- Like a speck of glitter in the eye, Art Basel has come and gone. Nobody can really agree on what was making some work fly off the walls, like Mickalene Thomas’ acrylic and rhinestone paintings. “Galleries bring what they know the market wants,” one dealer told Carol Vogel for The Times. Another says: “Collectors these days are looking for artists that have museum and curatorial support”. Can’t we just agree that people like shiny things? [The New York Times]
- Yes, and those shiny things selling. Kelly Crow and Mary M. Lane discuss big sales with mirrored artworks, but that’s nothing new. The hook might be catchy, but we’ve spotted this art fair trend for the last several years now. [Wall Street Journal, Art F City]
- “Every artist knows how cheap an effect is, and how revolutionary an experience.” Chuck Close on James Turrell’s Roden Crater. This nine-page piece sparked by Turrell’s three-museum show currently on view at LACMA, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Guggenheim is incredibly written, though perhaps not overly critical. One NYTimes commenter complains that Turrell’s aesthetic has moved towards the sci-fi over the years, an observation, I have found to be true. Sci-fi or no, I’d still like him to complete Roden Crader. [The New York Times]
- Thomas Stevenson is running a secret rooftop resort out of Brooklyn. [Gothamist]
- Japanese psychology professor Shigeru Watanabe gives morphine to rats and shows them famous paintings, finding that his subjects could be conditioned to distinguish between Mondrian and Kandinsky. Why aren’t they conducting these studies on prairie dogs? We already know they can distinguish different colors. [Hyperallergic]
- Over the hill child prodigy Autumn de Forest returns with her take on Jasper Johns, Grant Wood, and Andy Warhol. [Huffington Post]
- Karen Rosenberg is happy The Jewish Museum picked up the Jack Goldstein exhibition after it was chopped from MOCA’s programming, but doesn’t like his paintings of meteor showers. [The New York Times]
Tagged as:
art basel,
autumn de forest,
brooklyn,
James Turrell,
shigeru watanabe,
thomas stevenson
Comments on this entry are closed.