sold for £10.3million. After weeks of speculation, the results have silenced claims that the sale would mark the end of the current art boom. Damien Hirst, who didn’t attend the auction, said, ‘I think the art market is bigger than anyone knows, I love art and this proves I’m not alone and the future looks great for everyone.’ The sale is...
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Thursday, 18th September 2008
4:52pm
In a week dominated by news of financial meltdown, the art world proved its increasing strength and vigour with two headline-grabbing events: Damien Hirst’s record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, which raked in a total of £111m, and the opening in Moscow of the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture (GCCC). Admittedly, how much either had to do with art, as opposed to celebrity culture, is up for debate.
Hype surrounding the GCCC was focused on its founder, Daria Zhukova, perhaps better known as the girlfriend of Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich. Clearly not content with a clichéd WAG lifestyle, the glamorous 27 year-old...
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Wednesday, 17th September 2008
5:22pm
At a press conference at the National Gallery, London, yesterday to announce its exhibition programme for 2009, the director, Nicholas Penny, revealed that he was unhappy with the 12-year-old agreement between the National and Tate Galleries that takes 1900 as the dividing point between their collections. This point is being reinforced by the gallery’s major exhibition for next year, ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past’ (25 February-7 June), which examines the artist’s engagement with Old Masters, an idea memorably pioneered in an exhibition at the Prado in 2006. Historians’ relatively new interest in modernism as a development from the art of the...
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Tuesday, 16th September 2008
5:57pm
The press view at Tate Britain for its latest retrospective of Francis Bacon (the first was in 1960, the second in 1985) buzzed with a level of anticipation I’ve not often encountered. A self-taught painter, Bacon mutilated most of the work he produced between 1933-45 at the time, but once his work became known his popularity was quickly established, lasting throughout his life, and is, it seems, growing by the day.
Tate’s current retrospective is very much a ‘best of Bacon’, taking a chronological approach through a selection of 71 works, broken only by two thematic rooms that group...
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Friday, 12th September 2008
4:29pm
Met announces new Director:
After months of speculation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has named Thomas P. Campbell as the successor to outgoing Director Philippe de Montebello who announced his retirement eight months ago after 31 years in post. English-born Campbell, aged 46, is a graduate of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and has been a curator at the Metropolitan since 1995 where he has developed a reputation for producing scholarly catalogues and ambitious exhibitions. Campbell will become the ninth director in the Met’s 138-year history.
Fakes alert:
The Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo has withdrawn three...
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Friday, 5th September 2008
5:10pm
2008 is the year of Andrea Palladio (above), born 500 years ago. The anniversary is being celebrated with a big exhibition in his home town, Vicenza, which opens at Palazzo Barbaran da Porto on 20 September (until 6 January) and then travels to the Royal Academy in London (31 January-31 April). There are plenty of good arguments for saying that Palladio – thanks to his 1570 book Quattro Libri dell’Architettura rather than his actual buildings – is the most influential architect of all time. Even Le Corbusier cannot quite rival him for the way that his understanding of the classical...
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Thursday, 4th September 2008
4:09pm
Now that summer is officially over and the Olympics hooplah seems like the dim and distant past, we can return to dwelling on religious imagery in contemporary art . Or at least that’s what appears to be currently happening in Essex, Newcastle, Bolzano and Rome.
Back in January, an offended citizen requested a police investigation into the display of Terence Koh’s statuette of Christ with an erection at the Baltic Centre, Gateshead. After receiving little satisfaction, Emily Mapfuwa from Brentwood, Essex, is bringing a private case against the gallery with the financial help of the Christian Legal Centre.
...
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Wednesday, 3rd September 2008
12:40pm
Two articles in yesterday’s press neatly demonstrated for me the two polar forces that characterise the art world. The first was a piece in The Telegraph by Richard Dorment highlighting the current show at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles about the Society of Dilettanti which contrasted with discussion in The Independent of Damien Hirst’s much debated September Sotheby’s auction in which the artist is staging the first single-artist sale consigned by the artist himself.
Hirst’s antics have got the art world and media a flutter. By dispensing with the dealers and art galleries that represent him (Jay Joplin at...
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Now in its 30th year, the London Park Lane Arms Fair returns with its annual array of fine arms and armoury. Elsewhere in the capital, impressive surveys of Freud, Hirst and mid-century British art can be found.
George Gilbert Scott described the dome as ‘the noblest of all forms’, and it appears as a powerful symbol in secular and religious architecture throughout history. On the island of Malta, however, the craze for dome-building reached astonishing heights.
