What is it with artists and Kate Moss? Everyone from Lucian Freud and Marc Quinn to Mr. Brainwash has taken a crack at portraying the supermodel, and now the man responsible for the first-ever holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (pictured), Chris Levine, has teamed with makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury to tackle the beloved blonde muse. (more…)
The percussion-loving, azure-skinned, neo-mime performance troupe the Blue Man Group has launched an art competition in which it is soliciting original works by established and emerging artists for a new “semi-permanent” outdoor art space at the Briar Street Theatre, the show’s longtime Chicago venue. Interested artists should note, however, that while their works must be inspired by the Blue Man Group, they may not actually feature a Blue Man. (more…)
While certain artists’ work lends itself quite readily to being turned into a skateboard deck — say, for instance, that of Keith Haring, or even Damien Hirst — conceptual photographer, video, and performance artist Laurel Nakadate doesn’t seem like one whose work is especially compatible with the format. At least not at first, but her new limited-edition, hand-painted decks for Artware Editions and Woodpoint & Kingsland, now available for a cool $3,000, actually ain’t bad. (more…)
Though signs of affection weren’t being traded nearly as freely as the art during Frieze Week, we’ve nonetheless emerged from the marathon of fairs with one Art World Missed Connection spanning both the giant Frieze New York tent and NADA New York, plus another item from the ever-reliable Metropolitan Museum. Let’s begin on Randall’s Island, where a NADA gallerist had his first encounter with a gent who later visited his booth, if you know what we mean — actually, he just visited his booth. (more…)
The most interesting piece of information in last week’s New York magazine profile of Jeff Koons by Carl Swanson is this gem more than a dozen paragraphs into the piece: “His balloon-twisting consultant, an L.A. balloon artist named Buster Balloon, told me it took him 85 versions using a 60-inch-long balloon to get [the model for the new Koons sculpture "Balloon Venus"] right; Koons then cat-scanned the actual balloon sculpture, to make sure he got the measurements exactly.” Who is Buster Balloon, you ask? (more…)
The staff at the Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment complex, a building housing artists’ studios, artisans, and independent businesses in Hunstville, Alabama, is good at memes. They got some 30 of their more than 100 artists to contribute works to “The Grumpy Cat Art Project,” an exhibition and online auction whose proceeds will benefit the artists and go toward the construction of a new children’s playground, and whose uniting motif is the forever frumpy feline Grumpy Cat. (more…)
We sincerely hope that Frieze Week sends a jolt directly to the heart of the New York art community, because today marks the third single-item edition of Art World Missed Connections in a row, which is a seriously worrisome state of affairs. That said, today’s solitary post seems to implicate workers at two 26th Street galleries — but which ones?! — which should help spice up your next Chelsea gallery day. (more…)
A strange brand of street art is popping up all around the Pratt Institute’s sculpture park where works by Mark Di Suvero, Robert Indiana and Martha Walker dot the 25-acre Brooklyn campus — someone is defacing art placards by correcting their typos. A short video by Jay Dockendorf at The New York Times explores the phenomenon of the “vigilante copy editor” who started making his mark on New York City’s largest outdoor sculpture park last September. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, Dockendorf takes to the park pointing out examples of the vandalism: the placards with erroneous commas or whole words crossed out, or suffixes added to verbs. Dockendorf talks to the sculpture park’s main curator, David Weinrib, who provides some illuminating details, if not about the vandal at least as to the origin of the typos. And perhaps most interestingly, this is not the first instance of vigilante copy-editing. (more…)
An 18th century porcelain sculpture of a monkey consuming snuff (see above) hit the auction block on Wednesday night in London during Sotheby’s sale of what it described as “the greatest group of 18th Century Meissen animals and birds in private hands” — those of Sir Gawaine and Lady Baillie, to be exact — and doubled its high estimate, selling for £800,000 ($1.24 million). (more…)
Just days before it was due to go on view at Queen Elizabeth II’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, puzzle master Dave Evans’s chef d’oeuvre, a 40,000-piece jigsaw puzzle celebrating the queen’s Diamond Jubilee crashed to his studio’s floor (see video below), instantly undoing more than 200 hours of work. (more…)
