Is art the new politics?

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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Weekly Arts news round-up

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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Weekly Arts News Round-Up

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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Dashing 'Oligarts'

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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Moving the goalposts at the National

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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