Thomas Messer, the legendary former director of the Guggenheim Foundation, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 93.  Messer, who came to the gallery in 1961, just two years after it moved into its signature building on Fifth Avenue, was instrumental in shaping the Guggenheim into the global institution it is today, developing its collection and tirelessly working to expand its mission.  “Here we are, three decades later, with Guggenheims in Bilbao, Berlin, Venice, and soon to be Abu Dhabi. The foundation for all this was laid by Tom Messer. And I can tell you, he laid that foundation under budget.”  said former Guggenheim President Peter Lawson-Johnston. (more…)

Pollock’s Number 19 Sells to Applause at Christie’s, via Charles Shoener for Art Observed

Christie’s contemporary evening sale made history last night in grand style, storming through its 72 lots to realize a world record $495 Million sales total that included new auction records for Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and 13 other artists, aided auction house’s impressively assembled catalog.  Hailing a “new era in the art market,” according to auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen, the show achieved an almost unheard of sell-through rate of 94%, with only four works failing to find buyers.  The sale also continues Christie’s growing dominance in the auction market, eclipsing the previous night’s sale at Sotheby’s with little difficulty.

The top selling lot of the night, Jackson Pollock’s Number 19, 1948 (1948), via Christie’s

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Andy Warhol (Installation View), via Alexandra Bregman for Art Observed

On May 12^th, The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut opened its first show of the year with a selection of works by Andy Warhol. Paper mogul and avid collector Peter Brant has been personally buying Warhol’s work since 1968, and has amassed a reported 200 paintings, prints, polaroid portraits and magazine covers, from which he has pulled for this impressive show. Mr. Brant co-curated the exhibition with Heiner Bastian, the latter of whom worked on the traveling Warhol retrospective of 2001-2002, which traveled from Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, London’s Tate Modern, and MOCA LA in Los Angeles. (more…)

On top of his widely recognized work as an artist and political activist, Ai Weiwei is also apparently a skilled barber.  Weiwei was recently documented giving haircuts to several fellow diners at a Chinese restaurant by Beijing Cream.  “I’ve given hundreds,” the artist said. “I could make a book out of it.” (more…)

A giant, inflatable rubber duck sculpture by artist Florentijn Hofman has been installed in the port of Hong Kong, bringing residents out in droves to see it floating in the harbor.  While the duck has traveled to a number of cities around the world, the fervent response to its arrival in Hong Kong has bordered on cultural phenomenon, with restaurants making special rubber-duck themed foods and politicians praising the sculpture for the “limitless amounts of joy” it has brought to the city. (more…)

Despite widespread austerity measures across the Eurozone, many European nations are still heavily investing in national pavilions at this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale.  Countries like Greece, the UK and Germany have earmarked comparable funds to their respective 2011 pavilions, despite budgetary constraints.  “The participating countries will always put resources towards the realisation of their exhibitions in the national pavilions, or find other sources to cover the costs.”  Says Jewish Museum deputy director Jens Hoffmann. (more…)

New York Magazine has published a thorough analysis of the inspirations behind Edward Hopper’s iconic painting, Nighthawks.  Scouring the artist’s former midtown haunts, the article traces influences from the Flatiron Building’s curved window display to the storefronts of Greenwich avenue.  “People want to find the real diner, but Hopper was a synthesizer,” says Carter Foster, the Whitney Museum curator who is preparing to open “Hopper Drawing,” a new show examining the artist’s creative practice. (more…)

World renowned auctioneer Tobias Meyer during the sale of the Yves Klein sculpture, which ultimately sold for $22 Million

Sotheby’s hosted its contemporary evening auctions last night, with Principal Auctioneer and Head of Contemporary art Tobias Meyer coaxing the audience through the sales with high energy and style.  The sale, which totaled at $293.6 million, trumps last year’s spring auction of $266.6 million, while falling short of the auction house’s record high of $375 million last November. (more…)

Paul McCarthy’s 80-ft inflatable balloon dog, which welcomed visitors to the Frieze New York Art Fair last week, has sold for $950,000, dealers at Hauser and Wirth have confirmed. The piece commanded a fair amount of attention just outside Frieze’s main entrance.  The other highly-noted work, Tino Seghal’s Ann Lee, also sold, commanding a price of $80,000. (more…)

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, (1958-66), via The Whitney

The story of painter Jay DeFeo, and her landmark work The Rose, has become something of a legend in the annals of American contemporary art.  The work took over 8 years to complete, constructed through the continuous process of painting and chiseling at the canvas until its weight reached nearly one ton, and its removal from her apartment necessitated the removal of an exterior wall.  Buried in storage for years at the Pasadena Museum of Art, the piece was nearly lost to antiquity before being rediscovered behind a hastily erected wall, and rushed to preservation.  Now The Rose has returned to the spotlight, the centerpiece of a massive retrospective of the work of DeFeo, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (more…)

The Vatican City will be sponsoring pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and has just announced its list of exhibited artists, featuring photographer Josef Koudelka, multimedia group Studio Azzurro and the artist Lawrence Carroll.  The pavilion, organized by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, will explore themes of “Creation, De-Creation and Re-Creation.”  “We want to create an atmosphere of dialogue between art and faith,” Cardinal Ravasi said. (more…)

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s charity foundation held a charity auction this week at Christie’s, in New York, realizing a staggering $38.5 Million in sales, and surging past estimates of $13-18 Million.  Benefitting several conservation projects for endangered species around the world, the auction allowed money paid over the estimated value to be counted as a tax deductible contribution, encouraging rampant spending that set impressive auction records for artists Rob Pruitt, Robert Longo, Mark Grotjahn, and several others.  As DiCaprio said before the event began: “bid as if the fate of the planet depends on us.”  (more…)

The Guardian reports on Damien Hirst’s recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where the artist admitted to getting so drunk after winning the Turner Prize’s £20,000 grand prize that he woke up in the morning forgetting where he had left the check.  Measuring his creative successes against the dangerous lives of Romantic-era legends like Egon Schiele and Joseph Turner, the newspaper uses Hirst to question the nature of the artist in an increasingly stabile, safe society. (more…)

Luxury aviation company VistaJet recently commissioned artist Tom Sachs, working in collaboration with former assistant Van Neistat, to create a series of flight safety videos to be shown onboard the company’s fleet of airplanes.  Taking inspiration from Todd Haynes’s 1987 cult classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was shot with a cast of only Barbie dolls, the duo created a short using stop motion and dolls to reconceptualize the traditional airline safety film. (more…)

The Ammersee home of German painter Georg Baselitz has been raided by German tax officials, who seized several crates of files as part of investigation into tax evasion.  The artist was implicated in tax dodging after his name appeared on a list of secret bank account holders with the Swiss bank UBS.  Baselitz had been quoted earlier this year as saying: “Despite all the taxes people pay, there supposedly isn’t any money in this country for art.” (more…)

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hannibal, seized by U.S. authorities during the investigation of Brazilian collector, former banker and convicted embezzler Edemar Cid Ferreira, has cast light on the use of fine art as an outlet for money laundering.  The current market for blue-chip fine art is often conducted with few questions asked, opening the door for an easy disposal of illicitly got income.  “You can have a transaction where the seller is listed as ‘private collection’ and the buyer is listed as ‘private collection,’ ” says Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office. “In any other business, no one would be able to get away with this.” (more…)

Financial Times reports on the growing popularity of performance works at major art fairs, helping the traditionally market-centered proceedings to rebrand themselves as cultural events.  The trend is especially notable at this year’s edition of Frieze New York, where nearly every piece covering the fair has reported on Tino Seghal’s Ann Lee, of particular note because the work is sold via oral contract, in which Seghal explains to the buyer how to re-enact the work.  “I’m an expert and even I get tired after seeing 180 booths. But performance can capture viewers’ attention.”  Says Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani. (more…)

Tate Britain has recently hung a pair of paintings by British artist Mary Beale, depicting her young son, as part of the museum’s efforts to get more female artists on its gallery walls.  The effort has already brought out a number of rarely seen works from the museum’s collection, and falls in line with museum’s new chronological hanging strategy.  “We are aware that in the past we have under-achieved in presenting the work of women artists,” says head of displays Chris Stephens. “This time in every section we have looked at all the women artists in the collection, and asked why not?, instead of why?” (more…)

Following MoMA’s announced re-evaluation of its plan to demolish the former American Folk Art Museum, The New York Times has published an editorial examining the Museum’s impact on Midtown, and the distinct design of the Folk Art Museum in contrast with MoMA’s sleek facade, and the problems MoMA’s design currently presents for the art it exhibits. “Economic development encourages the proliferation of glass giants, tourism and ever bigger museums, but not always smart streets or better culture.” says writer Michael Kimmelman. (more…)

Elizabeth Peyton, Jonas Kaufmann, March 2013, NYC (2013), via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Gavin Brown’s west-side gallery is currently playing home to a new set of works by artist Elizabeth Peyton, continuing the artist’s ongoing series of portraiture through a series of works taken from the New York Metropolitan Opera, as well as Peyton’s well-documented self-portraits and depictions of celebrities.   (more…)

Francis Bacon, Study from Portrait of P.L. (1962), courtesy of Sotheby’s

After last week’s busy schedule of fairs (Frieze, Collective Design Fair, Pulse, Nada, Wishmeme, Cutlog, and many more) the contemporary art hub of New York City will serve as the stage for another set of high-profile art sales this week, as Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips host their Evening Post-war and Contemporary Art Sales. Sotheby’s will hold their sale of 64 lots on May 14th, Christie’s on the 15th with 72 lots and Phillips on the 16th with 38 lots, featuring the familiar auctions and price tags for by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Agnes Martin, alongside a number of newcomers and unique pieces that define this month’s evening auctions as a major event.

Gerhard Richter, Domplatz Mailand (1968), courtesy of Sotheby’s (more…)

The Art Newspaper has published an article by Whatever Press on the increasing clout of art fairs worldwide, noting the diverse contemporary art offerings for visitors, bringing galleries from around the world to a single location.  The downside, it notes, is the distracting, overwhelming environment not conducive to experiencing works past a superficial sampling.  “Fairs are great for a scan of the pulse of the moment. One thing they are not is ideal for looking at art.”  Says Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

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Artists Jake and Dinos Chapman will bring three monumental dinosaur sculptures to London this summer, part of a series of sculptural installations that will also include work by Antony Gormley and Robert Indiana.  “Art is an essential part of vitality of the City of London, a draw for workers and visitors alike, a major contributing factor in our economic vibrancy and the kernel of the cultural brio of the Square Mile.”  Says John Scott, chairman of the City of London Corporation’s arts advisory board. (more…)