Category: visual

When a work of art sells for a quantum of money larger than any ordinary person’s practical reckoning, it seems to make art foreign to ordinary humanity. The feeling is akin to what it’s like to arrive back to some beloved place that has been gentrified so thoroughly that it now feels almost hostile to its former inhabitants.

Artist Melo Dominguez spent eight weeks in the hospital with chronic pancreatitis, and she made a promise, a manda, to “give her days to people and service.” Now she has a gallery in Tucson, not only for her own work but for that of artists who might not otherwise have a track to the art world. Dominguez: “You gotta wait in line to get into the museum. You gotta go to X amount of years to school to be admitted. And you know what? Some of us artists don’t got time for that. We’re trying to survive.”

How anonymous is the artist known as “Invader”? Interviewing him is “a bit like a toddler playing Peekaboo who covers his face thinking no one in the room can see him. Invader is clearly tall and slim, nearing 50, with thin lips and narrow cheeks that are peppered with graying stubble. He has clean, manicured nails. Tufts of dark and silvery hair creep out from under his cap. He smells of a freshly-finished cigarette.”

Before the discovery, the city of Tenea existed solely as a legend. “Tenea was built by the Trojans after the end of the Trojan War, according to the myth.”

Wait, what? Lowry was expected to retire after the new extension opened next year. And: “The extension comes as a surprise, since MoMA had long had a policy that ‘chief curators and other senior managers’ should retire at 65. In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Lowry said he planned to respect the rule. ‘We have a policy of senior staff at this institution retiring at or around 65, and I don’t intend to break that policy,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best between now and then.'”

Ron English: “We’re tired of people stealing our stuff off the streets and reselling it, so I’m just going to buy everything I can get my hands on and whitewash it. … I’m going to paint over it and just include it in one of the walls in my house.”

Should there be some legislation against the risk that a buyer will effectively or literally destroy a work of art? Particularly one which could be designated a “world treasure”, on a list of the sort that Unesco releases on protected monuments? One that would oblige private owners to make the works accessible within reasonable terms and require them to maintain the work, which could be considered a matter of international interest?

“Third-party guarantees at auction — the art market’s hybrid of a risk hedge and a speculative gamble — are on track to hit an all-time high of around $2.5bn in 2018. … Such deals are now the norm for high-value Impressionist, Modern and contemporary works. But experts warn that third-party guarantees, if misused, may precipitate a crisis.”

The painting of Jesus of Nazareth with John the Baptist — badly deteriorated but perceptible with high-tech photography and potentially restorable — is on the wall of the baptistery in a ruined 5th- or 6th-century Byzantine church. “In contrast to the Western image of Jesus as someone with flowing long hair and, sometimes, a beard, the Shivta painting shows him in the Eastern style with short curly hair, a long face and an elongated nose.”

With a total price of $90.3 million at Christie’s last night, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) became the most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold at auction. Even more unusually, “the Hockney painting went to the block without any type of guarantee — almost unheard of in this day and age, when consignors know how to play the big auction houses off against one another.”