How is the value of art determined? “Scholars, critics, researchers and historians all shape the value of art. You think you are pure, but you give an expertise and you are participating in the market. Your assessment of quality, authenticity or attribution makes you a player, like it or not. You go to graduate school and think about truth and beauty, but there’s this whole other world that affects the truth-and-beauty factor.”
Blog
Hadid Wins Prizker
“Zaha Hadid, whose dynamic designs often seem to defy laws of gravity, has won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor. It is the first time the prize has been given to a woman in the award’s 25-year history.”
Picasso – Patron Saint Of Today’s Architects?
“Today, many architects – bored of straight lines and right angles on the one hand, and of the kitsch post-modern design that did so much to dumb down city skylines in the 1980s on the other – have decided that they want to be Picasso, too. They want to imbue matter-of-fact buildings like office blocks and blocks of flats with the spirit of the great artist and sculptor.”
Jamming With Saatchi
Charles Saatchi’s new show is jammed full of art. “An emporium is what it feels like – piled high, stacked deep. If one more work was tacked to one more inch of wood-panelled wall, the building would surely collapse. The central pantheon that guarantees the box office remains more or less intact: the shark, the dung, Myra and the bloody head, dead dad and the famously unmade bed. But all the other rooms, halls and corridors are jammed. By my count, there are more than a hundred new works on display, plus several more classics from Saatchi’s collection. You get three shows for the price of a ticket.”
Capitol Idea – A Record Company That’s Growing
Capitol Records is that rare music label that has been expanding even as the music business has contracted in the past few years. “Since taking over nearly three years ago Andrew Slater and his very hands-on approach to music making — from rerecording parts of songs to dissecting new videos — have transformed Capitol from a languishing heritage label best known for the Beatles and Frank Sinatra into a company that can once again develop hit artists.”
Museums Form Alliance Of Art
Three American museums – in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles – are joining forces to “acquire finished works together and to organize shows as the cost of buying art and producing exhibitions has risen.”
Meeting The Enigmatic Mr. Pletnev
Pianist and conductor Michel Pletnev is “a prime example of one who protects under layers of mystery the emotions and the brilliant, albeit sometimes provocative and idiosyncratic sparks of imagination that fire his piano playing.”
France’s New Rough And Tumble Art Market
Three years ago France opened up its art markets to foreign sellers, ending a long-standing ban on foreign auction houses operating there. Many predicted that in the new era, the big international auction houses would swamp the French firms. “However, the reality has proved very different and in less than two and a half years Paris has evolved into the world’s most unpredictable and fiercely competitive art market centre.”
Vettriano – Popular But Scorned
Jack Vettriano – the self-taught Scottish painter – is a hugely popular artist in the UK. But no public museums have interest in showing his work. Why? “The proposition that Vettriano cannot be slotted into a spectrum of art that runs from Titian to Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas is just risible. Why Pop Art but not Popular Art? If the National Theatre can reinvent itself by staging popular musicals and also populist shows like Jerry Springer – the Opera, then why cannot our galleries do likewise?”
Did Elvis Have Scottish Roots?
That’s the claim of a Scottish author who has researched the matter. “Elvis Presley’s roots can be traced back to a village in Aberdeenshire,” he says.