2008 Lucelia Artist Award Nominees
The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced a few days ago the nominees for the museum's 2008 Lucelia Artist Award.
The 15 nominees are Doug Aitken, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Slater Bradley, Matthew Buckingham, Mark Dion, Keith Edmier, Spencer Finch, Harrell Fletcher, Mark Grotjahn, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard, Suzanne McClelland, Wangechi Mutu and Dana Schutz.
Nominated artists work in a diverse range of media including film, installation, mixed media, painting, photography, sculpture and video.
The one artist in this list that continues to be a question mark for me is Dana Schutz.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Artsy Raincoats
Ahhh... the glamorous life of an art dealer...
Earlier this year we peddling art at a New York art fair, and when the fair ended one day, at the end of the day all the gallerists marched out as the building closed.
Except that it was raining out like a Florida rain; buckets and buckets of water. The sidewalks were like rivers, with at least a couple of inches of running, dirty New York City sidewalk water covering shoes and sandals.
You don't want your feet soaked in NYC sidewalk dirty water.
So everyone had to wait until the monsoon ended, and slowed down to a trickle. Since we didn't have umbrellas or raincoats, a little tape and bubbling wrap and voila!
Art on Trial
Souheil Chemaly turns us all onto Art on Trial.
Developed in part to increase public awareness of such restrictions, Art on Trial is a virtual exhibit of artworks that were once at the center of actual courtroom battles.
Check it out here.
The collector's mind
Edward Sozanski, the Philly Inky's art critic has an interesting article titled Art: What motivates big collectors to do what they do?
The Cone sisters of Baltimore, Claribel and Etta, might have seemed eccentric to some of their contemporaries, not only because they continued to dress like staid and proper Victorians well into the 20th century but also because they collected avant-garde art.Read the article here.
Anyone who has seen the Matisse-rich Cone collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art will realize that the sisters - who otherwise lived the most conventional of spinster lives - were more aesthetically adventurous than 99 percent of Americans who witnessed the birth of the modern world.
Like Albert C. Barnes, a contemporary of younger sister Etta, they enthusiastically patronized the two most prominent European modernists, Picasso and Matisse, along with other progressive artists such as Cezanne and Gauguin.
Mainly, though, they concentrated on Matisse. Of the approximately 3,000 objects in the Cone collection in Baltimore, about 500 are by him, the largest group of Matisse works anywhere.
Even since I first visited the collection years ago, I've wondered how and why two Victorian spinsters from a wealthy but nonartistic mercantile family made such an astonishing conceptual leap. The question of what ignites such a passion for collecting art never fails to fascinate.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
China detains American artist
An American artist who planned to use laser beams to flash "free Tibet" on buildings in downtown Beijing was detained Tuesday, according to a colleague and a pro-Tibet group.Read the AP story here.
James Powderly, co-founder of Graffiti Research Lab in New York, was detained before dawn as he prepared to use a handheld green laser to project messages on prominent structures in Beijing, according to Students for a Free Tibet.
Powderly's colleague, Nathan Dorjee, said in New York that he received a text message from the artist which said he had been detained around 3 a.m. by police.
Officials at Beijing's Municipal Publicity Security Bureau did not answer phone calls Tuesday night. His whereabouts remained unknown, the group said.
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