Social Network For Artists (originally posted in VanityFairAgenda.com in December 2011) Question: What happens when you mix two New York social butterflies, Lisa Anastos, and Zev Eisenberg, with the city’s robust community of artists and collectors? Answer: The new social network and e-commerce site, ARThood.com. The duo created the site with the mission to connect new and emerging artists and give collectors an easy way to purchase or commission new work without the divide of gallery walls. I signed up as a member and came a...
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Added by ARThood on January 16 — No Comments

Dear Daily, Art Basel Miami Beach was the wildest hurricane of 2011 from the whirlwind of art to the windstorm of parties!  The 10th Anniversary of the grandest art celebration in the Unites States was even hotter than the Miami Heat. When the doors first opened for the VIP preview, the buying frenzy began, and with the stock market up by 400 points, the collectors were inspired. A Damien Hirst sculpture sold for over $2 million and Paul McCarthy’s “White Snow Dwarf (Bashful)” sold for $950,...
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Added by Lisa Anastos on December 7, 2011 — No Comments

Duchamp’s manufactured “readymade” urinals and shovels, Sol LeWitt’s written instructions for wall drawings, Joseph Kosuth’s blow-ups of dictionary texts -- these iconoclastic gambits can seem better suited to a seminar on epistemology or linguistics than to an art gallery. Who would want to live with these obscure and visually unrewarding artworks?  But some feel quite the opposite. They find beautiful things boring and the intellectual  challenges of Conceptual art exciting. The works th...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on November 4, 2011 — No Comments

Imagine the museum of the future. You step inside your home tele-dec and settle into an armchair that self-adjusts to your comfort settings. “Computer,” you command, “load the National Gallery of Art.” The room brightens and you find yourself in the atrium of the great Washington institution. In the air above the information desk a menu reads: Permanent Collection, Special Exhibitions, Timeline of Art History, and Lounge. “Timeline,” you say, and the great hall becomes a mist out of which emerges a se...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on October 3, 2011 — No Comments

Washington, D.C. is not renowned for private collections of contemporary art. The likes of Eli Broad, François Pinault, Steve Cohen, and Dakis Joannou make their homes elsewhere. But there are high-quality and innovative collections in the U.S. capital, and I recently profiled the couple that put together one of them. Daniel and Mirella Levinas fled the Argentine dictatorship and settled in Georgetown where they turned their white-brick mansion into a museum of mainly Latin American and Spanish art, with works by...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on September 16, 2011 — No Comments

Budapest is not exactly a hotbed of contemporary art. Curators there tell me people simply aren’t interested. Mounting a survey of artists from across Europe to mark Hungary’s recent  presidency of the E.U. seemed like a recipe for failure. The city's MFA rounded up big shots  like Jaume Plensa, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and two dozen others. But how would they get the locals to come look?The answer: they set the sculptures on the surface of a lake in a popular park! It’s part clever idea and part gimmick...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on August 23, 2011 — No Comments

Here’s the scene in front of the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale: A sand-colored Armytank is flipped upside down with its turret on the ground. On top of its elevated undercarriage is a treadmill with an athlete dressed in red, white and blue and running in place, his action seeming to power the tank treads that roll with an ear-splitting clatter. The contraption — conceived by the artist couple Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla — constitutes an unsubtle critique of American values. The theme co...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on August 8, 2011 — No Comments

Gay pride weekend kicked off with a celebratory cheer on Friday as the state passed the legalization of equal marriage for all! What better way to celebrate than to head to Kenny Scharf’s wild East Williamsburg basement and party it up with one of the world’s most renowned street artist? Scharf’s psychedelic murals coat city walls throughout the United States (most recently, his mural on Houston Street in New York was replaced by a less striking work by Chinese artist Liu Bolin). Playing off space creatures and popular cartoon...
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Added by Zev Eisenberg on June 29, 2011 — No Comments

Tucked in the neighborhood boundaries of Chelsea, Manhattan exists a land of white-boxed rooms separated from the mere reaches of dodgy gay bars and high street “American Apparel-like” boutiques.  Exploring the buildings west of 9th Avenue can be daunting, not because of dangers lurking around the corners but arising more harshly from the cold stares and ignoring back-turns of the art gallery community.  Unwanted airs that pollute this world derail budding collectors from beginning on what should be an exciting journey.&n...
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Added by Zev Eisenberg on June 21, 2011 — No Comments

The art collection inside the new United States Mission to the United Nations, as curated by Yale art school dean Robert Storr, is American art at its least provocative. The decorative mix of mainly abstract prints by well-known U.S. artists is unadventurous and uniformly anodyne — about what one would expect for a government building: nothing to ruffle the American eagle’s feathers. In a year when Allora & Calzadilla are bringing politically-charged, challenging art to the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Bienna...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on June 14, 2011 — 2 Comments

Glenn Ligon, 50, is a Bronx-born African American who has devoted his career to making word-based art that elegizes his reflections on being gay and black in America. The New York-based artist’s retrospective is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through June 5.Click here or on an image to read my review in The Washington Post. President and Mrs. Obama decorated the White House with an artwork by Ligon.  The 1992 canvas, borrowed from the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, is titled “Black Like Me #2,” and like a l...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — No Comments

It is nearly half a year since the Smithsonian Institution bowed to congressional pressure and ordered the removal of an exhibited artwork deemed offensive by a religious group. But the “Fire in My Belly” controversy continues to spur reflections on the tensions between government, religious conservatism and freedom of expression in the arts. Prompted by that controversy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a photography exhibition that looks back to the so-called culture wars of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when social...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — No Comments

When I heard that the National Portrait Gallery was organizing an exhibition drawn from private collections in the Washington area, I figured it would be a good one to miss. These sorts of community-based shows tend to be mediocre affairs. Institutions mount them in part to reach out to new patrons, and curators — against their better judgment — can be obliged to lower standards to comply with the exigencies of politics and fundraising. But when I saw “Capital Portraits: Treasures from Washington Private Collections,” I...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — No Comments

A recent New Yorker magazine profile about George Condo – a 54-year-old American painter widely collected by U.S. and especially European private collectors and some museums — gave equal space to his profligate lifestyle and his claims to have mastered the techniques of the Old Masters. He says he paints like the greats but applies their technical finesse to subjects of his own invention. Don’t believe it.A 20-foot high wall carpeted with his canvases from the last three decades is a bizarre spectacle for a major museum, even ...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — 1 Comment

Chances are that when you think of the term “African art” what comes to mind are figures and face masks carved out of wood. Right? Well, you’re not wrong. Most sub-Saharan art fits that description. But an exhibit at theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond reveals another tradition that puts the lie to this stereotype. “Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria” opens our eyes to the astonishingly realistic human figures cast in metal or terra cotta more than half a millennium ag...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — 1 Comment

The contemporary art world may be an orgy of the rich, but occasionally it shows a glimmer of compassion for the poor. That’s the takeaway from “Waste Land,” a film about the Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz, which recounts a celebrated artist using his work as an instrument to promote social justice.Vik Muniz at Jardim Gramacho The documentary accompanies Muniz to Brazil, where he plans to harvest garbage from one the world’s largest landfills and use it to assemble portraits of peopl...
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Added by Jason Edward Kaufman on May 18, 2011 — No Comments