Category: visual

Michael Kimmelman: “The show [“Art of Two Germanys” at LACMA] makes clear that the truth was actually more complicated, as it usually is, East German art having been more varied, not always politically compliant, closer at times to what was happening in West Germany than the West German art establishment either acknowledged or bothered to notice.”

The Cincinnati Museum of Art will be the only US venue for an exhibition of more than 200 Surrealist and Dada paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc. from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Duchamp’s urinal and mustachioed Mona Lisa will be there, as will Magritte’s boulder hovering over the sea and Man Ray’s landscape with lips.

“A Francis Bacon painting, which had been expected to fetch a price of up to £6m, has failed to sell at an auction in London. The 1954 artwork, called Man in Blue VI, was one of a series of seven paintings completed by the artist. Bidders at Christie’s auction house failed to reach the asking price and the piece has gone back to the vendor.”

Shepard “Fairey’s arrest has spawned a debate on the concept of public art, at least art that is imposed on the public by self-important phonies who regard property rights the way some pols and rich folks do taxes: rules that should apply to everybody but them. … [T]he people who defend taggers as ‘artists’ have the same mindset as the Manhattan socialites who defended self-described revolutionaries in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe coined a term for these fools: Radical Chic.”

“Divided for 60 years by war and political turbulence, the imperial art collection of China is now the focus of negotiations that could lead to at least a few of the works being exhibited together again. The director of the National Palace Museum [in Taipei, Taiwan], the repository of the cream of the 1,000-year collection, plans to travel on Saturday to Beijing, the first official visit by a director of that museum to the mainland since the Nationalists lost China’s civil war to the Communists in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan.”

“China’s government today urged the estate of the late French designer Yves Saint Laurent to return two Qing Dynasty bronze sculptures scheduled for a Feb. 25 auction by Christie’s International in Paris. The two animal-heads — a rabbit and a rat — were severed from a water fountain at Beijing’s imperial Summer Palace when British and French troops plundered and burned the palace in October 1860.”

“Zach Feuer, the New York dealer with a knack for turning young art-school grads into stars, has dropped eight artists — nearly half of his roster. ‘I didn’t want to be big in this economy,’ said Feuer, 30. ‘Now is the time to have a lower overhead and be small and lean.'”

With a powerful (and expensive) software package called Digital Project, “fabricators have produced a façade with various textures at a price that Mr. Gehry says does not exceed what a developer would pay to build a conventional boxy building of similar dimensions.”

“When commuters push through the turnstiles at the new South Ferry Terminal in a few weeks, they’ll find themselves surrounded by an arabesque of glass panels depicting intertwined silhouettes of trees – a lyrical, $1 million installation by the identical-twin artists Mike and Doug Starn.”

“A giant white horse has been chosen as a new £2m art commission for south east England dubbed ‘Angel of the South’. The design, by former Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger… will see a horse standing on all four hooves at 33 times life-size.”