Manish's Artlog
Findings by Nish
Where Outsider Art Comes In From the Cold
found by Nish / 11 minutes ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
A review of one of the first art fairs of 2009 should begin with pronouncements about the plunging art market, the weakening dollar, skittish dealers and the sins of the recent past. Let’s pretend it did, and move on. There’s a fresh fair to be seen, and a new location to adjust to. The Outsider Art Fair, now in its 17th year, has forsaken the Puck Building — the only home it has ever known — at the epicenter of downtown, for the blander environs of midtown. Fifth Avenue and 34th Street to be exact, on the 11th floor of an undistinguished, recently minted structure opposite the Empire State Building.
Protecting Your Art from Thieves
by Nish / about 2 hours ago / Source: www.pbs.org
PBS reminds collectors why it is important to document your collection with digital images and detailed records. Artlog will soon launch its collectors website service which will make it very simple to document private collections and share with family and friends or keep protected.
Museums Exhibit Signs Of Economic Distress
by Nish / about 2 hours ago / Source: www.npr.org
It’s hard to talk about museums these days without discussing the effect the recession is having on them. Funding of all kinds is being cut, and many museums are laying off staff, postponing exhibitions and looking for new ways to raise money.This funding crisis has led to some soul-searching about how far a museum may go to stay open. The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts committed what is considered a cardinal sin in the museum world when it sold, for $15 million, two paintings from its sizable permanent collection.
National Gallery of Art Videos & Podcasts
found by Nish / about 3 hours ago / Source: www.nga.gov
The National Gallery of Art produces terrific podcasts and video content accessible for free by the public. Recent highlights include Calvin Tomkins discussing his latest book Lives of the Artists. Tomkins explores ten major artists to demonstrate the direction that contemporary art is taking. Paul Zanker, professor of art history, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, discusses ancient myth and how it was represented in Pompeii and at other sites in Italy
Connoisseurs take back control of art market
found by Nish / about 3 hours ago / Source: www.iht.com
Buying art is fundamentally different from ordinary commercial transactions – desire, the combustible that fuels the art market engine. These days, it is made more vivid by a sense of urgency as art supplies dramatically shrink. If you pine for a Lanvin suit, you will still be able to buy another one a few days later. If you are dead keen on a landscape by Monet, instant action is advisable because the opportunity of getting it may never recur. The last-chance syndrome accounts for the otherwise inexplicable performance of some works of art observed on the auction scene from New York to Paris as the economic outlook kept darkening last fall. The most remarkable example was the $60 million “Suprematist Composition” by Kazimir Malevich sold at Sotheby’s New York on Nov. 3. The Dow Jones had just plunged but this was a chance in a lifetime. The picture, which had been hanging in an Amsterdam museum for 50 years, only tumbled on to the market following a court decision restituting it to the artist’s family.
Best Album Art Covers of 2008
found by Nish / 4 days ago / Source: www.artvinyl.com
“Fleet Foxes have picked up the Best Art Vinyl prize for having the best album cover of 2008. The group won the award for the front of their self titled record which according to MTV’s art experts features a painting from 1559 by Pieter the Elder.Second in the list of 50 cool covers was the more modern Roots Manuva cover for Slime & Reason. Coldplay’s Viva La Vida got third prize for their reversion of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830 fact fans).” (MTV)
Design Loves a Depression
found by Nish / 4 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
Few of the arts benefited from the late economic boom more than design. After all, when the wealth is flowing, people don’t covet the concerts you see or the books you read. They covet the couch you bought, and then they buy a cooler one. In the recent giddy years, signature architects and designers came to be known by their first names — Rem, Philippe, Zaha — and they were photographed as prolifically as Bono in new design hotbeds like Miami and Dubai. Brooklyn designers became the apotheosis of indie cool (thin portfolios notwithstanding), and the British collective Established & Sons and other skilled maneuverers learned to breed their self-conscious furniture selectively into limited editions that sold for the kind of prices more often found in the art world.
Museums acquiring art that vanishes the moment it’s made
by Nish / 11 days ago / Source: nymag.com
MoMa brought together 80 of the most influential forces in art—and, last March, started scheduling private workshops to figure out some rules for preserving ephemeral art. Curator Klaus Biesenbach invited in artists (like Abramovic, Matthew Barney, and Francesco Vezzoli), curators (the Whitney’s Chrissie Iles and Shamim Momin), and performers of all kinds (Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, Laurie Anderson, Jason Sellards of the Scissor Sisters). “The sessions go on forever—like, hours,” Biesenbach says. “People just do not leave.” They addressed everything from the discrepancies between a performance and its remnants to legal quirks to the appropriateness of an institution’s owning work created to subvert institutions.
2008 Art In Review
by Nish / 18 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
The NYT highlights “notable events from 2008, a year that may go into the history books as the first catastrophic fall, but also the first vital correction, for art in the new century.” Thomas Campbell was named the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. LA art museums made a lot of noise with the Broad collection opening with negative reviews at LACMA and the current drama surronding the MoCA being on the verge of bankruptcy. China & India: Chelsea was transported to China and Indian artists hit the jackpot at auction.
After Years of Art Market Expansion, the Contraction Begins
found by Nish / 18 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
WHAT will the art world be like a year from now? In five years? These unspoken questions seem to hang in the air these days over art fairs and galleries of every size and persuasion. One answer is that it will be smaller, leaner and, many assume, cleaner. All that supposedly nasty money and degrading hoopla will have faded. And to think it all began to unravel so quickly after two memorable milestones of sorts: the adrenaline-pumping Damien Hirst auction in London in September and the spectacle of a Louis Vuitton shop within the exhibition space of a Takashi Murakami survey that traveled in spring from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Brooklyn Museum. Now that the “correction” that had been pending for so many months has arrived, the thinking goes, we will see what really sticks; the real artists, dealers and collectors will emerge.
After Years of Art Market Expansion, the Contraction Begins - NYTimes.com
found by Nish / 18 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
Draw Me Schools Of Commercial Art
found by Nish / 24 days ago / Source: www.designobserver.com
Long before isms, ologies and otics. Before the Chicago Bauhaus, Yale, RISD, Cranbrook and Cal Arts. Before commercial art was called visual communications, the correspondence school was the principal American academy of art and an early training ground for American graphic designers. Scores of advertisements, like the famous “Draw Me!” matchbook cover, offered willing aspirants the big chance to earn ”$65, $80 and more a week” in “a pleasant, profitable Art career.” Although the ads often shared space at the back of cheesy pulp magazines with offers to learn, well, brain surgery at home, they offered a legitimate way for anyone with a modicum of talent, limited means and an existing job to train in their spare time for a new profession. Let’s call it the precursor of “distance learning.”
National Geographic' s Most Viewed of 2008
found by Nish / 24 days ago / Source: news.nationalgeographic.com
Balancing Form, Function In Museum Architecture (NPR)
found by Nish / 25 days ago / Source: www.npr.org
The Denver Art Museum and San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum were both designed by Daniel Libeskind. Both Libeskind museums are seen as architectural standouts. But in buildings designed to showcase art, can form impede function?
Marlene Dumas - Gorgeous & Grotesque @MoMA
found by Nish / 28 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com
“The figurative painter Marlene Dumas has been characterized as an artist you either love or hate, but that’s not necessarily so. “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, cuts right down the middle.”
Check out details of Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave opening this weekend
NY Mag's 2008 Art Superlatives
found by Nish / about 1 month ago / Source: nymag.com
Best Photography Show: William Eggleston
Best Trend: More Big Shows for Women
Best Oddball Trend: Toy Art
Best Photography Shows That Slipped Under the Radar: Rachel Sussman and Polixeni Papapetrou
Best Response to a Bad Economy: Street Art
Best First “Big” Show: Gary Panter
Best Eye-Opening Moment: Urs Fischer dug a 38-by-16-foot crater
Worst Art Show: Photographs of human and animal excrement by Andres Serrano at the Yvon Lambert Gallery
NY Mag's 2008 Superlatives
found by Nish / about 1 month ago / Source: nymag.com
Best Photography Show: William Eggleston Best Trend: More Big Shows for Women Best Oddball Trend: Toy Art Best Photography Shows That Slipped Under the Radar: Rachel Sussman and Polixeni Papapetrou Best Response to a Bad Economy: Street Art Best First “Big” Show: Gary Panter Best Eye-Opening Moment: Urs Fischer dug a 38-by-16-foot crater
Worst Art Show: Photographs of human and animal excrement by Andres Serrano at the Yvon Lambert Gallery
Urban Guru: Olaf Breuning on the beach (Sponsor)
found by Nish / about 1 month ago / Source: www.guruenergy.com
Created by Swiss artist Olaf Breuning on the beach behind the Sagamore Hotel.
Urban Guru: Art Under//Over My Skin (Sponsor)
found by Nish / about 1 month ago / Source: www.guruenergy.com
A trend we continually noticed pulsing through Art Basel and its tentacles this year? Ever since Shepard Fairey has become a household name with his Obama art, and Banksy has become a cultural icon across the pond in London, there has been abundant acceptance of urban art in major art fairs, showcased by cutting-edge museums and collectors. Along with this guerrilla-art motif, we began to notice a lot of tattoos on the roads of Basel. The cooler the art, the cooler the tattoos. There was even an exhibit of a tattoo-covered sculpture at Scope this year.
Forget art fairs and galleries, visit your nearest airport for your art fix
found by Nish / about 1 month ago / Source: www.usatoday.com
Original art at airports across the country has become common place. In SF, check out Inside Track, an exhibit that highlights the golden era of toy trains with more than 200 vintage toy trains and accessories. In Seattle, The Berlin Airlift — A Legacy of Friendship includes more than 60 panels of historic black and white photos and pays tribute to the efforts of the U.S. and Allied forces. Philly has exhibits in nearly every terminal including Randall Cleaver’s Something Old/Something New, which features about two dozen lighted and functioning clocks.
