Category: visual

The Times of London is asking a group of leading artists to explain how they got their start, how they learned to balance authenticity with success, and what aspiring artists should expect to encounter. The answers are diverse and fascinating: “I never knew I wanted to be an artist – it was just a sort of burden that I was born with… I find the hardest bit is generating ideas – sitting there and thinking things through makes me feel lazy if I don’t come up with stuff.”

Philip Kennicott writes that the much-despised but vigorously defended 2 Columbus Circle, originally designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone, has been transformed from “a building that was hard to love… into a building that is hard to hate. The defense of 2 Columbus Cir. might not have been so passionate if Stone’s work wasn’t under general assault around the country.”

“Everyone knows what we are supposed to feel before the transcendent beauty of a Rothko – amazement, awe and revelation.” But Laura Cumming writes that the collection of late Rothkos on show at Tate Modern are “dispiritingly ordinary… compared to the riches of the previous decade.”

British artist Martin Creed’s work has evolved considerably in the roughly two decades since he first came to public attention. “[One] way of talking about the change in Creed’s work is to say that he was once depressed, but he is no longer… His melancholia somehow allowed objects the freedom to speak for themselves.”

What defines an art gallery, beyond the simple fact that someone has hung some art in it? “Agreeable spaces, controlled lighting, hints of the incongruous or transgressive licensed by the sanctity of art.” It’s a topic most of us never really consider, but some of the greatest minds in the art world devote themselves to it every day.

Have we had Mark Rothko wrong all these years? “Rothko’s problem – the reason why he appears to have been so thoroughly misunderstood by posterity – is the dark myth that he allowed to emerge around him while he was alive and which overgrew his entire reputation after his suicide in 1970.” But a new Tate Modern show seems to be breaking down that image.

A truly dismal showing at a contemporary art auction in London this weekend has the art world buzzing. “Many of yesterday’s lots were withdrawn after failing to reach their reserve,” and one dealer warned that, while “there will always be the super rich who keep the top of the market afloat… everywhere else it’s a bloodbath.”

“Yesterday, the $2-million Audain Emerging Artists Acquisition Fund was officially announced – an endowment that will allow the Vancouver Art Gallery to purchase work by emerging artists in perpetuity. It’s the largest fund of its kind in [Canada.]”

Even a city as architecturally rich as New York has a few clunkers, and Nicolai Ouroussoff has a list of buildings he wishes the city would just demolish. On the list: Madison Square Garden and the just-opened Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle.

“A group called Pest Control, endorsed by Banksy, was set up earlier this year to authenticate the artist’s canvasses and prints after a spate of fakes. But Pest Control said Banksy does not like his art being removed from its original setting and will not approve any street pieces.” As you might imagine, this is slightly annoying to auctioneers attempting to sell his art.