Category: visual

“Unlike most dealers at the Art Basel fair, who are showing a smorgasbord of the artists they represent, the New York dealer Matthew Marks has mounted an exhibition honoring one artist, Ellsworth Kelly, who turned 85 last month.”

“Increased competition from Christie’s, particularly in the fields of impressionist, modern and contemporary art, contributed to an $18.1m (or 12%) fall in turnover at Sotheby’s for the first three months of 2008, compared with the same period last year.”

“A Roman Catholic watchdog group is protesting a student art exhibition in which religious symbols including a crucifix and rosary are depicted in sexually explicit paintings.”

“Unsurprisingly, at Art Basel an increasing number of collectors are buying not just for themselves but to build a museum collection. The trend is changing the dynamic of the market–and its unwritten rules for buyers and sellers.”

A former guard at the Carnegie Museum of Art has been charged with vandalizing a million-dollar painting he apparently didn’t like, damaging it beyond repair.

The paintings were stolen Aug. 5 by gunmen as a handful of visitors milled about the museum in Nice. The stolen paintings were Monet’s 1897 “Cliffs near Dieppe,” the 1890 “Lane of Poplars near Moret” by fellow Impressionist Alfred Sisley and Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder’s 17th century “Allegory of Earth” and “Allegory of Water.” Together, they are worth about $1.55 million.

“What exactly is an exhibition copy? If the artist oversaw its creation, why isn’t it an original? The Cai exhibit, which drew huge crowds to the Guggenheim, raises questions that many museum goers have probably never considered. And when we’re talking about contemporary art made from common or mass-produced materials, how do we know when a work of art is the ‘real thing’?”

“When art fairs work, and they often do, news of a beautiful painting or a ground-breaking sculpture flashes through a crowd with the excitement and urgency of the first few notes of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo at Woodstock. But the art-fair explosion has a real dark side, and a real downside.”

“Most texts which accompany contemporary art production are so alarmingly twisted and woolly that they could easily pass for self-parody. Texts on art rarely explain what they profess to explain; they simply simulate the explainability of their theories.”

“Portraiture is all around us, at every stage in our lives… And yet in spite of its ubiquity, many take it for granted, or even treat it as the poor relation of other forms of painting.” How many of us can even say that we really know how to look at, and judge, a portrait?