William Wegman "About Four Thirty" and "The Architect, photo: 20 x 200
Art fairs aren’t the only way to move quantities of art.
Dealer and technology impresario Jen Bekman, whose 20 x 200 website markets affordable prints, sold over $100,000 worth of work by William Wegman on Feb. 3. Today she sold 220 prints by artist William Powhida–in two hours.
Bekman has recently begun collaborating with more established artists on her virtual gallery. The website, founded in 2007, is best known for marketing images by young and mid-career names. (Bekman also…
Giacometti’s slinky ‘Walking Man I’ dominated the Wall Street Journal’s front page after selling for 65 million pounds or $104.3 million at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3, becoming the priciest artwork sold at auction.
Wall Street Journal devotes page one to Giacometti's record busting "Walking Man I" photo: Lindsay Pollock
Artist Sterling Ruby at Pace Wildstein's "2Traps," on opening night. photo: Lindsay Pollock
On Thursday night Sterling Ruby’s first show with dealer Pace Wildenstein opened on West 22nd Street. The LA based artist’s “2Traps” comprises a pair of ominous metal sculptures. One is a modified metal bus, outfitted with woofers and solitary confinement cages. The second piece, “Pig Pen,” is made from metal security doors of a type found in the roughest of neighborhoods.
Collectors Michael Ovitz and Adam Lindemann, architect David Adjaye and Pace artists Chuck Close, Tara Donovan and Tim Eitel…
Whitney banner heralding upcoming Biennial, photo: Lindsay Pollock
The Whitney Museum invited a group of reporters for a breakfast this week with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Francesco Bonami, curators of the upcoming Feb. 25-March 30 Biennial, innocuously titled “2010.”
The show will be the 75th biennial or annual presented by the museum since 1932, two years after its founding. There is no particular theme this year, but curator Bonami predicts it will be “less imperial, less heroic and less macho.”
Artists at Whitney Biennial breakfast, seated in front of
…
Hirst's "The Golden Jubilee (Green)" 2008, oil on canvas, via Gagosian
Damien Hirst’s recession priced $300,000 photo-realist paintings of giant gemstones are selling swiftly at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue outpost.
Publicity photograph of actual "Golden Jubilee" diamond, owned by Thailand
The series, titled The Golden Jubilee, doesn’t have the most original composition. Like Warhol’s soup cans, Hirst has appropriated the title and aesthetic from a famous gemstone, a 545 carat caramel-hued diamond, reported to be the largest facet cut diamond in the world. The namesake stone is part of…
Damien Hirst Christmas card, painterly flourishes by Ashely Bickerton
You wouldn’t expect Damien Hirst to send out a conventional holiday card and he didn’t disappoint. Hirst teamed up with Bali-based artist Ashely Bickerton to create a tropical fantasy.
The card depicts Hirst, companion Maia Norman, and their children Connor, Cassius and Cyrus, beaming madly. Bickerton dolled up the Hirst family with face paint and they are decked out in Bickerton’s signature style– a la Gilligan’s Island on acid.
For the record, I did not receive the Hirst card personally, but a well-connected reader kindly sent this image along.
Alfred Taubman at Sirio's in Las Vegas
The opening of Las Vegas’ new $9 billion City Center was heralded with a Wednesday night bash. The evening featured bikini-clad Tiger Woods-style showgirls, fireworks, a new Elvis-inspired Cirque du Soleil show, former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and the unveiling of a corporate art collection including a mesmerizing Jenny Holzer in the nightclub valet area. The evening marked the end of an era of big-money development on the Vegas strip.
Henry Moore's "Reclining Connected Forms" at City Center
Gabriel Orozco, right, in an interview during MoMA's press preview
The press preview for the 47-year-old artist’s MoMA retrospective last week was crowded with the usual NY art reporters, plus a healthy contingent of Mexican journalists wielding video cameras and tape recorders, eager to capture a personal word.
The exhibit contains Orozco’s best-known objects, including a spliced Citroen, a checkerboard skull and an empty shoebox.
Some bewitch and others are more appealing in concept than face-to-face. My favorite was the back room, containing a table laid out with organic clay forms, like…
AXA lounge, photo credit: Robin Hill via AXA
There isn’t much free stuff handed out at Art Basel Miami Beach.
In an exception to this rule, AXA Art, the insurance company, has donated its artist-designed Art Basel lounge to the Miami Art Museum, according to Christiane Fischer, President and CEO of AXA North America. The lounge was used during the Dec. 2009 fair for entertaining clients and guests.
AXA’s lounge, consisting of laser-cut cardboard furniture, pixilated walls, video loops and cellular designs, was created by four artists from…
Pinchuk prize launch: from left Andreas Gursky, Eckard Schneider, Jeff Koons
Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk gathered a heady roster of supporters last night at the Gramercy Park Hotel to launch his $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize, an international competition open to artists under 35 years old.
Pinchuk, who has amassed an estimated $2.6 billion steel pipe fortune, used his financial muscle and cultural ambition to assemble a mostly male blue-chip board for the prize, including the Guggenheim’s Richard Armstrong and collector Eli Broad, who both attended last night’s event,…
