The legendary artist, filmmaker, beat poet, and Lower East Side institution Taylor Mead passed away yesterday after a stroke. Mead had recently relocated to Colorado after leaving his rent-stabilized Ludlow Street apartment in April due to a conflict with the property’s landlord over renovations. He was 88. (To read J. Hoberman’s obituary of Taylor Mead, click here.) (more…)
William Wilson, a former art critic for the Los Angeles Times, died Saturday, the LA Times reports. He was 78, had had a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. Wilson first began writing criticism for the LA Times in 1965, while still a student at UCLA — he first got a degree in design and later pursued a graduate degree there in art history. In 1978, he joined the staff when the critic at the time, Henry Seldis, died. Wilson stayed on until 1999 when he departed to write a book about the history of art in LA. and continued to contribute to the newspaper until 2001. (more…)
An Andy Warhol flower painting recently sold for $5.8 million at auction, but for the same price a collector could have snapped up a much rarer piece of the Pop artist’s legacy: The townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue that served as his home and studio during his most important years, between 1959 and 1974. Curbed reports that the four-bedroom home has hit the market for $5.795 million, a substantial increase from the $3.55 million its seller paid for it in 2011 — although firmly in keeping with the appreciation of Warhol’s work in the art market. (more…)
The Brillo boxes stacked near the entrance of Pier 94 at the Armory Show — up for grabs to whomever can get to them first — turned out to cause quite the kerfluffle, according to Andy Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner, who commissioned the boxes from artist Charles Lutz (pictured signing one of his works at the bottom of this post). (more…)
On March 19 a complete set of Andy Warhol’s ten-piece “Endangered Species” print series from 1983 will hit the auction block as part of Sotheby’s London’s sale of Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Prints, where they’re expected to fetch between £250,000 and £300,000 ($378,000-$453,750), BBC News reports. The last time a full set of the series came up for auction — at Sotheby’s New York in November of last year — it went for $482,500. (more…)
An appeals court greenlighted Ryan O’Neal’s $1 million defamation lawsuit against Craig Nevius, a documentarian who told “Good Morning America” that the actor had stolen an Andy Warhol painting of Farrah Fawcett — a picture that is the subject of a separate lawsuit between O’Neal, Fawcett’s ex-husband, and the University of Texas. CBS reported yesterday that a split panel of justices ruled that “The inferences reasonably drawn from the evidence here would support a jury’s finding that Nevius harbored strong ill-feelings toward O’Neal.”
The new search engine Giphy, which launched earlier this month, promises to let visitors search among the best animated GIFs the internet has to offer, which is a bold claim by any measure — especially in light of the file format’s many previous cross-pollinations with art history. While its cat GIF bonafides are indisputable (see above), we set out to discover its best animated art images, and came up with these eight masterpieces. (more…)
The Armory Show has released the lineup for its 2013 “Focus” section, and it includes a big fish: Gagosian Gallery. The international megabusiness will participate in the Armory Show for the first time with a booth devoted to Andy Warhol. It will be a fitting anchor for the section, which focuses on the United States in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show’s namesake exhibition. (more…)
Larry Gagosian’s power might be waning (maybe), but the mystery surrounding the infamously press-shy dealer is as appealing as ever — particularly as he fights numerous of legal battles and faces almost a full stable of defecting artists. Eric Konigsburg published a lengthy, in-depth look into the life and career of the art world’s most dominant dealer in New York Magazine this weekend, which will appear in the January 28 print issue. (more…)
This fall New York art critics barred no holds in their collective, tag team-like takedown of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” an examination of the Pop art patriarch’s influence on contemporaneous and successive generations of artists, from Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince to Ryan Trecartin and Cory Arcangel — New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz, for instance, noted its “shallow, pandering fecklessness” and deemed it a “pseudo-extravaganza.” Their point was taken, and Andy Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner will re-calibrate the exhibition before it opens in Pittsburgh next month. (more…)
