Damien Hirst‘s Friend Antony Genn to Play Fashion Week [NYMag]
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Banksy Speaks Up in Rare Interview to Shepard Fairey [Swindle]
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How Larry Gagosian Got to the Top… And Stays There [Economist]
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The Risks They Take for Shepard Fairey‘s Street Art [ArtInfo]
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Overseas Collectors Propping Art Market [NYSun]
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Financial Markets Question Gallery & Auction Fall Season [NYTimes]
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Will the New New Museum Attract New Galleries Below Houston? [NYMag]
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Marlborough Chelsea‘s New Chelsea Space to Open October [NYSun]
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‘Clothespin Dress’ Artist Annie Morris Profiled [Vanity Fair]
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Free Artwork by Turner Prize Winner Jeremy Deller [Platform For Art]

Are we seeing the beginning of a new art district in Manhattan? This week’s “Fall Preview” issue of New York Magazine gives us a glimpse of the burgeoning art scene on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. One to note in the new crowd is Upper East Side gallery Salon 94 owner and art adviser Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn opening her Salon 94 Freemans on Freeman Alley. She’ll join established LES galleries such as Rivington Arms, opened five years ago by Melissa Bent and Mirabelle Marden. Also, Lehmann Maupin is the first Chelsea gallery to make the move crosstown with it’s first exhibit expected to open later this year.

The LES Art Map [NYMag]

Crossing the Line? LV Store for Murakami Retrospective [LATimes via ArtKrush]
Lower Price Points Now Have Higher Fees at Sotheby’s [Bloomberg]

Defying Gallery Tradition with Francesca von Habsburg [FT]
Cyril Duval on Terence Koh‘s First Trip to Tokyo [Jetsetera]
Can Fine Art Be Traded On Indices Long-Term? [NYSun]
Sotheby’s and Christie’s Take Opposing Strategies [FT]
Third Largest Auction House Bonhams Moves Into New York [FT]

Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap clothing chain, recently announced their plans to erect a museum in the Presidio in San Francisco to share their contemporary art collection with the public. Slated to be built on a seven-acre parking lot which was once part of a US Military base, the museum will be located at the intersection of Lincoln Boulevard and Graham Street and will be home to the 1,000-plus pieces contained within the Fishers’ collection. (more…)

via Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian Gallery has announced “Summer Show,” a group exhibition featuring work by Tom Friedman, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Alec Soth, Franz West, and Jenny Saville, all chosen for their emphasis on the physical form. While possessing an affinity for the monumental, Jenny Saville’s work dominates Gagosian’s Summer Show both in terms of size and talent. Saville has been recognized as one of the most thought provoking and technically accomplished talents of her generation. Characteristic of Saville’s work, her paint becomes flesh as it evokes the feel and touch of the body, its smell and material presence. (more…)

MOCA Confirms Murakami Retrospective to Open October 29 [NYTimes]
Monet Among Paintings Stolen from French Museum [WashPost]
Second Illegal Art Stunt within Three Days [NYSun]
UES Luxe Gallery Moving to Stanton Street [NYSun]
Van Gogh Painting From Asylum Time Found [NYTimes]

via NYTimes

Sotheby’s has recruited yet another museum director to join their New York offices. Lisa Dennison, who became director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005, announced her resignation to focus on internal business development at Sotheby’s. (more…)

Auction Houses Find Ways to Profit During Vacation Season [FT]
Rare Interview with Collector Charles Saatchi on His Online Venture [FT]
Seoul-Based Gana Art Gallery Makes Move Into Chelsea [NYBusiness]
France Museums & Gov’t Debate How to Bring In Native Visitors [NYTimes]

In Matthew Monahan’s signature sculptural assemblages, wax, paper and plastic take on barbaric forms of bodies and faces. They are then smothered and captured in perfect glass cases or teetering precariously in open air on primitively constructed pedestals made of shoddy materials. Two-dimensional charcoal drawings are crumpled and manipulated into a three dimensional form. Their gray surface gives the illusion of heavy stone, juxtaposed with the reality of the feather-light paper.

Monahan’s sculptures often feature enormous faces, expressively twisted and folded in a lawless Origami. Their enigmatic expressions loom and haunt, invoking references to the archaic heads of Easter Island. Monahan’s pedestals of cheaply constructed drywall are the precarious foundations for his visually richer assemblages of shards and scraps gathered and displayed by geometrically severe glass cases. (more…)

Via Serpentine Gallery

London’s Serpentine Gallery, located in Hyde Park’s Kensington Gardens, literally received a new twist thanks to the joint efforts of artist Ólafur Elíasson and architect Kjetil Thorsen. Together, the duo designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a wooden “spinning-top” that will offer guests views across Kensington Gardens.

(more…)

Last year Mass MoCA invited the Swiss sculptor Christoph Büchel to create a giant installation entitled Training Ground for Democracy. On paper, it sounded like it would be a fruitful pairing; a standard type of relationship between artist and institution. Büchel has an international reputation for creating ambitious, marvelously complex walk-in environments using all kinds of found materials, and Mass MoCA is known for sponsoring artists with ambitious, big ideas. Büchel, who was recently exhibited in this year’s Art Basel Unlimited, is known for creating unsettling and disturbing scenarios. Whether its winding through piles of obsolete cameras or walking through an abandoned sweat shop filled with sewing machines, Büchel forces his audience into cramped and creepy spaces intending to provoke deep, unsettling feelings in the viewer.

(more…)

Finding Fine Art Bargains and Discounts [WSJ]
The Warhol That Launched a $20M Lawsuit [NYDN]
Warhol Market Conspiracy Theory Leads to Lawsuit [NYSun]

On display through September 16th at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies is “Feelings,” the latest exhibit produced by British artist Martin Creed. Creed is the same artist who caused a stir in 2001 after he received the Tate’s Turner Prize for his “Work No. 227: Lights Going On and Off,” a piece that incorporated a given space that may or may not contain his art, complete with lights that are set to go on and off at regular intervals. “Work No. 227” can be viewed now at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, which contains a collection of Creed’s own work interspersed with the Hessel Collection’s older pieces that seem to influence Creed’s craft.

Via Martin Creed Website

More controversial is the exhibition’s inclusion of two videos. Both are set in a completely white space, into which a person enters and either vomits or defecates before walking away. Creed’s “Work No. 628: Half the Air in a Given Space” fills half a room (eight-feet high) with balloons that respond to the viewer’s every move.

“Feelings” also features over 100 of Creed’s works that include paintings, sculptures, drawings and music. –-Andrew Eisen

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Martin Creed [Martin Creed]
The Bearable Lightness of Martin Creed [NYTimes]