MCQUEEN WINS GUCCI GROUP AWARD

Artist Steve McQueen has won the Gucci Group Award at the Venice Film Festival for his film Hunger, reports the Press Association. The British artist won the Camera d'Or Prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for a movie about the Maze Prison. Hunger concerns the final weeks in the life of Bobby Sands. Thanking those behind the award, McQueen said, “We're living in a time and age where it is all about putting our cards on the table and going for it.” The award, which honours filmmakers from other disciplines, had intense competition. McQueen beat another British nominee, Isaac Julien, a London-based photographer and video and film artist who was nominated for his direction of Derek, a film narrated by Tilda Swinton that highlights the work and importance of the late director Derek Jarman. McQueen also beat out Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. Yauch was nominated for his direction of Gunnin' for That No. 1 Spot, a Harlem-set documentary that trails eight high school basketball prospects. Julian Schnabel, winner of the 2007 Gucci Group Award, was also nominated for his direction of Lou Reed's Berlin. Members of the 2008 Gucci Group Award selection committee included Marco Muller, artistic director of the Venice Film Festival; Franca Sozzani, editor in chief of Vogue in Italy; the artist Jeff Koons; the actress Isabelle Huppert; and Stefano Pilati, creative director of Yves Saint Laurent.

ANN TEMKIN NAMED CHIEF CURATOR AT MOMA

After a six-month search, the Museum of Modern Art has chosen one of its own curators, Ann Temkin, to succeed John Elderfield, who retired as chief curator of painting and sculpture in July.
Ms. Temkin assumes the curatorial post, considered the most prestigious in the field of Modern art, as MoMA gears up for its second growth spurt in less than a decade. After an $858 million expansion completed in 2004, the museum plans to extend its galleries further in a tower that is being built next door on West 54th Street in Manhattan. The museum is also in the midst of rethinking how it presents the history of Modern art through its world-class collection. In addition to the display of paintings and sculptures, Ms. Temkin’s top responsibilities will include planning special exhibitions and advising the museum on acquisitions. “I plan to take a broader, more international view than we did in the past,” said Ms. Temkin, 48, who arrived at MoMA in 2003 after 13 years as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Since the era of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s legendary founding director, the museum has played a greater role than any other institution in carving out a canon of Modern movements under curators like William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe and Mr. Elderfield, who is now the museum’s chief curator emeritus. Yet in recent years some art-world critics have felt that the museum should have been more on top of what was happening in contemporary art. Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities was to ensure that MoMA’s collection of contemporary art is unrivaled. Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities would be to “change our viewers’ experience in many ways,” especially by integrating painting and sculpture with other mediums. The Modern and many other museums still have separate departments for painting and sculpture, film and video, and prints and drawings.
Ms. Temkin called that approach outdated. She said that she planned to “reflect the way artists work today, where these divisions are far less prevalent.” She also intends to change the works in the permanent galleries more frequently. “I’d like to mix the foundation of the collection in new ways, to animate those galleries so they are constantly full of unexpected revelations,” she said.

FOR SALE: SERPENTINE'S RICHARD PRINCE EXHIBITION

Every work in the Serpentine Gallery’s Richard Prince show, “Continuation”, which is on display through September 7th, is drawn from the artist’s personal collection and is available for sale, raising questions about the relationship between publicly-funded galleries and their sponsors.
Richard Prince, one of the world’s most commercially successful artists, is billed as the exhibition’s co-curator in collaboration with the Serpentine, while two of the artist’s dealers—Larry Gagosian and Sadie Coles—are listed on the gallery website as supporters of the exhibition program. The gallery denies there is any conflict of interest, saying “all parties wanted to present a successful show for the benefit of the public”.
 “Continuation” is the first major UK show of Prince’s work for over 20 years and consists of 32 works. It follows the New York Guggenheim’s retrospective “Richard Prince: Spiritual America” (which closed in January). Many of the works in that show were loaned by private and public collections.

The Serpentine says it had intended to borrow works from the Guggenheim show, but its dates clashed with the exhibition’s tour (currently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until September 14th). The Serpentine therefore decided to “show works drawn entirely from the artist’s collection. In discussion with Richard Prince, the inspiration was the installation in the artist’s own studio.”

 It credits sponsors on the walls of the gallery but makes no mention that the works are for sale.
 One trade source says that one work has sold since the opening, the iconic Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, for several million pounds. The Serpentine says it has “no confirmed information that any works [have been] sold” and adds that in any case, “the gallery has no arrangement to receive money from exhibition sales”. Richard Prince declined to comment.


theanyspacewhatever

Liam Gillick, theanyspacewhatever signage system (prototype), 2008. Aluminum.

The Guggenheim Museum

theanyspacewhatever

October 24, 2008–January 7, 2009

During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters. Using the museum as a springboard for work that reaches beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with other disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation. This loose affiliation of artists, each of whom now boasts strong, independent careers, periodically and randomly joins forces to create a variety of projects. The Guggenheim Museum has extended an invitation to a core group of these artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, one that will reflect and articulate the unique nature of their practices. Organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Nancy Spector, in close collaboration with the artists, the exhibition will present a genealogy of their shared history through site-specific installations of new, often self-reflexive works created on the occasion of this project.

JEFF KOONS MEETS MARIE ANTOINETTE At VERSAILLES

From September next year, Jeff Koons -- the world's costliest living artist, who once pictured himself coupling with his porn- star wife Cicciolina -- will exhibit his giant sculptures indoors and outdoors at the Palace of Versailles.

Koons, 52, whose newer works include inflatable bunnies and puppies made of flowerpots, will stage his first major French museum exhibition at the former royal residence. His host: Jean- Jacques Aillagon, president of the Chateau de Versailles, who until June ran billionaire Francois Pinault's Palazzo Grassi exhibition venue in Venice.

``I sincerely believe that this artist, who is a product of neo-Pop culture, is very well suited to Versailles,'' said Aillagon, a former French culture minister, in a gilded chamber near the late Queen Marie Antoinette's apartment. ``Versailles is a Baroque object, and Baroque art, after all, was the 17th and 18th century's version of Pop Art.''

REVEALED: THE ART DAMIEN HIRST FAILED TO SELL

On the eve of Sotheby’s auction of over 200 new works by the British artist, The Art Newspaper, reports the extent of unsold stock held by his London gallery White Cube.

“As Sotheby’s prepares to auction 223 new works by Damien Hirst on 15 and 16 September, we can reveal that the artist’s London gallery, White Cube is sitting on unsold sculptures and paintings by the British artist worth in excess of £100m.
This figure excludes the £50m asking price for Hirst’s diamond-encrusted platinum skull, For the Love of God, which is owned by a group of investors whose members include Hirst himself and White Cube owner Jay Jopling.

Recent White Cube documents seen by The Art Newspaper reveal that the gallery’s stock of paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst numbers over 200 works.
It includes 34 butterfly paintings dating from 2005 to 2008 and ranging in price from £145,000 to £2m; 35 spin paintings dating from 2005 to 2008 (£150,000 to £400,000); seven spot paintings dating from 2006 to 2008 (£300,000 to £950,000), and six medicine cabinets, one of which, The Martyrdom of St Jude, 2002-03 was included in the gallery’s 2003 exhibition “Apostles”. These range in price from £100,000 to £2.5m.

Paintings which are still available from the artist’s “Beyond Belief” exhibition held in June/July 2007 include Periodic Table of the Elements, (£3m); 13 so-called biopsy (or cancer) canvases ranging in price from £450,000 to £850,000 (a further eight biopsy paintings not shown in “Beyond Belief” are also available) and nine “Fact” paintings (showing the labour of Hirst’s wife Maia and the birth of the couple’s son Cyrus). These range in price from £500,000 to £2m.
Unsold “Natural History” sculptures from the same show are: Love’s Paradox, 2007, a cow in formaldehyde in two vitrines (£4.5m), and Black Sheep (£4m).
Signature works such as Charity, a 22-ft sculpture of a girl with a calliper holding a teddy bear, produced in three editions and first exhibited in Hoxton Square in 2003, is still available for £2.5m, as is an edition of the Virgin Mother, the 35-ft bronze statue showing the insides of a pregnant woman, originally displayed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in 2006 (£2.5m). Another version of the latter cast in silver and entitled Wretched War—The Dream is Dead, 2007, is on sale for £1.25m.
Two editions of The Hat Makes the Man (After Max Ernst), a sculpture included in Tate Britain’s 2004 exhibition “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”, are available for £475,000 and £950,000 respectively.

Other Hirst works with White Cube have not been publicly displayed. These include three editions of The First Relic, a platinum sculpture in the shape of a jawbone encrusted with diamonds (£1m each) and 25 versions of The Fear of Death, a human skull coated in flies and resin (£150,000 each). The gallery also has numerous prints and other multiples by Hirst for sale on its website.

The quantity of art available for sale with Hirst’s London gallery helps explain why the artist has opted to take his latest work straight to auction.
For Hirst the challenge is to find enough outlets to distribute the huge volume of art he produces. His factory enterprise with its network of assistants working in multiple studios makes him one of the most prolific living artists. Only Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and some Chinese contemporary artists come anywhere near to this level of productivity (Murakami is also believed to be in discussions with an auction house).

The 223 Hirst lots on offer at Sotheby’s, estimated to fetch £65m, include most of his trademark pieces: “Natural History” sculptures of animals in formaldehyde, some adorned with golden attributes; spot, spin, and butterfly paintings; photo-realist canvases, and medicine cabinets, among others. All have been produced in the last two years.

Hirst already works with a network of galleries—White Cube in London, Gagosian Gallery in London and the US, and Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico City. Others who do not represent him officially also sell his work and art is available directly from his studio. But the scale of his output requires him to find a steady stream of new buyers; the global reach of the auction house will have proved decisive.

“Sotheby’s promotion is not directed at existing collectors. They are targeting new buyers, especially in parts of the world which have only recently started collecting contemporary art,” says a trade source.
A selection of works from Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction will be displayed at the five-star Oberoi hotel in New Delhi next week. The show opens to invited guests on 26 August and to the public two days later. On 28 August, a further selection of lots will be shown at the Bridge Club in Bridgehampton to invited guests only."

SEE YOU IN THE FALL!!!

GREEN VS. GREED

SOTHEBY’S "BEAUTIFUL" HIRST SALE

LONDON (Reuters) - Sotheby's will auction a series of new works by artist Damien Hirst, including a trademark animal preserved in formaldehyde that is expected to fetch up to 12 million pounds.
Hirst, one of contemporary art's most bankable stars, said he chose to sell his latest work in the auction room rather than the gallery because "the world's changing".
The big auction houses have never made any secret about their ambitions to move into the primary market: As Christie’s deputy head Amy Cappellazzo told Art Review not too long ago, "We’re the big box retailer putting the mom-and-pops out of business." Christie’s acquisition of the private dealer Haunch of Venison was widely seen as a move in that direction -- but now Sotheby’s has once-again leapfrogged its rival by securing a high-profile auction of completely new works by Damien Hirst. The sale is dubbed "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," and is set for Sept. 15-16, 2008, in London (a preview show opens to the public Sept. 5-15).
Sotheby’s is making the most out of the coup, billing the event as "an historic sale." The centerpiece of the auction is The Golden Calf, a bull preserved in a tank of formaldehyde -- a classic Hirst trope, this time with the twist that the animal is fitted with a solid gold halo and hooves and horns cast in 18-carat gold. The work is estimated at £8-12 million. As for the rest of the sale, Sotheby’s promises it will "document the full breadth of the artist’s creative output," including new works incorporating his popular butterfly, pill and cancer motifs, as well as a suite of preparatory drawings, all created in the last two years.
Acknowledging his dealers, Hirst said in a statement, "I never want to stop working with my galleries," then added, "This is different. The world’s changing, ultimately I need to see where this road leads." As for those scrappy mom-and-pop operators, Hirst dealers Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling, the Sotheby’s press release quotes them both as being OK with the arrangement. "As Damien’s long-term gallery, we’ve come to expect the unexpected," Gagosian said.
The 43-year-old also based his decision on the success of a 2004 auction, also hosted by Sotheby's, which raised 11.1 million pounds from the sale of objects he designed for the defunct Pharmacy restaurant in London.
"After the success of the Pharmacy auction, I always felt I would like to do another auction," Hirst said in a statement on Thursday. "It's a very democratic way to sell art and it feels like a natural evolution for contemporary art.
"Although there is risk involved, I embrace the challenge of selling my work in this way," he added. "I never want to stop working with my galleries. This is different. The world's changing, ultimately I need to see where this road leads."
The main lot in the auction, to be held in London on September 15 and 16, is "The Golden Calf", a bull in a glass tank of formaldehyde with its head crowned by a solid gold disc and its hooves and horns cast in 18-carat gold.
The work, which Sotheby's said united the artist's preoccupation with "science, religion, beauty and death", is estimated to realise eight to 12 million pounds.

German Memorial by Elmgreen & Dragset Unveiled

On May 27th, Germany unveiled a memorial to the Nazis' long-ignored gay victims, a monument that also aims to address ongoing discrimination by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing.
The memorial, a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin's Tiergarten Park, echoes the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, which opened three years ago just across the road. The pavilion-sized slab includes a small window where visitors can view a video clip of two men kissing. Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the monument was a reminder of the ongoing struggles that still confront gays.
"This memorial is important from two points of view - to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Wowereit said as he inaugurated the memorial alongside Culture Minister Bernd Neumann.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality a threat to the German race and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
"This is a story that many people don't know about, and I think it's fantastic . . . that the German state finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well," said Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen. Even in the hubbub of Berlin’s political life, such a queer mixture is seldom to be seen: Last Tuesday, the conservative minister of cultural affairs, Bernd Neumann, stood amid hundreds of gay men of all stripes. There were guys in bomber jackets and skinny jeans, in suits and kippahs, in brogues and a bow tie—even one with a neon-red Mohawk. A few lesbians were among the crowd. A special occasion, to be sure, for the culture minister that day had the honor and duty to inaugurate Germany’s national memorial for homosexual victims of National Socialism—a monument, it should be noted, that his party had frequently opposed, as it also does gay marriage. But other high-profile politicians, among them Berlin’s lively mayor (and gay icon), Klaus Wowereit, were on hand.
The memorial sits on the edge of Berlin’s biggest park, Tiergarten, within view of the Brandenburg Gate, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the new, terror-proof American Embassy. It consists of a concrete stele, thirteen feet high, with a small window through which viewer’s can watch a looped video, shot by Robby Müller (Wim Wenders’s cinematographer) and directed by Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg, of two men kissing. The memorial was designed by Elmgreen and Dragset, who submitted their proposal to two consecutive competitions (the first open, the second invite only) and beat out fellow artists like Wolfgang Tillmans for the commission.
The unveiling was not without its tensions. The ministry of culture’s invitations to the unveiling did not depict the kiss, which angered the artists, who voiced their frustration a week earlier in an interview (which, full disclosure, I published in Zitty). “The kiss is central to the memorial,” Michael Elmgreen said. “We would have liked to show it on the invitation. But the minister made clear that this was not desirable.” His partner, Ingar Dragset, added, “So the memorial is more relevant than ever, when the kiss poses a problem even for the minister. Not to show the kiss was his personal decision.” At Tuesday’s ceremony, however, Neumann praised the work, saying, “This memorial is a sign against intolerance. It has sparked important debates and marks Germany’s mature culture of remembrance.” He even praised the video itself, which “directly links the memory of victims with the situation of gays and lesbians today.” But when Neumann approached the stele to be the first person to see the kiss, the artists did not accompany him. Neither did they pose for pictures with the politicians. “Politicians come and go. We stay,” Elmgreen joked from the sidelines.
So why all the fuss? Elmgreen elaborated: “You can grant us homosexuals all rights: marriage, adoption, inheritance. But as long as people are grossed out when they see us kiss, something is missing.” In his frustration, Elmgreen overlooked that it was Neumann who made the memorial possible: A year ago, the minister negotiated an agreement after the artists’ initial proposal had met with criticism. With Neumann’s help and blessing, the artists decided to change the video every two years, with an open call for submissions for other depictions of homosexual love.

Carnegie Museum Guard Defaces a Celmins

A guard at the Carnegie Museum of Art is accused of using a key to deface a $1.2 million painting, reports Jerome L. Sherman and Timothy McNulty in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece—from Vija Celmins's "Night Sky" series—was on display as part of the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition, according to a police affidavit. It was damaged beyond repair on May 16; a "large vertical gouge" runs down its middle. A surveillance tape caught Timur Serebrykov in the act of defacing the work, the affidavit said. "I didn't like the painting," Serebrykov told police when they arrested him at the museum on May 20. He added, "I'm sorry." Serebrykov was charged with one count of institutional vandalism. He has waived his right to a preliminary hearing. James Sheets, whose law firm represents Serebrykov, said he may use a mental-health defense.
Ellen Baxter, the museum's chief conservator, told police that the art piece was a "total loss." The painting was one of at least eight “Night Sky” paintings on display in the museum's Gallery Fifteen, part of "Life on Mars," the latest version of the Carnegie International.
Artforum

BASELMANIA 2008

"People come to Basel in June to buy art, sell art and see art, not necessarily in that order. Of late doubts have been raised about the health of the art market, which can now be laid to rest. The market is strong. It is strong not only at the top, where it is very strong, but also in the middle, where it has been said to be soft."
Walter Robinson

KOONS BALLOON FLOWER OPENS IN LONDON

A giant sculpture by American artist Jeff Koons is to go on display in London before being sold for an estimated £12 million.
The work, in the shape of a pink, shiny balloon twisted into a flower, will be in St James's Square from June 21 until Christie's sale of post-War and contemporary art on June 30. Balloon Flower (Magenta), 1995-2000, is the most valuable and significant work by Koons to be sold in Europe. It is being sold by the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas. At about three metres square, the sculpture, which was designed to be in the open air, is too big to get through the doors of the auction house. The work is one of a series, called Celebration, that Koons, 53, created over the course of a decade.

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS

MAY 9 -AUGUST 3, 2008
JOHN ARMLEDER and OLIVIER MOSSET

This spring, conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset take over the galleries at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Strongly influential for a younger generation of artists working in the U.S. and in Europe, Armleder’s and Mosset’s work remains unfamiliar to a wider American audience.
The inaugural show of the Contemporary’s new curatorial team signals a commitment to artist-centered exhibitions. Jointly conceived by the artists—who have been close for more than twenty years—the exhibition represents neither a curated two-person show nor two independent solo exhibitions. Instead, it proposes an active juxtaposition of parallel and opposite artistic approaches where artworks act as obstacles, and obstacles act as artworks. Armleder contributes new pour and pattern paintings, a site-specific fifty-foot wall-painting, an installation of Mylar Christmas trees, and strips of metallic vinyl. Mosset, in addition to a series of his infamous “circle paintings” from the late 1960s and early 1970s, presents a large-scale installation of several dozen Toblerones, large cardboard sculptures based on anti-tank structures used by the Swiss army.
John Armleder has produced thousands of sculptures, paintings, drawings, books, and performances, creating an art of impenetrable surfaces that collapses the unique into the generic, and vice-versa. Olivier Mosset, on the other hand, chooses to remain firmly committed to blankness, stripping art of any content, and pursuing a decelerated process, rejecting our conventional notions of progress and insatiable hunger for the new.

TERENCE KOH. CAPTAIN BUDDHA

TERENCE KOH
WARHOL REMAINS AS A CHINESE WINTER
GARDEN IN MY HEART (SELF PORTRAIT), 2006
Courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin
copyright the artist

28 May - 31 August 2008
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany

Terence Koh is installing one of his signature monochrome environments especially for the Schirn; for this exhibition, he will initiate the surreal objects, ritually summoning them to life, in a secret performance. Under the title “Captain Buddha”, visitors who set foot in the luminously flooded room are invited to accompany the artist on a journey that will take them on a search for themselves through the entire world – India, China, Burma, Belgium, Africa, Mexico and Canada are just some stations along the way – one that aims to reach nirvana and ends in nothingness.
For his installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Koh links two worlds that at first glance seem almost antipodal: Buddhism and that popular classic of world literature, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” – the tale of the fateful quest of charismatic and supremely obsessed Captain Ahab for the Great White Whale. But the two worlds are alike in their descriptions of endless and irresolvable search - a unity conveyed in the title “Captain Buddha”. For this installation, Koh himself set out on a quest: clad as a monk in a golden robe, he journeyed to fifteen places – Canada, Japan, China, Thailand, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Iceland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Africa, and the USA – in his search for objects, much as Captain Ahab sailed the world over in search of the White Whale. In Terence Koh’s words: “I’m like the captain in Moby Dick. I’m trying to find the White Whale in the white objects, but in the end I find nothing.”

JEFF KOONS LENDS ART TO US EMBASSY IN CHINA

Jeff Koons is lending his sculpture Tulips, an edition of which is shown here in the courtyard of the Nord/LB bank in Hanover,
Germany, to the US embassy in Beijing for ten years.

WHAT'S LEFT FOR THE YEAR

June
Early June Artranspenine08
http://atp08.blogspot.com/
3 - 8 June Scope Art Fair, Basel
www.scope-art.com
4 - 8 June: ArtBasel, Basel
www.artbasel.com/go/id/kh/
12 June - 12 Sept: BP Portrait Award, London
www.npg.org.uk/live/bpmenu.asp
14 June - 14 Sept Folkestone Triennial, Kent
www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk/
18 June - 7 Sept: Sydney Biennial
www.biennaleofsydney.com.au
20 June - 2 July: London festival of architecture
www.lfa2008.org
21 June - 6 July: Whitstable Biennial, Kent
www.whitstablebiennale.com/
June 22 - October: 26 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico
www.sitesantafe.org/biennial_2008/biennial2008fr.html
July
19 July - 2 Nov: Manifesta, Italy
www.manifesta7.it/
8 July - 14 Sept: Rencontres-Arles Photo Festival
www.rencontres-arles.com/
August
25 Aug - 17 Sept British Glass Biennale http://www.ifg.org.uk
September
5 Sept - 9 Nov: Gwangju Biennale, Korea
http://www.gwangju-biennale.org/
6 Sept - 15 Nov: Yokohama Triennale, Japan
www.yokohamatriennale.jp/2008/index_en.html
8 Sept - Nov: Shanghai Biennale
www.shanghaibiennale.com/
11 Sept - 16 Nov: Singapore Biennale
www.singaporebiennale.org
Mid Sept: Jerwood Drawing Prize opens in London
www.jerwoodspace.co.uk
18 - 21 Sept: 100% design
www.100percentdesign.co.uk
20 Sept - 30 Nov: Liverpool Biennial International 08
www.biennial.com
20 Sept: New Contemporaries Opens as part of Liverpool Biennial
www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/
20 Sept - 4 Jan: John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/
26 Sept -12 Oct FRED, Cumbria
www.fredsblog.co.uk/about.html
October
Brighton Photo Biennial
www.bpb.org.uk
7 - 19 Oct: Origin - The London Craft Fair
www.craftscouncil.org.uk/
15 - 19 Oct: Scope Art Fair, London
www.scope-art.com
16 - 19 Oct: Frieze Art Fair, London
www.friezeartfair.com/
16 - 19 Oct: Bridge Art Fair, London
www.bridgeartfair.com/
17 - 20 Oct: Zoo Art Fair, London
www.zooartfair.com
23 - 26 Oct: FIAC, Paris
www.fiacparis.com/page.php?lang=uk
30 Oct - 2 Nov: Bridge Art Fair, Berlin
www.bridgeartfair.com/
November
7 Nov - 11 Dec: Jerwood Photography Awards, London
www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/photography/
December
4 - 7 Dec: ArtBasel, Miami
www.artbasel.com
4 - 7 Dec: Bridge Art Fair, Miami
www.bridgeartfair.com/
6 Dec - mid Feb 2009: Artsway Open 08
www.artsway.org.uk/

THE JOKES ON...

“Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, Richard Prince's dealer since 1988, said jokingly as she was leaving Sotheby's salesroom. Seems the jokes on her! Ever since art-industry newsletter the Baer Faxt made the pithy announcement that “Richard Prince is working independently,” the rumor mill has been in the kind of overdrive that would befit the 1980s-era soap. Some say Prince sold paintings out of his Guggenheim show directly to billionaire Ukrainian collector Viktor Pinchuk. Others say Larry Gagosian took a commission on the deal. Indeed, word has it that Gagosian Gallery has lined up an exhibition in Rome. Although the gallery would not confirm that Prince had joined the roster, one of its senior directors was willing to assert... A new gallery with a new tier of collectors can take an artist up an echelon.

MAY AUCTIONS EVENING SALES

MAY 13, 2008-CHRISTIE'S CONTEMPORARY DOES $348 MILLION-the second-highest total ever.
Lucian Freud’s large-scale Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, brought $33.6 million with buyer’s premium, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund, is eighty-five years old.
MAY 14, 2008 -SOTHEBY’S CONTEMPORARY DOES $362 MILLION
The auction, which totaled $362 million, was the biggest in the company’s history. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, said the sale was the result of “global hunger” on the part of “global individuals” who “live everywhere.” Enlightening!
A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.
MAY 16- PHILLIPS CONTEMPORARY DOES $59,345,000, with 55 of 64 lots selling, or almost 86 percent. Top lots included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 Untitled (Fallen Angel), which sold for $11,241,000; Jeff Koons’ 1991 marble Self-Portrait, which sold for $7,545,000; and Gerhard Richter’s 1986 Abstraktes Bild 610-1, which sold for $4,521,000.

Art collectors shrug off market woes

Art collectors this week shrugged off the US economic downturn and global financial turmoil to buy solidly at the big New York auctions although there were some signs of a more cautious mood seeping into the market. Sotheby’s and Christie’s had bet that record-breaking prices would prevail at their Impressionist and modern art sales last week, and they were largely proved right, although both auction houses had tempered expectations by reducing the number of lots on sale compared with similar auctions last year.
Source: FT

Carnegie's "Life On Mars"

Detail of of a large installation by Barry McGee.

"Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people “love to hate,” or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference. Their underlying message seems to be: Careful now, don’t frighten the trustees.“Life on Mars,” the 55th Carnegie International, is the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens.
It has been organized over the last three years by Douglas Fogle, who was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1994 to 2005, when he joined the Carnegie as curator of contemporary art. For his advisory committee Mr. Fogle selected Daniel Birnbaum, the director of Portikus, an alternative space in Frankfurt, who will organize the next Venice Biennale; Chus Martínez, director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Richard Flood and Eungie Joo, the chief curator and director of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In the lead essay of the show’s exceptional catalog Mr. Fogle notes some questions posed by his show’s title. Are there other forms of life in the universe? Can art help us explore what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called its “intimate immensity”? And, more pertinent, has the human race turned Earth itself into an alien planet, a place of rampant waste, arrogance, immorality and violence?
The show itself has little of the catalog’s pointedness. It seems selected largely from a preapproved list of veterans of shows just like this. When the exhibition’s participants were announced, I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning.
Despite the international character of the Carnegie, more than half of its 39 artists are from only three countries: the United States, Britain and Germany. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern.
Curators have about the most complicated and daunting job in the art world; they are pulled apart by pressures to raise money, write, hunt out hot new artists and oversee acquisitions, while organizing shows that attract the public. Their value and responsibilities seem less and less appreciated by trustees, who are experiencing their own kind of pressures. Jobs and budgets are at stake. These are expensive shows; don’t make waves.
Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." Roberta Smith

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Beyond the familiar Campbell's Soup cans, Brillo boxes, silkscreened Marilyn Monroes, and floating silver mylar pillows--20 years after pop icon Andy Warhol's death, we are still picking through his incredibly prolific output to understand what his artistic legacy actually is. Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, published on the occasion of the major exhibition by the same name at Amsterdam's renowned Stedelijk Museum, provides some new insight, digging into Warhol's lesser-known film, video, and audio tape works. Important--and just a little scandalous--films like Blow Job and Kiss, audio tapes of celebrities, friends, and anonymous hangers-on talking, and other marginalia are considered alongside a selection of key photographs, drawings, screen prints and spatial installations, such as the spectacular Silver Clouds.

Edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann and with contributions by Geralyn Huxley, Greg Pierce, and Warhol Museum Archivist, Matt Wrbican, who is currently unpacking hundreds of never-before-seen Warhol Time Capsules in Pittsburgh, this volume brings readers up to date with the most recent developments in the way we see the late artist's oeuvre.

WILFREDO PRIETO WINS THE CARTIER AWARD 2008

Untitled (Footprint)

Frieze Art Fair is delighted to announce that the winner of The Cartier Award 2008 is Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Prieto, based in Barcelona, is a talented young conceptual artist whose works often take the form of site-specific installations. His winning proposal was chosen from over 400 applications submitted by artists across the world. The award allows an emerging artist from outside the UK to realise a major project at Frieze Art Fair as part of the influential Frieze Projects programme curated by Neville Wakefield. Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Habana in 2002. His work has been exhibited at SMAK (Ghent) in 2008, the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, at the Kadist Art Foundation and Apolitical at the Louvre Museum in Paris as well as the VIII Havana Biennial in 2006 and in A Moment of Silence at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2003. Prieto was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.

Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, strangers in our
own world?
Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International explores the important yet continually perplexing question of what it means to be human in the world today. Organized by Douglas Fogle, curator of contemporary art at Carnegie Museum of Art, the provocative Life on Mars will present the varying perspectives of 40 artists from 17 countries, spanning generations and continents. This is the 55th installation of the series of contemporary-art survey exhibitions that was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1896. It will include 204 works of art in diverse media, from painting, sculpture, and drawing to animation, film, installation, and performance—all searching for the sublime in the confusion of everyday life.
The question “Is there life on Mars?” is a rhetorical one posed by the exhibition in the face of a world where political, social, natural, and economic global events increasingly seem to challenge and threaten to overtake the most basic forms of everyday existence.

SPIKE ART MAGAZINE

SPRING 2008 OUT NOW!
http://www.spikeart.at

Cover image: Matthew Barney

THEFT IS VISION by BOB NICKLAS

Theft is Vision gathers essays and interviews from the past ten years by the influential New York critic and curator Bob Nickas, offering a personal, shoot-from-the-hip take on the American art scene. More of a fan than a theorist, Nickas views art through a focused, subcultural lens; he pursues overlooked figures such as graphic designers Art Chantry and Jamie Reid, post-punk legends The Fall, cult artists Cady Noland and Steven Parrino; collaborates on photo/text pieces with Trisha Donnelly and John Miller; and offers a fictional conversation between Andy Warhol and On Kawara. Interviews with Philip Taaffe and Jeff Wall reflect on the 80s, while those with Wolfgang Tillmans (not previously published) and Kelley Walker bring us into the present. Since 1985, Nickas has organized over 60 exhibitions for galleries and museums as an independent curator. As Curatorial Advisor at P.S. 1 from 2003-2007, he organized more than 20 exhibitions, including Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fredom From The Known, William Gedney-Christopher Wool: Into the Night, Peter Hujar and the Lee Lozano retrospective. .

PUBLISHED BY: JRP Ringier
FORMAT: Paperback, 6 x 8 in. / 160 pgs / 24 b&w.

THE MIRACLE IS LOVE

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films. While the name Patti Smith evokes an image of a founder of the New York punk-rock scene, she has explored the visual arts and poetry since the late 1960s. The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier embraces the various facets of her creative process. Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem.” Many of Smith’s photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.

"Blubberland" The Dangers of Happiness by Elizabeth Farrelly

The MIT Press
6 x 9 1/4, 219 pp.
$19.95 (PAPER)
I, like you, drive too much. I buy too much--of which I keep too much and also throw too much away. I overindulge my children, and myself. Directly as well as indirectly I use too much water, energy, air and space. My existence, in short, costs the planet more than it can afford. This is not some handed-down moral stricture, nor any sort of guilty self-flagellation, but a simple recognition of fact. The consequences are obvious, and near enough now to see the warts on their noses. For my own future, as well as my children's, I must change. And yet--this is what's weird--I, like you, can't. Cannot abandon comfort, convenience and pleasure for the sake of abstract knowledge. Can't stop doing it. This is interesting.
It's interesting because we think we are so rational, so intelligent, and yet we behave, both individually and as a herd, in such unintelligent ways. That's what drove this book into being.
--from Blubberland

Welcome to Blubberland--a world of quadruple-garaged mansions, vast malls, gated communities, stretch limos, and posh resorts. Blubberland is a place, but it is also a state of mind: we expect to be happy (trophy house, SUV in the driveway, home entertainment system, pension fund, cosmetic surgery), but in fact we've grown increasingly bloated, bored, and miserable. In Blubberland, award-winning critic Elizabeth Farrelly looks at our "superfluous superfluity," our huge eco-footprint, and asks why we find it so hard to abandon habits we know to be destructive. Why can't we build human-scale cities, design meaningful public spaces, eat reasonable meals, and stop assaulting nature?
Farrelly, trained as an architect, begins this story with architecture, urban sprawl, and housing, but she does not end there. She also looks at "affluenza," childhood asthma, diabetes, addiction, beauty, ugliness, narcissism, climate change, mega-churches, big box retailers, sustainability, depression, anorexia, and the links that collect all of these issues under the same roof--the roof, as it were, of the McMansion. As "big" becomes more and more pervasive, and success is seen in increasingly measurable and material terms, the goal of happiness jeopardizes our survival. Blubberland is a smart, thoughtful, and stylish argument for turning things around.

About the Author
Elizabeth Farrelly is one of Australia's liveliest and most provocative writers on architecture and the environment. The winner of the CICA International Critics' Award, the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and the Marion Mahony Griffin Award, she is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, a commentator on Australian television and radio, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney.

The MIT Press

Sonnabend Heirs Hold Colossal Private Sale to Pay Off Estate Taxes

4.03.08

In what experts described as the largest private sale of art ever, the heirs of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend have parted with some $600 million worth of paintings and sculptures in two transactions to cover their estate taxes, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. Ever since Ms. Sonnabend died last October at ninety-two, the auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been vying with some of the world’s most powerful art dealers—Larry Gagosian, William Acquavella, Robert Mnuchin, the team of Giraud Pissarro Ségalot—to get at least a piece of the collection to sell. Sonnabend’s art trove, which includes seminal works by artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, is valued at more than $1 billion. Taxes on the estate amount to more than half the value of the assets, experts said. After months of deliberations Sonnabend’s son and daughter settled this week on the two private sales. “We did sell two blocks of works,” said Antonio Homem, Sonnabend’s son, who along with her daughter, Nina Sundell, inherited the collection. Citing confidentiality agreements, Homem declined to identify the buyers. But experts close to the transactions who insisted on anonymity, also because of those agreements, said that the dealers Franck Giraud, Lionel Pissarro and Philippe Ségalot, who have offices in New York and Paris, bought $400 million worth of art on behalf of several clients, including some of the collection’s finest works. A second group of artworks, all Andy Warhols, was sold to the Gagosian Gallery for $200 million, the experts said.

STEVEN SHEARER AT NEW MUSEUM

Steven Shearer
silkscreen and acrylic on canvas, 1997
Collection: Barbara Balkin Cottle and Robert Cottle

DOUBLE ALBUM: DANIEL GUZMÁN AND STEVEN SHEARER
APRIL 23 THROUGH JULY 6
“Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer” brings together two artists—Daniel Guzmán, born in Mexico in 1964, and Steven Shearer, born in Canada, in 1968—who use an array of visual media to explore the overwhelmingly male world of rock ‘n’ roll and popular subcultures as a way to look inward at themselves. With both artists creating works across a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, and video, “Double Album” allows for Guzmán’s and Shearer’s bodies of work to be explored independently, as well as in relation to each other’s practices. The exhibition is curated by the New Museum’s Chief Curator, Richard Flood.

NEW MUSEUM
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002

Neon by Tim Etchells

"A cage is a container for animals. A mirror is a defective window. A hall of mirrors is a room full of bad mirrors. Shift workers are people who work when other people are sleeping. The night shift is hard on your sleep patterns and on your relationships. Tired people get depressed. Stressed people say unexpected things. Rage is another word for anger. There is only one correct answer to a mathematical question. There is only one way out of a maze. A blood transfusion is way of moving blood from one body into another using pipes and a small pump. Clouds change shape in ways that are impossible to predict. Hate is hard to explain. Rats move in groups. Knives are things made of metal. Metal comes from out of the ground. Heavy Metal music has a strong beat and a lot of guitar. You cannot stop people from dancing if they want to dance. You cannot stop progress. An umbrella is no protection against a swarm of bees. Happy people are more productive than sad people. Change is not always a good thing. A cardiac arrest is nothing to do with the police."
Tim Etchells

GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

Yan Pei-Ming
Selfportrait, 27/08/2007
oil on canvas
59 x 59 in. (150 x 150 cm)
Photo: André Morin


Yan Pei-Ming with Yan Pei-Ming
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio
19 march - 27 JULY 2008

Twenty large format works, oils and watercolors, many of which, will be shown for the first time, will offer the public a chance to see Pei-Ming’s work in an exhibition created around a theme selected by the artist and the curator. The exhibition is organized into four sections: Self-portrait with Landscape, Self-portrait with Religion, Self-portrait with Relatives and Self-portrait with Life and Death. The title suggests the central subject of the exhibition, the self-portrait which is present in each room and is in continuous dialogue with the other subjects displayed. This choice follows from the consideration that every work is in some way a self-portrait of the artist even when it does not directly depict him.
The exhibition underlines the technique the artist uses: painting. In particular his painting makes heavy use of matter and it’s produced with violent brushwork, thus representing a bridge between the East, his origin and the West, his cultural homeland. These two areas are represented by the large oil canvases on the one hand and his watercolors on the other. However his painting never makes reference to a precise geographical setting but becomes synonymous with atemporality and non-place: East and West combined in a mixture of styles, elements and subjects. The use of watercolors is important to the artist, he uses it to paint the series of children the life in its early stages and the skulls and self-portrait as a hanged man, and therefore the end of existence.

Thomas Krens to step down at Guggenheim

Jerry Saltz on Thomas Krens: Our Long Cultural Nightmare Will Soon Be Over
“Thomas Krens Countdown Clocks.” That’s because on Wednesday evening news spread that Krens, the Guggenheim Museum’s controversial dictatorial head for almost twenty years — 7,300 days, for clock-watchers — will be stepping down from his post. Well, not quite stepping down; he’ll oversee the creation of the gargantuan 452,000-square-foot Frank Gehry–designed museum in Abu Dhabi. (According to the Times, he'll stay on in his current position until a successor is found.)

Over the last two decades Krens changed museum culture in the West. He made museums corporate and ran the Guggenheim like a business – even if that business often careened like an out-of-control savings and loan.

He branded the Guggenheim and kicked off the starchitect phase of museum culture, building and closing snazzy outlets around the world, most notably the grand shining building in Bilbao. Krens turned his museum into a spectacle and opened it up to the public, mounting crowd-pleasers and blockbusters like “The Art of the Motorcycle,” “China,” “Russia!,” “Brazil,” and other unfocused national smorgasbords that had less to do with the Guggenheim’s original mission than in doing deals in other countries. (He also oversaw excellent exhibitions of contemporary artists like Jenny Holzer and Matthew Barney.)

For all practical purposes the Krens clock began ticking last summer when Lisa Dennison stepped down from her position of museum director. It was widely understood that no real candidate for the job would appear unless Krens stepped away from any day-to-day operations, as just his presence muddied the waters around the museum. With Krens finally away trying to change museum culture in the Middle East, the Guggenheim could become a real force in the New York art world overnight. The building is unique; the capable staff is hungry; the art world is eager to welcome the Guggenheim back into the fold.

Meanwhile in Abu Dhabi, a quick check to numerous government Websites will confirm that Israeli passport holders and travelers whose passports bear Israeli stamps will be denied entry visas to the Emirates. Thus, Krens will continue to do what he does best: try to accessorize the museum while sullying the Guggenheim’s good name, recklessly removing the “heim” from Guggenheim. —Jerry Saltz

Broad Contemporary Art Museum Gala Opening

Some compared it to the Grammys and others to the Oscars, but when Barbara Kruger called it "anthropology," she nailed it. The black-tie gala introducing the Renzo Piano–designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum to Los Angeles society last Saturday night, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was interspecies communication at its best, very like The Day of the Locust. Except that this event was strictly postfiction, with competing narratives involving movie stars, pop stars, studio heads, philanthropists, politicians, museum directors—and a smattering of people who make art, most of them male.
However, the gala’s purpose was not to make (or look at) art or artists. It was to make (and look at) money: over $5 million, the amount it raised for the museum, minus the $1.5 million it cost. Organized with military precision by LACMA’s crack development and marketing team the guests had shelled out big bucks (tables cost $25,000 to $100,000) to witness the unveiling of the $56 million BCAM. And they did. But they also had to endure the canonization of Eli Broad.
The party began on a red carpet rolled onto the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, where celebrities could stop for photo ops with paparazzi, before a line of taiko drummers and valet-parking attendants dressed in black BCAM BORN 02-09-08 T-shirts bearing the image of Jeff Koons’s cracked red egg that LACMA adopted for its BCAM opening. Performers on stilts, costumed as dragons, nudged guests through Chris Burden’s outdoor allées of vintage LA lampposts (a permanent installation called Urban Light) and into the pavilion, where tray-carrying “waiters” carved from blocks of ice proffered flutes of champagne.
Throughout the cocktail hour, the building that everyone had come to see remained hidden from view by fabric curtain walls. That mystified many patrons, who wondered what they were supposed to talk about during dinner, if not the art. Still, it was hard not to appreciate the ironies of an event that included, along with the ritual speeches of congratulation for anyone not an artist, a bar mitzvah–like set by Lionel Richie. I don't think I’ll ever forget watching the seventy-four-year-old Broad dance to “Brick House,” cheek by jowl with several hundred other people on a narrow strip of lighted Plexiglas floor. What really set tongues clucking, though, was the overproduced commercial for Broad, starring Boone, Baldessari, Koons, Damien Hirst, and even Richard Serra, all testifying to Broad’s generous patronage and “talents” as a collector.
No sooner did the film end than those attempting to flee were stopped in their tracks by the pounding chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” played loud from a stage descending from fifty feet above and carrying the pouty young pianist William Joseph. Just then, the tent wall behind the players fell to the ground and there, klieg-lit and framed by Robert Irwin’s palm-tree garden, was the three-story BCAM in all its travertine glory. A dozen violinists with faces painted bright red to match Piano’s exterior escalator were also playing “Kashmir” as the crowd at last ascended to the building’s glass-ceilinged top floor. Here, amid a veritable playland of Koonsiana, bookended by Andy Warhol and Baldessari paintings (as if Koons were the key to these artists), the crowd gathered to grouse and coo at what was clearly the most expensive, rather than the most representative, display of works in Eli and Edythe Broad’s collection.while wondering whether the show wasn't more exposition than exhibition. It certainly did bare the machinations of power in art. As Kruger’s pungent text work, commissioned by LACMA for BCAM’s glass elevator shaft, put it, PLENTY SHOULD BE ENOUGH. If only we could all be as perfect.

DUCHAMP, MAN RAY, PICABIA

TATE MODERN
21 February – 26 May 2008

This provocative exhibition presents three colossal 20th century artists who changed the course of art forever - Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptualism and creator of the “readymade”, Man Ray, the celebrated photographer and painter, and Francis Picabia, the French painter and poet.

Their meeting led to the creation of the Dada movement in New York during the First World War. These three pioneers of art remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives and shared a special artistic dialogue. At the heart of their friendship lay a shared outlook on life, which emerges in their works via jokes, a sense of irony, and a pronounced interest in eroticism.

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores the affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others’ ideas and innovations.

The exhibition features over 400 works with key pieces such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No21) 1912 which created a furore when displayed in New York in 1913, his iconic Fountain 1917and the Mona Lisa parody L.H.O.O.Q 1919 alongside Man Ray’s distinctive rayographs, and Picabia’s later inspired paintings.There has been no major exhibition of this kind at Tate since the Duchamp show of 1966 and this is an unmissable opportunity to see the works that steered the course for contemporary art as we see it today.

Darren Almond exhibition at Parasol unit in London

Darren Almond, Night + Fog (Norilsk) (5), 2007

Hosted by the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, ‘Fire Under Snow’ is the exclusive UK exhibition of recent works by British artist Darren Almond. By harnessing the symbolic power of place and object, Almond explores the themes of time, memory, exploitation and corruption.
Drawing upon his own experiences of travelling through some of the world’s most remote terrains, Almond has utilised his personal encounters to inspire this outstanding collection of works, which combined, reflect upon the over-arching human experience.
Focusing on both the plight of humankind and his own perceptions, the main body of Almond’s work is the film ‘In The Between’. Shot in China and Tibet, the film focuses on the symbolic nature of the highest train route in the world. Reaching up to 5,000 metres, and running from China to Tibet, the train line is presented as an embodiment of China’s political and cultural imperialism.
By contrasting images of the train with those of Tibetan Buddhist monks, Almond alludes to the apparent lack of awareness that the Chinese train passengers have towards the political situation that runs through their neighbouring country.
Keeping his subjects politically charged, Almond goes on to explore the exploitation of Indonesian miners in his second film ‘Bearing’. Focusing on the severe conditions under which they work, Almond has captured evocative footage of workers breathing polluted air – making the viewer ponder the environmental detriment and human cost of capitalist-based industry.
With other thought-provoking themes including the environmental damage caused by mining in Siberia and the unstoppable passage of time, ‘Fire Under Snow’ illustrates Almond’s unswerving commitment to tackling a multitude of world issues. Through film, stunning photography and suggestive sculpture, Almond has produced a collection of work that masterfully combines universal comment with a deeper personal resonance.

Bruce Nauman Chosen for Venice Biennale 2009

The multifaceted conceptual artist and sculptor Bruce Nauman, a pioneer of Post Minimalist video and performance art, will represent the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Office of the Spokesman of the U.S. State Department:
We are pleased to announce the selection of the U.S. representative to the 2009 Venice Biennale. Following the unanimous recommendation of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), the Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) has selected an exhibition of the work of Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) to be presented in the U.S. Pavilion at this noted bi-annual exhibition, held in Venice, Italy since 1895. Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor, curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will serve as Commissioners and organize the exhibition and related publications and activities that will take place in June 2009.

In the course of a career that has spanned more than four decades Bruce Nauman has distinguished himself as a major figure in American and world art. His practice - characterized by a multi-media, strongly conceptual approach - extends from early printmaking and performance, to work in sculpture, film and video, audio and installation projects. Much of his work draws its materials and inspiration from everyday life and activities. Mr. Nauman has been the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been the subject of many exhibitions in the United States and around the world.

Martin Creed wins Duveen Commission from Tate Britain

Martin Creed has received the Duveens Commission for 2008 from Tate Britain, a site-specific installation for the museum’s spacious upper level, due to be unveiled on June 30, 2008. For some, he is the minimalist artist best known for having a light turn on and off in an empty room. Or crumpling up a piece of A4 paper into a ball. Or sticking some kneaded Blu-Tack on to a wall. On January 14, 2008, Martin Creed was named as the first artist invited to fill Tate Britain's Duveen galleries as part of what will be an annual commission. Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar hailed Creed as an artist who questions whether there is a need for art and what impact it can have on people's lives. "Creed is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking contemporary British artists," he said. "He creates arresting works that often disrupt the norm."

ART GOES TO THE STADIUM

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno are going to carry on the new art vogue: Spoart (sport + art). The Scottish artist - who won both the Turner Prize and the Hugo Boss Prize - and his French colleague - truly a master of collaborations - are currently preparing the sequel of the 2006 masterpiece Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.
This video, three years in the making, could be said to have inspired a series of events between art and sports like Deep Play, a video installation by Czech Republic-born Berlin-based filmmaker Harun Farocki devoted to the last World Cup final match and which premiered at the last Documenta. The Farocki project was collaborated on together by MACBA Barcelona, DFB Kulturstiftung Berlin, and FIFA. Deep Play is going to be presented at GreeneNaftali Gallery in New York on January 10.
The new Gordon-Parreno project will feature José Tomás, the most famous matador in Spain. Tomás returned to the ring after five years of unofficial retirement that began in September 2002 without explanation. His comeback took place on June 17 at the Monumental of Barcelona confirming himself as one of the greatest toreros on the planet. As reported by The Times' Mike Wade, Gordon -- who attended the bullfight -- said: "it was the most astonishing bullfight I'd ever seen. He is an amazing character who has obviously gone against the grain in that very machoculture, and Philippe and I are very interested in him as a matador. But we can also see things from the point of view of the animal, this beautiful beast."
Great expectations attend the launch of this new effort. Zidane was premiered at Cannes; consequently it was played during Art Basel at the St. Jacob Stadium - designed by artists' frequent collaborator Herzog & De Meuron - and then at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, which co-produced the video, which is already part of both the MoMA and Guggenheim collection. The Turin screening was held at the prestigious Carignano Theatre and accompanied by a press conference conducted by foundation director Francesco Bonami — who co-organized in 2006 the sport culture survey "Human Game" at Pitti Immagine in Florence - and several soccer journalists.
While Parreno's last solo show closed last November at the Berlin leading gallery Esther Schipper, Douglas Gordon seems to be more and more concentrated on other aspects of his carrier. The artist - who presented his ongoing self-reflective project Pretty Much Everything about Douglas Gordon at the SFMOMA (an artist talk is scheduled on January 10) - has been recently appointed food-and-drink editor at French Playboy magazine. He is also going to opena non-profit art space in Glasgow with friend and former Dundee Contemporary Arts director Katrina Brown. (Brown founded in 2006 The Common Guild, a visual artorganization based in Glasgow.) Anna Gaskell (Gordon's ex-girlfriend) is supposed to be the artist who will inaugurate this Gordon new initiative.
Nicola Trezzi

THEORY OF THE MARKET

Painter Charline von Heyl recently described American’s disconnect between the personal and the political this way: “While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up, our inner lives aren’t altogether messed-up.” The current art world, awash in money and success, is shot through with a similar disconnect. To some, the art market is a self-help movement, a private consumer vortex of dreams, a cash-addled image-addicted drug that makes consumers prowl art capitals for the next paradigm shift. This set seeks out art that looks like things it already knows: anything resembling Warhol, Richter, Koons, Tuymans, Prince and Wool could be good; any male painter in his 30s could be great. To others, the market is just a happy popularity contest, or as New York Times reporter David Carr put it about having his own blog, it’s like “a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention.”
For many, the art market is a communal version of the Primal Scene — a sexed-up site that offers a peek into the bedroom of the creative act. Art advisors and collectors now treat art fairs and auctions like Warhol’s Factory: Places to flaunt junkielike behavior while hoping one’s creative potential might bloom. In this global circus, mega-collectors like Charles Saatchi and François Pinault are the art world’s P.T. Barnums: showmen who have become part of the show — moguls who understand that the market is a medium that can be manipulated. Once upon a time, the market and the scene (clubiness, chicanery and profligacy notwithstanding) were joined and reflected social, political and sexual change. Now the market is only in service of itself. The market is a perfect storm of hocus-pocus, spin and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater and brothel where an insular ever-growing caste enacts structured rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight.
Consider the lame-brained claim made by Sotheby ’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, Tobias Meyer, who recently effused, “The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” This is exactly wrong. The market isn’t “smart;” it’s like a camera — so dumb it’ll believe anything you put in front of it. Essentially, the art market is a self-replicating organism that when it tracks one artist’s work selling well craves more work by the same artist. Although everyone says the market is “about quality,” the market merely assigns values, fetishizes desire, charts hits, and creates ambience. These days the market is also too good to be true. Still, the slap-happy assertions keep coming. Last season, Amy Cappellazzo, International Head of Christie’s Post- War and Contemporary Art, crowed that auction houses were “the big-box retailers putting the mom-and-pops out of business.” Then she gushed of her clients, “After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?” After wondering, “What’s a G5 jet?” you may well ask how the current super-heated art market is changing the ways we see and think about art. These days no one knows. The market is now so pervasive that it is simply a condition — as much a part of the art world as galleries and museums. Even if you’re not making money — as is the case with most of us — that’s your relationship to the market. To say you won’t participate in the market is like saying you refuse to breathe the air because it’s polluted. The current market feeds the bullshit machine, provides a lot of cover for a lot of vacuous behavior, revs us up while wearing us down, breeds complacency, and is so invasive that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status and money in their studios. Yet, it also allows more artists to make more money without having to work full-time soul-crushing jobs — and it provides most of us with what Mel Brooks called “our phony-baloney jobs.” Last December more than 400 New York art dealers representing more than 5,000 artists paid for booths in one art fair or another in Miami to participate in this market. Everyone is trying the best they can. For critics to demonize the entire art world as somehow unethical or crass is selfrighteous, cynical and hypocritical.
Much confusion stems from there being no new cogent Theory of the Market, no philosophy that addresses he ways in which the ongoing feeding frenzy is affecting the production, presentation and reception of art. Nothing we say about the market adds-up, partly because “the market” isn’t really an autonomous subject. It’s a diversionary tactic. Essentially, it’s a blend of economics, history, psychology, stagecraft and ifestyle, an unregulated field of commerce governed by desire, luck, stupidity, cupidity, personal connections, connoisseurship, intelligence, insecurity and whatever. Yet we can’t ignore the market or just sit back and drink the Kool Aid. Maybe we should be asking questions such as: Are we sometimes liking things because we know the market likes them or are we really liking them? Do people really believe the icky kitschy pictures of naked girls with pussy cats by German painter Martin Eder are any good or are buyers simply jumping on the bandwagon because his prices have reached $500,000? When we learn that a newish painting by the second-rate latterday fuzzy Neo-Expressionist Marlene Dumas sold for over three million dollars, does it alter how we think of her work? Does it alter the ways magazine editors or curators think about it? The curator of Dumas’ upcoming Museum of Modern Art exhibition, the otherwise excellent Connie Butler, recently responded to one of my public hissy-fits about the overestimation of this artist by saying, “Dumas has been making portraits of terrorists,” as if to suggest that certain subject matter exempts art from criticism. In fact, this subject matter is not only predictable and generic, and in that sense utterly conservative, it’s perfect fodder for a culture in disconnect. It’s wonderful that mediocre women artists
like Dumas now command the same astronomical prices for their art that mediocre male artists always have. But do artists who don’t sell for high prices have less of a chance to ever make money? Are Vito Acconci and Adrian Piper fated to forever being “Lifestyles of the Poor and Famous” artists? If you’re unknown and over 35 do you have a shot? In this era of the 30-month career, what happened to the 30-year career? Will there one day be a Larry Gagosian Gallery in every major art capital?
In the 1970s, conceptualist Joseph Kosuth said, “The only people who care about art are artists.” That’s obviously changed. The art world is big business. Vanity Fair and W have launched annual “Art Issues;” we have “Power lists” and “Top Ten” issues galore. In January three young male art stars canoodled together in bed in their underpants on the cover of New York Magazine. Inside the magazine we read about their rising prices and that one of them is “well-endowed.” That’s fine, although the all-white-maleness of many of these things is only more proof of the unexamined agenda-driven blindness of the art market. But, is the art world of greater interest to people outside it because art has become more interesting or because art is a hot property? Is the market creating a competitive atmosphere that drives artists to produce better work or is it mainly fostering empty product?
If there’s a silver lining to this golden cloud it’s that despite how professional and “smart” it is made out to be, the market is still inherently blinkered, erratic and insecure. As such it is simultaneously vulnerable and a force of chaos. As almost everyone in the art world knows, chaos is almost always good for art. In addition, the disconnect between our public and personal lives is so unstable that it too is a site of chaos, albeit an internal one that could be exploited. Finally, at the end of the day art still has a private inside and a public outside. It still exudes an alchemical otherness. In our studios and before artworks we still experience moments of authentic serenity, passion and meaningfulness — places on the edge of language that the market can’t strip away. In this imperfect realm we can intuit the elemental feeling that sometimes, just by making or looking at art, we might glimpse the full range of human possibilities. The market is art minus otherness. “The rest,” as artist Anat Elberg recently wrote, “is gossip.”


Jerry Saltz is the Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice. He is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. The Good, The Bad and The Very Bad is a new Flash Art column by Jerry Saltz.

Thom Mayne to design Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, TX

Pritzker Prize winner Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne will design the new Museum of Nature & Science, joining the local Pritzker Prize parade that includes I.M .Pei, Renzo Piano, Sir Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas. These four winners of architecture's highest award all have buildings in the downtown Arts District.

"Historians will look back on the 20th century as a second renaissance, especially in the sciences," he said. "Every day our understanding of our world changes, so I want the museum to be part of that, to be explicit in its ideas, but also to a welcoming civic place."

Yet if history is any guide, the new museum will also be formally complex and unarguably iconic. Mr. Mayne is not a tentative, hedge-your-bets architect. In his embrace of technology, aggressive use of materials and eye-popping structural inventiveness, he and his firm, Morphosis – a synonym for change and transformation – focus on what it means to be contemporary, "on that which is difficult, because it is difficult, and by its difficulty worthwhile."

DOUBLE ALBLUM: NEW MUSEUM

LEFT: Daniel Guzmán, Sigue siendo rock and roll para mí, 2005
RIGHT: Steven Shearer, Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar, 1997

Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer April 23 - July 6, 2008

This exhibition is a dynamic visual conversation between Mexican artist Daniel Guzmán and Canadian artist Steven Shearer.

The show’s title, “Double Album,” refers to the exhibition’s related yet separate taxonomy and the bridge that music and a shared generation builds between Guzmán and Shearer’s work.

Both Guzmán and Shearer were born in the 1960s, and their work is rooted in their adolescent aspirations and anxieties; each artist, in his own way, investigates the pitfalls and appeal of prolonged male adolescence. While their respective nations are essential to their identity, Guzmán and Shearer’s work confirms the existence of the international language of popular culture.

Both artists are masters of emblematic autobiography, and their personas inhabit their work as stand-ins for a generation that came of age and shaped their lives with heightened awareness of certain bands, lyrics, posters, and celebrities.

“Double Album” is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator.

STEVEN SHEARER

Steven Shearer, Sorry Steve, 1999, ink in paper.
Collection of the artist.

Vancouver’s Steven Shearer is celebrated for his works that investigate the cultures of, and links between, youth, Heavy Metal, and the avant-garde. His sculptures, prints, collages, paintings, murals and drawings approach class, gender, and alienation with a keen sense of absurdity that is rarely applied to such subjects. The first major survey of Shearer’s work is in Toronto, at the Power Plant through February 10, 2008.
The raw material for Shearer’s works comes from his image bank of some 36,000 JPEGs, clippings, Xeroxes, reproductions, and found snapshots. As he recycles these pictures, Shearer looks for visual rhymes and puns, formal and thematic associations that reveal unexpected, frequently hilarious, affinities. The results revel in the anger, aggression, and creative opposition that bubble beneath polite society’s surface. Shearer’s fascination with the art historical resonances in contemporary life emerges in works throughout the show, from collages and sculptures to portraits of long-haired androgynous men and 1970s teen idols.

IMAGINE PEACE: HAPPY NEW YEAR

To our clients, colleagues and dear friends:
Happy New Year from Barbara Balkin Inc.