Ceramics

• All this week, the Art Market Monitor has been churning out doomsday scenarios for the collectoratti. The Italian art market is dying, and “Sadly, The Picasso Ceramics Market Isn’t For the Entry-Level Collector Anymore.” [The Art Market Monitor]
• This week at artnet Paddy Johnson interviews Nicholas O’Brien, a co-curator of the exhibition The New Romantics, currently on view at Eyebeam. [artnet news]
• More horrific news of bodies piling up in Chicago, aka, Chiraq. [The Daily Beast]
• The broken down World’s Fair towers in Flushing Meadows now have National Treasure status. There’s even talk of fixing them up! [New York Times]
• New York Magazine features a whole bunch of Internet celebrities, and that’s gotta be a boon for their site. We only knew a couple of them, but Eckhaus Latta got a shoutout from Mike the Ruler. [New York Magazine]
• 100 new emojis on Vine. The only way you can see any of them is to pause the video. Nicely done! [Vine]
• Looks like Paddle8 is doing well.

Alex Gilkes of @Paddle8 made winning $900k bid 4 Koons’ Fabergé egg wearing a 1966 @GirardPerregaux rose gold chrono. pic.twitter.com/KjXZ4p7ccz

— Jim Shi (@jimshi809) April 23, 2014

• Peter Schjeldahl, with his tender prose and passionate research, is hard to leave, but it’s finally time to walk away. Enough with the MoMA and Guggenheim retrospectives! [The New Yorker]
• For whatever reason, Roberta Smith ended up reviewing James Franco’s exhibition at Pace. She’s written about the actor-artist a lot. Thankfully, with this exhibition, she shows no mercy. Franco, she writes, seems informed by “confused desperation” and an “entitled narcissism.” She ends her piece with a death knell: “It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him, while also wishing that someone or something would make him stop.” This is what we’ve all been thinking—that he needs to stop—and now she should never write about him again! [The New York Times]
• Start-ups beware of the Red Herring Award. The company informs nominees of their opportunity and then charges them $3,820 for the privilege. This article was written in 2013, but as the awards are coming up again, it seemed a good time to issue the reminder that this resembles a scheme. [TechCrunch]
• Judy Chicago is celebrating her 75th birthday with an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. During the press preview, she tells Village Voice reporter Lilly Lampe about her first meeting with critic Harold Rosenberg. “She brought her slides; he brought a hard-on.”  [The Village Voice]
• A quiz to end all Buzzfeed quizzes: the New Inquiry’s darkly sarcastic “What briefcase full of money are you?” [New Inquiry]