Christie’s is making big moves to beef up its private sales department. Amy Cappellazzo, the house’s highly-regarded chairman of post-war and contemporary art development, will take on an expanded role in its private sales sector, while former Gagosian director John Good will join the team as senior vice president of private sales, Christie’s announced today. Continue Reading
Christie’s Pumps Up Private Sales Sector With Amy Cappellazzo and John Good
May 16, 2012, 12:34 pm
ArtPad SF Completes a Trio of Art Fairs in San Francisco
May 16, 2012, 11:26 am
San Francisco is currently awash in art fairs. While the San Francisco Fine Art Fair and artMRKT San Francisco are battling it out, ArtPad SF is returning to the Phoenix Hotel for its second year in business. The question of whether the city can support three art fairs on the same weekend was answered last year with a resounding yes — California art blog SquareCylinder notes that the fairs drew a grand total of 12-15,000 visitors.
Watch “A Brief History of John Baldessari,” Narrated by Tom Waits
May 16, 2012, 9:04 am
Yesterday the New York-based filmmaking duo of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (known collectively as Supermarché) uploaded their short documentary “A Brief History of John Baldessari” — which premiered last year at LACMA — to YouTube. The video, which features snippets of the conceptual art pioneer speaking in his L.A. studio interspersed with raspy commentary from fellow National City, California native Tom Waits, and is full of fun Baldessari factoids. Continue Reading
Bill Powers Quizzed Aspiring Astronauts at Opening for Tom Sachs Mars Mission Last Night
May 16, 2012, 8:01 am
Last night during the opening for Tom Sachs’s “Space Program: Mars” at the Park Avenue Armory, would-be crew members began the process of joining the NASA-suited crew of the mission by taking a competency or “Indoctrination” test. And though success rates fluctuated in proportion to the supply of the evening’s signature cocktail, Astronaut Sunrise, one test administrator seemed especially strict, perhaps owing to his experience as a judge on “Work of Art.” Continue Reading
The Getty Museum Explains How it Earthquake-Proofed Its Sculpture Collection
May 15, 2012, 2:16 pm
Ever wonder how museums in seismically shaky sectors secure their sculptures? You don’t!? No matter; Los Angeles’s Getty Museum has produced a surprisingly interesting video about the high-tech pedestals it has designed — and shared with museums in similarly earthquake-prone areas — and how they keep sculptures from toppling or crumbling during quakes. Continue Reading
“Desperate Artwives” Aims to Show That Women Artists Can Balance Work and Family
May 15, 2012, 1:16 pm
Delusional Downtown Divas, eat your heart out. There’s a new female art collective in town, and its name is Desperate Artwives. The group is comprised of artists returning to work after motherhood, and they come from all over the world. Drawn together via Twitter and Facebook, the collective will have its first exhibition at Vibe Gallery in London, opening May 18. Continue Reading
Rob Pruitt’s “Andy Monument” Sticking Around Until the End of the Summer
May 15, 2012, 1:14 pm
When it was unveiled on March 30, 2011, Rob Pruitt’s chrome statue of the Godfather of Pop, Andy Warhol, was scheduled to be removed from the corner of 17th Street and Broadway — outside one of the former locations of Warhol’s Factory studio — on October 2 of that year. But the Public Art Fund, which commissioned “The Andy Monument,” extended it to May 13, 2012, when the sculpture proved to be immensely popular. Now, that popularity has earned Pruitt’s monument another 15 minutes of fame. Continue Reading
Gagosian Gallery Takes Out a Billboard to Promote Richard Avedon Exhibition
May 15, 2012, 12:36 pm
A full page ad in Artforum costs approximately $4,200. But when you’re the largest, most profitable gallery in the world, you can afford to do something a little bigger to promote your latest exhibition. So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when we spotted a massive billboard advertising Gagosian’s exhibition “Richard Avedon: Murals & Portraits” overlooking Chelsea’s High Line Park this weekend. Continue Reading
New Doc Examines the Life and Death of Artist Mark Lombardi, Drawer of Sinister Infographics
May 15, 2012, 12:20 pm
The New York-born, Brooklyn-based artist Mark Lombardi died in 2000 at age 48 of an apparent suicide, leaving as many nagging questions as his exhaustively researched infographic drawings sought to answer. Eighteen months after his death, the Whitney Museum received a call from a purported FBI agent, who wanted to examine a Lombardi drawing in the institution’s collections: One charting the connections between president George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. These and other strange developments are the focus of a new documentary by German director Mareike Wegener, “Mark Lombardi: Death-defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy.” Continue Reading
Artist Merlin Carpenter Made a Painstaking Copy of the Tate Cafe on the Lower East Side
May 15, 2012, 9:00 am
The Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art is on a roll with its third consecutive exhibition consisting of a large-scale, transporting installation: After Klara Liden’s indoor forest of discarded Christmas trees and Alex Israel’s tacky talk show set, the British artist Merlin Carpenter has created a painstaking replica of the Tate’s Café in the East Broadway gallery. Continue Reading
