Category: visual

“All appears well in the art world, with the millionaire buyers seemingly insulated against the current economic uncertainty. The global market doubled in value between 2002 and 2006 to £28bn… Records also fell this week for Munch, Rodin and Léger. But the headline figures are disguising signs that the market has already cracked.”

“It’s the anti-establishment movement that has taken the art market by storm, keenly collected by hedge-funders and Hollywood’ s A-list. Now, even Tate Modern is giving Street Art its stamp of approval.”

“Tom Thomson is probably the hottest artist in Canada right now – and he’s going to get even hotter this month… Five Thomson sketches are coming up for auction soon, [and] expectations are high that two works from this batch will at the very least enter the million-dollar circle, and at the very best smash the Thomson record of $1,463,500.”

An interactive sound-art installation erected in a Boston suburb is drawing attention for its innovative use of the city as a soundscape. “Under the dome, anyone can spin the dial and make an original mix of sounds, and with each turn, the direction the dial faces in the landscape calls up sound culled from that location.”

“The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden [in Washington, D.C.] has never been like most other Modern- and contemporary-art museums… It has always been, in one sense, an accidental museum, visited by a lot of people who know that it is part of the Smithsonian Institution and wander in because it is free, but have little idea what’s inside.”

“Why sell the painting in Australia and not, say, New York or London? And why auction a work valued at between $5million and $7million at a time of international art market uncertainty and local nervousness about the economy?”

“When the new American embassy opens in Beijing just before the start of the summer Olympics in August, it will display work by at least 18 American and Chinese contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rausch-enberg, Betty Woodman, Martin Puryear, Maya Lin, Yun-Fei Ji, and Hai Bo.”

“Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday proved to be a solid if unexciting evening… Unlike at [Tuesday’s] Christie’s sale, which was dominated by European buyers, at Sotheby’s Americans took home 67 percent of the work, and Europeans bought 27 percent.”

“A court in the India has dropped legal proceedings in three cases against one of the country’s best-known and controversial artists. MF Husain has been accused of obscenity in at least seven cases filed against him in a number of Indian states… In dropping criminal proceedings against the painter, the Delhi court said the painting was not obscene.”

Canada’s Governor General’s Medals for excellence in architecture were announced this week, with structures in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and east Toronto being recognized.