Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) announced today its annual Awards for Excellence in the categories of museum Catalogues, Articles/Essays, and Exhibitions. All AAMC members are eligible for nomination. The AAMC Prize Committee and member juror groups determine awards prior to the AAMC’s Annual Conference and Meeting in May. New to this year’s vetting process, the categories of Awards for Exhibitions and Catalogues were subdivided based on the operating budgets of the members’ museums.

"We were impressed by the quality and depth of the nominations,” says Judith Pineiro, Executive Director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, "It is wonderful that our new selection process allowed for celebrating the outstanding work of so many curators.”

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is working with the Park Hyatt luxury brand on a collaboration that will mutually benefit guests and members of both global organizations. The collaboration coincides with MoMA’s Sigmar Polke retrospective, “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010,” which was sponsored by Park Hyatt.

The Hyatt recently purchased “Siberian Meteorites,” an original work by the postwar German artist and it will be displayed at Park Hyatt Chicago later this year. The work will eventually replace Robert Rauschenberg’s “Tropicana/Channel,” which currently hangs in the hotel’s lobby. The Rauschenberg work is on loan from Hyatt’s Executive Chairman Tom Pritzker.

Winslow Homers in the shadow of a defunct Beech-Nut baby food plant. A Rembrandt, Picasso, Rubens and Renoir up the hill from a paper mill. The founder of the Hudson River School vying for attention amid baseball memorabilia and old farm machinery.

There are plenty of treasures to be found among the collections of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-path art museums dotting upstate New York. But they're well worth the trek for anyone looking for great art in unexpected places, whether it's the rolling, bucolic countryside typical of many areas or the industrial grittiness of riverside mill towns.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which stood by Steven A. Cohen last year as his SAC Capital Advisors LP bore the brunt of a massive insider trading probe, has come to the billionaire’s aid again.

The top prime broker to the former hedge-fund firm, Goldman Sachs is making a personal loan to Cohen for the first time, according to a regulatory filing, joining the list of banks that have provided SAC’s founder with credit lines backed by his $1 billion art collection. Like Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., New York-based Goldman Sachs is making the loan through its private bank as part of an effort to expand its business catering to ultra-wealthy individuals.

One of the harshest battles between an activist investor and a company came to an end on Monday, when Sotheby’s announced it had reached a deal with hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb.  Third Point, run by Loeb, won a partial victory, securing three board spots and the removal of a poison pill that will allow it to raise its stake in the company to 15%, yet he didn’t manage to force embattled CEO Bill Ruprecht to ease his grip on the company, as he’s manage to hold on to his job while remaining president and chairman of the board of directors.

"Degenerate Art" is the term Adolf Hitler and his henchmen used to describe works they simply did not like. The Nazis are long gone. Much of the art they denounced has survived, and is now on view. Here's Erin Moriarty of "48 Hours":

In the cultural capital that was Berlin in the early 1930s, art and politics often clashed, with modern artists like George Grosz leading the charge.

"Grosz was fearless, and whether it was his art or politics, he spoke his mind," said Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "He was probably the most famous Communist artist in Germany at the time, and he used his art as a weapon."

The Hall Art Foundation announces an exhibition by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson being held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 3 May – 30 November 2014. This survey brings a focused selection of Eliasson’s sculptures, photo series, optical devices, and works on paper together with his major outdoor installation, Waterfall (2004), unveiled at the Hall Art Foundation last year.

Throughout the past two decades, Eliasson’s installations, paintings, photography, films, and public projects have served as tools for exploring the cognitive and cultural conditions that inform our perception. Ranging from immersive environments of color, light, and movement to installations that recontextualize natural phenomena, his work defies the notion of art as an autonomous object and instead positions itself as part of an active exchange with the visitor and his or her individualized experience. Described by the artist as “devices for the experience of reality,” his individual works and projects prompt a greater sense of awareness about the ways we both interpret and co-produce the world. By recreating the natural through artificial means and capturing it in both time and space, Eliasson's work encourages the renegotiation of linear perceptions of space as well as the line between reality and representation.

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.

Widely considered one of the greatest sculptors of all time, British artist Henry Moore played a pivotal role in translating modernism into three dimensions. A new exhibition at the artist’s former home in Hertfordshire, England, examines the influence that Moore’s soaring, organic sculptures had on contemporary art.

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” presents works by some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary arts, including Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor. Works by a number of post-war artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, are also included in the exhibition. Site specific works by leading British artists Richard Deacon and Robert Long have been commissioned as part of the show.

“Body & Void” presents sculptures that examine Moore’s central themes, including the exploration of internal and external space, mother and child, and figures in a landscape, alongside contemporary works that touch on the same topics. For example, Hirst’s “Mother and Child (Divided),” a bisected cow and calf floating in giant tanks of formaldehyde, appears between Moore’s rose marble sculpture “Mother and Child” and “Stringed Mother and Child,” a single plaster cast that features two forms connected by a series of cords. The three works explore the same mother and child relationship in vastly different ways.

“Body and Void” fills the galleries and gardens at Perry Green, where Moore lived and worked for 50 years. The estate is also home to the Henry Moore Foundation, which was established by the artist in 1977. Although Moore amassed considerable wealth during his lifetime, he chose to live frugally and put most of his fortune towards endowing the Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.  

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” will remain on view at Perry Green through October 26.

The Miami art fair PULSE just kicked a little sand in the face of its rivals.

The contemporary art fair plans to relocate from downtown Miami to a spot along the beach this winter—a move to lure more visitors and stand out from the crowd of more than a dozen art fairs that hit the city every December. Fair director Helen Toomer unveiled the new location in an interview Thursday.