Category: visual

“After queuing for up to five hours in the blazing heat, all expectant Chinese visitors have discovered inside the prickly pavilion is … well, nothing. No enticing British exhibits, no music, no welcome drinks and snacks, not even a film, much less a presentation showing the best of British design and innovation, or all the zillions of things the British buy from the Chinese.”

The man behind a cancer charity whose facilities are designed by high-profile architects “has come under fire from both the scientific community, who question the validity of his claims (or media distortions of them); and the design community, who wonder if Maggie’s Centres aren’t injecting more architecture into small healthcare facilities than they strictly need.”

“The museum of the 21st century should be based on encounters with the unfamiliar and on exchange and debate rather than only on an idea of the perfect muse…. It has to have some anchors or fixed points for orientation and stability, but it also has to be a dynamic space for ideas, conversations and debate about new and historic art within a global context.”

“APT is an art investment fund with a twist–the artists contribute the works themselves, and the trust is structured to provide future income for the artists. Now in its seventh year, it has a global portfolio of 1,100 artists and a collection of more than 4,500 works, which it values at $45m.”

“Let’s imagine, for a minute, that this picture truly was a great cultural landmark. Would Tuesday night’s record deserve celebration, even then? What would a Martian anthropologist make of a society that produces a roomful of bidders with such vast reserves of surplus cash that they can drop more than $100 million on a fancy picture — while millions of their fellow citizens have their homes repossessed?”

“Two, three, four million extra? Worth it. After all, if you’re the evening’s big spender, you not only get to own an object you’ve just helped to make fantastically valuable, but your extravagance, with your name attached or not, also buys a mention in the news. You could lay out the same bucks for a hospital wing, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

“Christie’s is facing a bitter compensation claim after a drawing it sold for £11,400 as a 19th-century German picture was claimed to be a 15th-century Leonardo da Vinci worth £100m.”

Peter Plagens: “7. Money stories in the art world translate something that most people don’t understand (e.g., why is Picasso considered all that good?) into something they do understand–a sum of money. The bigger the sum of money, the ‘sexier’ the story in the bargain.”

A growing number of artists “have gone natural, … scavenging the world’s vivarium and rummaging through the life sciences in search of materials, ideas, cosmic verities, tragicomic homilies, personal agency, a personal agent, a way to stand out in the crowd.”

“Now, there is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won’t get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.”