Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

 British collector Charles Saatchi will sell Tracey Emin’s iconic readymade, “My Bed,” on July 1 at Christie’s. The work, which is quite literally the artist’s unmade bed -- complete with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, and discarded undergarments -- carries a pre-sale estimate of £800,000 to £1.2 million, which many people feel is too low considering the piece’s storied past.

Emin was a founding member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in the late 1980s and favored everyday materials, shock tactics, and wild-living. Created in 1998 following a particularly low period in Emin’s life, “My Bed” earned a Turner Prize nomination in 1999, which sparked outrage among the art world. A year later, Saatchi purchased “My Bed” from Emin’s New York dealer, David Maupin, for £150,000, a hefty price tag at the time. 

This fall, Christie’s Education, the academic arm of the well-known auction house, will offer a certificate course titled Collecting Contemporary Art at its facility in New York. Divided into seven evening sessions, the course will explore what drives the current trends in the contemporary art market. According to Christie’s, the course is ideal for art enthusiasts or collectors at all levels who are interested in learning more about art from the late 1980s to the present, as well as artistic strategies, collecting practices, the market, and the social and institutional networks that support the art.

The contemporary art market has become increasingly robust in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this month, Christie’s postwar and contemporary art sale netted $745 million, making it the most expensive auction in art market history. Prices for works by contemporary masters such as Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, and Jean-Michel Basquiat continue to climb as there is no shortage of hungry buyers with millions of dollars at their disposal. Christie’s Education seeks to make sense of the mind-bogglingly lucrative market through classes like “Defining Contemporary Art,” “Learning to Look,” and “Global Markets.”

The battle being waged between the Museum of Contemporary Art’s board and the city of North Miami over the institution’s future has taken a new twist.

The museum’s board of trustees — which has said it wants to move the museum’s collection to Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art — said Wednesday it would no longer consider the city of North Miami’s designee for new museum director.

“The Board provided the candidate, Mr. Babacar M’Bow, with a two-week window to participate in a standard background check, which is a required step in evaluating the credentials of candidates for the position,” the museum’s board said in a statement Wednesday. “Despite multiple notifications, Mr. M’Bow did not comply with the background check and is therefore no longer under consideration for the position. The board is disappointed that Mr. M’Bow chose not to take part in the evaluation process.

When Marina Abramović called the Serpentine Gallery’s co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist to explain the idea for her forthcoming London performance, she said: “This is what I want to do: nothing … there’s nothing. There’s no work, just me, and the public is my live material, and that’s the most radical, the most pure I can do.”

Entitled 512 Hours, the piece will involve the veteran performance artist being present in the gallery six days a week from 10am to 6pm for the duration of the exhibition. Nothing else will be exhibited, although the performance will also feature props and furniture.

When Robert Blumenthal decided to open his first gallery, he didn’t consider Chelsea, where most of his local contemporary-art peers operate.

He thought about the Lower East Side, where several younger art dealers have found lower rents, but in February, he opted for a third-floor location with distinctly un-Chelsea crown molding at 1045 Madison Ave., near 79th Street.

“The Upper East Side is so unhip, it’s hip,” said Mr. Blumenthal, 33 years old. “Chelsea is a generation before me.”

On Thursday, May 22, “Tara Donovan: Untitled” opened at Pace Gallery’s pop-up in Menlo Park, California. It will be the final exhibition held at the Gallery’s temporary West Coast location. Prior to the Tara Donovan show, Pace presented an exhibition of stabiles, bronzes, standing and hanging mobiles, colorful gouaches, and wearable jewelry by Alexander Calder. Pace, which specializes in contemporary art, has permanent spaces in New York, London, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

“Untitled” surveys work by the Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan from 2000 to the present. Donovan is best known for her large-scale installations and sculptures made from manufactured materials, such as Scotch tape, Styrofoam cups, paper plates, toothpicks, and plastic drinking straws. Donovan creates her process-driven works by repeatedly layering a single material until an everyday object is transformed into a complex, otherworldly work of art. Donovan also plays with perceptual phenomenon through light and scale, using a variety of materials and three-dimensional forms to create captivating optical effects.

The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has received a gift of six original never-before-exhibited Andy Warhol prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

All with Warhol’s recognizable style and focus, the prints represent a period of the artist’s work from the late 1970s to mid-1980s, not long before the Warhol’s death in 1987 at the age of 58. The prints depict a range of subjects, from fashionable portraits to popular culture, and include such iconic images as Warhol’s portrait of friend and fellow artist Joseph Beuys and his striking representation of Lakota chief Sitting Bull.

Art Dubai announced today that next year’s edition will take place from March 18 to 21. The fair’s dates will be particularly convenient for crowded art world calendars, as it will coincide with both the Sharjah Biennial and Design Days Dubai. The biennial in Sharjah, fifteen minutes away from Dubai by car, has become one of the foremost events at which to see art specifically from the Gulf regions.

For the ninth edition, Art Dubai’s extensive program of artists’ projects, including a live radio station and cinema, will continue. This includes the five-day Global Art Forum, which will feature 40 speakers; an exhibition of work by winners of the Abraaj Group Art Prize; and Campus Art Dubai, a year-round art school for artists and curators based in the UAE.

On Thursday, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will welcome its newest exhibit.

Robert Morris’ Glass Labyrinth sits on the south lawn of the museum, in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Garden.

Morris in an internationally recognized artist who is from the Kansas City area. The Nelson-Atkins Museum has wanted to include one of his pieces in its collection for many years.

“I think we were all thinking something indoors, but this is the perfect way to celebrate him and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park,” said Jan Schall, Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The Orange County Museum of Art has been without a director since the end of 2013, leading many in the local art world to speculate about the executive search being conducted by museum leaders.

On Wednesday, the Newport Beach museum announced that it has named Todd DeShields Smith as its new chief executive and director. Smith has served as executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida for the last six years.

Smith will begin his term at OCMA on Aug. 4. He succeeds Dennis Szakacs, who served as the director and CEO of the museum for 10 years before stepping down in 2013.