Category: visual

The Denver Art Museum is preparing to accept one of its largest bequests ever – “more than $30 million in contemporary artworks by such marquee names as Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman; Fifteen million dollars in cash; [and] A house and gallery in Vail.” The gift comes from a Vail couple who “have spent more than 14 years acquiring work from around the world, anticipating collecting trends and tapping new sources, including the booming Chinese market. They are included on ARTnews magazine’s prestigious annual list of the world’s top 200 art collectors.”

Just as the Whitney Biennial is constantly being reinvented, so is the Whitney itself. “We’re always going to be criticized for being trendy, for getting things before they’re fully tested. You can’t afford not to do that, if you’re the Whitney. We have to take risks, and make mistakes, and be light on our feet. Sometimes the things that happen by chance are the best things. The art world is changing, artists are changing, so to have a plan that’s too fixed would defeat what we’re trying to do.”

A new website has developed a mathematical formula to determine where in the food chain any artist lives. “Today, nearly 60,000 internationally recognised artists are listed. The number of points awarded reflects the importance of the artist in the eyes of the curators who select the artists for exhibitions. From these charts it is possible to get an idea of an artist’s standing on the international exhibition circuit. The key points from the prediction point of view are the sudden rises in the flow charts which suggest the revaluation of an artist’s career or the blossoming of a new one.”

For the second time in ten days, art thieves have scored a major heist in Rio. “Two armed men burst into the Rio City Museum and took gold and silver relics from Brazil’s empire era said to be of ‘incalculable historic value’. The 11 stolen items include an ivory sabre and a pearl and silver foil.”

Sotheby’s and Christie’s say auction buyers will have to pay a new UK levy on the resale of art. “The artists’ resale royalties are paid on a sliding scale, based on the hammer price, and are capped at 12,500 euros ($14,904) for any individual item sold. Works costing less than 1,000 euros are excluded.”

There’s a new “revised version of ‘Janson’s History of Art,’ a doorstopper first published in 1962 that has been a classroom hit ever since Horst Woldemar Janson wrote it while working at New York University. For a generation of baby boomers, it defined what was what and who was who in art. But in recent years it has lost its perch as the best-selling art survey and has been criticized for becoming a scholarly chestnut. So its publisher recruited six scholars from around the country and told them to rewrite as much as they wanted, to cast a critical eye on every reproduction, chapter heading and sacred cow.”

We’re told that artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial are “challenging concepts,” “transgressing boundaries,” “blurring lines” and “investigating relationships.” But Ariella Budick has some news for the curators: “There are no boundaries left to transgress. Art can’t be liminal in the absence of the thresholds. How can you challenge conventions that have already been burned beyond recognition? There’s something almost quaint about the use of these cliches. Where have the curators been for the past 20 years?”

That Helen Frankenthaler painting damaged last week when a 12-year-old boy affixed a wad of gum to it in the Detroit Institute of Arts has been taken to the conservation lab. “Museum officials said they are optimistic that the picture will make a full recovery. But in contrast to comments earlier this week in which relieved officials said decisively that the 1963 painting, ‘The Bay,’ would be fine, the museum issued a more tempered statement.

The 12-year-old boy who stuck gum on a valuable painting during a school visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts probably got more than he bargained for. “He’s slammed with a suspension from school, a front-page newspaper account, derision from morning-ride DJs and mentions in media across the world. At 12 years old, he becomes Gum Boy. Forevermore, everyone expects the worst from him. His parents keep their shades drawn.”