1992 Redux?

In the early nineties, more than 70 New York galleries went out of business.

Could it happen again? No, say many observers—today’s art market is too global, too rich, even too smart to suffer such a wrenching setback. All the same, one shouldn’t forget that the art market’s biggest climb ever has been based in part on a growing pile of dealer debt. Dealers have borrowed against inventory to fuel bigger shows, art-fair exhibits, and satellite galleries all over the world...

There are now 360 galleries in Chelsea, up from 124 eight years ago. Already, Craigslist has seen a slight bump in its rental listings for gallery spaces in the area. A couple of them even read “Currently an art gallery.”

Read this very interesting piece by Alexandra Peers in New York Magazine here.

Seeing Double

El Greco painted several versions of "Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple," and in the process set the OK standards for generations of artists to re-visit the same theme or image over and over in their work.

"You are not seeing double. Sotheby’s and Christie’s both have mystical gray-and-black paintings by Mark Rothko, executed the same year and painted on the same size (60 by 68 inches) canvas. The sellers of Sotheby’s version, the Iowa collectors John and Mary Pappajohn, bought it at Christie’s for $800,000 in 1996. Christie’s Rothko was purchased from the John Weber Gallery by an unidentified collector. Why Sotheby’s Rothko is supposedly worth $2 million to $3 million more is anyone’s guess."

NYT's Carol Vogel discusses the fall auction season's star offerings as the millions continue to pour into the secondary art market. Read it here.

Good News

Last August, The Washington City Paper added a new writer to the DC area art scene, and Maura Judkis has been a refreshing new voice to the region's critical dialogue.

Thanks to the art gods that the CP understands the critical importance of having different voices delivering art criticism to a region. It amazes me that the CP understands and can afford to do this, but the WaPo doesn't and won't - neither the "new" Style nor the "Weekend" section editors!

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Much Ado About Oil and Water

The Smithies have to return a $5M donation because of mixing oil and water. Read it here.

Feh!

Use the money to do some roof repairs instead.

Don't give it back.

Botero Opens Tuesday

"Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib" opens Tuesday at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in DC.



Tomorrow's WaPo will have this article on the works by Erica Jong.

This will be one of the major exhibitions of 2007 for the entire Mid Atlantic and I bet that it will set new attendance records for the Katzen.

My own thoughts on Botero and his torture paintings are here.

AAC Survey

The Arlington Arts Center has an online survey here to help them fine tune their programming.

It only takes a few minutes; take it here.

Saturday Openings in DC

Loads of good shows are opening in DC tomorrow: Kathryn Cornelius at Curator's Office, Linn Meyers at G Fine Art, and James Huckenpahler & David Byrne at Hemphill. The openings are from 6pm-8pm.

Also catch Nicholas Khan & Richard Selesnick at Irvine Contemporary (till 8PM) and Lori Nix & Dane Picard at Randall Scott (till 7:30PM).

Trinity College

I am honored to announce that some of my Pictish Nation drawings are now part of the permanent collection of The University of Dublin's Trinity College in Ireland.

Below is "Minotaur Waiting for Theseus" my most recent drawing. It's about 17" x 14." Anyone interested in acquiring it, send me an email and I'll email you back details Sold!

Minotaur Waiting for Theseus
By F. Lennox Campello
circa 2007 - Charcoal and Conte on Paper

David Hickey on Selling Out

"The question of how to sell without selling out is especially relevant in the contemporary art world and there are few people better qualified to grapple with this thorny topic than Dave Hickey.

Not only is he Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Hickey is also one of America’s best known art and cultural critics, admired for his aversion to academicism and his robust analysis of the effects on art of the rough and tumble of the free market.

Last month he delivered a keynote speech at Frieze: 'Schoolyard art: playing fair without the referee.'"

The Art Newspaper has an edited transcript here or the lecture is available as a podcast here.

Fake Banksys on Ebay

"Unauthorised prints by the anonymous graffiti artist Banksy have been sold on eBay as limited edition, signed works, by employees of the company which publishes and authenticates the artist's works on paper, Pictures on Walls (POW).

These have been stamped with a replica of the POW blindstamp and some of them carry forged signatures.

The prices for the prints have then been raised by an illegal practice known as shill bidding in which sellers or their associates make offers for goods to inflate the price artificially."

Read the story here.

First Fridays in Baltimore too!

Tonight is First Fridays in Fell's Point in Baltimore too... and Lisa Egeli, one of Maryland's master painters has a solo show opening at Diliberto Gallery; make sure to check that show!

Corcoran News

The recent opening of the Ansel Adams exhibition at the Corcoran also saw the unveiling of the Photography Exploration Gallery. The multimedia room includes a camera obscura constructed by two BFA photography students, Natalie Cheung and Chris Gibson; a pictorial timeline of the history of photography designed by Adjunct Graphic Design Professor Antonio Álcala with student involvement; and an interactive digital photo booth that allows visitors to create and display self-portraits on the gallery’s walls. Be sure to stop by and add your photo to the digital album.

Go to jail card

Brit artist Michael Dickinson, who lives in Turkey, will be on trial next week accused of insulting the Turkish Prime Minister's dignity. Dickison was arrested for displaying a poster of his work entitled Good Boy.

It shows Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a dog on a leash made from the American flag.


Read the whole story here.

The Blogger Show opens in NYC



The first part of the Blogger Show opens at Agni Gallery (170 East 2nd Street, New York, NY 10009 412-389-0288) in New York City with an opening reception this coming Saturday, November 3, 6-9PM.

See the work online here.

Banksy Exposed?

So claims the BBC - check out the well-known street artist here.

Looks like Mark Jenkins to me.

Sometimes a good notion show

I am one of those annoying persons who's always complaining about anything and anyone that focuses on just and only on bad news, and yet it seems that I also spend a lot of words trying to discuss bad art news myself.

Feh! My bad.

Good news: Remember the Manon Cleary show at DCAC that I mentioned a while back?

Cleary is a DC artist collected worldwide and yet strangely semi-ignored by the DC area arts press (other than a fantastic multi page article in the CP a couple of years ago that seems to be unavailable online).

And her worldwide collectors came through in the DCAC show; all 34 works in the show sold, delivering a rarity for the Greater DC region art world: a sold out show.

Blogger Interrupted

The current issue of Art in America has an interesting roundtable on art blogs by Peter Plagens - It's not available online, but Capps has a good post on it here.

Mental Masturbation

A few years ago, a friend of mine who works with new experimental supercomputers told me about an exercise that they had done with some of the neural networks supercomputers that they were training.

They asked the computer to predict what events from the 20th century would be taught in history classes 5,000 years into the future. They expected a variety of historical points such as WWI, WWII, etc.

According to my friend, only two words came out of the computer's predictive cognition as to what would be the only marker for the 20th century:

Neil Armstrong.

And so...

Jeff Koons, whose collectors include billionaire Eli Broad, and Damien Hirst, whose shark is owned by hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen, failed to draw a vote from museum curators nominating artists who'll be famous in 105 years' time for U.S. magazine ARTnews.

Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Yoko Ono were chosen as some of 2112's renowned artists. ARTnews, now 105 years old, said it surveyed experts as a guide to which contemporary artists would be "embraced" by museums at its 210th anniversary, as part of a look at the art scene of the future.

Read the Bloomberg article by Linda Sandler here.

First Fridays

If you wanna do openings and gallery crawls, first Fridays is one of your key days in Philly and DC.

There are a lot of gallery openings tonight in Philadelphia, a city known for "legendary stinginess toward the arts" according to the Daily News' Tom DiNardo.

Details on the Philly area gallery openings here.

In DC, as usual, the Dupont Circle area galleries have their gallery crawl starting at 8PM. Check out Which Came First? Drawing Conclusions: Kilnformed Glass by Kari Minnick at Hillyer Art Space.

Viral Post

While I was away the WaPo did this viral piece on my good friend, the very talented Judy Jashinsky.

Read it here.