A Final Look Back at Frieze Week
Emin-ence Gris: Tracey Emin Comes to America
‘Ben Vida: Slipping Control’ at Audio Visual Arts
Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a “score” consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid Read More
Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery
Old Punk on Pay Phone, a color transparency mounted on an aluminum lightbox, shows the artist Rodney Graham at almost life size. He’s standing on a sloping wet sidewalk in Vancouver, against a brick wall painted yellow and blue. His black leather jacket is covered in studs and crude lettering, his graying hair is greased up into a faux-hawk, and there’s eyeliner on his eyes. Holding the handset of a much-abused, wall-mounted pay phone to his ear, he looks off in shock—as if he’s just learned, say, that his father has died, and he is realizing for the first time that when it comes right down to it, he’d be glad to put on a necktie for his widowed mother’s sake. Read More
‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
It’s too easy to make fun of the Met’s new “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. There was the chipper press preview at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning bustling with well-groomed junior fashion editors in leather pants and Walter Steiger heels, the facsimile of CBGB’s bathroom circa 1975, complete with graffitied urinals and cigarette butts, and Anne Hathaway and Miley Cyrus playing platinum punk Barbies at the Costume Institute gala—mockable incongruities served up on a silver platter. Read More
‘Anselm Kiefer: Morgenthau Plan’ at Gagosian Gallery
“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show. Read More
2014 Sydney Bienniale Releases Partial Artist List
The 19th Biennale of Sydney doesn’t open until March 21, 2014, but its artistic director, Juliana Engberg, is already releasing a partial list of artists who will be involved in her exhibition, which is titled “You Imagine What You Desire” and is, according to a news release, “an evocation celebrating the artistic imagination as a spirited describing and exploration of the world through metaphor and poesis.” Read More
David Wojnarowicz’s Journals Now Available Online
New York University’s Fales Library has completed digitizing the journals of artist David Wojnarowicz and has released them all online. The journals are dated from 1971 to 1991 and can be accessed over on Fales’s site. Read More
Tax Authorities Raid Georg Baselitz’s House
A bit of news that was overlooked last week due to art fair frenzy: Georg Baselitz, the esteemed painter and cranky misanthrope, had his home in Bavaria raided by tax authorities. Der Spiegel reports that it’s “likely that Baselitz had been given advance warning” of the raid, and was on his way to his property on the Ligurian Coast in Italy when investigators arrived. Read More
Darren Bader Wins 2013 Calder Prize
The artist Darren Bader (b. 1978) has won the Calder Foundations’s 2013 Calder Prize, presented to “contemporary artists who have completed exemplary work early in their careers and whose work can be interpreted as a continuation of Alexander Calder’s legacy.” Read More
Morning Links: Fundamentals Edition
Marion Maneker warns that last night’s Leo auction “had all the hallmarks of a market driven by anything but fundamentals.” [Art Market Monitor]
Here’s a party report from the Brant Foundation’s Sunday event. [WSJ] Read More
He Had Their Attention: Leonardo DiCaprio Charity Auction at Christie’s Hammers in $31.7 M., 13 Artist Records
Last night Christie’s hammered an impressive $31.7 million across 33 contemporary works in a charity auction organized by Leonardo DiCaprio. Thirteen new artist records were set, with many works doubling their pre-sale high estimates. The night had a total high estimate of just $18 million and most of the proceeds from the auction, titled the Read More
