Creating an Art Fair – time lapse video
From a blank space to the VIP opening: the installation of the structure and booths at an Art Fari, round the clock for four days. Check out the vidoe.
Tag Archives: Money
Jeff Wall: ‘I’m haunted by the idea that my photography was all a big mistake’
He provokes anger, awe and huge prices for his controversial staged scenes of hostage situations and homeless shelters. The pioneer of ‘non-photography’ talks cliches, creative freedom – and his regrets. “In my time, I’ve been accused of being afraid to go out into the world to take pictures, like a so-called ‘real’ photographer does,” Jeff […]
Paddle8, Online Auction House Aims to Give Big Houses a Run for Their Money
Think of an auction house, and centuries-old institutions like Sotheby’s and Christie’s probably spring to mind. But a four-year-old start-up believes that it can become something of an online equivalent to those companies — and it has drawn big-name backers from the art world along the way. The venture, Paddle8, plans to announce on Wednesday […]
Can the Single-Venue Gallery Survive?
Notable dealers have chosen to end eponymous enterprises to join larger entities at a partnership level. Such was the case with Gérard Faggionato, who recently joined David Zwirner in London, and Valerie Carberry, who merged with Chicago’s Richard Gray last spring. Veteran contemporary art dealers Esther Schipper and Jorg Johnen are in the process of […]
Cy Twombly makes me want to plan the art heist of the century
You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition. By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who […]
Has the Market for ‘Zombie Formalists’ Evaporated?
“No one wants to be a market darling,” an art dealer once told me. It’s the art world equivalent of a one-hit wonder, where sudden stardom and outsize demand for a particularly hot artist creates intense pressure, and has the potential to create unsustainable spikes in his or her market and career. Notwithstanding the fact that the […]
The new reserve currency for the world’s rich is not actually currency
Here’s an interesting question: If the world’s economy is filling markets with a pervasive sense of uncertainty, why is the art market picking up steam for yet another season of what would appear to be massive sales? For the very rich, art is a store of value—which is not a very new idea and one […]
The New Vancouver Art Gallery: A Generous Building
When the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed their conceptual design for a new building earlier this week, it was evidently a far cry from their current neoclassical courthouse. Gone are the ionic columns, ornate marble and porticos; instead, Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron has developed a soaring, wood-wrapped structure with boxy levels that recalls West Coast […]
Mapplethorpe Print at Center of Culture Wars Returns to Public Eye
Twenty-five years ago this month, a Cincinnati jury wrote an exclamation point into the story of the culture wars that were raging through art museums and academia. The jury acquitted that city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director of criminal obscenity charges for exhibiting a group of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, graphic sexual images that […]
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?: ‘ART BREAKERS’ and the Art World’s Reality TV Problem
The art advisor is a bit of a grab bag of roles—curator, interior designer, dealer, buyer. The line dividing these roles is ever hazier because the sole aim of nearly every art professional is to make a lot of money, and many of them do. Let’s think of advisors as opportunistic personal shoppers for the […]
Auction Houses Jockey to Lead Sales in First Big Market Test
Art auctions used to be a gentlemen’s business. Now the gloves are off. As art sales face their first major test since the August financial market rout, auction houses are jockeying not only for trophy artworks but also for the best positions to highlight them at the November auctions in New York. The result is […]
The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises
The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized […]
Ai Weiwei review – momentous and moving
Three-thousand porcelain river crabs clamber over one another in a great red, green and white sprawl of twitching legs and claws. Porcelain sunflower seeds are one thing, crabs another. Good thing they’re not quite real. This is but one small moment in the largest show Ai Weiwei has held in Britain. Not exactly a retrospective, […]
Ovation’s Reality Show on Art Advisors Looks Horrible (but we’re going to be watching…)
Get ready for Art Breaker$, Ovation’s new reality television show, focusing on two New York art advisors. Miller Gaffney and Carol Lee Brosseau are making a pretty hard sell in a promo video, in which they introduce themselves and together proclaim, “We’re the top art advisors in the country!” “We travel the world in search […]
Review: Picasso, Completely Himself in 3 Dimensions
Many exhibitions are good, some are great and a very few are tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom. The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is in the third category. Large, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It sustains […]
Emerging Art Cools Down
LONDON — The art market is a notoriously opaque business. And over the past couple of years the highly speculative trade in emerging artists has given off plenty of heat. In 2014, recently made works by young abstract painters like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Alex Israel, Mark Flood and Christian Rosa were being “flipped” at […]
The great debate: why galleries could take even more money from their artists
This was the controversial suggestion of a recent survey. We asked its author and four art-world figures to comment. A Twitterstorm erupted in the US last month over the findings of survey of 8,000 art galleries based in the US, UK and Germany. Cultural researcher and Larry’s List co-founder Magnus Resch found (no surprise here […]
Protocinema Founder Mari Spirito on the Manifold Challenges Facing Istanbul’s Art Scene
Conceived as an artistic wormhole connecting New York and Istanbul,Protocinema is the highly unconventional brainchild of the equally unconventional curator Mari Spirito, a former 303 Gallery dealer who in 2011 decided to parlay her voluminous Rolodex of art connections into the kind of free-floating, no-holds-barred platform that artists dream of. Now nearing its fifth anniversary, the […]
Why Bruce Nauman’s Persistent Market Defies Trophy Hunters
Bruce Nauman is considered a towering and influential figure in postwar American art. His reputation as a master of minimalist and conceptual art was cemented more than four decades ago when he was first showing with Leo Castelli in New York and in important European shows like “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern […]
Art Market Bracing for an Uncertain Sales Season
LONDON — The international art market is gearing up for a hectic autumn of auctions and fairs. Trading conditions could be challenging. Shanghai’s Composite Index of Shares has lost more than 35 percent of its value since June, destabilizing stock markets across the world. Slowing growth in China has depressed oil and commodity prices, tipping […]