Category: visual

“Even in the intervals at the Royal Opera House, I’d never seen such a bunch of well-groomed, glossy, bouffy-haired folk, and that was just the specialist art-market journalists.”

The J. Paul Getty Museum is preparing for the arrival of two bronze casts of a pair of ancient marble sculptures in Florence. “The Getty recently purchased the bronzes for an undisclosed sum from London dealer Daniel Katz, after the British Cultural Ministry’s effort to keep the artworks in England failed to raise the officially recommended price of about $10 million.”

Colorado officials may not yet have decided whether to allow Christo to cover a 40-mile stretch of the Arkansas River in cloth canopies, but that’s not stopping the artist from drumming up support for the project as far away as Washington, D.C. “This whole exhibition feels more like a publicity campaign for a product than like a considered investigation of an important aesthetic event.”

The most interesting thing about London’s Frieze Art Fair may be the provocative activities going on around its fringes. “If the 2008 Frieze, which ran for five days, ending on Sunday, offered a glimpse of a plush, moneyed-to-the-gills art world that may soon be history, the outlying shows in many cases seem more reality-based.”

From velvet mice with red-bulb eyes to bubbles of blood on a tile wall to paintings of desaparecidos that fade away as they dry, exhibitions in Colombia reveal “a resurgence of contemporary arts in the country” – new work in which “violence permeates and transforms everything.”

“Some people queued and camped out for two nights to get their hands on work by artists like Gavin Turk and Stella Vine at the Free Art Fair. The 40 pieces available, which were allocated by a ballot system, were all gone within an hour and 20 minutes. The most valuable piece given away was worth £15,000. Interest in the Free Art Fair was so great, its website crashed as people clamoured to log on.”

“Nowadays, a Norman Foster building in Hong Kong looks just like a Norman Foster building in Canary Wharf – neither British nor Chinese, just nationless steel and glass in both places. […] We were much more open to influences from abroad two centuries ago, taking styles from all round the world and modifying them to suit our cool home climate.”

Attorney-businessman-collector Harald Falckenberg has opened a “stunning” new museum in Hamburg to showcase his collection of contemporary art. “A fascination with the grotesque runs throughout the collection, lending it a no-holds-barred irreverence that might be difficult to represent at public expense. ‘I’m not interested in reaching a broad public,’ he said, ‘and I have no official mandate. Instead, I can offer alternatives.'”

“Henry Kravis, co-founder of the leveraged-buyout firm KKR & Co. LP, has asked Sotheby’s & Co. to auction an Edgar Degas work in his collection estimated to fetch more than $40 million, according to two New York dealers. … He has locked in a ‘guarantee’ from Sotheby’s to receive an undisclosed amount regardless of the sale’s outcome.”

It was a rough weekend at the contemporary art auctions, yes, but “the art market, while diminished, is by no means dead and buried.” After all, “big profits were still being made.” On the other hand: “One record that was set was the time in which these auctions – usually long-drawn-out affairs – were completed due to lack of bidding.”