Archive
Reuters blog archive
from Photographers Blog:
A special performance
Madrid, Spain
By Susana Vera
Luismi Astorga clasps his hands as he lifts his head up to the sky. He’s waiting to take the stage at a music club in Madrid where his dance group, Fusionarte, is taking part in a charity gala.
Astorga closes his eyes and begins to pray. The click of my camera breaks his concentration and he smiles at me as he proceeds to tell me, “Waiting makes me nervous.”
It’s not the first time Astorga has faced the thrill of performing for a live audience. He has been dancing with Fusionarte since Argentine choreographer and dancer Pau Vazquez formed the group six years ago with the aim of introducing dance to people with special needs.
Around 20 adult men and women with different intellectual disabilities make up the group. They rehearse every Saturday for an hour and occasionally they perform.
from Breakingviews:
Bernanke deserves art museum spot next to Pollock
By Richard Beales
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Ben Bernanke probably deserves a spot somewhere in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A record $495 million sale at Christie’s on Wednesday evening set new highs for Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other contemporary artists. More collectors than ever have $20 million to spend on a single work. The buoyancy of the market paints a picture of an art world indebted to the Federal Reserve chairman and his alternative asset-friendly monetary policy.
from Felix Salmon:
Democratic art
Maud Newton has a good introduction to the art of Molly Crabapple, whose new paintings are being raucously exhibited at a storefront gallery on the Lower East Side. The new work was born of Occupy, and shares much of its ethos:
“Occupy favored art that was populist,” she told me last month... Theirs was art, Crabapple says, “that was passionate, accessible, unironic—art that bled and took sides. It was art out of the gallery and into the streets, into life. I hope it presented an alternative, a good strong alternative to detached, ironic uber-expensive art whose primary purpose is to fill up an oligarch's loft.”
from Counterparties:
The last big Lauder gift?
The big news early this week in the often overlapping worlds of art, philanthropy, and sophisticated tax strategies was Leonard Lauder's $1 billion donation of cubist art to the Met. It's Lauder's largest charitable donation to-date, and even though he has a long history of philantrophy and is still worth more than $7 billion according to Forbes, it's unlikely he'll ever make a bigger gift. Lauder's wealth is tied up in Estée Lauder stock you see: he simply isn't rich enough to give away much more money or add to his museum worthy art collection, and maintain his controlling stake in the family's business.
The more likely scenario is that Leonard, along with his brother Ronald, will maintain their earlier level philanthropy. While large, their earlier gifts were far below the billion dollar level. Leonard has given $131 million to the Whitney, and Ronald is a large supporter of Jewish charities. Both brothers and their wives have also founded, endowed, and serve on the boards of numerous non-profits (the full lists run for text dense paragraphs on the Carnegie Foundation and Estée Lauder websites).
from Felix Salmon:
Why techies don’t buy contemporary art
Alice Gregory, in the NYT, has been reading her Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged," she writes, "that a young technologist in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a high-end art collection". Well, maybe she doesn't put it exactly like that. But that's her clear message:
Considering their net worths, technology innovators and the venture capitalists who back them are not collecting much art, according to people in both the tech and art worlds.
from Felix Salmon:
A very smart way to save antiquities
I first heard about the Sustainable Preservation Initiative back in 2009. Back then, it was little more than an idea attached to a tollgate. The problem at hand is the large number of antiquities and important archaeological sites which exist in poor areas of poor countries. Historically, that has been a recipe for looting; more recently, those sites have been more at risk of simply being bulldozed as urban areas sprawl. As SPI's Larry Coben and Rebekah Junkermeier write, the way that archaeologists have historically attempted to address those problems -- conservation, education and museums -- simply didn't work. So, they came up with another idea -- one which would give locals a sustainable financial incentive to maintain and preserve their patrimony.
Four years on, SPI is a well established organization. The bare-bones original concept was simply to put up a fence in front of an archaeological site, and let locals charge for admission. When tourists would arrive to see the ruins, they would pay the locals, creating a brand new income stream. Today, SPI's ambitions -- and the incomes, and the number of people that a single site can support -- are much bigger. The organization's first big project was in San Jose de Moro, in Peru, a region where incomes average $9.50 per day. SPI came in with a $48,000 one-time grant, which paid for a visitors center, a snack bar, toilets, a crafts workshop -- standard touristic infrastructure, which is now providing good incomes to a dozen local residents. The local crafts, based on local antiquities, are even available now on Novica.
from Felix Salmon:
Art world lawsuit of the day: Mirvish vs Knoedler
There's a very simple and cost-free thing that all news organizations can do to make their news better: every time you write about a court filing or judgment, link to it. (And, ideally, make sure it's been uploaded to Recap, too.) For instance, consider Patricia Cohen's NYT article about David Mirvish's lawsuit against the Knoedler gallery. (See what I did there? You're welcome.)
Cohen's article is a very interesting view of the lawsuit and its context, but it doesn't come close to capturing the barminess of the complaint. And because Cohen understands the bigger picture, she actually ends up misrepresenting the suit itself, in which Mirvish is seeking to take possession of two paintings on the grounds that Knoedler, which has now closed, isn't selling them. Here's Cohen:
from India Insight:
“Homelands” exhibit in Delhi examines identity through art
Indians give high importance to the concept of identity and kinship, especially in a land that is home to hundreds upon hundreds of different languages and ethnic groups. Indian curator Latika Gupta explores this theme in “Homelands”, an exhibition of works by 28 leading contemporary British artists, all wrestling with the idea of what "home" means in the 21st century.
The artists whose works are displayed include four Turner Prize winners, Jeremy Deller, Richard Long, Grayson Perry and Gillian Wearing. Work by World Press Photo (2007) winner Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya, also is on display.
from Felix Salmon:
Stevie Cohen, collector of traders and art
Gary Sernovitz, a research analyst turned novelist, has 3,500 words in n+1 about Stevie Cohen, trading, and art collecting. That's about 3,000 words too many: his core thesis is really pretty simple. Cohen's art collecting, says Sernovitz, holds up a mirror to his professional life: both are about the "struggle against the mortality of the edge".
The idea here is that contemporary artists and stock-market traders -- both of which Cohen collects -- are similarly searching for the "edge": that original and unique thing which sets them apart from everybody else. And if you look at Cohen's art collection, it's long on pieces from radical artists' "incandescent years" -- the years when they were doing something shockingly new. That's what Cohen looks for in art, and it's what Cohen looks for in traders, too: not people doing the same thing as everybody else in a slightly better way, but people who aspire to doing something that no one else is even attempting.
from Felix Salmon:
Larry Gagosian’s feet of clay
Carol Vogel has a good summation of the craziness at Gagosian right now. Within the space of a week, the largest and most important art gallery in the world suffered three massive defections: first Jeff Koons announced he would have a major show with archrival David Zwirner, then Damien Hirst said he was leaving Gagosian entirely, and then Yayoi Kusama said that she, too, was leaving.
It's hard to overemphasize how unthinkable even one of these moves is, let alone three at once. Gagosian is the gallery you move to, not the gallery you move from. At every other gallery in the world, the big fear is that if they're successful and help one of their artists become a global star, then Larry will swoop in and sign that artist up, grabbing all that juicy future income for himself. Because his access to the biggest and richest collectors in the world is rivaled only by the two big auction houses, an artist will always see their prices rise across the board the day they jump into his welcoming arms.
