Market Soars for Britain’s Most Popular Painter David Hockney is no stranger to the limelight, but lately the Los Angeles-based painter and photographer has had unprecedented exposure and the value of his work has risen exponentially, culminating in a canvas selling for more than $90 million. Nearly a million and a half visitors swarmed…
If you weren’t around for the posthumous Andy Warhol retrospective at MoMA in 1989, and you haven’t studied postwar art, your knowledge about the Pop icon likely centers on soup cans and Marilyns. The Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum (until March 31, 2019) fleshes out his life and career.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art may move forward with a plan to install art on its Fifth Avenue facade. Vacant plinths under the arches on either side of the great stairs may become a public showcase for contemporary art projects.
Jin Shangyi, a major Socialist Realist artist of the People’s Republic of China, explores the Classical realist tradition in three paintings based on masterpieces by Vermeer that are the centerpiece of his retrospective at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing in 2011.
From Rockefeller Center to Madison Square Park and the Park Avenue median, public art has become increasingly prominent around New York. Among the memorable projects in recent years were Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates winding through Central Park, Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls edging the lower harbor, and Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus, a living room constructed around the column-top statue of the explorer at Columbus Circle, a hot ticket earlier this year.
Much has been written about the state of LA MOCA, its stumbling exhibition program, and the forced resignation of its chief curator Paul Schimmel. But not enough investigative work has been done to determine how director Jeffrey Deitch’s commercial profile may be affecting his leadership of MOCA.
Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese-born artist known for orchestrating pyrotechnic spectacles, is in Los Angeles this week to create a trio of new works that will be part of “Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder,” his first West Coast exhibition, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary from April 8-July 30.
The Frick Collection in NY has begun to stream its lectures, beginning with deputy director Colin Bailey’s talk about Renoir’s full-length figure paintings, subject of an exhibition at the museum.
Barbara and Aaron Levine are not major philanthropists on the scale of Duncan Phillips or Joseph Hirshhorn, but they bring comparable seriousness, perspicacity and enthusiasm to collecting, which focuses on Marcel Duchamp and Conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and others. A recent tour of their Georgian house in Washington, DC suggests that they are more interested in ideas than in big-ticket trophies and eye candy.
Museums including MoMA, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian and the Tate, and software companies like Google, are experimenting with new apps that meet audiences in the expanding virtual world. Technological leaps are rapidly making possible remote access to images and information about art museum collections, often on ipods, Androids and other smartphone devices.