Category: visual

“Such is the impact of the 4,200 sq m of decoration, the Painted Hall has been dubbed the UK’s Sistine Chapel. But it was – and remains – so overwhelming that, according to legend, elderly sailors pleaded to be allowed to eat their dinners somewhere less grand.”

“For the sculptures, JR photographed young athletes who may one day make it to the Games, people who are still ‘working hard for the passion of sport.'”

“Beecroft became known in the U.S. in the mid-1990s for staging performances that featured monochromatic arrangements of nude or barely clothed models in body paint who often glared at viewers with empty or defiant stares. About a decade ago, she left the art world and began collaborating with West — orchestrating his fashion spectacles, which are held in locations like New York’s Madison Square Garden arena.”

“Pictures at $70 million are good P.R., but the revenues are in the middle market,” he said, where sellers tend to pay full commissions and guarantees are nearly unheard of. “That’s the most lucrative way to do business.”

“The collapsed sailing ramp has been hauled out of the water, a Russian diplomat has heroically killed a carjacker (or maybe not), and 450,000 condoms await action in the leaky athletes village. Beset by construction problems and delays and with preparations decreed the ‘worst ever’ by the International Olympic Committee, how is the architecture and design of the XXXI Olympiad shaping up so far?”

“An unnamed artwork by a mysterious artist is at the center of a $2 million lawsuit against dealer David Zwirner by Old Master dealer Fabrizio Moretti via his the London company, Blue Art Limited, which accuses Zwirner of breach of contract, fraudulent concealment, and inducement.”

The brainchild of billionaire Microsoft tech giant, Seahawks owner and avid art collector Paul Allen, the 70,000-square foot, 84-gallery event brought 18,000 visitors to the Emerald City last weekend. A cursory rundown of SAF’s stats, which included an exhibitor list of heavy hitters like Pace and David Zwirner, presents like a fully formed Art Basel air-dropped on the West Coast via Jeff Bezos-commissioned drone, but it was the wave of companion fairs and satellite exhibits that elevated Allen’s main event from what could have been an impressive-yet-boring gathering to a unique addition to the contemporary art scene.

“The building is a stark — and welcome — departure from the neoclassicism for which D.C.’s architecture is known. And while it is not yet complete (scaffolding still covers the building’s broad entrance), the museum nonetheless cuts a daring profile on the Mall, where its stacked trapezoidal forms appear to erupt from a grassy plain between the obelisk of the Washington Monument and the columnar façades of the Herbert Hoover Commerce Department Building.”

Robert Storr: “[Stuart] Davis was also the only first-class Cubist to emerge from North America. In my estimation he was the equal of the great Fernand Léger … I would even argue that, painting-by-painting, Davis was in some respects Léger’s superior.”

“The work, entitled Etnias, covers more than 30,000 square feet of a formerly abandoned warehouse in Rio’s newly reinvigorated port district. Using a wild quiltwork of brightly colored geometric shapes, it portrays the faces of five indigenous men and women from five continents.”