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Starting today A1 will have a slightly tweaked format, with the big story of the day separated out for its own post to be published later in the morning.
– QUOTE OF THE DAY –
“I’m not trying to be controversial. If I wanted to be controversial, I would have used photographs. But I’m not interested in being so literal and direct. Paintings give you more room for illusion and fantasy, more room to discover things.” – The artist Mickalene Thomas on the centerpiece of her upcoming Santa Monica Museum of Art show Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, a painting in homage to Courbet’s sensationally graphic painting of that title that she based on photographs she took of her own spread legs and intimate place.
– MUST READ –
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art Opens – The Scottish contemporary art celebration has come round again, with Jeremy Deller‘s inflatable Stonehenge (“the grandest of bouncy castles”) as a main attraction and major new shows of artists like 2011 Venice Biennale representative Karla Black. (Guardian)
Portrait of the Art Critic as a Young Man – In the latest of Holland Cotter‘s exceptional and Pulitzer-number-two-targeting series on African art, he uses a trip to Ethiopia’s churches—where (SPOILER ALERT) he reveals the Ark of the Covenant can still be found today—as a jumping off point for a reminiscence about a youthful pilgrimage to Istanbul’s art treasures that “confirmed what I had begun to suspect: my compass was not set westward.” (NYT)
Peter Max Is Looking for His Nanny – In a touching and remarkable story, the once-world-famous Pop artist is searching for a Shanghai woman who cared for him when he came to the city as a three-year-old refugee from the Holocaust and taught him how to draw. (Shanghai Daily)
Gunplay at the Met! – A museum guard at New York’s most dignified art institution staged an impromptu rendition of Chris Burden‘s Shoot when he accidentally shot himself in the leg while cleaning his museum-issued .38-caliber Colt in the basement. (NYT)
Jeffrey Deitch Has an Awesome Couch – The most enviable thing in the Los Angeles MOCA director’s Hollywood Hills home is the breathtaking Montanara couch by Gaetano Pesce that looks like mountains and waterfalls. (NYT)
Playboy’s Debut Marilyn Monroe Cover Was “Art” – An in-depth article recalls the how the black-and-white cover of the nudie magazine’s first issue was devised by founding art director Art Paul as a “piece of art.” (The Age)
– ART MARKET –
Wooing Western Buyers, Too – As speculation continues about when Chinese collectors might start turning their attention in earnest to Western art, Christie’s contemporary Asian art director Eric Chang says that shows like Wu Guanzhong‘s retrospective opening at New York’s Asia Society this Wednesday herald that Western collectors might finally start going gaga for pre-1990s Chinese modern art. (WSJ)
Insight Into China’s Art Market – The Chinese publication Jing Daily makes an interesting point about the country’s booming interest in art buying, writing that the phenomenon is partly driven by “the disappointment many wealthy Chinese feel with the other limited investment options they have at their disposal… [since they have] little faith in the stock market and less of an appetite for risky property investments.” (Jing Daily)
Paris’s Biennale des Antiquaires, France’s oldest and bluest-chip art fair, is going to debut a satellite in Hong Kong next year to tap into all of that hot money. (Bloomberg)
– IN & OUT –
Tate Modern has begun construction on the new wing that it’s building in to gigantic former oil tanks, having raised 75 percent of the much-delayed project’s $346 million cost. (Bloomberg)
The Cooper-Hewitt is opening a Harlem pop-up space to promote its educational programming while the Smithsonian design museum’s main Upper East Side building continues to undergo a two-year renovation. (WSJ)
Blum & Poe‘s wonderful show of Japan’s Mono-Ha movement, previewed at Art Basel Miami Beach last year and now drawing raves in Los Angeles, will travel to New York this June. (Artinfo)
The Qatar Museums Authority, that money-dripping art hoover of historic proportions, will launch its partnership with the Google Art Project with a probably deluxe ceremony tomorrow. (Qatar News Agency)
