A recent article in the New York Times investigates the growing trend towards museum exhibitions and spaces that prioritize experience and interaction over the quiet reflection and observation of more traditional art environments.  Exploring various approaches, including interactive installations, games, parties, interactive displays and social networking, museums are seeking ways to reposition themselves in a broader creative economy. (more…)

A group of art researchers, led by self-styled art history detective Silvano Vinceti, claim that they have taken a major step in identifying the remains of the model for Da Vinci’s most famous painting.  Taking DNA samples from remains in the crypts of Florence’s Santissima Annunziata basilica, the group will perform a number of tests before attempting to reconstruct the face of the woman, conventionally believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Renaissance-era silk merchant.   (more…)

Ghost of a Dream’s Living Trophy Sculpture, via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

This past friday, Creative Time returned to the beaches of Far Rockaway for its second annual “Creative Castles” sand castle building competition, welcoming a diverse group of artists to the redeveloping waterfront at Beach 86th Street for another year of bizarrely original sand sculptures, structures and imaginative installations.

Rachel Owens’ Sperm Whale Car, via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed (more…)

Akio Suzuki, Ku (detail) (2012), via Lisa Cooley

The field of sound art, as trumpeted by the New York Times and the Museum of Modern Art, is currently emerging into the mainstream dialogues of the high art world, exposing what was once seen as a relatively underground practice to the milling crowds of major museums.  Even so, with that sort of focus placed on the medium, a new level of critique, or rather, a reassessment of the techniques, practices and processes inherent in the creation of sound art.

The String and The Mirror (Installation View), via Lisa Cooley (more…)

While Olga Dogaru, the Romanian woman who claimed she burnt works by Picasso and Monet in her stove after fearing for the arrest of her son, has since retracted her story, Romanian authorities have identified at least three paintings in the ashes of the woman’s home.  Authorities found nails and tacks, as well as traces of oil paint in Dogaru’s oven, but were unable to correctly identify the paintings as the missing works.  “We found remains of burned oil paintings, but whether they are the ones that were stolen is a separate question, to be determined by prosecutors and judges.”  Says Ernest Oberlaender-Tarnoveanu, head of Romania’s National History Museum. (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new show, opening this December, focusing on the life and patronage of collector Ileana Sonnabend, a Romanian emigré who at one time was married to Leo Castelli, and presided over the New York art world, eventually developing a collection valued at well over $900 million, and championing artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Mario Merz.  “For us, the emphasis will clearly be on the history she made.” Says Chief Curator Ann Temkin. (more…)

Several days after the birthday of Andy Warhol, a group of artists in Pittsburgh have begun the process of covering the Andy Warhol Bridge in layers of knitted blankets, part of a project titled Knit the Bridge.  The project, which raised over $100,000 in crowdsourced funding, launched yesterday, and will be on view until September, when the blankets used in the project will be donated to homeless shelters.  “Everybody is jubilant,” said Jenny Tabrum, the technical adviser for Knit the Bridge. “The excitement is palpable in the air because everybody is thrilled that it’s finally happening.” (more…)

The newly launched Amazon Art marketplace system has opened, and close behind are a series of bizarre and sarcastic comments from users eager to weigh in on the offering of high-priced works for sale online, including a $1.45 million Monet.  Says one commenter: “I think I’m going to touch this up a bit with some water colors I have laying around. Make the colors pop more.” (more…)

James Turrell, Breathing Light, (2013) Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr.

Part of his three-museum, nationwide retrospective, James Turell lights up LACMA with a retrospective that exhibits works from the artist’s nearly fifty-year career.  Extending across an entire wing of the Resnick Pavilion, and an entire floor in the Broad building, the exhibition is easily the heaviest concentration of works by Turrell in one place that one could hope to see in a lifetime.  Loosely chronological, the show begins with a projection work from the first years of Turrell’s light experiments, and ends with an immersive environment created this year.  These works, Afrum (White) (1966) and Breathing Light (2013), provoke pure wonderment, emphasizing the device central to Turrell’s artistic investigations: that the work itself doesn’t necessarily exist in the space, but within the viewer’s experience, moving through the work.

James Turrell, Afrum (White), (1966), Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr. (more…)

Gallery mogul David Zwirner has been featured in Bloomberg’s Businessweek, discussing his early aspirations as a jazz drummer, the increasingly wealthy art market, and his thoughts on the impact of the internet on the techniques and approaches to the aesthetics of contemporary art.  “It changes the way they interact with the world.”  He says.  “I’m starting to see work where there’s something radically new in the way images are produced. Some of it’s in film and video, some of it’s in photography, some of it’s in sculpture. But we’re on the cusp of something. The emotional quality around the Internet is nonexistent—that cold, cold, cold energy I’ve seen in some works of art recently.” (more…)

James Turrell, Tycho White: Single Wall Projection, (1967), Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, © James Turrell

Part of his ongoing retrospective spanning three cities and upwards of 92,000 square feet of exhibition space, American artist James Turrell has brought several of his iconic light installations to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.  Serving as the way station between the Guggenheim’s “blockbuster” exhibition of Turrell’s Aten Reign, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s blowout review of Turrell’s nearly fifty years of work, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston offers a subdued, yet cohesive addition to the national celebration of one of America’s pioneering light and space artists. (more…)

Artist Ruth Asawa, known for her complexly crocheted wire sculptures and communal sculptures has passed away at the age of 87. A pioneering student at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, Asawa worked to transcend the fierce discrimination she faced as a Japanese-American in mid-20th century America, creating a body of work that mixed elegant architectures with a spirit of communal obligation, epitomized in her Union Square fountain sculpture in her home city of San Francisco.  “She was in a very real sense knitting the community together with the communal public fountain,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “ mirroring the city back to itself and saying we are a community.” (more…)

The former Paris studio where Pablo Picasso waited out the Nazi occupation and painted some of his most famous works, among them Guernica, is currently embroiled in a bitter argument between a private arts education group that currently occupies the space rent free, and the building’s owners, who want the group gone.  Calling them “squatters,” the firm owning the building has made moves to evict the group, despite sharp protests.  “It was abandoned and we renovated it completely, respecting its original state,” said Alain Casabona, spokesman for the occupying group, the Comité National Pour l’Education Artistique. (more…)

Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong and his colleagues have returned to the Finnish city of Helsinki, in an attempt to revive talks over the possibility of a Guggenheim Museum there.  Meeting with Finnish officials, the group of representatives are seeking what would be the Museum’s northernmost outpost in continental Europe.  “Topics that were mentioned during our discussion were the exclusion of the Helsinki Art Museum from the proposal, the possible sites, and funding,” says Helsinki Mayor Jussi Pajunen.  (more…)

One of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks exploring the possibilities and potentials for human flight will come to the Smithsonian Institution this fall, on view at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.  Codex on the Flight of Birds, which will begin showing in mid-September, explores the various concerns of flight, including weight, space, and an early exploration of the force of gravity, years before Newton formally named it as such.  “Centuries before any real progress toward a practical flying machine was achieved, Leonardo expressed the seeds of the ideas that would lead to humans spreading their wings,” says National Air and Space chief curator Peter Jakab. (more…)

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The highly anticipated James Turrell exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which opened last month, and remains on view through the summer, has renewed the ongoing debate surrounding contemporary artworks of Disney-esque proportions, especially considering whether or not these spectacle-inducing affairs are worthy of the attention they often command. Like his ongoing work-in-progress, Rodin Crater (a massive naked-eye observatory built within an ancient crater near Flagstaff, Arizona), Turrell’s multi-venue comeback is not exactly a modest undertaking, with concurrent exhibitions on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. At the Guggenheim, Turrell joins Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Maurizio Cattelan, and others who have mediated Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda through Turrell’s site specific Aten Reign, which uses an ingenious system of stretched fabrics and LED lights to create the illusion of billowing clouds of color that unfold in concentric rings through the rising levels, with visitors invited to watch the dizzying light show from the rotunda floor. Four other historical projected light works, three of which date to the 1960s, are also on view in adjacent galleries along with a selection of thirteen aquatints that, with expert lighting and position, appear to emit a soft glow. However, it is Aten Reign that has generated the most buzz, both good and bad.

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York  (more…)

Distributed Arts Publishers has released a new monograph of polaroids by Dash Snow, titled Dash Snow: I Love You, Stupid. Featuring over 400 of the artist’s photos, the book documents the globe-trotting hedonism and early 2000’s art world he once noted that he “wouldn’t remember otherwise,” alongside his friends and fellow artists Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley.
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A report on behavioral economics in art, as summarized in The Economist, examines the link between the experience of viewing art, and its effects on the viewer’s desire to see more art.  Through repeated exposure in a blind study, subjects were found to grow more partial to works they had repeated experience with, particularly with works that were considered high quality versus works that are generally regarded as trite or “poor” (in this case, Thomas Kinkade). (more…)

KAWS, Wooden Companion (2013), via More Gallery

Opened during Basel Week Switzerland, More Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition by American artist KAWS, entitled “GISWIL,” composed of paintings and two large-scale wooden sculptures culled from the artist’s recent output.

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Despite the city’s economic woes, The New York Times reports that Detroit’s art scene is thriving, with a number of galleries returning to locations within city limits, and a number of arts hubs have already developed, alongside a popular art open with over 60 participating galleries.  “I think we’ll have a little cloud for a while, but I don’t think it’s going to be long-lasting,” said George N’Namdi, founder of the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art. (more…)

The ambitious Art Everywhere initiative, a UK project that places classic works and contemporary art selected by the country’s population on public billboards and signage, has launched this week, with the unveiling of large-scale reproductions of works by Peter Blake and David Hockney in London.  The project will continue to expand across the country, covering advertising spaces and public spaces donated by various companies and corporations, with expenses estimated at £3 million.  “Art is for everyone, and everyone who has access to it will benefit from it. This project is amazing and gives the public a voice and an opportunity to choose what they want to see on their streets.” Said participant and supporter Damien Hirst. (more…)

Sotheby’s has posted its earnings for the first half of 2013, with profits up to $91.7 million, over last year’s $85.4 million in the same period.  Revenues also saw a 0.3% increase, likely from the increased commissions that the auction house announced earlier this year.  In addition, the auction house noted that the global bidding activity of Asian collectors at Sotheby’s in the first half of 2013 has exceeded the total for all of 2012, an impressive feat that once again trumpets the importance of the Asian market. (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new initiative, in conjunction with blogging platform Tumblr, to engage younger internet users and introduce them to art through education and exposure.  The project, titled MoMA Teens, was launched on Monday after nine months of work.   “Museums can be very intimidating at times,” Says MoMA’s associate educator Calder Zwicky said.  “The idea was to meet teens where they already are, and it seemed like Tumblr was the platform to use.” (more…)

A group of friends in the Canadian province of Ontario are convinced that a painting they purchased on eBay for $585 is actually a work by American master Edward Hopper.  The group of Canadians, who had previously made money buying and reselling paintings online, have spent over six years and $40,000 to try and authenticate the work, and are currently waiting for approval from a leading Hopper expert.  The work is of particular note, as it bears a strong resemblance to Hopper’s High Noon, questioning whether this disputed piece may have been a study or forgery. (more…)