REVIEW: SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD BY SARAH THORNTON

"The title subtly suggests the idea of a quest. Seven days to save a masterpiece for the nation! Seven days to rescue Damien Hirst's reputation! But in fact Seven Days in the Art World is only, somewhat less excitingly, what it purports to be: an account of seven disparate days spent in the excessive and increasingly loopy world of contemporary art. Its author, Sarah Thornton, a 'sociologist of culture' whom the Daily Telegraph once described as 'Britain's hippest academic', visits an auction and a biennale, a prize giving, an art fair and an artist's studio. She also, more weirdly, hangs out at Artforum, a New York art magazine, and attends a student seminar at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.The result, from her publisher's point of view, is an 'insider' guide to the shadowy types who make, market, sell and buy art. Thornton, however, appears to believe that she has dished up rather more than this. At the end of her book is a brief note in which she explains her methodology. 'Ethnography,' she writes, 'is a genre of writing with roots in anthropology that aims to generate holistic descriptions of social and cultural worlds. Its main research method, "participant observation", is a cluster of qualitative tools, which include first-hand experience of the environment, visual observation, attentive listening, casual interviewing and analysis of key documents.' Well, who knew? The rest of us call this journalism. This particular ethnographic odyssey, according to a rather pert video of Thornton on YouTube, took her five years to complete, during which time she interviewed, formally or informally, 250 people, among them Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian. Unfortunately, this research is not always apparent in her minute-by-minute narratives ('2pm: time to meet an Italian collector for lunch... 7pm: I'm stuck in slow traffic on my way to Chelsea'). The likes of Saatchi, an extraordinary and fascinating case study when it comes to modern collecting, and Gagosian, a gallerist who is known to protect his artists' stock with a fierceness you might ordinarily only expect to find on a Wall Street trading floor, are not quoted at length in her book, presumably because they insisted on speaking off the record (several collectors who are quoted are given made-up, Tom Wolfe-ish names like Dwight Titan and Sofia Ricci). In which case, why mention, in your acknowledgments, that you talked to them at all? No one likes a tease.
Still, Thornton has bagged a few big beasts. Nicholas Serota is here, in all his inscrutable, white-shirted glory and Philippe Ségalot, the art adviser who oversees the collection of François Pinault, the owner of Christie's, Gucci and Château Latour. 'Buying is an extremely satisfying, macho act,' he tells her over fish carpaccio and sparkling water. Naturally, most of these people are pretty circumspect about what they say to Thornton, however attentively she listens. Disappointingly, the Rubell family of Miami, the owners of a fairly significant collection of contemporary art, won't let her follow them round Art Basel, the most important art fair in the world: 'That's like asking to come into our bedroom!' Occasionally, though, someone says something pleasingly dumb, revealing or both. At an auction at Christie's in New York, a well-known collector, Juliette Gold (not her real name), incisively analyses why the bidding on a painting by Warhol, Mustard Race Riot, has been somewhat stuttery: 'It's a great historical piece, but it's not a very appealing colour and it's too large to hang easily in one's home.' At the California Institute of Arts, where sessions of group criticism last so long that participating students take naps, get on with their knitting and order in pizza, a student tells her: 'Creative is definitely a dirty word... it's almost as embarrassing as beautiful or sublime.'
When she visits the foundry where Oval Buddha, a huge sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is nearing completion, she watches curator Paul Schimmel clap eyes on a piece he will shortly put in a Murakami retrospective for the very first time: 'It's either a disaster waiting to happen or it's... brilliant,' he says, gazing up at the 18-foot-high work ('a Humpty Dumptyish' self-portrait, according to Thornton). Then he remembers what he's about. 'In terms of showstoppers, I got lucky. They'll be praying to this thing in 500 years!'
The trouble is that the hope of the odd daffy quote is not enough to keep you reading. Newspapers and television are crammed with stories about art, from the latest crazy auction-house prices to the wilful silliness of the next contenders for the Turner Prize (Thornton devotes a whole chapter to the Turner Prize and, for the record, she was able to elicit no more useful information from the 2006 winner, Tomma Abts, than anyone else).To write a successful book about this world, a writer must bring something extra in the way of insight or argument. What Seven Days in the Art World lacks, fatally, is a point a view; a sense of investigation as well as observation; a little polemical verve to pull the reader along. Thornton never adequately explains how an artist comes to be considered worthy of critical or commercial attention. I still don't know why, exactly, the likes of Dwight Titan hanker after Jeff Koons, though Roberta Smith, the powerful and waspish art critic of the New York Times, brilliantly sums up the art of criticism itself when she says: 'You put into words something that everyone has seen. That click from language back into the memory bank of experience is so exquisite. It is like having your vision spanked.'
Does ethnography require its practitioners always to favour comprehensiveness over judicious selection? Perhaps. Thornton describes everything: every lunch, every fashion statement ('a petite curator in low-rise black jeans that revealed a hint of midriff briefed the crowd'), every object ('he stared into a well-used cut-glass ashtray') - but never for any other reason than to prove that she was there. A lot of non-fiction being published at the moment seems to be all style and posturing and no hard graft. This book is all graft and not a lot else.
What, I wonder, does Thornton really think about what money has done to art? Does its corrosive influence ultimately matter? Most important, when, if ever, will the bubble - so shiny and so seemingly impenetrable - burst? These are the questions I wish that she, or someone, would try to answer."
Rachel Cooke The Guardian Observer

ANDY WARHOL: OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS

Filmscape’, part of Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at London’s Hayward

GIANT WHO CHANGED THE WORLD
In art, even the recent past is another country. To experience a frisson of how it felt when art started to be made, felt and understood radically differently in the early 1960s, walk along the South Bank from Rothko at Tate Modern to Warhol at the Hayward. Here two American postwar art giants are displayed through a series of big, dark rectangular screens: Rothko’s melting purple-black veils of paint in the Seagram murals and late brown-grey series (1959-69) and Warhol’s monochrome films (1963-68) shown together in a gallery decked out with enormous biomorphic-formed sofas and swirling midnight-blue carpets. It is a brilliant dramatisation of the crash point of postwar culture: Rothko’s sublime straining for effect and transcendence versus Warhol’s shimmeringly cool, affectless, levelled images – “Sleep”, “Blow-Job”, “Haircut”, “Kitchen” – of everyday life.
In 1961 Warhol was a commercial artist with painterly ambitions – asked by a dealer why his works were smudged, he replied, “But you have to drip. Otherwise they think you’re not sensitive”. Then, in 1962-63, all at once, he depicted his first Campbell’s soup cans, produced his first “Disaster”, “Elvis” and “Marilyn” paintings and made “Sleep”. Two years later Barnett Newman complained that his abstract expressionist generation was already being “treated as if we were all dead”.
By then, the Great White Father’s influence was hypnotic, pervasive, irritating, inestimable, urgent. It is still all those things, which is why retrospectives – Tate Modern’s in 2002, Edinburgh’s in 2007 – keep coming, trying to pin down the impossible: an aesthetic so powerful that it saturated high art and mass culture and collapsed the difference between them. The battle lines are clear: Rothko changed lives, but Warhol changed the world.
The Hayward’s lavish “Other Voices, Other Rooms” is a mixed show visiting from Amsterdam and Stockholm. Lined with the silk-screened cow wallpaper Warhol made for Leo Castelli and culminating in a room full of air-brained “Silver Clouds” – “I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats, so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your windows” – it is a theatrical, original installation at once transforming and empathetic towards the Hayward’s 1960s brutalism. However, its claims to “shed new light”, “make us look afresh” and “introduce us to a whole new world of extraordinary images” are vainglorious nonsense.
The crammed galleries of soup cans, Brillo boxes and golden nudes, electric chairs and spooky, pallid self-portraits are compelling but familiar, as the best Warhol always is. Much else – time capsule memorabilia, excerpts from the “Factory Diaries”, a TV-Scape room featuring all 42 television programmes, mostly on fashion and gossip, made from 1979 to 1987 – is interminably tedious, as late Warhol often is. The premise of curator Eva Meyer-Hermann, that Warhol’s moving images is the key to all mythologies, is narrowing. Yet it has produced, in “Filmscape”, the section devoted to 48 hours of simultaneously screened films, a must-see exhibition that is the best showing of film in a gallery context that I have seen: alluring in comfort and lighting, generous in space, canny in its juxtapositions, practical in the clock with each film enabling you to know where you are in it.
The range is superb: from the five-hour epic “Sleep” – Warhol positioned his camera to gaze steadily at the naked body of his slumbering boyfriend, filmed at 24 frames per second but projected at 16 frames in eerie semi-slow motion – and the eight-hour “Empire”, consisting of a stationary shot of the Empire State Building as the sun sets, to both iconic and lesser-known shorts. “Haircut” is a brief, unexpected choreograph of desire. The exquisitely camp four-minute “Mario Banana” features a drag star munching the suggestive fruit. “Outer and Inner Space” meditates on the nature of screen identity, as a discomfited silver-haired Edie Sedgwick watches herself on video. Reality and artifice, celebrity and the underworld, a culture without hierarchies of image or thought, the subtle eroticisation of almost anything he touched: here is a visual and conceptual overload which emphasises that, inescapably and from all sides, Warhol is our contemporary.
FINANCIAL TIMES

7 October 2008 - 18 January 2009

The Hayward
Southbank Centre,
Belvedere Road,
London, SE1 8XZ

SERPENTINE GALLERY

Gerhard Richter
4900 Colours: Version II, 2007
Enamel paint on Aludibond
49 Panels, each 97 × 97 cm
La Collection de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création
© 2008 Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter
4900 Colours:
Version II
September 23 – November 16, 2008
Gerhard Richter (born Dresden, 1932) is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Since the early 1960s he has tirelessly explored the medium of painting at a time when many were heralding its death. He has produced a remarkably varied body of work, including photography-based portrait, landscape and still-life paintings; gestural and monochrome abstractions; and colour chart grid paintings. This autumn, the Serpentine presents 4900 Colours, a major new work comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid formation to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic colour.
4900 Colours comprises 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares that can be reconfigured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings. Richter has developed a new version especially for the Serpentine Gallery exhibition: 4900 Colours: Version II, formed of 49 paintings of 100 squares.
4900 Colours is in the context of Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced the stained glass that was destroyed in World War II. Cathedral Window, unveiled in August 2007, comprises 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colours that are derived from the palette of the original medieval glazing.

Polltrack.com

ART WORLD LAUNCHES POLLTRACK
As if we needed more proof that the art world was eagerly watching the current elections, two of the art world’s most indefatigable political forces, SoHo art dealer Ronald Feldman and curator and art historian Maurice Berger, have launched Polltrack.com, a new website designed to track the contemporary political campaigns, interpret the results of the many polls of voters, and predict the results of the elections. At present, Polltrack’s electoral map shows Barack Obama ahead, with 260 elector votes, compared to John McCain’s 185 votes; 93 are too close to call. Blog entries, largely authored by Berger, explain and expand upon the polls. The site’s new nonpartisan blog, called Voices on the Ground, features reporting from around the nation, and incorporates photographs and other artworks, such as Paul Shambroom’s series of color photos of town meetings. "If you think of the presidential election as a sport," said Feldman, "Polltrack gives you a front-row seat."

Koons's Former Porn Star Ex-Wife Can Keep Their Son, Court Says

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- New York painter and sculptor Jeff Koons's human rights weren't violated by Italy's decision to give custody of his son to his ex-wife, a former porn star and member of the Italian parliament, a court said today.
Koons and Ilona Staller, known as ``La Cicciolina,'' divorced in 1994 and have since fought over custody of their son.
Koons claimed that Italian authorities breached his right to respect of his family life by allowing Staller to keep their son in Italy, blocking him from visiting the U.S. and awarding his ex-wife custody, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, said today in a statement on its Web site.
Italian authorities ``made every effort to protect the higher interests of the child'' in ``a difficult situation marked by constant disagreement between the parties and their inability to put their son's well-being first,'' the court said.
Staller sued Koons in New York in March to enforce an Italian child-support ruling.
A lawyer for Koons, whose works are on display at the Palace of Versailles in France, didn't immediately return a message left requesting comment before regular business hours.

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES

by Gerrit Gohlke & Stefan Kobel

Michael Moses, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, may well be the art-world’s most famous academic expert on art prices. With his colleague Jianping Mei, Moses co-developed the Mei Moses Index, a fine-art price index that widely made news for showing that artworks sold at auction over the past 50 years had a compound annual growth rate better than that of bonds and close to that of the Standard & Poor 500 index. With U.S. financial markets facing the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, Artnet Magazine Germany contacted Moses for a telephone interview on the role that art investments might play in the ongoing fiscal-market drama.
AM: The finance world has not experienced such turbulence for decades. Will there be repercussions for the art market?

Michael Moses: Historically speaking, the art market has tended to lag downturns in the financial market by 6-18 months. But the art market is also dependent upon worldwide wealth creation. So a downturn in a single market may not affect the art market, but a downturn in world markets will most likely affect the art market. But it’s driven more by global accumulated wealth than by short incremental changes.

AM: Could art become a substitute investment? In times like these, do investors move their funds not only to gold, but if necessary also to artworks?

MM: When individuals sell equities, they need to put the proceeds somewhere, whether it’s gold, cash or art. Historically, art has been basically an asset class, and money flows to it during good times and bad times. The question is how much is flowing. And when people are disposing of other assets, there may be an opportunity for some of those assets to flow into the art market.

AM: Is speculating in art a good idea during volatile times like these?

MM: Historically, art has had positive returns over many different holding periods. In the last five to ten years, art has outperformed financial assets. In the last 20 years, financial assets have outperformed art. Art is like any other asset, it has good times and bad times -- it’s not a silver bullet. My perspective is that the thing that most affects the art market is major changes in world-wide accumulated wealth.

AM: Can the loss of capital on the financial markets lead to “emergency selling” in private art collections?

MM: Yes. We’ve seen it before when the dotcom bubble burst. There were executives who had to sell works that they had just recently bought during the glory days, and that’s true with any asset. [Editor’s note: It has just been reported that Richard Fuld, chairman of the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers banking firm, has consigned $20 million in art to Christie’s auction house.]

AM: Is the gallery market invisibly linked to the finance market? Will New York lose influence as a marketplace?

MM: Again, this is a question of ups and downs. It would stand to reason that, due to changes in Wall Street and changes in some American companies, the people who were long in all of these markets will stand to lose money. The people who were short in all of these markets will tend to make money. On balance, most likely in the short run, there probably will be more losers than winners. But in the long run, there’s nothing that I see that shows that things won’t rebound over time -- they always have in the past. But I don’t have a crystal ball.

AM: The market has many different sectors, like contemporary art, or classic modernism, or 20th-century design. Will this financial crisis effect sub-sectors of the art market differently?

MM: Currently I think that we’re finding that new money seems to go after new art, and this tendency might be one of the reasons that post-war art has done so well over the last five years, so potentially, this category might be more susceptible to downturns in new wealth creation. But we have to remember that wealth creation is a worldwide phenomenon now more than it has been in the past, so it may be that the world market picks up now where the American or European markets may slow down.

Hirst's `Golden Calf' Bucks Financial Slump in Record Art Sale

LONDON — "Against a backdrop of reeling financial markets and nervous investors, Sotheby’s and the British artist Damien The Golden Calf'' kept alive a 10-year bull run in the art market last night as collectors vied for the British artist's works at Sotheby's, even as global stock markets collapsed.
Hirst's ``Beautiful Inside My Head For Ever'' auction in London took 70.5 million pounds ($126.6 million) with fees, led by the 10.3 million-pound preserved Charolais calf with 18-carat gold horns. The total was a record for a sale of works by one artist, said Sotheby's, which had estimated the evening would fetch as much as 62.4 million pounds. All but two of the 56 lots sold.Hirst forged ahead with “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” a highly publicized auction of 223 works, all by Mr. Hirst and all made within the last two years. In a gamble that could have ramifications for other artists, Mr. Hirst was bypassing his dealers — the Gagosian Gallery, based in the United States, and White Cube, based in London — and taking his work straight to auction with a sale that began here on Monday night and concludes on Tuesday afternoon.
And there were signs that the bet was paying off: the first session’s total was $127.2 million, above the high estimate of $112 million. “I woke up this morning in the teeth of the gale of recession,” Mr. Hirst’s business manager, Frank Dunphy, said after the sale, “but we came out as confident as ever.” Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, explained the total this way: “Damien Hirst is a global artist that can defy local economies.” Jose Mugrabi, a New York dealer, had another take: “Today people believe more in art than the stock market. At least it’s something you can enjoy.”
While Mr. Hirst risked flooding his own market, he had also spent several months courting potential buyers. Still, he could not anticipate the sale’s timing, amid news that Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy and other serious changes on the financial landscape. Sotheby’s was said to be taking steps to ensure that the sale did not fall flat, like offering buyers a six-month grace period to pay for purchases.
Jay Jopling, owner of the White Cube gallery, could be seen in the audience bidding on works (and winning at least one, “The Triumvirate,” which features anatomical models, for $3.1 million). Word in the auction world was that Sotheby’s had given him an incentive to steer his clients to the sale. Sotheby’s declined to comment on any of the financial arrangements. As part of his sales pitch, Mr. Hirst said that he would no longer be making spin or butterfly paintings and that there would be far fewer dead animals and almost no dot paintings."
We've heard that before!!!!!!

CONFLICT OF INTEREST AROUND KOONS?

Jeff Koons’s forthcoming exhibition at the Château de Versailles is not just irritating French cultural purists who would prefer to keep the American king of kitsch off the castle grounds. As Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre and Emmanuelle Lequeux report, there are now charges of a conflict of interest around the exhibition at the former residence of Louis XIV. The exhibition’s origins go back to Venice in June 2007. “Jean-Jacques Aillagon found himself with his friend the businessman François Pinault,” write Fabre and Lequeux. Aillagon was then responsible for the Palazzo Grassi, where Pinault shows part of his private collection. “Monsieur Aillagon, also the former French minister of culture, was getting ready to take over at the Château de Versailles,” write Fabre and Lequeux. “Pinault then asked him: ‘With all the gardens that you have, you will be able to exhibit my Split-Rocker!’ ” Koons's Split-Rocker, 2000, is one of seventeen works that will go on display this week inside the castle and on the grounds. Although a former employee of Pinault, Aillagon seems to be doing his old job by including a total of six Koons works from Pinault’s private collection in the Versailles show. That’s not the only problem. Elena Geuna, who is curating the project with the Centre Pompidou's Laurent Le Bon, is an employee of Pinault.
“I find this argument specious and discourteous,” says Aillagon in Geuna’s defense. “Koons’s works have obtained impressive prices well before being exhibited at the Metropolitain a few weeks ago and at Versailles today.” Of course, many of those impressive prices have been reached at Christie’s, which is owned by Pinault’s holding company. The director of the Friends of Versailles, Anémone Wallet, would have liked to have had the chance to make one request to the artist: to create a work that would have deferred the costs of the exhibition, estimated at around $2.7 million. At Versailles, the public purse is paying for around $400,000, while the remaining $2.3 million has been provided by partners, most of whom also happen to be Koons collectors with works in the Versailles exhibition: François Pinault, Eli Broad, Dakis Joanno, and Edgar de Picciotto.

ROBERT HUGHES LASHES OUT AT HIRST'S "TACKY ART"

Robert Hughes, the world's best-known champion of modern painting and sculpture, is publicly to lay much of the blame for the decline of contemporary art at the door of Damien Hirst. In an uncompromising television essay about art and money that follows next week's controversial London 'clearance' sale of 223 of Hirst's works, the Australian critic will claim they are 'absurd' and 'tacky' commodities.
Hughes's film for London's Channel 4 argues it is 'a little miracle' that Hirst's 35ft bronze statue, Virgin Mother, could be worth £5m and yet be made by someone 'with so little facility'. Calling Hirst's famous shark in formaldehyde 'the world's most over-rated marine organism', the critic will mount a lengthy attack on the artist for 'functioning like a commercial brand' and make the case that both Hirst and his shark prove that art has lost all meaning separate from its price tag.
Hughes, 70, became well known in Britain with his acclaimed BBC series The Shock of the New in 1980, which made the theories behind modernism in art accessible to a wider audience. But Hughes says he now fears he is a member of the 'last privileged generation' to have visited an art gallery without thinking about the market value of the exhibits.
Hirst's 1991 suspended tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is, Hughes judges, a 'tacky commodity', even though collector Charles Saatchi sold it for £8m in 2004. 'It is a clever piece of marketing, but as a piece of art it is absurd,' Hughes says. The common defence is that Hirst's work mirrors and subverts modern decadence: 'Not so. It is decadence,' says Hughes.
His harsh verdict on Britain's leading artist is a key part of the new film's argument about the change Hughes has witnessed over 50 years as a New York-based art reviewer. His film, The Mona Lisa Curse, opens with shots of Hirst's diamond skull, For the Love of God, which sold for £50m and is now owned by a consortium. Hughes maintains that all works of art now operate in western culture much as celebrities do. He dates the trend from 1962 when Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa left the Louvre in Paris to go on display in New York. The long queues to see it turned a masterpiece into a mere spectacle, he argues.
The huge sums now regularly paid out by collectors at auctions, placing the lots out of the reach of public galleries, mean that art itself has been redefined. The works, he suggests, are now like film stars, while the galleries have been reduced to the level of the limousines used to convey them to people. 'Art as spectacle loses its meaning,' Hughes warns.
Grayson Perry, the Turner prize-winning potter and artist, welcomed Hughes's intervention this weekend, although he admires some of Hirst's work. 'I always enjoy Robert Hughes's erudite grumpiness,' Perry said. 'We get the art we deserve and Damien is the perfect artist of our times of fluff economies, New Labour and celebrity hype. His skull was brilliant for its brazenness and for the debate it provoked. His work has always been largely about money: I fear his accountant has become his most influential artistic adviser.'
Like Hughes, Perry is concerned about the way the significance of artworks is skewed by the price they attain in the market. 'What has changed is that the market, fuelled by glitzy new wealth, is becoming more powerful than the connoisseurs, museum curators and art academics whose consensus used to decide what was good art. Hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs are not necessarily known for their sophisticated good taste,' said Perry.

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

The Wizard of Oz
September 2 - December 13, 2008

CCA Wattis Institute
for Contemporary Arts
California College of the Arts
San Francisco CA

Curated by Jens Hoffmann
Robert Bechtle, Jennifer Bornstein, Ulla von Brandenburg, Bruce Conner, Walker Evans, Simryn Gill, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Loris Gréaud, Joseph Grigely, Carsten Höller, Evan Holloway, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Gareth Moore, Rivane Neuenschwander, Raymond Pettibon, Clare Rojas, Harry Smith, Donald Urquhart, Andy Warhol, Cerith Wyn Evans

The Wizard of Oz translates the narrative of L. Frank Baum's famous book into the narrative of an exhibition. It features sculpture, film, video, painting, drawing, and photography by 22 international artists, several of whom are contributing new pieces specially conceived for the show; others are represented by existing artworks related to one of the book's key themes. A number of cultural artifacts, inspired either by the novel or by the famous 1939 film, create a framework for the visitor's journey. This is the second in a series of exhibitions by curator Jens Hoffmann that take a written narrative as their point of departure (the first was Around the World in Eighty Days [2006]).
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become one of the most beloved stories in popular culture. Written in 1900, it captured a moment in American history when society was rapidly changing, due in part to industrial, sociopolitical, and technological developments as well as increased expansion toward the West. Some of the themes that it touches upon—the realities of childhood, rural life, poverty, displacement, and migration as well as the more intangible, but nonetheless powerful, ideas of security, friendship, and dreams—continue to have resonance with the way that we experience the world and approach the idea of America itself.

Designed by Jon Sueda / Stripe, the 76-page exhibition catalog is inspired by the first edition of Baum's novel. It includes a full-color plate section (including photographs of the new commissions), a text on each participating artist, and critical essays by Jens Hoffmann (curator and director of the Wattis Institute) and Rebecca Loncraine (writer and Baum biographer).

DEREK: FILM BY ISAAC JULIEN

DEREK is a unique collaboration between Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton, in which British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman is remembered and celebrated. The new film will combine document with fiction, and experiment with narrative to produce an enthralling work of art about Derek Jarman. It will be a timely reappraisal and celebration of the work of one of Britain’s most important artist filmmakers, and is intended to inform and inspire at a time when the pioneering work of a number of key figures of the 1970s and 1980s is becoming a significant influence to a new generation.

From Sebastiane (1976) to Blue (1992), Derek Jarman’s films constantly interrogated time and art, and epitomized his own era. He was a painter, part of the moment that made sixties London a capital of the art world. He was a filmmaker, perhaps the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema through the seventies, eighties and nineties. He lived as a gay man surfing the joys of Gay Liberation and the sorrows of Aids. He lived as a participant observer, noting with pen or camera all that passed before him - from punk to Thatcher, from Hampstead Heath to film premiere.

Now those images will serve to place his art in his time, to produce a fascinating history that we can put to use. As well as the feature films and Super 8 films, which span three decades, there are the extensive video clips he recorded from the early seventies, for artists from the Smiths to the Pet Shop Boys, and from television to film festivals in Japan, Berlin and Cologne. There are also images of Derek, as he erupted into the viewfinder of the news media. This unique perspective will provide a counterpoint, as his own images are juxtaposed with the images of the history that generated them.

Director: Isaac Julien
Executive Producers: Tilda Swinton, James MacKay
Producers: Colin MacCabe, Eliza Mellor

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