Category: visual

Rowan Moore is not in love with Wright. “Of all the architects officially designated great, he provokes in me a special allergy. It is not that he was a fantasist, liar and egomaniac who left a trail of emotional destruction in his wake, nor that his buildings leaked and crumbled and went many times over budget, nor that the chairs he designed fell over and defied basic norms of comfort, nor that he wrote and spoke pure, shining, transcendent, transparent nonsense, nor that he was a hypocrite who preached democracy and freedom but flirted with tyrants such as Mussolini and Stalin.”

But he’s no starchitect, despite his stylish glasses. “Yantrasast is funny and warm, as intrigued by vernacular culture as he is by high art. During the course of an afternoon interview, he expresses admiration for the choreographies of Pina Bausch and the sculptures of artist Gabriel Orozco. He also stops to admire homegrown modifications on a jalopy Toyota.”

A big sale at Sotheby’s shows off the new potential and new collector interest in modernist African art. But while Western collectors drive up the money for those artists, “whole countries in Africa cannot boast of a single art museum of any renown. On other continents, you might expect to see at least one public art museum in any city big enough to have a sports team. But good luck trying to find a museum in Lagos, one of the world’s largest cities, that displays the work of a big-name Nigerian artist.”

It was performance art with an extremely cool audience (and an extremely cool performance group): “At times, the event took on a mystical cast, Ms. Knowles and her troupe extending their arms toward the crowd in a kind of benediction. The effect was moving, the show itself museum-worthy. As Nat Trotman, the Guggenheim curator of performance and media, noted, it was part of a tradition that dates from the late 1960s, when Meredith Monk first performed in the rotunda.”

“The high price reflects the fact that 20th-century art increasingly dominates the list of the world’s most expensive paintings, partly because such works are more likely to be available for sale – with classics such as the Mona Lisa unlikely to come on to the market. Only three of the top 10 most expensive paintings are pre-19th century, with most of the highest prices attached to works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Gustav Klimt.”

The obvious incentive is financial. While structural changes to meet earthquake codes can throw an expensive wrench into the works, museums can get a better price per square foot by adapting an existing building if its bones are good.

Gasps escaped from the crowd as the final bid came in for the 1982 untitled depiction of a skull. The price is the highest ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist; indeed, it’s the sixth-highest price paid for any artwork at auction. As Jeffrey Deitch said, Basquiat is “now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso.”

As Robin Pogrebin and Scott Reyburn report, “the answer to this remarkable trajectory … lies in the art market’s unpredictable but powerful alchemy: a combination of raw talent, compelling biography and limited supply.”

There’s been some talk lately of the Greek capital becoming the next Berlin – a large-and-low-priced city where artists can afford to settle and work. The arrival this year of Documenta – the first time the super-hot art shindig has left its German hometown – was expected to legitimize Athens’s standing as a contemporary art center. But the locals aren’t having it.

“In the late 2000s, there were roughly 10 such experts worldwide—a small number that was poised to get even smaller. Many of these individuals were approaching retirement age, and across the whole of the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, there were at most two young conservators considering a career in this niche field. This was the worrisome picture that emerged from a survey begun in 2008 by Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst and funded by the Getty Foundation.”