Category: visual

Caroline Woolard: “OurGoods asks participants to involve themselves fully in exchange. If this kind of deep thinking-doing is social practice, then OurGoods is a social-practice project. At Creative Time, we often found people reluctant to fully engage. This could be because art is often experienced as an abstract idea or proposal to discuss, not a plausible reality to fully involve oneself in — both in body and mind.”

Frieze has great location, a stellar reputation, excellent lighting, fantastic organization and good sales. Everything’s going well for the fair that moved across the pond this year.

“The map purported to show the Byzantine Empire at its largest size in the 6th century, but he noticed that Spain and part of Africa were missing from the depiction.
Benjamin Lerman Coady knew he was right, because he had just studied the empire in school before last summer’s trip to the museum with his mother. He was told to fill out a form.”

“The Internet generation is rediscovering granny’s knitting needles — and the yearning to make, or own, authentic handicrafts has propelled virtual craft fairs from a niche pursuit into big business.” (Only, the people running the craft websites don’t have time for handwork anymore.)

“It might be unfair to categorize Edvard Munch as a one-hit wonder. His 1894 painting Vampire sold for $38 million in 2008, and plenty of art critics are interested in his lesser-known work. Still, he fits rather well into the conceptualist-revolutionary category.”

“Philosophically, they’re less about art’s being–art objects displayed and for sale–than they are about artists becoming–creating circumstances free from market pressures and the need to hobnob with the rich (who are, after all, the only people able to buy even modestly priced art with any regularity).”

“After studying and writing about art for 40 years I see too many other options, options that would allow me to put together an encyclopedic mini-museum for the same dollars. That museum, filled with art that could be bought, even in these over-the-top times, for comparative bargain prices.”

“A second man has been charged in connection with a raid at Durham University’s Oriental Museum in which artefacts worth almost £2m were taken. Thieves cut a 3ft wide hole in the wall of the museum on 5 April and stole a Chinese bowl and figurine.”

“Not just because they’re freak-show legal casinos, spectacles where the Über-ultrarich can act out as profligately in public as possible, trying to buy immortality, become a part of art history, make headlines, and create profit. … I hate them for what they do to art, for the bad magic of making mysterious powerful things turn into numbers.”

Picasso’s Woman Seated in a Chair, which sold for $29.2 million at the same Sotheby’s auction where Munch’s The Scream sold for $120 million, suffered a tear while at a New York gallery in 2008 – damage for which the then-owner’s insurance company paid out $7.5 million. (Sotheby’s says the painting is now in “very good condition.”)