The Manchester Art Gallery reopens to the public on Saturday after more than four years of building work. The gallery has been almost doubled in size, with the addition of a new extension, and there's a swanky glass atrium connecting the old art gallery to the new. The Guardian's Adrian Searle wonders, though, What lies behind the contemporary obsession with remaking galleries into architectural baubles?
At this year's Cannes International Film Festival, the fifty-fifth, the violence and confusion that afflicts societies from Asia to the Americas have found their way onto the screen. Filmmakers from different backgrounds, working in wildly eclectic styles, use the medium to explore, with varying degrees of success, histories of poverty, war, communal hatred, and the way these histories continue to shadow contemporary daily life.
The cream of the Queen's collection of art and royal artifacts, consisting of 450 works acquired over a period of 500 years, was unveiled on Friday, before going on public show in Buckingham Palace's gallery.
Eyestorm.com, an online art gallery that was established to sell exclusive artwork to the Internet masses, has been declared insolvent and is now itself for sale. David A. Ross, who abruptly left his post as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and became Eyestorm's chairman last October, confirmed in an e-mail message Thursday that the company, based in London, was being liquidated.
The contemporary-art market was in a triumphant mood as it danced on the graves of Wall Street, new technology, and the travel business in a flamboyant display of wealth spread across three successive evenings of auctions. Paradoxically, the prices being commanded in the salesrooms are coming to exceed, by a fair margin, what dealers are able to ask and obtain in their galleries, and several notable consignments were supplied by the trade hoping to take advantage of that impulsive bid.
Despite many public commissions and exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, the voluble and often funny Mierle Laderman Ukeles remains best known for her singular role as the New York City Department of Sanitation's first and only “artist-in-residence.” She assumed this unsalaried position in the early 1980's, but she actually earned it while doing a conceptual piece called Touch Sanitation, for which she spent eleven months crisscrossing the city day and night to shake hands with every one of its 8,500 sanitation workers, telling each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”
For years Stéphane Breitwieser, a youthful-looking Frenchman, traveled through Europe working as a waiter and in his off hours visited out-of-the-way museums where he looked for opportunities to walk off with what he liked. But when he was arrested last November in Switzerland, his mother destroyed $1.4 billion worth of fine art, including works by Brueghel, Watteau, and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
Contemporary art has been surprisingly healthy at all three major sales this week, with records set for established blue-chip names as well as emerging artists. Last night, however, paintings by Gerhard Richter, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art has drawn more than 300,000 visitors since it opened in February, brought the two highest prices. After that, the evening belonged to Andy Warhol.
Collectors sniffed at what some consider icons of modern art—Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel and snow shovel, his urinal and bottle rack—yet works by contemporary stars like Donald Judd and Edward Ruscha scored record prices on Monday night at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg.
Fed up with the fact that most art in Cuba is now sold to tourists, a group of artists have taken to the road with their work painted on their cars.
Though the sculpture failed to sell last week, on Monday a Sydney collector bought Large Slow Form, a 1968 bronze abstract sculpture by famed British sculptor Henry Moore for $490,000, an Australian record for a work offered at auction.
The resounding success of the first TriBeCa Film Festival has proved that, as one of its founders, Martin Scorsese, said in his opening address at the award ceremony on Sunday, “a major film festival, pulled together in four months” can be made to happen.