“China’s rush to build flagship museums of contemporary art makes sense, at a time when the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun and Zhang Huan has a global reach. But the building boom – which also landed the world’s largest museum of any kind on Tiananmen Square last year – may be running ahead of China’s ability to run and make sense of such institutions.”
Category: visual
Artsicle – An Entry-Level Intro Into Collecting Art
“The galleries made it very clear that they were not very interested in a young buyer with a budget of $1,000. I encountered a lot of attitude everywhere I went. At the same time, I met a lot of young people interested in art. There seemed like a disconnect, an inefficiency in the market.”
Will Art.sy Crack The Online Art Market?
“People have been trying to sell art online for more than a decade, with little success. Art.sy is the most sophisticated attempt yet, and its team of art world veterans has a better chance than its predecessors of cracking open the cottage industry that the art market remains.”
Why Writing About The Art Market Is Unsatisfying
“Art market reporting is not financial news. It’s financial-news porn. It’s a voyeuristic, vacuous distraction from the facts of the finances, and certainly from any analysis of how that wealth was amassed in the first place…”
Girls Only – Seattle Art Museum Removes All the Boys’ Art From Its Walls
“Not a single male artist from the modern and contemporary period remains on the walls at SAM.”
How Google Images Have Changed Photography
“The massive and growing archive has spawned a virtual world of images like we’ve never seen before in the history of photography–and its accessibility has inspired a new generation of photographers who are using the tool to document the world while simultaneously redefining the boundaries, quite literally, of contemporary art photography.”
Cambodia V. Sotheby’s
“The governments of Cambodia and the United States are locked in a legal battle with the auction house Sotheby’s over a thousand-year-old statue. The two governments say the statue was looted from a temple of the ancient Khmer empire. Sotheby’s says this can’t be proved, and a court in New York will decide on the matter soon.”
How Andy Warhol Changed Pop Art
“While [Jasper] Johns mainly chose objects so familiar that they were overlooked, Warhol would take images so popular that they already had mass appeal – he would be as bold and brash as the advertisements and products surrounding him in Manhattan.”
You’d Better Not Be Eating A Sandwich On The Spanish Steps
A new municipal ordinance “outlaws eating and drinking in areas of ‘particular historic, artistic, architectonic and cultural value’ in Rome’s center, to better protect the city’s monuments, which include landmarks like the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps. Fines range all the way up to $650 for culinary recidivists.”
Anthony Gormley, The Engineer Of Experience
In a Q&A, the sculptor talks about what his installations – for instance, putting groups of visitors in a pressurized room to do what they want with 100 tons of clay, or placing them on a large reflective platform suspended 25 feet above ground – reveal about the ways humans interact.