A New Documentary Reveals the Living, Breathing Joseph Beuys

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For the first documentary ever made about Beuys, director Andres Veiel dug into the archives, creating a film that is 95% footage of the artist.

The first major documentary on Joseph Beuys, simply titled Beuys, is finally screening in New York for a short run at Film Forum. The artist is often referred to as Germany’s most important artist since World War II, and with good reason — he pioneered new definitions of performance art, political activism, sculpture, installation, and art pedagogy in the war’s wake, and they are still widely circulated today.

Shockingly, despite this stature, there has not been a major Beuys retrospective in the US since 1979, when the Guggenheim in New York let him take over its building and left some critics and the less adventurous members of the public scratching their heads. No one knew then that he would die just seven years later, at the age of 64, or that his enigmatic approaches would come to be so widely imitated.

Fondation Beyeler opens retrospective of the work of German artist Georg Baselitz

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The focus of the exhibition is on Baselitz as an artist who is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting, and who is seen as the originator of an outstandingly inventive pictorial language.
 
The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its first exhibition in 2018 to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor Georg Baselitz (b. 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony), whose work occupies a central position in the art of our time. The exhibition, marking the artist’s eightieth birthday, takes the form of an extensive retrospective, comprising many of the most important paintings and sculptures created by Baselitz over the past six decades. These include loans from renowned public and private collections in Europe and the USA, some of which have not been seen in public for many years. The exhibition begins at the end of January 2018 at the Fondation Beyeler and will be shown in the summer in a modified form at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Baselitz exhibitions are rare events in Switzerland and the USA. The last monographic exhibition of Baselitz’s work in Switzerland took place in 1990 at the Kunsthaus Zürich. In the USA, the present exhibition will be the first North American retrospective since the major show in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum, which subsequently traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and to further venues. 

From Van Gogh to Richter—what happens when bidders fail to pay up at auction?

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Flaky winning bids are knocking the gloss off record-breaking sales.

Shortly before Christie’s sale of post-war and contemporary art in New York on 15 November 2017, the auction house learnt of a potential new bidder: a little-known Saudi prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud. According to the New York Times, a scramble ensued to establish his identity and financial means, and, in order to bid, he had to pay a $100m deposit for a red paddle.

The work he bid for, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (around 1500), went on to make a record-shattering $450.3m and was bought by Abu Dhabi with the prince acting as a middleman, but why did all the bidders on the high-value work need a special paddle? Quite simply because Christie’s wanted to be sure the final buyer would pay up.

The Four Tribes of Art Collectors

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The most enjoyable part of leading the art division of a private bank is working with the great characters of the art market. In my experience, serious collectors tend to fall into one of four “tribes,” each with their own behaviors, insecurities, strengths, and motivations for seeking, acquiring, and appreciating art. You may recognize them wandering the fairs or waving their paddles at auctions; others tend to collect more discreetly, known mostly by the dealers who feed their obsessions. Below are the tribes I’ve known.

Andreas Gursky review – godlike visions from the great chronicler of our age

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Hayward Gallery, London
From raves to road trips, from the icecaps to the trading floor, from Amazon to the Rhine, these breathtaking panoramas take aim at globalism – and reinvent the very notion of photography.

Over the last two decades, Andreas Gursky has become the most significant image-maker of our time. Not just for the topicality of his subject matter – the scale and reach of global capitalism, the thrust of 21st-century commerce and the fragility of the planet – but for his grand-scale, digitally driven reinvention of the very notion of the photographic image. In his epic panoramas, from the frenzied activity on the Chicago stock exchange to the painterly stillness of the Rhine, nothing is as it initially appears. Often what you are seeing is a digitally created composite image: several photographs seamlessly knitted together. It is photography but not as we know it.

Indeed, if you look closely at certain images – May Day IV, for example, his depiction of a vast German rave – you can pick out the same person appearing more than once. In the vast Ocean 11, satellite images are used in the creation of an overhead shot of an area so enormous it defies “normal” photography. Gursky’s digitally enhanced, almost godlike vision is the main reason he so disturbs traditionalists. But the issues of authenticity that concerned many of his contemporaries as they made the move from analogue to digital seem never to have entered his mind.

Conceptual Artist Jill Magid Wins the 2017 Calder Prize—and the Keys to Alexander Calder’s Home

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Magid will receive $50,000 cash and a residency at Calder’s former home and studio in Connecticut.

The Calder Foundation announced today that the New York-based artist Jill Magid has won the 2017 Calder Prize. The award comes with $50,000 cash and the promise to place one of the artist’s works in a major public collection.

Magid will also participate in a residency this spring at Calder’s former home and studio in Roxbury, Connecticut—a first for the prize. “I find it a very exciting invitation,” Magid told artnet News. “When I suggested to Sandy [Rower, the foundation’s president] that staying in Calder’s house might be like the experience I’d had staying in Luis Barragán’s house and studio in Mexico City, he disagreed, saying, ‘the Barragán house and studio is now a museum, and open to the public; Calder’s house is exactly how he left it. It’s as if he walked out to get a carton of milk and never came back.’”

“Although Calder and Magid appear to be polar opposites, the two artists share a common ground, drawing as they do upon immaterial notions as material—whether that be permission, as in Magid’s case, or chance, as in Calder’s—to reveal the complexities beyond transparency,” the foundation said in a statement.

The Director of the Beyeler Foundation Promises to Break Its ‘Glass Ceiling’—After Baselitz and Balthus Shows

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Sam Keller says that Switzerland’s most-visited art museum will show more female artists as it expands on its 20th anniversary.

In just over 20 years, the Fondation Beyeler has become Switzerland’s most-visited art gallery. And it is growing, in both ambition and size.

The Beyeler’s director, Sam Keller, is overseeing the forthcoming $100 million Peter Zumthor-designed expansion, which will double the institution’s footprint by adding pavilions to complement Renzo Piano’s celebrated building.

Construction is not likely to begin until later this year at the earliest. In the meantime, however, the museum is keeping busy. We spoke to Keller, who served as the head of Art Basel before joining the Beyeler in 2008, on the eve of its big show of the work of Georg Baselitz.  (So we had the idea to organize a retrospective on the occasion of his 80th birthday, with over 100 paintings and sculptures at Fondation Beyeler and his drawings and prints at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Georg Baselitz is one of the most interesting artists of the past 50 years and made a mark in art history.)

Keller discusses why the museum has rejected requests to franchise, why he’s not worried about its Balthus show, and how he plans to show more work by female artists at an institution with a history as a boys’ club.

How to sell a billion worth of art

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This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.  

BARRY RITHOLTZ, ANCHOR, BLOOMBERG:  This week on the podcast I have a special guest.  Her name is Brooke Lampley.  She was the former head of impressionist and modern art at Christie’s.  She is the incoming Chairperson of Fine Art Sotheby’s and this is a little off the beaten path of Hedge fund managers and economist and traders but it’s no less fascinating if you are at all interested in how artwork is determined to have a specific valuation, how we can tell the providence and whether or not something is real or not, what takes place at auctions and what the future of modern art looks like.  I suspect you’ll find this to be a fascinating conversation.  

 

First look at Rachel Whiteread’s suburban house sculpture in London’s new US Embassy

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Sections of an all-American home have been mounted on the walls.

A major new public art work by Rachel Whiteread modelled on a suburban US house will be unveiled next week at the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, south London. The wall sculpture, titled US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015), will greet embassy visitors as they enter into the lobby through the consular court. The work was commissioned by Art in Embassies, a US governmental body.

Virginia Shore, the curator for the London Embassy project, tells The Art Newspaper: “The work uses the motif of the average American House, the type that may have been purchased from a catalogue in the 1950s; a familiar house that lines the suburban streets of America and would have appealed to a family of modest means.”

What Happened After Mexico’s Greatest Architect Was Turned Into a Diamond

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On April 27th, more than a hundred people gathered in the underground auditorium of a prestigious contemporary-art museum in Mexico City. Those who couldn’t find seats lingered outside, watching a live video feed of what was transpiring within; more than seventy thousand others streamed the proceedings at home. For almost two hours, the audience looked on as epic and often metaphysical questions—of faith, language, taste, value, ownership, legacy—were debated with ferocious intensity. The subject of the discussion was a diamond—2.02 carats, rough-cut—which, as I reported last year, was made from the compressed ashes of the late Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Created with the permission of the local government in Guadalajara, where Barragán was buried, and with the blessing of his direct heirs, the jewel was set in a silver engagement ring. The ring was conceived as part of a project by the American conceptual artist Jill Magid, with the idea that it might be exchanged for the architect’s professional archive, which has been kept in Switzerland for close to twenty-five years.

By this point, the discussion, which had been largely philosophical, had turned to what, exactly, the project had revealed about local customs regarding art preservation, the sufficiency of current laws to protect human remains, and Mexico’s responsibility to preserve its own culture**—**a question that was argued bitterly when Barragán’s professional archive left the country, years earlier. Magid started to look more relaxed. “I felt a great sense of relief,” she told me later. She was glad to know that the work’s provocations were working. The moderator wrapped up the discussion, and, just before Medina announced the exhibition open, he took a small bow. “So,” he said, “We invite you to see the Minotaur.”

Damien Hirst to show new spot paintings at 18th-century mansion

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Exhibition of Colour Space paintings will open in March in the gilded state rooms of Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

Damien Hirst is to take over the spectacular gilded state rooms of Britain’s finest Palladian mansion to show a new series of his long-running spot paintings.

The Colour Space works, two of which can be seen here for the first time, will be shown at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, built in the 18th century for Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and which once housed one of the world’s greatest art collections.

The exhibition, opening in March, is another example of Hirst never doing anything by halves. In 2012 he took over all 11 Gagosian galleries around the world for his spot paintings, and last year his monumental fantasy exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable filled two grand Venice palaces.

New Damien Hirst Paintings to Be Exhibited in Stately British Home

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The British artist Damien Hirst will exhibit new works from his series of spot paintings at a stately home in Britain.

The exhibition, titled “Colour Space,” will open in March at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, in the southeast of England; the mansion was built in the 1720s for Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole.

Roughly 50 of Mr. Hirst’s new works will go on display in the state rooms of a building that once housed a world-class collection of European old master paintings.

“I originally wanted the Spots to look like they were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine,” Mr. Hirst said in a statement. “‘Colour Space’ is going back to the human element, so instead you have the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies.”

In the statement, Mr. Hirst said, “There are still no two exact colors that repeat in each painting, which is really important to me. I think of them as cells under a microscope. It felt right to show them somewhere historic rather than in a conventional gallery space and Houghton’s perfect.”

The Kippenberger Conundrum: How the Wildly Prolific Artist’s Artist Became an Eight-Figure Auction Darling

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It was the peak of the 2014 fall auction season in New York, and though nearly two decades had gone by since Martin Kippenberger’s death of liver failure in 1997, the artist’s market had never been hotter. Prior to its bellwether postwar and contemporary evening sale, Christie’s had set the estimate for a prized 1988 Kippenberger self-portrait in its November sale at $20 million—an aggressive estimate, but one that paid off. It was bought by dealer Larry Gagosian, hammering at $20 million for a with-premium total of $22.5 million.

The sale capped a run of seasons where the Kippenberger market rose precipitously—an irony for an artist who lampooned both “try-hard” artists who sucked up to the market people and the market people who got suckered into buying any of it.

All of Kippenberger’s top ten highest-selling works at auction have come in the last five years, and after the one-two punch of 1988 works sold at Christie’s in May and November 2014—the $22.5 million picture nabbed by Gagosian, but also another work from the same series that sold for $18.6 million—the same auction house sold two more Kippenbergers in May 2015: another 1988 self-portrait for $16.4 million, and one of his 1996 paintings of Jacqueline Picasso for $12.5 million.

Galleries hit by cyber crime wave

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Hackers are stealing large sums of money from art galleries and their clients using a straightforward email deception. The Art Newspaper has so far identified nine galleries or individuals targeted by this scam. They include Hauser & Wirth, the London-based dealers Simon Lee, Thomas Dane, Rosenfeld Porcini and Laura Bartlett and, in the US, Tony Karman, the president of Expo Chicago.

“We know a number of galleries that have been affected. The sums lost by them or their clients range from £10,000 to £1m,” says the insurance broker Adam Prideaux of Hallett Independent. “I suspect the problem is a lot worse than we imagine.”

How it works

The fraud is relatively simple. Criminals hack into an art dealer’s email account and monitor incoming and outgoing correspondence. When the gallery sends a PDF invoice to a client via email following a sale, the conversation is hijacked. Posing as the gallery, hackers send a duplicate, fraudulent invoice from the same gallery email address, with an accompanying message instructing the client to disregard the first invoice and instead wire payment to the account listed in the fraudulent document.

“Casting it in Plaster Monumentalized a Space That is Ignored”: Rachel Whiteread on the Sculptural Elements of Emptiness

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British minimalist sculptor Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) is known for her innovative use of negative space as sculptural object.  Most renowned for her plaster casts of architectural spaces and utilitarian found objects, Whiteread’s haunting, tomb-like works evoke themes of loss, memory, and invisibility. 

Whiteread’s work is currently on view at Monnaie de Paris as part of the Women House Exhibition, which features the work of 39 artists whose work explores the relationship between gender and space; particularly that of the female to a domestic space. She also has a solo show at the Tate Modern in London, closing on January 21. In honor of the artist’s concurrent shows, we’ve revisited an excerpt from Phaidon’s Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation, in which Whiteread spoke with contemporary art critic Michael Archer in 1992 about developing an extensive vocabulary of sculptural mediums, how site-specific works translate into new spaces, and how the installation of a piece can alter its meaning. 

Torbjorn Rodland’s Puzzling Photos Are Unsettling and Arousing

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One of the most striking images in the new retrospective of Torbjorn Rodland’s photographs currently on display at C/O Berlingreets visitors as they enter the exhibition. It is a picture of a young woman, lit from the side by a powerful red light, with honey streaming down her cheeks onto her chin. Like many of Mr. Rodland’s works, the image — titled “Goldene Tränen,” or “Golden Tears” — looks like the kind of high-gloss photograph that might appear on a billboard or in a magazine advertisement, but it is unsettling in a way that can be hard to pin down.

Sitting on a windowsill in the gallery, Mr. Rodland explained that the photograph was meant to arouse a variety of reactions depending on a viewer’s cultural interests. An art historian, he said, might see it as a reference to the weeping Virgin Mary, while a 22-year-old consumer of online pornography would see something more obscene. “If there’s only one possible reading of a photograph, then I’m less interested,” Mr. Rodland added. “The photographs are reading you if you’re reading them.”

Is Donald Trump, Wall-Builder-in-Chief, a Conceptual Artist?

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Is Donald Trump a conceptual artist?

That’s the intriguing possibility put forth in an online petition Tuesday that seeks to have the group of eight prototypes for Mr. Trump’s controversial Mexican border wall designated a national monument.

The prototypes were built at a cost of $3.3 million in federal funds and unveiled last October along the United States border near San Diego. The petition, sponsored by the puckishly named nonprofit, MAGA (the acronym recalls the President’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”), seeks to protect the prototypes from demolition by invoking the Antiquities Act of 1906 and characterizes the structures as “a major Land Art exhibition” of “significant cultural value.”

The notion that the prototypes could qualify as conceptual art might seem somewhat far-fetched. They were designed to United States Customs and Border Protection specifications, built to withstand a 30-minute assault from sledgehammers to acetylene torches, and to be difficult to scale or tunnel beneath. Aesthetic considerations are largely secondary to brute strength, but, when viewed up close, the walls collectively have the undeniable majesty of minimalist sculpture.

For an additional article, more images – click here.

Here Are the 15 Biggest Art-World Controversies of 2017

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From Dana Schutz’s notorious painting to divisive animal art at the Guggenheim, 2017 was chock full of debate, discussion, and protest.

This year saw unprecedented tumult in the real world—and in the art world, too. There were fiery debates over cultural appropriation and the definition of censorship; a legal tussle over deaccessioning at the Berkshire Museum; and front-page exposés on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cultural philanthropy of the Sackler family, and the buyer of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi.

Below, we recount the biggest headlines and controversies of the year in chronological order. Just don’t expect the debates they ignited to end in 2017.

Art-Fair Economics: Why Small Galleries Do Art Fairs Even When They Don’t Make Money

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As the middle market shrinks, many dealers are finding they can’t afford to do fairs—but they can’t afford not to, either.

Think art fairs are all about sold-out booths, comfortable shoes, and exclusive dinner invitations? Think again. For many small to mid-size galleries, fairs—like Art Basel in Basel, which opens to VIPs today—are an increasingly nail-biting gamble that involves paying hundreds of thousands of dollars up front with no guarantee of a payoff.

As the middle market shrinks, many dealers are finding they can’t afford to do fairs—but they can’t afford not to, either. “It’s very hard to estimate what the revenue will be, so a gallery’s decision to do a fair is highly uncertain,” says Olav Velthuis, a professor at the University of Amsterdam who specializes in economic sociology. “People don’t realize that fairs are loss leaders for many small galleries.”

Indeed, fairs—which multiplied from 55 worldwide in 2000 to at least 180 in 2014, according to the 2015 TEFAF art market report—pose an economic riddle for mid-market dealers. It doesn’t cost that much less money for a small gallery to participate in a major fair than a large one, but the stakes are much higher for small businesses. The potential upside, meanwhile, is far greater for large ones. (See the end of this article for a breakdown of galleries’ costs and revenue at Art Basel in Miami Beach.)

Richard Long Knighted (Video)

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Richard Long, the four-times Turner Prize nominee and one-time winner (1989) has been knighted in the New Year’s honours list.

Richard has been in the vanguard of conceptual and land art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking in 1967, while still a student. This photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. Through this medium of walking, time and distance became new subjects for his work. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world. He mediates his experience of these places, from mountains through to deserts, shorelines, grasslands, rivers and snowscapes, according to archetypal geometric marks and shapes, made by his footsteps alone or gathered from the materials of the place. These walks and temporary works of passage are recorded with photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names and phenomena are vocabularies for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.

Watch the Video.