Tate Modern has finally won me over – with art

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Great art museums need great art. That should go without saying, but the new Tate Modern is so architecturally exhilarating that I started to wonder: perhaps you really can have a museum where it doesn’t matter much what’s in it because the experience of walking around is so enjoyable and cool.

I love the Switch House, the expressionistic, futuristic new wing of Tate Modern, from its sinister dark basement – the Tanks – to its bleak but addictive concrete stairways and, yes, its stylish bar. It’s a place that would speak of modern art even if there were no modern art inside. This is because, like so much of today’s best architecture, it translates the jagged lines and harsh dissonance of early 20th-century art into three dimensions. There may not be many cubist painters around today, but there sure is cubist architecture.

What Was Fluxus? A Brief Guide to the Irreverent, Groundbreaking Art Movement

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Fluxus was a loose confederation of international artists in the 1960s working in performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and even correspondence art (art sent through the postal service). It was often, though not exclusively, political in tone. Fluxus works shared similarities with the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow, particularly in the way they blurred distinctions between art and life. In doing so, Fluxus transformed art from an object of aesthetic contemplation to a gesture of political action. The actions of these artists laid the groundwork forConceptual art and performance art in the decades to come, and Fluxus shared members with other movements, such as Neo-Dada and video art.

Britain’s Top 50 Galleries You Should Know (and Visit)

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artnet News picks the top of the crop in the UK.

Europe’s Top 55 Galleries You Need To Know—Part 1

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From Athens to Zurich, here are the European galleries.  Part 1

7 Great Artist Duos That Shaped Art History

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While the lone wolf artist has long been romanticized for its singular (if not god-given) genius, the creative duo has also, many times over, recast the shape of art. Below, we explore seven of art history’s game-changing partnerships during the 20th century. For these pioneering artists—from Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Marina Abramovic & Ulay—collaboration was an integral, motivating agent in the development of their practices, which span monumental sculpture, endurance-testing performance, and innovative digital art.

Real Estate for the 1 Percent, With Art for the Masses

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THE sculptor Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’”

For most of the last century, residential and commercial developments in New York City tended to marry architecture and art with that kind of ambivalence, if they married them at all: lobbies with a few pretty, unremarkable paintings; courtyards with pleasant design pieces or plop art by sculptors whose work rarely showed up in the museums around town.

But the landscape is starting to change, leading to what will soon be an almost walkable itinerary of some serious art in and around Manhattan buildings. The phenomenon is propelled largely by the same factors that are making it more difficult for artists themselves to live and work in the city: a concentration of global wealth with its eyes trained on real estate and luxury developers trying to stand out to attract a piece of that wealth.

Antony Gormley: Humans are building ‘a vast termites’ nest’ of greed

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Antony Gormley says his first White Cube exhibition in four years, which opens in September, is driven by “more of a sense of urgency” than any other show he has done. From the warming of our climate and the acidification of our seas to cities dominated by skyscrapers – “nothing more than expressions of virile corporate power,” says Gormley – the artist’s despair at society’s failure to take action has filtered unavoidably into his latest work.

“We are living in a really strange time,” Gormley said. “Yet we are all sleepwalking through it. And it is urgent we wake up. We are sort of aware the centre cannot hold, that 250 years of industrial activity has undermined and fundamentally disturbed our world – yet we feel somehow not responsible.”

Watch the Video!

Francis Bacon’s New Major Exhibition Will Transform Our Understanding of His Work

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Last week, there were two major events relating to  Francis Bacon and, on this occasion at least, they didn’t have anything to do with the artist’s record-breaking market, but with a renewed and in-depth understanding of his fascinating oeuvre and artistic process.

On June 30, the Francis Bacon Estate published a new catalogue raisonné, presenting the 584 surviving paintings that form his complete oeuvre, including many previously unpublished works.

Two days later, on July 2, a major exhibition of his work, entitled “Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture” opened to the public at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, gathering 66 paintings by the artist alongside works by Modern masters who influenced him, including Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Auguste Rodin, Fernand Léger, and Chaim Soutine.

Wonders and blunders: what makes a great museum?

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Artists, architects and curators tell us about the spaces they love—and hate.

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture.

Now the discussion has moved on again. In the public imagination, museums have been transformed from cultural destinations into leisure ones, and there has been a global rise in visitor numbers. Tate Modern’s new extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, was partly predicated on annual visitor numbers topping five million instead of the two million originally envisaged when the institution opened in 2000. The new wing is notable for the spaciousness and drama of its circulation spaces as much as for the galleries themselves. The other challenge for museum architects today is to design spaces for forms of media, such as video and performance, that are an increasingly prominent part of institutional programming.

How I became the bomb – Ulay, Oh (Music Video)

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When I first saw the vid of the reunion of the two artists Marina Ambramovic and Frank Uwe Laysiepen aka ‘Ulay’ after 33 years of being apart, I was so touched by how they look at each other eyes and you can tell that true love never dies. 🙂

Watch the Video – Click Here.  And make the picture BIG and turn up the sound and, oh yeah, don’t shed a tear …

All copyright are credited to their respective owners.

Observing the Drama of the World: A Q&A with Stefan Brüggemann

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For his first show at Hauser & Wirth, which opened Wednesday, June 29, Mexico City- and London-based artist Stefan Brüggemann covered the walls of the first floor of the gallery’s Upper-East-Side outpost with spray-painted scareheads ripped from recent news stories and quotes culled from classic films. Part of his ongoing “Headlines and Last Line in the Movies” series, the text ranges from pre-Brexit market predictions to the famous last Rosebud-referencing speech in “Citizen Kane.” The phrases overlap, both visually and contextually, making it difficult to tell what’s news and what’s cinema. Eventually the drama of the world becomes indistinguishable from the drama of the screen.

More than anything, Brüggemann’s work is concerned with time. The news stories from which he appropriates his headlines appeared just last week. After the exhibition is closed, the gallery walls will be painted over, and the first-floor texts will be gone. For Brüggemann, the temporary nature of his installation reflects the way we receive information now: quickly, constantly. “So fast it becomes static,” says the artist.

ArtList, Startup for the Art World, Closes Shop Just as It Was Gearing Up

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ArtList, an online platform for anonymous secondary market sales of art, is ceasing operations. In June, during the week of Art Basel, a British art appraisal company was set to sign a deal to acquire the New York-based start-up but it went awry on the very day that it was meant to be signed. The next day, all five of ArtList‘s employees were let go, and the company summarily moved their belongings out of their shared office space at 356 Bowery.

The site was launched in January 2015 by the young, hip French trio of Kenneth Schlenker, Astrid de Maismont, and Maxime Germain. It had roughly 50 users and an inventory of some 300 works that were sold in three categories—prints and editions, unique works selling for below $50,000, and unique works above $50,000.

Not so long ago, August 3, 2015 they were one of the ArtWorld Disruptors … click on this link also.

Related: 17 Disruptors Who Have Completely Changed the Art World

Christo: The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in Sulzano, Italy

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The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in Sulzano, Italy
The first work by Bulgarian artist Christo in more than a decade is seemingly miraculous; three kilometres of shimmering marigold walkways floating atop Italy’s Lake Iseo, giving visitors the power to walk on water.

First conceived in 1970 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude – his partner in life and work, who passed away in 2009 – the magic of the Floating Piers is made possible by a floating dock system comprised of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes and covered with 100,000 square metres of sunny fabric. Christo likens the sensation of walking on the pathways to “walking on water – or perhaps the back of a whale.”

The installation, which closes on July 3, has drawn tens of thousands of visitors since it opened on June 18.

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

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The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye.

Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead of a major travelling exhibition.

Conner (1933-2008) made the work, a black-wax figure of a boy—its head thrown back and mouth open as if screaming—covered with nylon webbing and strapped to a high-chair, in response to the planned execution of career criminal Caryl Chessman. In 1948, Chessman was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for kidnapping—a crime punishable by death in California at the time. Although the severity of his sentence for a non-lethal crime divided public opinion, he was eventually executed in 1960 after several widely publicised attempts to overturn his conviction.

The Art Market: now what?

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This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision.

To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with fees) for 20th-century and contemporary art, under the low presale estimate of £10.2m, to a half-filled room. Anselm Kiefer’s “Für Velmir Khlebnikov” made £2m hammer (£2.4m with fees), four times estimate.

However, while Sotheby’s sale the following night was much skinnier than last year (when the house made £130.4m), the sale proved to be a real confidence-booster. Its tally of £44m (£52.2 with fees) skipped over the high end of expectations; all but six of the 46 lots found buyers.

Champions of a Monster Polaroid Yield to the Digital World

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Over the last eight years, as cameras have become smaller and smaller — tiny enough to fit on a pair of glasses or inside a swallowable pill —John Reuter has been working to stave off extinction of one of the largest cameras ever made, so big and irredeemably analog that it feels, he says, “as if we’re pulling oil paintings out of the back of it.”

The camera, the 20-inch-by-24-inch Polaroid, was born as a kind of industrial stunt. Five of the wooden behemoths, weighing more than 200 pounds each and sitting atop a quartet of gurney wheels, were made in the late 1970s at the request of Edwin H. Land, the company’s founder, to demonstrate the quality of his large-format film. But the cameras found their true home in the art world, taken up by painters like Chuck Close and Robert Rauschenberg and photographers likeWilliam Wegman, David Levinthal and Mary Ellen Mark to make instant images that had the size and presence of sculpture.

The Politics of Seeing, Being, and Visibility in Photography

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Aperture Magazine‘s first issue dedicated to African American lives as represented by the medium of photography, “Vision & Justice,” was published last month. It doesn’t seem right to call this issue a magazine. It is a powerhouse book; it does so much heavy lifting. The artists involved include Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Sally Mann, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deborah Willis, Hank Willis Thomas, Deana Lawson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Awol Erizku. Professor Steven Nelson wrote of Erizku in his introduction to the artist’s work, what can indeed be said of almost all the artists in this collection, that his strategy “lays bare the act of seeing as culturally contingent, and more to the point, racially informed.”

This book equips one not just to see, but to see more.

In Tate Modern’s New Wing, a Broader, More Global View of Art

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LONDON — The day began in the Turbine Hall, the 85-foot-tall atrium at the heart of Tate Modern, the most visited museum of modern and contemporary art in the world. If the museum functions like a medieval cathedral — as the Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of Tate’s Board of Trustees, suggested in a packet of materials distributed to reporters — the Turbine Hall is the nave, a space for aesthetic parishioners to marvel at the wizardry of temporary, site-specific installations like Olafur Eliasson’s domesticated sun (“The Weather Project,” 2003–2004) or Doris Salcedo’s subterranean chasm (“Shibboleth,” 2007–2008).

On Tuesday, hundreds of reporters assembled for a sneak peek at the new wing, a 212-foot-tall pyramidal tower adjacent to the main building. Designed by Herzog & De Meuron, who developed the original Tate Modern 16 years ago, the Switch House is sheathed in a perforated lattice of 336,000 bricks, a slate-colored skin that rhymes with the brickwork of the Boiler House next door. The idiosyncratic structure is reminiscent of a crumpled paper cup that has been inverted and slashed by a capricious hand, with irregular bands of fenestration tracking the building’s contours. At night, the Switch House is lit from within, a 10-story concrete monolith calling to the dignified masonry of St. Paul’s Cathedral across the river.