News | Page 33 of 57

Jae Hoon Lee in Aotearoa Baroque at MUCA Roma, Mexico City

Jae Hoon Lee's installation Tree Roots is part of El Barroco de Aotearoa at MUCA Roma, Mexico City. Co-curated by Richard Reddaway and MUCA Roma director Gonzalo Ortega, the exhibition runs to February 2012 (closing date yet to be announced).
Image: Installation view of Jae Hoon Lee's Tree Roots at MUCA Roma, Mexico City

Jae Hoon Lee on the frozen continent

Jae Hoon Lee is at Scott Base under the Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship Programme. Each year Antarctica New Zealand invites artists to become honorary Arts Fellows and travel to the frozen continent to undertake specific projects that will help raise awareness of the scientific, aesthetic and wilderness values of Antarctica. Lee follows in the footsteps of Phil Dadson who was there in 2003, a visit that culminated in Polar Projects.
Image: Scott Base Antarctica

Like many other of the world's tallest buildings, Renzo Piano's Shard may herald a recession

Scheduled to open in June and bankrolled by Qatari wealth, Renzo Piano's Shard will be the tallest building in Europe. The 301-metre-high (1,017ft) building includes 27 floors of offices, three floors of restaurants, an 18-floor five-star Shangri-La hotel with a spa, and 10 palatial apartments, two of which span the entire floor – these are expected to become London homes for members of the Qatari royal family. A four-story public viewing area is being built starting on the 68th floor and the developer is considering renting out the very highest room on the 78th floor for high-powered conferences and political talks – summits at the summit.

The building has been a source of pride and symbol of confidence for Londoners, but they may think again in light of a new report that says rather than being a sign of growing prosperity, high rises, especially those spearheaded by the next 'world's tallest building', herald a recession. Barcalys Capital has examined the cases of 18 'world's tallest buildings' in the past 150 years and links them to recessions. The Empire State Building was completed in New York in 1931 as the Great Depression got underway, while the world's current tallest building – the 2,717ft, 163 story Burj Khalifa skyscraper was built in Dubai in 2010 as the emirate came close to economic meltdown.

As Andrew Lawrence, the author of the report explains, the pattern is typically the same. Buoyed by an economic boom and the availability of cheap credit, property developers are emboldened to take on increasingly ambitious skyscrapers. By the time they are finished a few years later, the world is generally a very different place – the economic bubble has is bursting, reality has hit, the banks are nursing their losses on their loans and credit is much harder to come by. But by then, the building is built, providing a potent symbol of the excesses of recent years.
Image: Renzo Piano's Shard by London Bridge

Art Los Angeles Contemporary teams up with Paddle8

Prompted by the arrival of the VIP, the world's first virtual art fair, partnerships between art fairs and online sites offering platforms for the viewing, curating and acquisition of art have been on the rise over the past 12 months. Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) is the latest fair to utilize the web through a partnership with Paddle8 that adds web-based exhibitor presentations and transactions to the mix, along with a fair preview. (You need to join Paddle8 to access the preview and online services.) Art Los Angeles Contemporary runs from 19 – 22 January and the online facility remains in place to 9 February.

Artist and art activist Michelangleo Pistoletto behind new prize for socially engaged art

Recently the Serpentine hosted an awards show for a new art prize conceived of by artist and art activist Michelangelo Pistoletto with the Fondazione Zegna for artists and collectives who aim to bring about responsible social change through their practices. Read more…

Image: Michelangelo Pistoletto with one of the winners of the first Visible prize, Anna Maria Milan (of the collective Helena Producciones) and co-organisers Andrea and Anna Zegna

Keith Haring mural: conservation v. repainting

Keith Haring's last surviving mural in Australia is at the centre of a conservation v. repainting debate. Arts Victoria is advocating conservation works including an investigation of the materials used by Haring, cleaning and “selective retouching”, stabilisation and the application of a protective coating.

Others want to see the mural repainted saying it is in line with the artist's wishes. Director of the Keith Haring Foundation Julia Gruen says: it is more important that the work conveys Keith's ideals and respect for communities in which he worked, rather than to preserve a brushstroke.” ACCA's artistic director, Julia Engberg agrees. “If we stabilise it now it would just be a vapid, dilapidated [piece] instead of a lively work.”

Haring's Melbourne work is one of only 31 known murals across the world that have survived to this day.

Images: Keith Haring working on his Melbourne mural and a detail of the work showing the effect of time, neglect and the elements

This week at Starkwhite

This week we continue with Mariana Vassileva's exhibition The gentle brutality of simultaneity downstairs and works by represented artists upstairs.

Images: Mariana Vassileva, Globe (2011) and Jin Jiangbo, Hidden (2011)

The new $2000 Swiss Army Knife

In addition to the requisite blade, scissors and nail file-screwdriver, the latest Swiss Army Knife has a new utility – a jump drive that can hold up to a terabyte of information, which is enough to hold 220 million pages of text or two continuous years of music.

Image: Victorinox's new SSD pocket-knife with thumb drive combo

Chinese artists take first and second place on world auction market and Picasso drops from first to fourth place

Chinese artist Zhang Daqian has ousted Picasso to take the No.1 position on the world auction market. Artprice reports Zhang generated $506m in auction revenue in 2011 followed by compatriot Qi Baishi on $445.1m. Warhol took third place with auction sales of $324.8m followed by Picasso on $311.6m. Fifth slot was occupied by another Chinese artist, Xu Beihong who tallied $212.9m.

The change reflects China's growing strength in the global art market. Of the approximately 11 billion total works revenue for fine art last year, China's share was 39%, up from 33% the year before. Artprice said. The USA was in second place with 25%.

Image: Lotus and Mandarin ducks by Zhang Daqian which fetched HK191m ($24.5m) at Sotheby's in Hong Kong in May 2011

Mariana Vassileva exhibition installation views

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Staged in association with DNA Berlin, Mariana Vassileva's exhibition The gentle brutality of simultaneity runs at Starkwhite to 31 January 2011.

Images: Mariana Vassileva, The gentle brutality of simultaneity, installation views, Starkwhite, 2012. Photos: Sam Hartnett

Art Stage Singapore: putting the spotlight on collectors

Art Stage Singapore's opening showcased works by big name artists, from an installation by Turner prize winner Antony Gormley to a painting that took Rikrit Tiravanija 20 years to complete. Read more…

Image: Yayoi Kusama's Statue of Venus

The second edition of Art Stage Singapore starts today

This year's edition of Art Stage Singapore (12 – 15 January) includes a local platform curated by Eugene Tan. In a recent interview he talked about why Singapore art needs this push. Read more…

Tan was the curator of the Singapore pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale and co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006. He is is former director of Singapore's Institute of Contemporary Art and in 2006 he curated Islanded: Contemporary Art from New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan. Currently he is director of special projects at the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Image: Eugene Tan

VIP launches three new on-line art fairs

VIP has announced three new online fairs – VIP Photo, Paper and Vernissage – to take place later this year following the flagship VIP 2.0 fair which runs from 3 – 8 February. The new fairs will allow VIP to “showcase a wider range of works at a variety of price points” and “help the VIP brand solidify its position as the leader in online art sales,” VIP CEO Lisa Kennedy said in a statement.

The new platforms have been financed by a $1m injection from a pair of art collectors: Brazilian Selmo Nissenbaum, partner in Personale Investimentos, and Australian Philip Keir, media and arts specialist and founder of NextMedia.

Given the technical glitches that dogged the inaugural edition of VIP the move to expand the franchise seems surprising, but co-founder Jane Cohan says one impetus for seeking backers was to allow them to re-architect their site and build a new tech team which includes internet retail specialist Kennedy and former artnet sales director Liz Parks. “The space for the contemporary art online is only just beginning to take shape,” says Cohen. “The impetus to further develop the event, its capacity and its reach is ongoing.”

The MONA effect

Launched in January 2011 by gambling millionaire and maverick David Walsh, Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is on Australia's art map and is credited with having spared Hobart from the worst of the tourism declined triggered by the global financial crisis. During its first year MONA attracted about 400,000 visitors and is the state's number one visitor attraction. It was named Tasmania's best new tourism development of 2011 and is in the running for the national tourism awards in March.

Transforming Hobart's image from a sleepy backwater to a cultural playground comes at a cost. The $80m museum costs about $15m a year to run, which prompted Wash to start charging interstate visitors (entry remains free for Tasmanians). However the real money is to come from the sale of technology, such as the “O”, the super-smart, iPod-like device that in the absence of wall labels provides information about artworks when pointed at them, and tracks visitors movements in the gallery.

Image: MONA, Hobart

Mob museum to open in Los Vegas

A mob museum scheduled to open soon in Los Vegas will trace Hollywood's portrayal of mobsters from the birth of the silver screen. The museum is the brain child of former mob lawyer/Los Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman and has screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi amongst its advisors. Pileggi wrote the book Wise Guy and then adapted it into the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. The National Museum of Organised Crime and Law Enforcement opens in February in a former courthouse where a famous mob hearing was held in 1950.

Image: Marlo Brando as the Godfather

Voina on why firebombing a police tank is a “piece of art”

Voina have stretched the boundaries of art and politics by using Molotov cocktails to light a tank-like police transport vehicle used to relocate prisoners, describing the act as “a gift to all political prisoners of Russia.” Read more…

Image: A member of Voina firebombs a police carrier

9th Gwangju Biennale's theme is Roundtable

The team of six co-artistic directors appointed to organise the 9th Gwangju Biennale have announced the theme for their edition of the event. In a statement issued recently they say: “ROUNDTABLE allows us to reflect on our shared contemporaneity at a time when the tremendous momentum of ecological, political and economic change has radically transformed our global reality. The image of the round table is associated with political summit, where various urgent agendas are brought together and its participants convene to reach a renewal of understanding.”

The six co-artistic directors are from Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia and Qatar. Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and independent curator. Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the director and chief curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Art, Dohan. Mami Kataoka is chief curator at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Sunjung Kim is a Seoul-based independent curator and professor at Korea National University of Arts. Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator who works in Beijing and is also a contributing editor for Frieze. Alia Swastika is a curator, project manager and writer based in Jakarta.

The 9th Gwangju Biennale runs from 7 September – 11 November 2012.

Starkwhite opening tonight

Mariana Vassileva's exhibition The gentle brutality of simultaneity opens tonight at 5pm. The artist and her Berlin gallerist, Johann Nowak, will be present at the opening

Image: Mariana Vassileva, My old friends 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and DNA, Berlin

Starkwhite opens on 5 January with an exhibition by Mariana Vassileva

We reopen the gallery this week with The gentle brutality of simultaneity, an exhibition by Berlin-based artist Mariana Vassileva. The exhibition opens on Thursday 5 January at 5pm.

Image: Mariana Vassileva, Will they be friends one day? 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and DNA, Berlin

Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays

We'll be taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period and will resume our posts on 3 January. Happy holidays!

Image: Pohutukawa, a New Zealand native also known as the Christmas Tree for its brilliant display of red flowers over the Christmas period.

Download and print artist-designed Christmas paper

Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Julian Opie and Gillian Wearing are amongst the artists commissioned by the Guardian to design wrapping paper in the run up to Christmas. You can download and print the wrapping paper here.

Image: Tacita Dean's Christmas paper designed for the Guardian

Starkwhite summer hours

Starkwhite will close tomorrow at 3.00pm, reopening on Thursday 5 January with an exhibition by Berlin-based artist Mariana Vassileva.

Image: Mariana Vassileva, Will they be friends one day? 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and DNA, Berlin

Sign of the times

Image: John Reynolds' Democratic Vistas, 2011, reflective vinyl on aluminium

The art of war

As America withdraws from a misbegotten war in Iraq and the world wonders what will become of the country, ARTINFO looks back at 10 works addressing the conflict. View images

Image: Thomas Hirschhorn's Drift Topography

AK-47 takes its place as a design classic

Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47 is one of the London Design Museum's 14 new acquisitions currently on view in This is Design, an exhibition of the world's most influential objects. Introduced to the Soviet army at the end of World War II, the AK-47 revolutionised the assault rifle and today continues to be one of the most widely used (and deadliest) weapons around due to its simple, rugged design (it only has 8 moving parts) and cheap production costs.

In a 2003 interview with the Guardian, Kalashnikov acknowledged his deadly legacy to the world. “I made it to protect the motherland,” he said. “And then they spread the weapon [around the word] – not because I wanted them to.” Now the question is should one of the world's deadliest killing machines be celebrated in a design museum?

9/11 architecture?

Dutch architectural firm MVRD's plans to build two luxury residential towers connected by a cloud-like bridge in Seoul triggered a backlash of criticism when critics noted is resemblance to images of the exploding World Trade Centre towers. “A real media storm has started and we receive threatening emails and calls of angry people calling us Al Qaeda lovers or worse”, the firm stated in its Facebook page.

Image: MVRDV's design for two Seoul Skyscrapers

Gavin Hipkins billboard at Connell's Bay Sculpture Park

Gavin Hipkins' billboard commission Waiheke Island (877C), 2011 for John and Jo Gow opens today at their Connell's Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke Island.

Images: Gavin Hipkins, Waiheke Island (877C) 2011, billboard commission, Connells Bay

Marrakech Biennale curator Carson Chan on how the Arab Spring has influenced exhibition making

The Marrakech Biennale's fourth edition, Higher Atlas, will reflect the effects of the Arab Spring that has swept though North Africa. Recently biennale co-curator Carson Chan spoke to ARTINFO Berlin about the fallout from protest, the challenges of reassessing post-colonialism and why its important to break the rules. Read more…

Image: Marrakech curators Carson Chan and Nadim Samman

Cai Guo-Qiang lights up Doha sky with daytime fireworks

Cai Guo-Qiang lit up the Doha sky last week with an explosion event that shot rainbow coloured gunpowder into the sky near Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which is presenting his first solo exhibition in the Middle East. View video

Image: Cai Guo-Qiang's daytime fireworks in the desesrt near Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

Yuko Hasegawa selected as curator of the 11th Sharjah Biennial

The Shajah Art Foundation has announced the selection of Yuko Hasegawa as the curator of Sharjah Biennial 11, opening in March 2013. Hasegawa is Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), and a seasoned director, curator and advisor for international biennials.

For the biennial, Hasegawa has proposed a selection of artworks that reassess the Eurocentrism of knowledge in modern times and she has called for a gathering of architects, designers, creators and artists who will bring together different perspectives and challenge viewers to seek new knowledge by sharing ideas.

Image: Yuko Hasegawa

Too big to fail? Damien Hirst's mega-exhibition of spot paintings at 11 Gagosian galleries

Damien Hirst certainly knows how to play the art market with moves like his $78 million diamond-encrusted skull, which is owned by a consortium of investors including the artist himself (and soon to be shown at the Tate Modern), or bypassing his galleries to go direct to Sotheby's where the auction smashed top estimates to reach a record total of $125m.

His latest art-market venture is to supply all of Larry Gagosian's galleries world wide with exhibitions of his spot paintings. It's the kind of move that once prompted critic Jerry Saltz to call Hirst “a symptom of the hype, the hubris and the money that have swamped the scene lately.” When asked whether he worried about the art market's capacity to absorb another round of spot paintings, Hirst was quick to come up with several answers. Read more…

Image: Damien Hirst

Architectural heritage at risk in Christchurch

Plans to demolish 50% of buildings in Christchurch city's Central Business District, including historic buildings, has conservation societies up in arms. Campaigners say that new disaster recovery legislation supercedes laws designed to protect historic structures. Read more…

Image: The Christchurch Cathedral, designed by Victorian architect George Gilbert Smith is to be partially demolished

The end of the controversy surrounding A Fire in My Belly?

When David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly hit the headlines following the Smithsonian's decision to withdraw it from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian's National Portrait, many commentators talked about a return to the culture wars of the 1990s.

However, this time the controversy has played out differently from the era when Jesse Helms was railing against gay rights and contemporary art.The video made it onto YouTube, reaching millions of viewers who were previously unaware of its existence, MoMA acquired it for its permanent collection, the New Museum showed it continuously in its lobby, it was featured in an event at the Tate Modern to reconsider Wojnarowicz's work in the light if efforts to distort its intentions and legacy, and when the Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio reignited the controversy calling for A Fire in My Belly to be removed from Hide/Seek at the Brooklyn Museum the director of the Museum refused to withdraw the work.

This link takes you to an article in the Financial Times Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture and the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz's work.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to stage audience-sourced exhibition at the MCA, Sydney

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is about to stage his first solo show in Australia at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Recorders will be an audience-sourced exhibition with the content collected from visitors using technologies such as heart rate sensors, motion detectors, fingerprint scanners, microphones and face recognition software.

The artist is no stranger to Australia. He had a piece in the 2006 Sydney Biennale, gave a keynote address at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival and, last year, projected solar animations on to a giant balloon tethered over Melbourne's Federation Square.

Recorders opens at the MCA on 16 December and runs to 12 February 2012

Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Room.

John Baldessari: the first $100,000 I ever made

A new billboard by John Baldessari features the $100,000 bill that didn't make it into circulation. Forty-two thousand of these bills were printed during the Great Depression and Baldessari has re-issued it as the US economy faces the spectre of another deep global downturn. Titled The First $100,000 I ever made, the piece will be on display at New York's High Line until 30 December.

Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye

The exhibition Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye presents the work of five contemporary artists, including Phil Dadson and Dane Mitchell, engaging with Lye's legacy and the role of language in his work. The exhibition opens tonight at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and runs to 26 February 2012.

Images: Phil Dadson, Osmosis (of Len's Universe), 2011, single channel video (still grab) and Dane Mitchell, Len Lye, 'Snow Birds' 2010, glass, spoken word

Review of Billy Apple®: A History of the Brand

This link takes you to a review of our current show Billy Apple®: A History of the Brand.

Image: Billy Apple® A History of the Brand, installation view, Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

Vincent Ward takes time out from filmmaking to stage an exhibition at the GBAG

Filmmaker Vincent Ward is taking time out from Hollywood to stage an exhibition at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. He says his films have been a starting point for fresh exploration in the new mixed media work featuring in the exhibition. “Somewhere between the world of motion, film and painting I am currently working to find an alchemical marriage between these different media”.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new book Making the Transformational Moment in Film – Unleashing the Power of the Image (with the films of Vincent Ward) by Dan Fleming and distributed worldwide by US publisher Michael Wiese Books.

Breath – The Fleeting Intensity of Life opens tomorrow night at the GBAG and runs to 26 February 2012.

Image: Vincent Ward, Embryo 2011

Voina collective member stages daring escape from a Russian jail

Earlier this year the radical art collective Voina won a contemporary art award sponsored by Russia's Ministry of Culture and the National Centre for Contemporary Art for a project that consisted of a 210-foot penis painted on a drawbridge in St Petersburg, pointed at the the headquarters of the state security service, the FSB. Last week it was announced they would help organise the Berlin Biennale as associate curators, a title given to them by artist/curator Artur Zmijewski.

Voina is back in the news following the arrest of group member Leonid Nikolaev at Pushkin Square in one of the mass protests against corruption in the Russian elections where he roused the crowd into a rendition of the socialist anthem Internationale. He was taken to jail, but after noticing the magnetic door to his cell area was unattended he slipped his finger in the door as the guard exited and staged a daring escape. You can read Nikolaev's journal entry on his arrest and escape at the Voina website.

Image: Leonid Nikolaev shortly before his arrest