In 2010, Roger Ebert declared that “video games can never be art”. Yesterday, The Modern’s curator Paola Antonelli presented a different view, saying further, “they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe.” She also said that the museum’s holdings of interactive design are “one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.” (more…)

A solid gold sculpture called The Left Hand and the Right Hand Have Abandoned One Another by Douglas Gordon has been stolen from Christie’s in London. The scrap value alone is estimated at £250,000, while the insured value is £500,000. “I don’t think this is an art theft,” Gordon said. “I’m pretty sure it has been melted down.” Gordon said that a curator had told him about the theft and then later a Christie’s representative informed him on November 29th that it had been stolen, 16 days after the crime was reported to the police. Christie’s has said the incident is under investigation and did not comment on the matter. (more…)

The Whitney has announced that it has selected three curators for its 2014 Biennial. Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms, and Michelle Grabner will “represent a range of geographic vantages and curatorial methodologies”. Whitney curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, curators of the 2012 Biennial, will act as advisors in the 2014 project. (more…)

The Armory Show’s creative director, Michael Hall, has taken a position at Hauser & Wirth. Hall’s involvement ranged from the Armory’s Open Forum and Armory Film programs to the “Armory Focus” sections; he also took part in the selection of commissioned artists such as Theaster Gates and Liz Magic Laser. The co-founder and former director, Paul Morris, resigned in September after an 18-year tenure with the fair. It was reported by Art In America earlier this year that The Armory Show’s parent company, Merchandise Mart Properties,  may be  in negotiations to sell it along with the Volta Show and Art Platform Los Angeles.  (more…)

Sperone Westwater announced a group exhibition entitled “Giotto’s O”, to inaugurate its new space in Lugano, Switzerland on November 30th, 2012. The gallery inaugurated a new Foster + Partners-designed building on the Bowery in 2010. (more…)

Charles Ray – Installation View, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

The works of Charles Ray consistently sit at the intersections of the commercial, the human and the industrial, exploring our increasingly intertwined relationships with the imagery and machinery through which we engage with the world every day. Matthew Marks Gallery is currently showing three new works by renowned American sculptor Charles Ray, continuing the artist’s ongoing explorations of the human body and its interactions with the contemporary industrial world.   (more…)

Jeff Koons discusses his work on the occasion of being bestowed with a Medal from Department of State, as part of the 50th anniversary of the “Art in Embassies” cultural exchange program. Of the international reception to his art, Koons says, “…Americans are more intimidated by art, and they haven’t really come to realize that art is a tool and is something that is very very liberating to them”; on the subject of the work being physically created by studio assistants, he responds that “every part of it[the work] is an extension of my being”, and that “I am actually very very skilled at painting and drawing… it’s about being able to have vision”.
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Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal “Canyon” went on display yesterday at MoMA; it has been at the Met on a temporary basis since 2005.  The owners have donated the work as part of a $41 million settlement with the IRS. Glenn Lowry, the director of the Modern, stated: “If you were going to sit down and close your eyes and dream of an installation, you would envision ‘Rebus,’ ‘Bed’ and ‘Canyon’ in conversation with each other.” (more…)

Franz Ackermann, Walking South (2012), courtesy Faena Arts Center

Before installing the site-specific Walking South at Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, Franz Ackermann walked, trained, biked and bussed across the city for two months. Once, he took the train to the outskirts of the city and walked the same distance back, all part of his psychogeographical plan to map the city.

The result is a 260-square-meter (equal to ten highway billboards) multi-layered, 25-panel installation bursting with Ackermann’s emotional response to the landscape, dirt, people and air of Buenos Aires. Black and white photographs of buildings, cars, and street corners are a somber base for bright, unexpected shapes that extend from a busy center node, which is a tangle of red, blue, and grey tentacles growing from jellyfish-like bodies. These irregular bodies float among and encircle photos of reality, both connecting and confusing the viewer.

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The Metropolitan Museum is being sued and could face tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue.  According to a complaint filed November 14th, the “recommended” admission violates the Met’s lease terms with the city.  “The Met has engaged in deceptive practices”, according to plaintiffs Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson.  Admission and membership fees ($64.8 million in last fiscal year) account for more than a quarter of the Met’s operating revenue. The Met asserts that the lawsuit is frivolous, because the city had approved the policy.  (more…)

Exiled Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda acquired many masterpieces, including Picassos and Van Goghs, 146 of which are unaccounted for, according to The Philippine government. Andres Bautista, head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, told AFP: “The Marcoses were art aficionados and they spent millions of dollars buying up these paintings.” By all estimates the missing paintings are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. (more…)

Sotheby’s Russian Art Evening sale in London on Monday, November 26th, 2012 achieved £11,471,250 ($18,386,120), within its presale estimate. The sale saw sell-through rates of 89.3% by lot and 84.3% by value, with six new artist records. (more…)

Russian art sales got off to a rocky start in London on Sunday. MacDougall’s offered 45 lots but only sold nine in its Russian Art sale. Christie’s, however, fared somewhat better with £10.5 million – perhaps because of more realistic estimates. Just 68% of lots sold at the Christie’s sale.  £67.8 million worth of art was offered in total from all of the auction houses combined. (more…)

Ryan Gander, Imaginez l’Imaginaire, installation detail 2012, All images courtesy Palais de Tokyo

Ryan Gander‘s Esperluette, the first exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo‘s series “biboliothèque d’artiste,” explores and interprets the concept of the ampersand (&) as a symbol of the network of connections made by the human mind when solving a puzzle. Through a variety of images of everyday objects, sound installations, and books, Gander invites viewers to create their own stories based on the reactions and associations which occur in their own minds.

Ryan Gander, Imaginez l’Imaginaire, installation detail 2012

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The Leopold Museum has consigned three Egon Schiele drawings with a presale estimate of $17.6 million to Sotheby’s for their London sale in February. The sale of the works will pay for a restitution settlement of a 1914 Schiele painting which the museum purchased at auction in the 50s, years after it had been looted by the Nazis. The museum has settled on payments with 3 rightful heirs of the work to keep the painting. The founder of the museum, Rudolf Leopold, felt that the institution was not subject to Austria’s restitution law; however his son arranged to settle all outstanding claims after his father passed away in 2010.  (more…)

China’s recent auction results may indicate a maturing market, despite lower sales revenue than in 2011. A slowing economy is believed to be responsible for a decrease in sales, but demand is up for quality work by major 20th century Chinese artists. Christie’s sales totaled HK$783 million (USD$101.6 million), or 78% of lots sold, including art and wine. Poly Auction, the third-largest auction firm in the world, saw revenue of HK$518 million last week, with 64% of lots sold. (more…)

Critic Jerry Saltz says: “I love art, but I hate the astronomical prices it sells for.” So, last year he posted a request on Facebook for artists to make him a faux Richter painting, and describes his reaction to the final product: “All of the paintings seemed Richterian, but many had an Impressionistic, un-Richterian prettiness. Many looked too thought-out. Accidents looked intentional rather than discovered … then I understood that only when Stanley stopped thinking he was making a Richter could he make one.”  He has ordered more faux pieces by various artists. (more…)

Wayne Thiebaud, Cafe Cart (2012),courtesy Acquavella Galleries

Wayne Thiebaud’s most recent retrospective is currently on view at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition is organized into different rooms under the simple headings, ‘places, people and things’, which express the fundamentals of his landscapes, figures and still lifes.

Wayne Thiebaud, Two Kneeling Figures (1966) , courtesy Acquavella Galleries (more…)

Lisa de Kooning, only child of artist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and illustrator Joan Ward (1927-2005), died on Friday, November 23rd, 2012 at age 56. The cause of death has not yet been determined. Johanna Liesbeth (“Lisa”) de Kooning was born in New York in 1956. She was raised in Manhattan and lived primarily in The Springs, East Hampton, near her father’s studio. She created a foundation in her father’s name and a Trust for her personal collection of his work. She was known as an active and prominent philanthropist, and worked devotedly to preserve the legacy of her father. She maintained her father’s studio as he had left it, forming an invaluable resource for research and study. Lisa was a sculptor herself, and championed a variety of philanthropic causes, from animals to children to art. She is survived by her three children.  (more…)

London auction houses will offer $108 million worth of Russian art this week. The number of Russian and former C.I.S. nationals residing in London is estimated to be around 500,000, and auction houses hope to capitalize on that market. (more…)

In The New Republic, art critic Jed Perl discusses the cult of Warholism in context of the “Regarding Warhol” exhibition at the Met: “If we are all Warholians, then even our distaste for Warhol is a Warholian act… I would be perfectly happy never to see anything by Andy Warhol again”, he says, and asks: “Could it be that Warholism is by its very nature irreconcilable with discrimination? … Warholism as a faith ought by now to be in ruins, although you certainly wouldn’t know it from the prices that Warhols are reaching in the auction houses”. (more…)

Christo is reportedly creating what he calls the world’s largest permanent sculpture, which will be installed in Abu Dhabi. The Mastaba, which is made out of 410,000 oil barrels, has an estimated production cost of $340 million, making it the world’s most expensive as well. An “art campus” is planned to be built near the structure, along with a luxury hotel and restaurant. (more…)

An increase in lawsuits against those who authenticate artwork is forcing experts and artists’ estates to ramp up liability insurance and in many cases, stop authenticating altogether. Art lawyer and author of “The Expert and the Object”, Ronald Spencer, says scholars are “nervous about taking a $500 fee and getting sued for $10 million”. (more…)

Richard Artschwager – Exclamation Point (Chartreuse) (2008), courtesy The Whitney Museum

As the work of Richard Artschwager dances in and out of familiarity, taking the commonplace forms of our everyday existence, the artist reshapes them into something foreign – just outside of the viewer’s descriptive vocabulary.  Now, after four decades of work in sculpture, painting and drawing, Artschwager’s work is the subject of a large-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York City. (more…)