Bailey gets an earful
Our correspondent Martin Bailey's recent revelations about why Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear (see left) has prompted a flood of quirky comments on the Times website which reported the story at the weekend (www.timesonline.co.uk). Bailey's new evidence demonstrates that a distraught van Gogh slashed his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, on whom he depended financially and emotionally, was about to get married. "I prefer to think that he sneezed when shaving and cut his ear...at least that's how I cut my earlobe once (not off however!)," notes one learned observer while a wealth of other reasons are given for Vincent's mutilation. "The truth of the matter is that he simply slipped in the ice outside [in Paris], fell and cut his ear on a sharp object on the way to kissing the cobblestone street. When he returned home and told his brother he slipped on the ice and cut his ear, his brother said, 'Sheesh Vinney, I would make up a better story than that!'," adds another budding art historian.
From In The Frame
Published online: 30 December 2009
This month:
Pinchuk gets personal
Ukrainian bilionaire and major contemporary art collector Victor Pinchuk is always keen to spread goodwill. Indeed, no sooner had we received his special New Year Message (printed in full in our January issue), did we receive another warm n'fuzzy missive from the oligarch: "Dear friends, we are happy to greet you and wish you Marry (sic) Christmas and happy New Year! Let the forthcoming year bring you lots of joy and happiness, and help you leave all the sorrows in the past." As we've already said, what a softy.
From In The Frame
Published online: 28 December 2009
Emergency! Boris plans a new museum
The valiant police, ambulance and fire services are set to get their own museum in London if city mayor Boris Johnson has his way. “The Greater London Authority has commissioned a feasibility study for a museum, which would display selected artefacts from the collections of London’s emergency or ‘blue light’ services, to highlight their important work to the public,” said a spokesman for Boris. Will the planned space have a neon 999 above the entrance?
From In The Frame
Published online: 24 December 2009
Big (whinge) in Japan
Hot off the press: Tokyo is to get its first "Complaints Choir", an intriguing (code: bizarre) series whereby Helsinki based artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-KalleinenMori visit a city and invite people to complain and to sing about their complaints (in a choir, obviously). Tokyo's whinge is on show at the Mori Art Museum (until 28 February). "The 'Complaint Choir' is an extraordinarily positive and humorous project that will certainly bring a smile to your face," says the museum, optimistically.
From In The Frame
Published online: 21 December 2009
Wonga for your Warhol
Biting satire wings itself to us this weekend courtesy of artist Geoff Hargadon who is set to show 100 mass-produced "Cash for Warhol" posters next month at Montserrat College of Art Gallery in Massachusetts. A jaunty accompanying website, www.cashforyourwarhol.com, promises the following: "We Buy Warhol Fast - Sell Your Warhol Fast!!! No one can help you sell your Warhol fast like Cash For Your Warhol™! Sell your print or painting for cash regardless of the size, price, or condition. Cash For Your Warhol™ has been in business for several months so you can concentrate on moving on with your life." Andy would no doubt have approved of such a cheeky pairing of commerce and culture.
From In The Frame
Published online: 18 December 2009
Art is App(ening)
It had to happen…the iPhone is set to be turned into a mobile gallery with a new series of “e-art-apps” pioneered by the Berlin-based software developer and video art collector Ivo Wessel, in collaboration with the Leipzig-based dealer Gerd Harry Lybke. The project, “Art for Mobile Life” ($1.99 to download), kicks off with Rota by German artist Carsten Nicolai (pictured). “The installation deals with the effects of audiovisual stimulation on human perception. Referring to an existing room installation of the same name, this application causes a stroboscopic visual effect…[so] people with a disposition to epileptic seizures should not use this application,” states the app description, wisely.
From In The Frame
Published online: 17 December 2009
An art world whip-round
The Art Newspaper was thrilled to receive an invite to the farewell reception held last week for Gijs van Tuyl who left his post as director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam after five years. A little more surprising was the "gift suggestion" card tucked into the invite which read: "We would like to present Gijs van Tuyl with a work of art as a reminder of his time with the Stedlijk Museum...If you wish to contribute, please make a direct bank transfer to the account of the Stichting Stedlijk Museum Amsterdam." The appropriate bank details were enclosed and we are happy to report that Gijs received a Marlene Dumas painting at his leaving bash (TAN didn't send a donation).
From In The Frame
Published online: 15 December 2009
Rijksmuseum gets bladdered
A spot of drunken debauchery always appeals so we were quite taken by the following "gin-sozzled" press blurb from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam about its current show (until 1 March 2010) which focuses on boozy behaviour depicted by 16th- and 17th-century artists: "This graphic pub-crawl in 18 prints and drawings takes in some of the most colourful watering-holes in the Rijksmuseum Print Room collection." Works by Rembrandt, Cornelis Dusart and Adriaen Brouwer show the feasting and fighting at taverns, fairs and village revelries.
From In The Frame
Published online: 14 December 2009
Art's a drag at MIT
What has former Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush been up to since his dust up with Brandeis University in Massachusetts, which threatened to close the gallery and sell off its collection at the beginning of this year? He certainly hasn’t been resting on his laurels. Next February, Rush takes a turn as guest curator at another university museum, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, where he is organising the daring exhibition “Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde” (5 February-4 April 2010). But don’t expect mere titillation in this show which aims to present the art of cross-dressing as a strategy of avant-garde subversion. The description cites the practices of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, whose forays into drag were apparently meant to “both shock the bourgeoisie as well as to inflate the sexually intense agendas of the Surrealists whose mostly male cohort felt some threat from an emerging feminism in 1920’s Paris”. Where's Grayson Perry when you need him?
From In The Frame
Published online: 11 December 2009
(Just too much) Realism in art
There were (ever so slightly) red faces all round earlier this week at the non-profit John Jones Project Space in North London when police were called to investigate a possible break-in at the gallery. On discovering a deathly white, scarily stiff body at the far end of the room, the key holding company understandably alerted the boys in blue. Project Space managers were even called with the macabre news that a corpse had been found coiled up in the corner. But fear not—the police later telephoned to say that the dead man was, in fact, not really a man after all. The grisly find turned out to be a striking sculptural piece by RCA graduate Adam James which forms part of the current "Manderley" exhibition (one word: phew).
From In The Frame
Published online: 10 December 2009
Tacita to twinkle at Tate
Richard Wright may have bagged the Turner Prize but The Art Newspaper can now reveal another feted annual Tate awardee - the artist fortunate enough to bag the museum's coveted Christmas tree commission this year is none other than the Berlin-based superstar Tacita Dean. Tacita's take on tinsel and twinkling lights will be revealed later this week.
From In The Frame
Published online: 09 December 2009
The Men Who Stare at Goats
We love animal museums which is why we happily reported plans for a UK museum of the horse in July. But Oz goes one better with reports in the Australian press that the Australian Workers Heritage Centre at Barcaldine in Queensland's central West hopes to build a $2.4m goat museum by 2011. And what exactly will this institution achieve? "We've retitled the project The Pulling Power of Goats in Australia, rather than just saying it's a goat museum because it's got a lot more than just a museum," said the centre's chief executive Bob Gleeson who aims to outline the role goats have played in Australia's history. Goat devotees must be counting the days.
From In The Frame
Published online: 08 December 2009
James Franco's gallerist granny
Actor James Franco opined on his passion for performance art last week in the Wall Street Journal, revealing that his recent stint playing an artist inventively named “Franco” on the soap opera “General Hospital” wasn’t just any old gig, but was in fact a subversive conceptual art piece. Franco is in Miami this weekend, launching a new fragrance line for Gucci at ABMB haunt the Shore Club. Could another artistic happenings be on the cards? First the actor will have to visit his grandmother, sparky gallerist Mitzi Levine Verne, who is showing Japanese works on paper at the Ink Art Fair (156). “I never know when he’s going to arrive, last time he lost his cell phone,” Verne confessed. But there was one thing she was sure of: “He loves his grandmother very much.” See more gossip from Miami in our daily edition: www.theartnewspaper.com/fairs
From In The Frame
Published online: 05 December 2009
Bonfire of the art vanities
In the good old days the art market overheated. Last night it was the art. At The Most Combustible Art Show in the World the smell of barbecue smoke wafted through the Wynwood air but this was no sausage-and-steak fest; instead the New York artist El Celso was burning over 35 works of art by the (literally) “hottest” young artists on a sizzling grill. “We should try and remember that art is fun and shouldn’t last forever,” he said. And is this bonfire of the art vanities some kind of caustic commentary on the once-white-hot-now-coldish art market? “Because the works aren’t for sale, consider them priceless,” he added, pointing out the plus points of the pyrrhic event. “This is the easiest show in the world to curate. And at least we don’t have to return works we don't sell.” But there was one item that just wouldn’t burn. The Art Basel Miami Beach catalogue refused to go up in flames proving that the mothership fair really is indestructible.
From In The Frame
Published online: 04 December 2009
Rocky’s royal gal
Arguably the most unlikely pairing in the art world was seen yesterday at ABMB when a member of the British royal family hooked up with Rambo. Princess Michael of Kent and actor Sylvester Stallone came together on Gmurzynska’s stand (B20), which is selling a selection of paintings by the big-screen hard-man. Princess Michael, who is busy building up a contemporary art collection with the help of artist Tracey Emin, told The Art Newspaper that Stallone was “a very talented painter”. And will she add his work to her collection? “It’s not a question of wanting to, but being able to afford to,” she exclaimed. Stallone himself was happy to discuss why he picked up the brush, telling us that his Toxic Superman work, 1991, was about the “ups and downs of Hollywood, the peaks and valleys. Society makes it difficult for a man to be a man. The US working male is a dying breed.” Rocky’s gone all Rothko on us.
From In The Frame
Published online: 03 December 2009
Have a beer with Breuning
Last year, artist Olaf Breuning was commissioned by Art Basel Miami Beach to create a massive, Picasso-inspired sand sculpture on the beach. The Swiss-born, New York-based artist returns to Florida next month with a much more liquid project, having been chosen by the New Art Dealers Alliance and Dutch brewers Grolsch to design the labels for a limited-edition swing-top bottle that will be distributed at the NADA art fair preview tomorrow. Breuning’s work, chosen by a panel of curators, parodies the Evolution of Man from a stick-wielding Neanderthal to a blissful, beer-toting imbiber. “Humans have always invented the right tools to reach the next level of evolution, the invention of fire, wheel, weapons and books…It might now be time to enter the ‘Grolsch Age’,” says the artist. Cheers to that.
From In The Frame
Published online: 03 December 2009
Up where the air is clear
Eduardo Abaroa’s project for Art Basel Miami Beach plays on the popular adventure sport of parasailing. For his work Aereal Diary, 2009, (kurimanzutto, D13) fairgoers will be offered free rides off the coast of Miami Beach, opposite 16th Street. But in contrast to the multi-coloured parachutes used by the company that usually operates there, Abaroa will use minimalist white parachutes with the day of the week written on them in bold black letters. While participants will enjoy a bird’s eye view of the beach and the art deco hotels on the seafront, sunbathers will only need to glance up to be reminded of the passing of time. See more Art Basel Miami Beach news in our daily papers: www.theartnewspaper.com/fairs
From In The Frame
Published online: 02 December 2009