News
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05/16/2012
Bruno Mauro, director and founder of Ampersand International Arts, unfailingly generous and enthusiastic supporter of artists, and dear friend to many, including this magazine, passed away on Tuesday, May 15, at home.
It is impossible to write the news of his passing without feeling the profoundest sense of loss. Bruno's ardent support of artists and passion for art was most visibly articulated in Ampersand International Arts, a gallery he ran from his home starting in 1999. The most frequently used format was pairing artists in two solo exhibitions, resulting in often inspired juxtapositions. He was diagnosed with melanoma in 2009 and until recently, most of us thought he would beat it. Working with him at his home, one got to experience the deep love and affection he felt for his family, and our deepest sympathy goes to his wife Surma, and his children Thea, Saskia, and Rafael. - Patricia Maloney
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05/15/2012
At least it didn't sink in this version: the Artists Rights Society claims compensation for use of Picasso reproduction in "Titanic 3D."
From the Art Newspaper: The Artists Rights Society has sent the film director James Cameron a letter claiming compensation because the movie Titanic 3D includes a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. A copyright infringement was filed—and resolved—after the release of the original film in 1997. “A settlement was reached to the satisfaction of both parties pretty quickly,” says Theodore Feder, the chief executive and founder of the society. However, the new 3D version of the film breaches that agreement, he says. The Picasso estate did not give its permission to use the painting, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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05/14/2012
The two employees of the Asian art handling company IFAS Solutions that were arrested and charged with "trafficking" last month remain in custody while Chinese customs officials have offered no information regarding their status.
From ArtInfo: The company specializes in art handling, storage, and installation throughout Asia. The two men, one of whom is a Chinese citizen while the other is German, were arrested after customs agents raided the company's Beijing offices on March 30. They were held for questioning for 36 hours, IFAS director Torsten Hendricks said. The exact nature of the charges against them remains unclear.The arrests are another symptom of the great disparities between Western and Chinese business practices, a clash of corporate cultures that has only become more problematic as Chinese authorities have sought to control the flow of art into and out of the country's booming art market.
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05/14/2012
"Mobile Homestead," the final project by the late Mike Kelley, will be realized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Artangel of London, and the Swiss nonprofit, the Luma Foundation.
From the New York Times: The project had been in the planning stages for several years. After his death, the full project was put on hold and there were doubts that it would ever be realized. But construction on the full-size home will begin in June on a vacant lot behind the museum, and the home is expected to open by early 2013. It will function nothing like a traditional museum or gallery and will show none of Mr. Kelley’s work, at his own insistence. The mobile-home part will remain detachable and will sometimes take its leave of the rest and journey through Detroit. The home as a whole will operate as an unconventional community service office, providing things like haircuts, social services, meeting space and a place to hold barbecues and perhaps for the homeless to pick up mail.
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05/12/2012
The Asian Contemporary Arts Week (ACAW-SF), organized by the Asian Contemporary Arts Council, begins today, May 12, and runs through May 19.
This is the inaugural Asian Contemporary Art Week in San Francisco (ACAW-SF). An unprecedented event in connecting cultural institutions across the Bay Area, ACAW-SF features a variety of programs to celebrate the dynamic of Asian contemporary art practice. 2012 marks the inception of this collaborative effort with sixteen participants presenting exhibitions, tours, receptions, screenings, panel discussions and more. ACAW-SF was initiated by the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium San Francisco (ACAC-SF) with the intention of generating diverse discourses, creating stimulating conversations, building a larger audience group, inviting broader interpretations, and promoting sustainable interests around Asian contemporary arts in the Bay Area. For a full list of events, visit http://www.asiancontemporarysf.org/acaw/
Art Practical is proud to be a media sponsor and a participating organization in ACAW.
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05/11/2012
The Berkeley Art Center has a call for entries for its annual juried exhibition. Curator, critic, and educator Glen Helfand and gallerist Katrina Traywick are the guest jurors.
The exhibition dates are July 28 to September 9, 2012. Berkeley Art Center's annual juried exhibition, BEAUTY, is open to artists working in all media and living in California. The theme is a suggestion to artists to consider how beauty resonates in their work both literally and/or figuratively. Creative interpretations are welcome. There is a $5 fee to all applicants that goes directly to SlideRoom; additional charges apply to non-members: $35 for three images, $10 each additional image up to five. Deadline for submissions: June 11, 2012. For more information, visit http://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/
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05/10/2012
President Obama endorses same-sex marriage even as North Carolina passes a constitutional amendment banning it, the thirty-first state to do so.
From the New York Times: A sitting United States president took sides in what many people consider the last civil rights movement, providing the most powerful evidence to date of how rapidly views are moving on an issue that was politically toxic just five years ago. Mr. Obama faces considerable risk in jumping into this debate, reluctantly or not, in the heat of what is expected to be a close election. Mitt Romney, the probable Republican presidential candidate, was quick to proclaim his opposition to gay marriage after Mr. Obama spoke. And however much national attitudes may be shifting, the issue remains highly contentious among black and Latino voters, two groups central to Mr. Obama’s success.
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05/10/2012
After 22 years with the Asia Society, Vishakha N. Desai will step down as president and chief executive in September.
From the New York Times: Ms. Desai will join the Guggenheim Foundation as a senior adviser for global policy and programs, a new consulting position. She is also talking with several universities to develop an initiative focusing on the intersection of culture and international relations. She had overseen the development of two new multimillion-dollar buildings, one of which opened in Hong Kong in February, the other in Houston last month. During her tenure, Asia Society also expanded its New York headquarters and established new offices in India and South Korea.
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05/08/2012
"And he sailed off through night and day/ and in and out of weeks/ and almost over a year/ to where the wild things are." Children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died on Tuesday at age 83.
From the New York Times: , widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn. The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.
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05/07/2012
Collector sues sculptor Robert Indiana after the artist states he did not make the knockoff work the collector purchased.
From Artforum: The Washington Post reports that an art buyer from Monaco has filed a lawsuit against artist Robert Indiana. Joao Tovar brought the suit against Indiana, claiming Indiana’s actions made Tovar’s investment in versions of the “LOVE” sculptures with the word Prem—Hindi for love—that he thought were created by Indiana and paid $1.5 million, worthless. According to the lawsuit, the artist did not actually make the works.
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05/04/2012
Holland Cotter reflects on how he'd spend $120 million on art. He wouldn't buy "The Scream."
From the New York Times: If I were suddenly handed the same amount of money for art, is that the way I’d spend it? No.
After studying and writing about art for 40 years I see too many other options, options that would allow me to put together an encyclopedic mini-museum for the same dollars. That museum, filled with art that could be bought, even in these over-the-top times, for comparative bargain prices. It would begin with early Indian Buddhist art and go on to French illuminated manuscripts, African sculpture, tons of old master paintings and drawings—art that a new generation of collectors, fixated on thoroughly branded modern and contemporary art, doesn’t even know exists.
But even if I focused on modern and contemporary, I know where I’d spend. My museum would focus on, for starters, work produced by women, internationally, over the past fifty years. Some of the artists I’m thinking about call or called themselves feminists, though many don’t or didn’t. A huge percentage of current art comes right out of their work. Together it would be more than a collection; it would be a force.
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05/04/2012
Great Britain’s most generous philanthropist is artist David Hockney, who has donated twice his net worth in paintings valued at $124 million.
From the Los Angeles Times: David Hockney landed at the top of the nation's annual Giving List by donating more than twice what he’s worth to his own art foundation. The Giving List is compiled by Britain’s Charities Aid Foundation in partnership with London’s Sunday Times newspaper. Hockney, worth an estimated $55.2 million, transferred paintings valued at $124.2 million to his David Hockney Foundation, and kicked in an additional $1.2 million in cash to help fund the foundation’s operations, according to a Sunday Times report this week. The rankings were based on donations made in 2010.
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05/03/2012
A petition is circulating protesting Sotheby's eight-month long lockout of its forty-three unionized art handlers. The entire union contract totals $3.2 million.
From Change.org: Rather than negotiating a fair contract with its employees, the company has issued a set of demands: the gutting of the art handlers’ union, the elimination of health insurance and other benefits, and the replacement of full-time skilled workers with temporary unskilled laborers. There have been no negotiations. In meeting after meeting, Sotheby’s has stalled, preferring instead to extend the lockout in the hopes that their workers might eventually capitulate to demands designed to exploit them.
To learn more and sign the petition, visit: https://www.change.org/petitions/sotheby-s-offer-your-art-handlers-a-fair-contract#
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05/03/2012
The pastel on board version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" sold at a Sotheby's auction for a record $119.9 million.
From the New York Times: It took twelve nail-biting minutes and five eager bidders for Edvard Munch’s famed 1895 pastel of “The Scream” to sell for $119.9 million, becoming the world’s most expensive work of art ever to sell at auction...Gasps could be heard as the bidding climbed higher and higher, until there was a pause at $99 million, prompting Tobias Meyer, the evening’s auctioneer, to smile and say, “I have all the time in the world.” When $100 million was bid, the audience began to applaud.
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05/01/2012
In the "What-the-hell-does-that-accomplish?" category, protestors vandalize Mission District stores.
From SF Gate: Broken glass littered several streets in San Francisco's Mission District after protesters vandalized cars and buildings Monday night, including a police station. The vandals were in a group that marched from Dolores Park shortly after 9 p.m., following a rally in advance of Tuesday's planned Occupy general strike, police said. Traveling down 18th Street and onto Valencia Street, the black-clad, masked protesters smashed windows with crowbars and signs, threw paint on buildings and spray-painted anarchy symbols on the hoods of parked cars.
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05/01/2012
The J. Paul Getty Trust cuts thirty-four jobs from its museum staff to fund acquistions.
From the Los Angeles Times: The J. Paul Getty Trust announced Monday that it was cutting thirty-four jobs in its museum division, with the expected annual savings of $4.3 million to be redirected to art acquisitions. There will be no reductions in the exhibition schedule or public programs, the Getty said, and no cuts to curatorial and art-conservation staffs. The museum's education department will take the brunt of the cuts to be implemented by May 9, its staff falling from fifty-one employees to thirty-two.
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04/30/2012
David Weiss, the Swiss artist who began collaborating with Peter Fischli in 1979, has died at the age of sixty-six.
From Artforum: The artists, noted for their wry wit and deadpan irony, gained prominence for adapting a plethora of media, including sculpture, film, and photography, into a body of work that manipulated representations of their daily experiences, causing the incidental to become poetically iconographic.
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04/30/2012
The co-founder of the Frieze Art Fair, whose participants seek top dollars from sales of art works, says it is unrealistic for artists to expect to earn a living from making work. She blames reality TV for the warped perception.
From the Guardian: Frieze co-founder Amanda Sharp says she's not necessarily against the Occupiers, but senses the protest is based on false expectations. "Over the last 10 years, the art world has tracked global economic change. In America there is a more politicized awareness of inequality between class and wealth. At the same time, more people have decided that art can be a career. They've seen art reality TV shows and they think they can make a career purely out of their work. That's an unrealistic expectation so a lot more people feel disenfranchised," she says.
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04/26/2012
Cooper Union in New York has announced that it will start charging tuition for graduate students, changing its no-tuition policy.
From the New York Times: After months of agonized debate about its 110-year-old tradition of free education, will begin charging graduate students next year while maintaining, at least for now, its no-tuition policy for undergraduates, the college’s president said Tuesday.Cooper Union, in the East Village, will also expand its graduate and other programs to generate more income as it searches for a way out of a deepening financial hole.
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04/24/2012
The Axis Gallery, in Sacramento, has a call for entries for its seventh National Exhibition, juried by Apsara DiQuinzio, assistant curator at SFMOMA.
The exhibition dates are August 4–26, 2012. This 2012 competition is open to artists residing in the United States. Contemporary, original two-dimensional and three-dimension work in any media—including painting, prints, drawings, photography and digital images—is accepted. All work must be original, produced within the last two years, and not previously shown at Axis Gallery. The deadline for entries is May 28, 2012. For more information and to download the competition prospectus, visit http://www.axisgallery.org/Axis/Home.html
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