“In 2016, Art Basel’s parent company, the MCH Group, … announced it would debut Art SG, a new fair in Singapore; took a majority stake in the India Art Fair and a minority stake in Art Düsseldorf; and added Masterpiece London to its portfolio last December. But the experiment didn’t last long. According to a statement on Friday, MCH Group is undertaking a ‘profound transformation’ by dramatically downshifting its ambitions ‘for the necessary stabilization of the company.'”
Category: visual
As Crowds Become Unmanageable, Vatican Considers Limits On Visitor Numbers
“Tour guides claimed that at least 10 visitors fainted each day as slow-moving crowds filed through the long and narrow corridor that leads to the most popular attraction, the Sistine Chapel, while others have suffered injuries and panic attacks. … [There are even] fears among tour guides that overcrowding could provoke a stampede unless security policy is changed.”
Chicago Backs Down, Pulls Kerry James Marshall Painting Out Of Auction
“In the face of withering criticism from public art advocates and the artist himself, … Mayor Rahm Emanuel has decided to pull the Marshall canvas Knowledge and Wonder from a Nov. 15 auction at Christie’s in New York City, where the work, commissioned for the Legler Branch of the Chicago Public Library for $10,000 in 1995, was expected to sell for more than $10 million.”
How Architectural Digest Documented Conspicuous Wealth
Si Newhouse had apprehended the seismic shift then afoot in the upper-income levels of American taste—away from the discreet cultivation of East Coast grandees like the Rockefellers and Mellons (which I’ve called stealth wealth), and toward the unabashed display of new money that characterized the Reagan Revolution, especially on the West Coast and across the Sun Belt, where the operative attitude was “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” And no magazine reflected that change more accurately than Architectural Digest.
Virtual Art – Seeing The World As Artists Imagine It Could Be
While virtual art has sometimes elicited eye rolling reactions from art critics and curators, projects like Nancy Baker Cahill’s 4th Wall show that the medium can apply the language of fine art to new media with subversive ends. The artist highlights that if VR/AR technology continues to enable “hyper-violent, militaristic, or pornographic [images], we allow it to be dominated by themes that don’t contribute thoughtfully to culture,”
Soaring Prices For Antiquities Raise New Looting Fears
A bidding war at Christie’s last week sent the price of a 3,000-year-old stone relief from $7 million to more than $28 million, setting a world record for ancient Assyrian artworks and raising fears among some archaeologists that soaring prices will fuel the market for looted antiquities as well as legally acquired ones.
As A Contemporary Art Collector Sells Off Her Collection To Support Social Justice, What’s Next?
Agnes Gund doesn’t want to be profiled and doesn’t want to be too lavishly praised for being rich and using her money to support a wide swath of the worlds of social justice, not to mention artistic culture. “Her cash reserve has shrunk after a lifetime of giving to AIDS research, abortion rights groups and arts organizations, among many others. The valuable paintings in her home by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly have mostly been promised to museums.”
Kehinde Wiley Explains How He Deals With Self-Doubt, And Fame, As A Painter
Wiley, who painted the presidential portrait for former President Barack Obama: “My first thought was that no one makes it as a painter. I was just looking around at the landscape of contemporary art, which was pretty dry in Southern California during the ’90s. There was no modeling for success when it came to a job in the arts. So I thought that my best option would probably be in arts education. … I just knew that that would enable me to support my art habit.”
The Queens Museum, Which Let Its Director Go In An Ugly Way In January, Looks Abroad For Its New Director
Sally Tannant has worked at London’s Serpentine Galleries and has run the Liverpool Biennial, and now she’ll be the new executive director at the Queens Museum.
People Who Own Apartments Across From The Tate Modern’s Expansion Are Taking The Museum To Court
They’d like to “stop ‘hundreds of thousands of visitors’ looking into their homes from the art gallery’s viewing platform.” The Tate, of course, responds that they should draw their blinds.