News

WEEK IN REVIEW: From Christie's to Koons, Our Top Visual Arts Stories, May 13-17
17/05/2013
WEEK IN REVIEW: From Christie's to Koons, Our Top Visual Arts Stories, May 13-17Published: May 17, 2013– Judd Tully reported from an astonishing four modern and contemporary art auctions in New York this week, beginning with Monday’s sale at Christie’s benefiting Leonard DiCaprio’s wildlife charity, followed by Sotheby’s $293.5 million sale on Tuesday, Christie’s blockbuster $495-million auction on Wednesday — the highest total for an art auction ever — and concluding with Thursday’s $78.6 million sale at Phillips.– Rozalia Jovanovic attended a meeting of the Gertrude Salon, an exclusive gathering of artists, curators, and novice and seasoned collectors.– Sky Goodden parsed the ongoing controversy surrounding a student’s performance art piece at the Alberta College of Art + Design that involved killing a chicken.– Jeremy Deller offered a taste of his project for the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale.– David Lynch discussed how his art school ambition to become a painter has shaped his filmmaking.– New York dealer Yossi Milo announced plans to open a pop-up photography exhibition in Sydney.– Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop offered a preview of the offerings at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, which makes its debut on May 23 through 26.– Australian artist Patricia Piccinini unveiled the strange sea-creature shaped hot-air balloon sculpture that she created for Canberra’s centennial celebrations.– Ben Davis reflected on two new solo shows by Jeff Koons at David Zwirner and Gagosian in Chelsea.– Alexander Forbes chatted with Helsinki-based art dealers and collectors Rafaela Seppälä-Forsblom and Kaj Forsblom.This Week's Videos: brightcove.createExperiences(); Read full article here

Stockholm Cool Meets the Big Gay American West: ACNE x Bruce of Los Angeles
17/05/2013
Stockholm Cool Meets the Big Gay American West: ACNE x Bruce of Los AngelesPublished: May 17, 2013  Nothing like a little vintage homoerotica to raise an eyebrow, especially if those in the buff posed as far back as the conservative 1940s. Such was the mission – and legacy – of Bruce Bellas, the photographer more commonly known as Bruce of Los Angeles. The Nebraska native began his professional life as a chemistry teacher, of all things. But in 1947, Bellas relocated to L.A., where he started snapping bodybuilders in increasing states of undress. His oeuvre grew and he began to define the mid-century beefcake — framing men both physically raw and visually provocative, inadvertently creating a new category in art’s ever-expanding matrix: the fifties physique. Moreover, the photographer helped usher in a brave new era of masculinity, nude or otherwise – catalyzing a graduation from the vanilla to the explicit, à la Robert Mapplethorpe. In 2001, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote, “Mapplethorpe was virtually a Bruce creation, and artists like Cindy Sherman are almost certainly beneficiaries of his prop-wielding, icon-busting wit.” While Sherman didn’t necessarily dabble in birthday-suited gents, her work typically tackles gender issues in some way, shape, or form.  Yet Bruce of Los Angeles had a more private and buttoned-up side – a facet that Stockholm’s ACNE Studios has capitalized on in the book “Bruce of Los Angeles Rodeo,” a spectacularly juxtaposed collaboration between slick Swede cool and big gay American West. You see, Bellas shot a parallel series of work in addition to all the nakedness, specifically a selection of bona fide cowboys caught in off moments between bull-riding and bronco-busting. Considered the artist’s most personal work, the photographs elucidate a more complex view of modern masculinity. Curated by New Yorker critic Vince Aletti, the 192-page tome is a fitting testament to all things Bruce, laid out in typical ACNE minimalism (if you’ve never read ACNE Paper, pick it up ASAP from your local import mag shop). Additionally, the images are forever grafted to the Scandinavian design house in a capsule clothing line featuring Bellas’s photos screened on the brand’s ever-popular denims and blouses (the capsule is unisex). Attendees at the launch of the book and line included Fran Lebowitz, Hanne Gaby Odiele, and Kate Foley – an apt, unexpected blend, much like “Rodeo” itself.  Follow @BLOUINFashion Read full article here

Silicon Valley Gets an Art Fair, Promising "Earth-Shattering" Art-Tech Pairing
17/05/2013
Silicon Valley Gets an Art Fair, Promising "Earth-Shattering" Art-Tech PairingPublished: May 17, 2013There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the growing interest of Internet entrepreneurs in the art world. The art fair gods have heard them. Next year, their enthusiasm will be rewarded with a boutique art fair of their very own, right in the heart of tech culture itself: Silicon Valley Contemporary 2014. The newest addition to the roster of Hamptons Expo Group — a producer of art shows like ArtHamptons, ArtAspen, and the Houston Fine Art Fair  — Silicon Valley Contemporary will gather roughly 60 exhibitors from around the world from April 10-13 at the San Jose Convention Center for an exhibition of work selected to parallel the rise of Silicon Valley itself, historically and spiritually. “It will feature work created from 1980 to the present,” said Rick Friedman, founder and president of Hamptons Expo Group. “We think that’s in sync with Silicon Valley. We want it to be cutting edge, but accessible to people.” As with Hamptons Expo’s other boutique fairs, Silicon Valley Contemporary will be a regional show, catering to the interests of Silicon Valley’s three million locals. It will target the “intellectually curious and visually-oriented” from some of California's wealthiest zip codes, including Los Altos, Los Gatos, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park.  The fair is also seeking to collaborate with local museums, like the San Jose Museum of Art, for fundraising events and parties.  While visitors will be local, the galleries to this invitation-only event will be global with spaces hailing from India and Asia, as well as some from nearby San Francisco and Los Angeles. “The level of response is through the roof,” said the fair’s director Peter Bodnarchuk. Having closely studied the “impasse” between the art world and the tech entrepreneurs, Bodnarchuk, a long-time startup consultant who ran one of the first luxury goods auction sites (Finelot) and also has years of experience in the art world (most recently, he ran a gallery called Art Futures in Miami's art-centric Wynwood neighborhood), says the fair will be a “very open platform,” and especially geared to making visitors feel welcome. Everything will be accessible online and a good portion of the work displayed will involve new media and digital photography, computer-driven work, and high-tech installations. “We have one company that is doing something earth-shattering,” Bodnarchuk promised, though he couldn’t yet get into the details. “It’s a game-changer. It’s very futuristic — something that has never been experienced in this world before, with an art component.” Apart from such ground-breaking works, the fair will be much like any other fair, with booths and swag. Organizers, however, are aiming to minimize the inherent hierarchies of the bigger art fairs, where established galleries command pride of place. “You can’t get around the hierarchy,” he avers, “but I think it’s about being open and intelligent about it.” Click here for more information on Silicon Vallery Contemporary. Read full article here

Slideshow: The Architizer A+ Awards
17/05/2013
Language English Featured: 0Order: 0 Read full article here

Slideshow: Curiosity: An Exhibition Portfolio
17/05/2013
Language English Featured: 0Order: 0 Read full article here

Lucie Stahl, Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline
17/05/2013
Artists: Lucie Stahl, Tom Humphreys Venue: What Pipeline, Detroit Exhibition Title: Holes Date: April 19 – May 25, 2013 Click here to view slideshow Full gallery of images and link available after the jump. Images: Images courtesy of What Pipeline, Detroit.  Link: Lucie Stahl and Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art [...]Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today. Read full article here

Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" Screens at Cannes and Exposes the Dark Side of Consumerism
17/05/2013
Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" Screens at Cannes and Exposes the Dark Side of ConsumerismPublished: May 17, 2013“I wanna rob,” deadpans a chain-smoking post-Hogwarts Emma Watson in the infectious trailer for “The Bling Ring,” Sofia Coppola’s new movie based on the real-life exploits of a gang of sticky-fingered Valley girls who burgled $3 million in designer clothing and jewelry from the Hollywood mansions of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and other mid-aughts tabloid silage. A cabal of teenagers indulge in underage partying and grand larceny to the score of Azealia Banks’s badass anthem “212.” With their insatiable hunger for luxury branding (Chanel, Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, and Yves Saint Laurent among them), the Bling Ring girls referred to their stealing binges as “going shopping.” Kleptomania is consumerism’s double. Commodity fetishism — the quasi-spiritual, phantasmagorical love of stuff, made possible by capitalism, is a major trope in this year’s movies. The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott noted as much in his recent essay comparing “The Bling Ring,” Baz Lurhmann’s overstuffed Gatsby adaptation, and the hedonistic nirvana of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers."  In Spring Breakers’s standout scene, the vainglorious street thug Alien, played by a gold-toothed James Franco, revels in the sublime excess of all his stuff: “I got shorts! Every fuckin' color… This is the fuckin' American dream.” In an eerily parallel scene in “The Great Gatsby,” the sight of Gatsby’s wardrobe is to Daisy Buchanan an almost transcendental experience. "It makes me sad,” Daisy exclaims. “I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before.” Gatsby is a Jazz-Age Alien, a gangster in a penguin suit, and those mind-bogglingly gorgeous Brooks Brothers shirts were bought and paid for through unsavory means. Consumerism and criminality are one. Gatsby’s “view of American materialism is not moralistic, but pornographic,” says Scott. "[It] traffics in the sheer libidinal pleasure of money and what it can buy.” The same could be said of “Spring Breakers” and “The Bling Ring,” which exacerbate the American dream of upward mobility and self-betterment to the dissipated heights of lifestyle pornography. Neither a celebration nor a critique of consumerism, these movies approximate what cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek calls over-identification: the strategy of pushing an ideology to its limit in order to unravel it from within. “To be really subversive," says Žižek, "is not to develop critical potentials, or ironic distance, but precisely to take the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously." Instead of harping on the evils of mammon, these three flicks literalize desire. They give the people what they want to the point of obscenity. “This is how we live: greedily, enviously, superficially, in a state of endless, self-justifying desire,” Scott concludes. “This is the pursuit of happiness, mirrored in the pleasure these movies provide.”  At a historical moment where social class and economic redistribution have entered the public consciousness (vis-à-vis both the lefty populist rhetoric of Occupy and Mitt Romney’s "47%" blunder), these movies cast the tenants of “good filmmaking” (sympathetic characters, compelling human drama, a coherent moral program) aside like last season’s Prada, articulating a worldview defined by stockpiling fancy things. They might be criticized as decadent and superficial, but isn’t that the point? They’re materialistic, but also materialist: intentionally or not, they expose the unquenchable, desiring logic of capitalism. Follow @BLOUINFashion Read full article here

Reflecting on Jeff Koons's Hollow Triumph in Chelsea
17/05/2013
Reflecting on Jeff Koons's Hollow Triumph in ChelseaPublished: May 17, 20131. When I walked into “Gazing Ball,” Jeff Koons’s new show at David Zwirner, my first reaction was… pleasant surprise. The show, advertised as the opening shot in a Year of Koons leading up to his Whitney retrospective in 2014, consists of a number of creamy white plaster sculptures scattered around Zwirner’s beautifully lit 19th Street space, evidently intended as an extended riff on types of lawn decoration. Some are giant casts of familiar classical sculptures — pert, armless female nudes and brawny, writhing warriors — of the kind you might find lining the way to some godawful nouveau riche Beverly Hills palace; others are simulacra of elaborately decorated mailboxes; one is a jumbo-sized snowman. What binds the whole series together is a repeating element, a shiny blue sphere — here perched on the hip of a languishing figure, there balanced incongruously atop a row of mailboxes. I’ve so come to associate Koons with mindless rich-guy spectacle that these new “Gazing Ball” works come off as unexpectedly daring. They offer the semblance of a fresh formula, though Koons's queasy interplay of the high and the low remains unmistakable. Here, that theme is refracted through a whole system of other polarities: calculated variation and knowing repetition, matte white and mirrored blue, and finally the turbo-charged production values of the statuary (check out the surface of that snowman) and the store-bought character of the “gazing balls” (on Amazon, you can buy a blue “Odyssey Glass Gazing Globe” for $29.97; maybe the goofy classical reference fired Koons’s imagination).  As a viewer, you enter “Gazing Ball” and you are amused. Then you walk around these sculptures and you slowly realize that, after the initial intrigue, no further thoughts appear in your brain.  In that one-two step, the initial rush followed by the deeper emptiness, you have everything you need to know about Koons’s merit as an artist. You have his real skill — and let’s be honest, fellow Koons-sceptics, the man is talented. His eye for effects is one of his two great talents. It’s just that a single jolt of mannered peculiarity is not quite enough to convince you that it all has much of a point. You can’t help but think that the final destiny of these meta-lawn-ornaments is to end up as actual lawn ornaments for some multi-millionaire, as all the levels of irony collapse in on themselves. And ultimately the most appropriate word to describe the accomplishment of “Gazing Ball” would be “awesome” — delivered in as flat and affectless a tone of voice as possible. 2. The Zwirner show opened opposite another at Koons’s long-time gallery, Gagosian. The latter, unimaginatively titled “New Painting and Sculpture,” is a more diverse but also less novel experience. It contains three monumental polished stainless steel balloon animals, about which there is no more to say than there is about Koons's other monumental balloon animals, and a sculpture of a man-sized inflatable Incredible Hulk pushing a wheel-barrow. It also profers a set of works from the New York artist's newer “Antiquity” line, large photorealist collage paintings that mash together yet more images of classical nudes; “Balloon Venus (Magenta),” a large sculpture evoking the ancient, bulbous fertility totem known as the “Venus of Willendorf,” only formed out of shiny metal balloons; and “Metallic Venus,” a scale version of the so-called “Venus Callipyge” — the “Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks,” an epithet that must have amused Koons — in polished blue steel, studded with live flowers. “Antiquity” is new territory for Koons, perhaps — but in fact it fits a very old pattern: From Picasso’s florid versions of “Las Meninas” to Warhol’s icy riffs on “The Last Supper,” late-period artists have often pivoted to apply their signature techniques to the classics. As they age, such celebrity artists find themselves forced to quote themselves; locked in the prison of their own trademark effects, they look for something to buttress their credibility. Quoting the masters thereby signifies the lasting relevance they feel is slipping away from them, while replicating the problem of being trapped within art at a higher level. Which is to say: I can’t see much of meaning in Koons’s Koons-esque spins on antiquity, besides some kind of residual hunger to be taken seriously — though this almost makes them poignant in their own unintentional way. 3. The opening of Koons’s double whammy of shows last week came right on the heels of a lengthy New York Magazine cover story, which was, truth be told, short on fresh insight into the guy. The headline of the article asked, “What Does the Art World Have Against Jeff Koons?” This conceit produced a particular eye roll, evoking the mega-rich who go on and on about how they are a persecuted minority. But the title does at least make visible the ideology being beamed at you from all those gleaming surfaces at Zwirner and Gagosian. I mentioned Koons’s two talents before. One is his meticulous eye for a Baz Luhrmann-esque high-octane eye candy; the other, his ability to convince fans that the underlying lack of nuance is not a lack at all, but a carefully planned effect — in fact, a meaningful act of defiance against all those pointy-headed intellectuals who are always complaining about things. “He says if you’re critical, you’re already out of the game,” David Zwirner explains in the New York mag article, articulating Koons’s philosophy. This strikes me as a particularly One Percent kind of sentiment, a token of a world grown so unequal that a certain class of people is almost completely out of touch with the values of real humans. For most of us, after all, critical thought is important, because for most of us life is a struggle. The new millennium, so far, has belonged to Koons, with the brief interregnum of the art crash that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Then, good critics wondered aloud whether the crisis might be positive for art, returning some critical spark to it — and Koons’s brand of industrial-strength razzle-dazzle was exactly the kind of thing that was, for that crisis-wracked moment, exposed in all its social irrelevance. Yet the promised aesthetic renewal did not arrive, mainly because passing through the crucible of the Great Recession, the powerful stabilized their fortunes. Inequality has surged, and Koons’s status as Artist of His Time has surged back with it. But as in the general economy, where you get the sense that we have lived through a largely substance-free recovery, based on kicking the can down the road, Koons's new works give you the feeling that you are dealing with the same old schemes, though perhaps in slightly new forms. Read full article here

Peeping Tom Artist Scandalizes Neighbors, Keith Haring App Goes Live, and More
17/05/2013
Peeping Tom Artist Scandalizes Neighbors, Keith Haring App Goes Live, and MorePublished: May 17, 2013– Neighbors Angry Over Peeping Tom Artist's Photographs: Neighbors of the Tribeca-based photographer Arne Svenson who live in the glass-walled Zinc Building across the street from his studio are predictably upset to see themselves, however obfuscated, in Svenson's new exhibition of photographs taken with a birding lens, now on view at Chelsea's Julie Saul Gallery. "I don’t feel it’s a violation in a legal sense but in a New York, personal sense there was a line crossed," Zinc Building resident Michelle Sylvester said.  "I think there’s an understanding that when you live here with glass windows, there will be straying eyes but it feels different with someone who has a camera." [AP] – Keith Haring App Launches: The work of late street artist Keith Haring continues to take on new formats (recently, it adorned a high-end male sex toy). Now, its coming to iPads via the new application "Art Intelligence: Keith Haring," which sets his work in context with a timeline juxtaposing his work with major world and cultural events. "Haring's philosophy of art emphasized accessibility and transcending boundaries," said Julia Gruen of the Keith Haring Foundation. "Pairing this philosophy with today's technology perfectly expands upon his vision." [Press Release] – Ai Weiwei Tackles Chinese Milk Formula Scandal: In his latest work, "Baby Formula," which has just gone on view at Hong Kong's ParaSite art space, Ai Weiwei has used 1,800 tins of powdered milk to create a giant floor sculpture in the shape of the map of China, a response to a 2008 scandal in which at least six children died and some 300,000 became sick after consuming milk formula that contained melamine. Since the incident, many Chinese parents have flocked to Hong Kong to buy imported powdered milk. "A country like this can put a satellite into space but it can't put a safe bottle teat into a child's mouth," Ai said. "I think it's extremely absurd. This is a most fundamental assurance of food, but people actually have to go to another region to obtain this kind of thing." [Independent] – Cooper Union Occupation Enters Second Week: Students at the art, architecture, and engineering school the Cooper Union in New York have been occupying the office of the school's president Jamshed Bharucha for over a week now in protest of the university administration's decision to start charging tuition for the first time in the school's history. "It's very evident that he does not believe in the mission of the school," Angus Buchanan-Smith, a second-year art student, said. "We've been reading squatter's law, and apparently if you squat or occupy a building for more than 10 years it becomes your own. That's a good goal for us to reach." [AiA] – Meet the FBI's Art Crime Czar: Though her official title is rather ambiguous — "program manager" — Dr. Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who holds a PhD in Near Eastern archaeology, heads up the Art Crime Team at the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., which has been tracking thousands of missing artworks since its founding in 2004. "The idea that there’s a Mr. Big out there somewhere who’s directing all of this burglary and theft from museums I think is mostly a product of our film industry," Magness-Gardiner said. "Stolen art, stolen antiquities move into a legitimate market very easily." [Bloomberg] – Van Gogh Museum Sells His Sketchbooks: The just-reopened Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has added an unusual item to its gift shop offerings: replicas of the only four surviving sketchbooks that Vincent van Gogh used to doodle, sketch, and scrawl preparatory drawings for his iconic paintings. The bundle of sketchbooks, which are accompanied by a book of commentary from the director of the museum's collections, retails for €495, and includes facsimiles of his drawings in pencil, ink, chalk, and charcoal, as well as addresses, poems, and even a small map in preparation of his trip to Paris in 1886. [AFP] – Whitney Will Show Wilcox: This fall the Whitney Museum will give over its second floor to a massive video installation by T.J. Wilcox that the artist shot from his Union Square penthouse studio. The 360-degree video, titled "In The Air" (perhaps after ARTINFO's art news blog), features six short films relating to specific locations — Andy Warhol's Factory studio, the Empire State Building, and so on — unfolding over the course of a sunny September day. "It’s a portrait of New York from the 18th floor of the building," Wilcox said. "I had become fascinated with panoramic films because that was the way, in the early 19th-century, people first saw film." The exhibition run September 19-February 9, 2014. [NYT] – Doig Denies Painting, But Not the LSD: The Scottish painter Peter Doig denies that he ever spent time at the Thunder Bay Correctional Center, where a former parole officer claims he met Doig and bought a $100 painting from the troubled teen, and is now suing the artist for not recognizing the work as his own. Doig, now based in Trinidad, spent time in his late teens traveling through the Canadian prairies, working with a crew that drilled for gas, and sometimes using LSD, though he says that never caused him to end up in a correctional facility, as the former parole officer Robert Fletcher claims. [Independent] – Nahmad Case Not Art-Related: Despite the FBI's raid on the Upper East Side's Helly Nahmad Gallery last month, in which computers and documents were seized, there appears to be no connection between the gallery's operations, the Nahmad family's vast art collection, and the gambling and money laundering charges leveled on Helly Nahmad and other defendants in the investigation. However Helly's father David Nahmad, who founded the gallery in the early 1970s, may be tangentially responsible since he encouraged his children to gamble as a way of learning valuable life lessons — for his part, David is one of the world's top backgammon players. [NYT] – Stan Douglas Gets Photography Prize: The Vancouver-based, David Zwirner-represented artist Stan Douglas has won Canada's top photography prize, the Scotiabank Photography Award, for 2013. The win comes with a $50,000 prize and a solo show at Toronto's CONTACT Photography Festival next year. The two other finalists for the prize were Angela Grauerholz and Robert Walker. "Stan Douglas has helped define and enrich the Canadian art and photography landscape with his outstanding artwork," said photographer and jury chair Edward Burtynsky, who co-founded the award. "He has pushed the limits of contemporary photography and will continue to have an incredible impact on the world of photography both here in Canada and abroad." [CBC] VIDEO OF THE DAY The actual neighbors react to Arne Svenson's project "The Neighbors" ALSO ON ARTINFO Phillips Takes In $78.6 Million, Led by Warhol's $38-Million "Four Marilyns" Philip Haas's Fruit and Flower Sculptures Put a New 3-D Spin on Arcimboldo IN THE STUDIO [VIDEO]: Zhuang Hui & Dan'er Ahead of Art Basel Hong Kong Art Platform — Los Angeles Axes 2013 Edition, Citing a Changing Fair Landscape "Rain Room" at MoMA Heralds Restoration Hardware's Bold Move Into Art Sales Biz Connie Butler Leaves MoMA to Become Head Curator at L.A.'s Hammer Museum For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR. Read full article here

Llyn Foulkes at Hammer Museum
17/05/2013
Artist: Llyn Foulkes Venue: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Date: February 3 – May 19, 2013 Click here to view slideshow Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump. Images: Images courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Press Release: Los Angeles—The Hammer Museum presents an extensive career retrospective devoted to the work of the groundbreaking painter [...]Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today. Read full article here