“Most contemporary artists dream of having a work bought by Charles Saatchi. James Howard, a student at the Royal Academy Schools, was shocked to discover yesterday that Britain’s most influential collector of contemporary art wanted 46 of his – an entire graduation show.”
Author: sbergman
What Goes Up Must Come Down… Or Must It?
The art boom has been going on for so long now that nearly everyone assumes that a crash similar to the one the art world experienced in the early 1990s is just around the corner. But what if it isn’t? “As the number of sages predicting a crash mounts, prices continue to spiral like an ever spinning top… Just as our cyclical weather patterns are changing, so are the economic and social forces that effect the art market.”
Davidson To New York
Newsday‘s Justin Davidson has been named the new classical music critic for New York magazine, which has been taking a lot of heat since firing its longtime classical critic, Peter G. Davis. Davidson won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and has previously written for The New Yorker, Slate.com, and Opera News, among other publications.
German Theater To Premiere London Bombing Play
“It is the first play to tackle the 7/7 London bombings. But why is Pornography being staged only in Germany?” The playwright calls it “bewildering,” but says that the nature of the work fit better with a German theatrical sensibility.
Nuns Want Erotic Poems Stifled
“The verses would be no more than the erotic, if masterful, outpourings of a prodigious poet and Nobel laureate were it not for the fact that they appear to talk of his amatory adventures with a series of nuns. But now that a Spanish publishing company has decided it is time to publish the erotic musings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, an outraged order of nuns has asked for his poems to be silenced.”
Documenting An Artistic Disaster
British art critics have not been enjoying their time at this year’s Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany. “Documenta 12 is a disaster. I thought at first it must be me. After all, it is always good to stir things up a bit, to disturb hierarchies, rattle the tyrannical white box, juxtapose the new with the old, the dead with the living, east against west, the brilliant with the talentless, but hang on a second!”
Rushdie Row Reignites
The fury of Muslims around the world at the announcement of the knighting in Britain of author Salman Rushdie caught the nominating committee that submitted him for the honor completely by surprise, despite the fact that Rushdie spent more than a decade under a death edict issued by Iranian clerics. “The writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.”
So The Rest Of The World Now Thinks Paul Is Dead?
Are the Beatles more globally relevant than Shakespeare? “An academic conference heard yesterday that [Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band] – released 40 years ago with perhaps the most famous sleeve in music history – has overtaken Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as a global cultural reference point.”
Monet Goes For $37m
“Claude Monet’s masterpiece Nympheas has been sold at auction for £18.5m at Sotheby’s in London. The painting, from Monet’s water lilies series, is part of the auction house’s impressionist and modern art sale.”
YouTube Going Global
Online video giant YouTube has rolled out nine international versions of its popular web site for users in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. “Each site is translated into local languages and has country-specific video rankings and comments… More than half of all viewers on YouTube [are] now from outside the US.”