Stay Connected
Private sales are one week long.
Editions go fast and prices go up after one week.
Artspace Private Sales
Most Popular Posts
Connect with Facebook
What People are Tweeting About
– THE BIG STORY –
Can a collector control an artist’s production? Today Julia Halperin takes a close look on the unusual lawsuit that collector Jonathan Sobel has filed against William Eggleston, arguing that the photographer should not be allowed to make the new large-scale digital prints of his classic images because their giant popularity—one of them recently sold for a record $578,500 at Christie’s—is screwing up the value of the original, smaller-sized prints. Sobel, whose own 190-piece Eggleston collection is valued at up to $5 million, is treading into strange, new territory in the largely unregulated art market, and is likely going to have his work cut out for him explaining to a judge why he can limit an artist’s free enterprise. (It’s not like the photographer is printing his own money… though, of course, he kind of is.) For the time being, at least, it’s clear that the digital prints aren’t going to go away quietly: Gagosian is reportedly planning a show of Eggleston’s new poster-sized prints.
– QUOTE OF THE DAY –
“[Thomas] Kinkade’s work raises more questions about what constitutes art in contemporary culture than most everything from within the art world it aims to supersede. While skittish dilettantes tiresomely mine yet another implicit but unexplored incremental variation on early seventies avant-gardism in search of a frisson of wrongness to momentarily confuse their consumers into thinking they’re actually questioning what constitutes art and what its role in our culture consists of, Kinkade and associates blast through such twee niggling with what amounts to a manifesto for the new millennium. A fractally detailed hybrid of the high-pitched busyness of commercial culture and the low hum of contemplative interiority, Kinkade’s great work reads like a hypertextual marriage of the two most seemingly opposite cultural strains of our time. For an art world that shrugs as it continues to find titillating ways to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it ought to serve as a wake-up call.” – The great art critic Doug Harvey providing a thought-provoking counter-narrative about the art of Kinkade, the titanically successful but deeply unfashionable “painter of light” © who died suddenly at 54 over the weekend.
– MUST READ –
Rocket Man – This Saturday the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang lit up about 40,000 fireworks outside MOCA Los Angeles, sending streaks of sparking flame soaring into the sky—and, surprisingly, toward the assembled viewers—as part of his Sky Ladder exhibition at the museum. (LAT)
Talent to Burn – The artist Loris Gréaud talks to Andrew Russeth about preparing his history-making joint exhibition at the Louvre and the Pompidou—the museums’ first collaboration on any project—and, before that, his debut show at the Pace Gallery next month that will feature incinerated artworks. (Gallerist NY)
LACMA Pulls Off Diplomatically Fascinating Show – The Los Angeles museum has opened an exhibition in Doha called Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts that focuses on artworks the Sultans sent to Tsarist courts—a grouping the museum was unable to fully realize in the United States due to the crazy Russian ban on U.S. art loans. (LAT)
The Guardian‘s Favorite Flower Paintings – Laura Cummings picks a seasonal bouquet of 10 of art history’s nicest blooms, by artists from Hokusai to Manet. (Guardian)
The Rebel Glory of Tintoretto – The rule-breaking Renaissance painter, still hot from his Venice Biennale inclusion, is now the subject of an extraordinary-sounding show in Rome that makes one want to check airfare prices. (FT)
Louvre Still Holding Out on Google Art Project — The French encyclopedic museum, the most popular art institution in the world, is coquettishly playing hard to get as regards the search giant’s art initiative, keeping the Mona Lisa out of the super-high-resolution digital realm for now. (Bloomberg)
“Get Hold of a Skull” – A yellowed to-do list penned by none other than Leonardo da Vinci is on view at Buckingham Palace now, reminding the artist that he needs to bring nutmeg, a bone-saw, and a forceps on a coming trip, and that he should remember to “describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of a crocodile.” (Daily Mail)
– ART MARKET –
Yves Klein‘s Top Model Speaks – One of the two women who posed nude for the artist’s 1947 fire painting Untitled (FC1), which is heading to Christie’s with an upper estimate of $40 million, tells Vogue about her time with the high-concept Frenchman. (Vogue)
– IN & OUT –
The artist Edgar Arceneaux has stepped down from his post as executive director of the beleaguered Watts House Project in L.A. following a newspaper report on mismanagement at the nonprofit, ceding leadership to his managing director, Will Sheffie. (LAT)
Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentine-born printmaker and draughtsman best know for his his artworks depicting the atrocities wrought by the Nazis, has passed away at age 97. (NYT)
The artist Mickalene Thomas‘s show Origin of the Universe has opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and you can catch a glimpse of it here. (HuffPo)
