If the weather reports are to be believed, this is going to be one gorgeous Saturday in New York—a high of about 72, pretty much no chance of rain and just a few clouds in the sky.
It’s also shaping up to be a banner day for art books, with at least three major events on tap for May 18, which are listed below. Read More
Publishers Marketplace reports today that Don Thompson, author of the widely read The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, has just sold a follow up that seems to be in a similar vein. The book is set to be published by Palgrave in spring 2014. Read More
It’s often difficult to interview artists. This is not to say they’re inarticulate—far more often the opposite is true—but because artists make a career of nonverbal communication, speaking with them always has a looming sense of: well, what is there to talk about? Their art? All you can hope for is footnotes. Their lives? Their business? Their practice, every little element of it? And then occasionally throw out some inane comment like “that’s great” after they tell you about some new resin they’ve discovered? What was wrong with the old resin? Come to think of it, you didn’t even know that was resin. Read More
Clear your calendars next week, dear readers. Jan. 22–26 is known as Bibliography Week in New York, and many of the nation’s esteemed book-history associations will be holding their annual meetings. Meanwhile, many local book organizations will host special events for the bibliographically inclined. Among the planned activities: the Grolier Club has its annual dinner at the Metropolitan Club on Friday, and the American Printing History Association gets down to work on Saturday with its annual meeting, at the Morgan Library and Museum. On the art front, the Center for Book Arts will host an open house on Saturday. Read More
From a biographical angle, it’s better to think of P.G. Wodehouse as more entertainment honcho than author. He was a member of the jet set before there were jets, and translated his shtick from one medium to another the way a sitcom producer today might branch out into movies. (Could Arrested Development have a more direct antecedent than Wodehouse?) He loved writing books, and did so compulsively, but he began his writing career at newspapers before moving on to serialized novels. He bounced between New York, England and Hollywood, offering his talent where it was required, whether for Cole Porter comedies or talkies. He ended his life on Long Island and was as American as he was British. All this is to say that the new collection of his correspondence, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (W.W. Norton, 640 pp., $35), is not only a valuable supplement to Robert McCrum’s 2004 biography, but a study of the burgeoning comedy industry. Read More
Halfway through Always Looking (Knopf, 224 pp., $45), the third collection of John Updike’s art criticism—and the first posthumously released one—the celebrated novelist begins to rank haystacks. The snowy Claude Monet landscapes in question appear in the glossy hardback a page before the ranking, and since all of them feature a haystack or two, you would think they would all be fairly similar in quality. Read More
The writer Chris Kraus’s move from New York to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s coincided with the birth of a particular art scene there, one that emerged from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where Mike Kelley was on the faculty and where Ms. Kraus co-taught a class called “Fictocriticism” with science fiction author Mark von Schlegell. Fictocriticism, Ms. Kraus explained over the phone from Los Angeles last week, has to do with “writing about art and ideas with the same intensity and cadence as your own problems or the party you went to last night.” She was writing frequently for Artext magazine. Her friend Giovanni Intra had co-founded a gallery called China Art Objects, kick-starting L.A.’s Chinatown gallery district. She appeared in a film made by Mr. von Schlegell and another Chinatown gallerist, simulating a sex act on a tree in a state park outside the city. Read More
Last night at Smalls Jazz Club in the West Village, Richard Prince’s imprint Fulton Ryder celebrated the debut of a new book by Dan Colen, A Real Bronx Cheer. If you’ll head over now to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, you’ll see things got pretty bonkers. Read More
Art book publisher Taschen is reissuing one of its bestselling titles ever, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Drawings and Paintings. The book, which runs almost 700 pages and retails for $200, is the most thorough book of Leonardo’s life and work available. Read More
Sebastian Smee, chief art critic for the Boston Globe, has sold a book about friendship and rivalry between artists, specifically Edgard Degas and Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The book, it was announced yesterday via Publishers Marketplace, was sold to editor David Ebershoff at Random House. Read More
