Category: visual

“Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district. But if the five-million-square-foot building is one of the largest ever constructed, its architect sees it as a people-friendly reinvention of the skyscraper.”

Yet another round of records was set at Christie’s New York last night, as Andy Warhol’s famous portrait of Mao Zedong sold for $17.36 million, the most ever paid for a Warhol. “Two other portraits of classic Warhol subjects – Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy – sold for over $30m in total. Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXV fetched $27.1m. The $240m sale set new records for 19 artists and caps a fortnight in which Christie’s and rivals Sotheby’s took $1bn between them.”

The atmosphere at Wednesday night’s auction was electric, as buyers and observers alike caught the unheard-of fever that seems to be permeating this season’s high-end art market. “Christie’s had captured the best material this season, and the art world knew it. In the overflowing salesroom were dealers and collectors from all over the world.”

Tacita Dean, an English artist best known for her contemplative films, has won this year’s Hugo Boss prize, a $50,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Did David Martinez buy a Jackson Pollock for $140 million, as the New York Times reported last week? Martinez says no. Yet the Times is sticking by its story…

“In response to an ownership dispute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art says it has decided not to borrow a painting by George Grosz from the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition of German Expressionist portraits that opened yesterday… MoMA, which has been discussing the issue with the estate for three years, counters that it has thoroughly investigated the claim and has concluded that it has no legal basis.”

Fifteen sales records were broken at a Sotheby’s auction in New York this week as the art market continues to explode. Francis Bacon’s Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe sold for $15 million, the most ever paid for a Bacon work, while sculptor Anish Kapoor’s “untitled carved alabaster sculpture from 1999 generated $2.3m, about five times the sum it had been predicted to earn.”

“There is no mystery about the causes of the new boom. The rich have done very well over the last decade, and some of them, including hedge fund managers like Steven A. Cohen, are spending large sums of their money on art. New billionaires in China, India and, above all, Russia, have also entered the market. The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million.”

“Supporters of [Barrie, Ontario’s] MacLaren Art Centre, which got enmeshed in a controversial, multimillion-dollar deal involving dozens of sculptures attributed to French master Auguste Rodin, are casting a wary eye on the election Monday of a mayor who claims the gallery has received enough taxpayer help and needs to be more ‘self-sustaining.'”

“At least twice in the 1970s and 1980s, deep-pocketed buyers came knocking on the doors of Thomas Jefferson University seeking to purchase Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic.” Alumni soundly rejected those offers, but they weren’t consulted this time. “University trustees announced Friday that they had agreed to sell the painting for $68 million. The news, said David Paskin, senior associate dean at the university, hit Jefferson ‘like a nuclear blast.’ Yesterday, students, faculty members and alumni were still reeling from the shock, which caught everyone off guard, angering not a few by its seeming stealth.”