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– THE BIG STORY –
What’s it like working at Sotheby’s? In a rather all-encompassing essay on her experience working at the auction house’s New York headquarters, Alice Gregory touches on the market for Jacob Kassay‘s paintings, the company’s acquisition of the Parke-Bernet auction house in 1967, how to spot a cheap shirt, why one wants a “totemic” Ellsworth Kelley, and the proper car temperature to maintain girls from the contemporary art department. She also goes into the sticky class considerations surrounding Sotheby’s standoff with the union representing its art handlers, but the best parts are the sociological aperçus like these: “The men at Sotheby’s greased back their longish hair with some sort of unidentifiable shellac. In their well-tailored suits and leather-soled shoes, they looked like patrician vampires. A striking number of my fellow female employees were engaged—not married, but engaged. Something was always being celebrated—a birthday, a baby—and the break rooms were sometimes spread with red velvet cupcakes several times in one week. The cupcakes disappeared in fractions, the cream cheese frosting slowly hardening as, over the course of the day, one girl after another slinked by and, with a quick glance around, cut herself a slice.” (N+1)
– QUOTE OF THE DAY –
“If I met a woman in the street who looked like my paintings, I’d faint.” – Henri Matisse talking about his art, which is now the subject of a ravishing exhibition at the Centre Pompidou that looks at his masterful interplay of shape and color.
– MUST READ –
Now That’s Sports Photography – Here’s a nice slide show of Catherine Opie‘s new series of stunningly limpid pictures of high-school football games, which is currently on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. (Artinfo)
What Kind of Art Teacher Was Mike Kelley? – He was “extremely funny,” “encouraged you to dig deep and not get too comfortable,” and capable of “fiery, searingly honest critique,” according to his former students at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. (LAT)
Fashion Is in Fashion at Museums – The Financial Times takes a look at two of the hottest fashion exhibitions coming to art institutions this season: the Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations show at the Met in New York. (FT)
Not So Uncivilized After All – The nomadic denizens of the Eurasian steppes, known to Romans as the uncouth Scythians, were actually makers of surpassingly exquisite artistic and votive objects, according to John Noble Wilford, whose epic science-reporting career might make him the closest person to the Dox XX “most interesting man in the world” (seriously—look up what he’s covered). (NYT)
Google Partners With Similarly Ambitious Museum – The search giant is joining forces with Belgium’s not-so-coyly named Mundaneum museum, which in the century-plus since its founding has gathered a 16 million-card catalogue of cultural information in the pursuit of building a “city of knowledge,” which Google probably finds charmingly quaint. (NYT)
– ART MARKET –
Christie’s Sells Out of William Eggleston – The auction house held a white-glove sale of photography by the American master in London yesterday, selling every single lot for a total of $5.9 million and achieving a new world record for the artist at auction with the $578,500 sale of Untitled, 1970. (Press Release)
Clash of Art-Historical Titans – The intensely shady Wildenstein art-dealing dynasty is now embroiled in a new feud with the heirs of the family of Manet and Berthe Morisot, who claim that a $1 million Morisot painting seized by police from the Wildenstein’s infamous vault belongs to them. (Bloomberg)
“Who Cares? We’ll All Be Dead” – So sayeth collector Adam Lindemann when asked by art journalist Alexandra Peers whether or not the contemporary artworks achieving record prices at auctions nowadays will actually be remembered by art history. (Gallerist NY)
– IN & OUT –
Robert Stein is leaving his post as the celebrated tech guru of the Indianapolis Museum of Art to follow his former boss Maxwell Anderson to the Dallas Art Museum, where he will again be deputy director under Anderson. (Artforum)
As part of its gala celebration of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art‘s fifth anniversary, the Brooklyn Museum will honor a whole slew of notable women next month, including the artists Mickalene Thomas and Amy Sillman as well as other achievers like Sandra Day O’Connorand Toni Morrison. (NYT)
– VIDEO –
Unclear why everyone made such a big deal over the transportation of Michael Heizer’s 140-ton Levitated Mass rock sculpture to LACMA? Watch this astonishing video. (LAT)
