Archive for May, 2008

N.Y. Times. The Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor has always been a kind of magician: his pieces dispense multiple visual thrills and mysteries. But the same effects can make his work appear tricky, decorative and shallow. It hasn’t helped that they seem to have been concocted by playing fast and slick with the innovations of [...]

Some of Sony’s music executives believe there is a gold mine under the company’s New York headquarters on Madison Avenue. It doesn’t look like much: just a small room, three floors below ground level, with a wall full of the sliding shelves you’d find in a law firm or university library.
But the shelves hold decades [...]

The first part of Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris totaled €20,384,750, with works from French, European and American collections the majority of them fresh to the market including paintings by Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as four works from the Estate of President [...]

The retrospective, one of the most exhaustive and ambitious shows on Picasso to date, brings together over 400 works from this singular collection. The pieces, which came from the artist’s personal collection, are Picasso’s own “picassos” – works he was determined never to relinquish. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, etchings, notebooks and a selection of 20 [...]

Art objects inspire many reactions, perhaps most crucially acts of preservation or destruction. From 1979 to late 2001, destruction had the upper hand in Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war, the ensuing civil war and finally the pernicious rule of the Taliban inflicted incalculable losses on active archaeological sites and ancient monuments and artworks.
In March 2001 the [...]

AS summer approaches and the euro and pound remain mightier than the dollar, New York City seems to have been recolonized by Europeans over the last few weeks. But one group of visitors that arrived recently from Britain for a brief change of scenery did not travel the normal way, slogging through the purgatory of [...]

A portrait stashed in a bank vault in Athens could be the last painting Vincent van Gogh produced, according to some art experts and collectors who are attempting to determine the authenticity of the picture found among the possessions of a Greek world war two resistance fighter.
The discovery of the work, along with a notebook [...]

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