Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

Tracey Emin’s bed, strewn with cigarette butts, discarded condoms and empty booze bottles, was among the top pieces at Christie’s 99.4 million-pound ($170.5 million) postwar and contemporary art sale in London yesterday.

The provocative British artist, 50, sat in the front of the packed salesroom as her 1998 piece, “My Bed,” surged from the opening bid of 650,000 pounds to the final price of 2.5 million pounds, including buyer’s commission. The result smashed her previous auction record of 481,875 pounds and more than doubled the expected high target of 1.2 million pounds.

“Not yours here, Tracey,” auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen said to the artist in jest as he wielded multiple bids from the podium.

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) is currently hosting its inaugural “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” an exhibition that highlights the city’s vast and varied creative communities. The first show to be organized under the leadership of the museum’s new Director Glenn Adamson, “NYC Makers” spotlights the work of 100 artisans, artists, and designers, living and working in New York City. The roster runs the gamut from famous creative figures such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and multimedia artist/singer-songwriter Yoko Ono to furniture designers, fashion designers, and architects.

The goal of the exhibition is to further the museum’s ongoing commitment to craftsmanship across all creative fields, promoting not only makers who exhibit their work in a museum setting, but also those who operate behind the scenes or on a more practical level. Makers featured in the exhibition were nominated by a pool of over 300 New York City-based cultural leaders, including curators, choreographers, academics, and journalists. Finalists were hand-picked by a jury led by Adamson and exhibition curator Jake Yuzna, the museum’s Director of Public Programs, based on their mastery of their respective craft.

The Aspen Art Museum is arguably one of the most anticipated new structures in town.  When it opens later this summer it will be with a days-long celebration of contemporary art, Aspen and of the building itself.  Some say it's the most important building in Aspen in a century, while others call it a monstrosity. Designed by Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban, the space will be public. Aspen Public Radio's Marci Krivonen took a tour.

Museum director Heidi Zuckerman-Jacobson stands on a busy street corner in downtown Aspen. Rising above her is the new four-story Aspen Art Museum still under construction.

"The reason I like to start here is because the City of Aspen was very gracious and allowed us to create a commons around the museum," she says motioning near the front entrance to the building.

In the third iteration of its Platform series, the Parrish Art Museum presents artist Maya Lin, whose ecologically inspired works exist at the intersection of art, architecture, and environmental science. Platform: Maya Lin, opening July 4 and continuing through October 13, 2014, reveals the artist's exploration of how humans experience and impact the landscape. It will be on view during the Parrish Art Museum's annual gala, the Midsummer Party, on July 12, 2014.

Platform: Maya Lin features Lin's Pin River-Sandy (2013), a massive geographical installation depicting the boundaries of Hurricane Sandy's flood plain, composed of thousands of straight pins. Installed on the east wall of the Norman and Liliane Peck/Peter Jay Sharp Foundation Gallery, the work has a span of 12 feet (112 5/8 x 144 x 1 1?2 inches). Lin's three marble sculptures, Arctic Circle (2013), Latitude New York City (2013), and Equator (2014), representing the typographies at each of these positions on the globe, are installed in concentric rings in the center of the gallery floor. Three new, recycled silver works, Accabonac Harbor (Long Island Triptych), 2014, Georgica Pond (Long Island Triptych), 2014, and Mecox Bay (Long Island Triptych), 2014, are particularly relevant to the location of the Museum on Long Island's East End, and are installed on the wall opposite Pin River-Sandy.

Since Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” (1969) sold at Christie’s for $142.4 million in New York last November a rash of paintings by that Irish-born artist have emerged for sale. The auction at Sotheby’s on Monday night, which kicked off the contemporary art sales here, will be remembered for buoyant bidding on a triptych by Bacon from 1964, which brought $45.4 million, well above its $33.6 million high estimate.

Four telephone bidders fought for the painting, “Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground),” which depicts the artist’s lover and was painted at the height of their affair.

The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York—one of artnet News‘s recommended art day trips for New Yorkers) has pushed back the grand opening of its new north wing, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, from December of this year to March 20, 2015.

An email from the museum press representatives cited “this past winter’s record-breaking cold and snow” as being responsible for the delay. With construction on the $64 million project having fallen behind schedule, “this compressed the museum’s installation schedule for the fragile collection of contemporary art in glass.” The rescheduled opening date has been selected “out of an abundance of caution.”

Earlier this year, the Institute of Contemporary Art got disappointing news: It would no longer be in charge of painting the massive Dewey Square wall mural, at the head of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The job would instead go to the more mainstream Museum of Fine Arts.

Jill Medvedow, ICA director, was not pleased. “Really?” she said. “It’s walking distance to the ICA.”

Other Greenway changes, perhaps more universally welcomed, are in the works. On Wednesday the nonprofit funder ArtPlace will announce a $250,000 public art grant for the Greenway, a 15-acre network of parks in downtown Boston. That follows by just a few days the announcement of plans for a $1 million public art expansion that will include the installation next year of a huge, billowing fabric work meant to hover over the park, by Brookline-based artist Janet Echelman. The Greenway is even hiring its own art curator.

The last American retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons, the perma-smiling master of high art and low, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in the summer of 2008. A week before the show closed, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It was easy to imagine then, as the US braced for its worst economic crisis in 80 years, that we might never see another Koons retrospective – the costs could never be met, and the American public would surely lose its taste for easy pleasures with giant price tags.

But while the US went bust, the US art market has boomed to even bubblier heights than in the 1980s, when Koons was the poster child for art-world excess. His reputation has skyrocketed; his prices, too. Now he arrives, flashbulbs trailing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where a 35-year retrospective takes up nearly every room in the joint.

The French multinational luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH Group, announced that the long-awaited Fondation Louis Vuitton Pour la Création (or the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation) will open on October 27 in Paris. The Foundation will be housed in a building commissioned by LVMH’s chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bernard Arnault, and designed by the Canadian-American architect, Frank Gehry. The €100 million building, which resembles a cloud of glass, is located in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne district.

The 126,000-square-foot structure features 11 exhibition galleries that will house the modern and contemporary art collection of the LVMH Group, which includes works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons, as well as masterpieces from Arnault’s personal holdings. The Foundation, which promotes contemporary artistic creation both in France and internationally, will also host temporary exhibitions, artist commissions, multi-disciplinary performances, and events.