Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), first saw the Johannes Vermeer painting that inspired her novel when she was 19-years-old. Struck by the colors, as well as the expression on said girl’s face, Chevalier stood in front of the painting for hours and bought a poster of it on her way out. It still hangs in her home 30 years later.
Yesterday, Artnet closed its online magazine, which was almost certainly the first and longest-running art publication on the Internet. Walter Robinson had run the periodical for its entire existence, after leaving Art in America, where he served as a writer and editor for years. Below, a few of the responses that have come in from various members of the art world.
This promo for BMW M5, the world’s fastest sedan, utilize slow-motion bullet effects synchronized with Beethoven’s divine 5th Piano Concerto to manifest power and elegance.
Yesterday, Observer Culture Editor Sarah Douglas reported from a talk that Jeff Koons gave about his own work last week at Basel's Beyeler Foundation. Among his topics: biology, breasts, testicles. As many have noted, Mr. Koons is a remarkably eloquent, if bizarre, interpreter of his work. What has been less frequently addressed is his skill at posing with his sculptures. Perhaps…
The very hip artist's collective Still House has joined with the very powerful art collector and adviser Mark Fletcher to present a group show in Manhattan opening next week that marks Still House's first "New York City group exhibition since 2010."
Reblogged from Financial Post | Business:
DUBAI — Dubai has discovered there really are some things money can’t buy.
After a decade of petrodollar-driven success that has established it rapidly as a regional financial, trade, tourism and retail centre, the emirate has hit a speed bump in an unexpected arena — art.
Burgeoning enthusiasm for collecting art convinced many that Dubai was about to become an overnight sensation in the international market, putting a gloss of sophistication on the cultural life of the emirate.
As part of a global effort to school art-world professionals in the recovery of art and other cultural treasures that were looted during the Nazi era, experts from museums, auction houses and government agencies are meeting this week for a six-day conference in Magdeburg, Germany, the Associated Press reports.
Though Chinese officials are still forbidding Ai Weiwei from leaving the country, the artist nevertheless had an action-packed weekend, taking to YouTube to slam government corruption in a new video that was presented at an event in Basel, Switzerland, where the international art world has gathered for the 43rd edition of the Art Basel fair.
Well, this is one way to pay tribute to a beloved pet.
When Orville -- named after Orville Wright -- was sadly struck and killed by a car, owner and visual artist Bart Jansen thought the best way to honour him was to send him aloft like his namesake to hopefully join the birds as a tabby helicopter.
After several test flights filmed with a lousy camera, the latest of which you see here, the Orvillecopter still has trouble keeping altitude, which Jansen says will be fixed by more powerful engines and larger props.
Reblogged from Yale Books Blog: Yale University Press London:
Michael Peppiatt is a world renowned art critic, author and art historian, who has interviewed some of the 20th century's most eminent artists. Here he discusses his new book Interviews with Artists, 1966-2012 (published today), an informal, behind-the-scenes account of his interviews with such figures as Bacon, Dubuffet, Moore, Balthus and Auerbach.
Article by Michael Peppiatt
Crossing the Villa Medici’s grand rooms to meet its equally grand director, Balthus, in summer 1966, I was a million miles from thinking that this encounter would one day be the first in a whole book of interviews with artists.
The world inside a snow globe is usually pretty idyllic -- just pure white snow falling lightly on famous landmarks. Not really an accurate reflection of the environmental toll of mass-produced tourist kitsch. So the artists of the Dorothy collective have produced a limited run of two coal power plant globes, complete with ash-flake "snow." One has already been sold -- but the other can be yours for £2,000, or a little over $3,100.
Just when we'd gotten used to the idea of square watermelons and bonsai kittens comes the latest in plant-life modification: fruit grown in the shape of a juice box.
It's the masterstroke of a recent ad campaign for Brazilian juice company Camp Nectar, thought up by the creative agency AGE Isobar as a way to highlight the fact that the company's juice is all natural.
Reblogged from National Post | News:
JOHANNESBURG -- Two men on Tuesday vandalized a portrait of President Jacob Zuma posing as Vladimir Lenin with his genitals exposed in a Johannesburg gallery, prompting the curator to take down the painting.
The vandalism succeeded where a street protest, a court battle and a pornography probe had so far failed in making the Goodman Gallery remove the painting from an art exhibition about corruption.
Reblogged from The Daily Norm:
The blockbuster show of Tate's annual exhibition calendar, a retrospective to YBA supremo Damien Hirst, has been long anticipated by London's art scene as well as the purveyors of trashy gossip magazines and followers of The Only Way is Essex alike. And such is the pull of Damien Hirst - this isn't highbrow fine art, it's not oil paintings fastidiously executed or sculptures miraculously carved from marble.
Swedish photographer Helena Blomqvist creates dream-like imagery that transports us into the subconscious. She accomplishes this by constructing alternate worlds in her studio. Blomqvist builds models and props, which provide the backdrop for her narratives. Once completed, the models are then photographed, the images digitally edited, and finally the resulting prints complete the illusion of a separate reality.
Reblogged from THE SCIENCE OF PATTERNS:
I went to see the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Tate Modern over the weekend. For those who haven't seen it yet, you must check it out before it ends on the 5th of June! I realised I actually wasn't familiar with the whole spectrum of her themes. Her artworks relating to her obsession with spots are there (including an amazing immersive room where you walk through a narrow dark room filled with mirrors and small hanging multi-coloured lightbulbs...it gives a sense of infinity and claustrophobia all at the same time) as well as a series of "Accumulation Sculptures" (see below the sculptures in white), her early works, collages influenced by her close relationship with the artist Joseph Cornell and her recent paintings.
https://twitter.com/#!/saatchi_gallery/status/203075616164167680
Where: At Lisson Gallery, Milan, Italy
When: until may 25th, 2012
Chinese conceptual artist, architect, activist, antiques collector, and designer ai weiwei's first solo exhibition in italy has opened at lisson gallery in milan. Each work has been developed by the artist in either ceramic or marble, calling upon the traditional techniques typical to either medium.
marble plate' by ai weiwei, 2010…
From Columbia University:
Many strands of Eric Kandel’s life come together in his latest work, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. The 82-year-old University Professor and co-director of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative was born in Vienna, where, as a boy of 8, he witnessed the Nazis march into the Austrian capital.
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