Category: visual

“With more than 20 fairs (at least 7 more than last year) now piggybacking on the main event, Art Basel Miami Beach has made a point of finding new ways to showcase smaller galleries and individual artists… The art is heavily scripted, raucously colorful and monstrously proportioned.” It’s a style that fits the host city, and differentiates the event from nearly everything else in the art world.

“Under the fields and woodlands of Britain, a painted cave as great as the ice age art treasures of Chauvet and Lascaux may be waiting to be discovered. This claim will be made by a museum this week, for the first time, when a new archaeology gallery opens at the National Museum of Wales.”

Michelangelo is certainly famous, but “somehow, you don’t come across that many passionate, let alone perceptive, responses to him. There’s a sense that he’s famous just for being famous, and the reason why he is so eminent eludes us.”

Twenty satellite art fairs accompany this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. “It remains to be seen if all the fairs will do well and be able to return next year . ‘We have reached the top in terms of ‘art fair inflation’ and I think the events will downsize to a more normal level’.”

“A long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, possibly his last design before his death, has been discovered in the basilica’s offices.”

Fashion photography has never been given much credit in the serious art world, but that may be changing. “A paradoxical dimension of the current lively interest in the field is that the innovative spirit and visual daring of the late ’90s… appears to have gone into retreat.”

No one is complaining about the quality of the art at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, which is reportedly as high as it has ever been. But in a tough economic climate, prices are skyrocketing, leading to significant grumbling from collectors and slow initial sales.

“A 3¼-inch limestone lion from ancient Mesopotamia fetched the highest price ever paid at an auction for a sculpture – $57 million. Sotheby’s had estimated that the Guennol Lioness would bring up to $18 million.”

Antonio Paolucci has been art superintendent in Venice, head of Florence museums and Italy’s culture minister in 1995-96, among other high-profile jobs.

“In India today, there are investment funds set up to make money off the the nation’s artists. Ranjit Hoskote, a prominent Indian critic, says many artists are producing quickly to make money while the market is hot.”