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
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Rendering of Nouvel's tower, via The Architect's Newspaper
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is enriching its neighbor, the starchy University Club, to the tune of $14.5 million for 136,000 square feet in air rights, as part of a development deal to build a new glassy Jean Nouvel condo and hotel on West 53rd Street. This equals a $20 admission charge from 725,000 museum visitors.
MoMA paid out $11 million in December, 2009, according to a Jan. 15 letter sent to University Club members from the club’s president, George E. Pine.…
Picasso's 'The Actor' via Bloomberg News
Link to Bloomberg News story here.
By Lindsay Pollock
Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) — A Picasso painting, worth more than $130 million by some estimates, was gouged on Friday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when a museumgoer fell into the artwork, leaving a six-inch gash.
The 1904-1905 painting, The Actor, depicting a graceful, gaunt male figure in a dusty pink costume on stage, was hung in a second-floor gallery among a display of early Picasso artworks.
An unidentified woman attending a museum class…
Eli Broad, via Forbes
A new repository for information on American collectors, dealers and other market makers is now available courtesy of The Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting in America, which has launched an online database.
The Archives Directory currently includes 1500 names, including information on Pop collectors Ethel and Robert Scull, financier David Rockefeller, Old Master merchants Duveen Brothers, and Eli Broad.
The site is an ongoing project, according to manager Samantha Deutch, who is preparing the next tranche of 1500 names.
Currently missing are many contemporary…
Michael Brand, via Apollo
Here is an email message circulated internally yesterday from Getty Director Michael Brand announcing his departure. He gives no indication why he is leaving the post:
Dear Getty Museum Staff:
For those of you unable to attend this morning’s Museum all-staff meeting, I wanted to write to you to let you know that after four greatly rewarding years as Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, I am stepping down as of January 29.
I was brought to the Getty in 2005 to provide a strategic vision and strong leadership that…
Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) continues its make-over, tapping three wealthy collectors for the board. The museum added seven other new trustees in 2009, in a wake of a financial mess that imperiled the museum’s future. Board members commit $75,000 in annual dues.
Longtime collector Peter M. Brant, chairman of art publisher Brant publications and White Birch Paper Company, recently founded The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, where art can be viewed by appointment. He produced art films Basquiat, Pollock and the 2006 PBS’s Andy Warhol: A Documentary.
Steven T. Mnuchin is chairman…
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…
Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have announced the list of artists for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. The 75th edition runs Feb. 25-May 30. Eleven of the 55 artists have appeared in previous biennials. (Watch a video of the curators reading the list of artists here).
THE LIST
David Adamo
Richard Aldrich
Michael Asher
Tauba Auerbach
Nina Berman
Huma Bhabha
Josh Brand
The Bruce High Quality Foundation
James Casebere
Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher
Dawn Clements
…
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,…
