Jeff Koons, Ushering in Banality, 1988. Polychromed wood. All photos by Christian Saltas, unless otherwise noted.

The Foundation of Arts for a Contemporary Europe (FACE) is a collaboration between five non-profit art foundations: the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece; the Ellipse Foundation in Cascais, Portugal; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy; La Maison Rouge in Paris, France; and Magasin 3 Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden. Established in 2008, the FACE alliance is dedicated to the promotion of emerging international artists by supporting the production and exhibition of new works. Their first initiative takes the form of a traveling exhibition entitled “Investigations of a Dog.”

Bruce Nauman, Untitled (Suspended Chair, Vertical III), 1987.

The exhibition draws its title from a 1922 short story by Franz Kafka, and the selection of works take up the existentialist themes present in Kafka’s work: disillusionment, humanity, and marginalization. Among participating artists are: Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi, Mark Dion, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Urs Fischer, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, David Hammons, Thomas Hirschhorn, William Kentridge, Kimsooja, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Mark Manders, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Martin Parr, Aurel Schmidt, Santiago Sierra, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker.

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Quilt by Alexandre da Cunha, and Six Billboards by Angus Fairhust, Art Basel.  Image via Art Daily, AP Photo/Keystone/Georgios Kefalas.

Yesterday marked the end of the most highly-attended Art Basel to date. The 41st annual contemporary art fair boasted 306 galleries from 36 countries, and AO was on site to peruse the work of some 2,5000 artists.  62,500 dealers, collectors, curators, high-profile shoppers, artists, and art appreciators navigated installations, browsed gallery booths, mingled, and enjoyed the city of Basel.  Artists, established and newcomers both, showcased works ranging from Polaroids to performance pieces, paintings to videos, sculptures to large-scale installations.  A social and teeming affair with an obvious commercial edge, Basel’s sales were optimistic.  Picasso, Warhol, Prince, Hirst, de Kooning, Pollock, and other similarly established artists reigned supreme as the focus of this year’s event.  Franck Giraud, a New York dealer, spoke to the New York Times about the lack of prominently featured up-and-comers: “Is it because that’s what the market wants, or is it because dealers didn’t want to take risks? I think it was a bit of both.” Nonetheless, certain galleries used Basel as a platform to introduce new artists and show off their latest signings.

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Field, Ai Weiwei.  Ming Dynasty-patterned Chinese ceramic structure in front Art 41 Basel’s entrance, with White Cube‘s Jay Jopling in the background, sitting at the fountain.

Art 41 Basel begins this week in Switzerland.  The international art show, featuring approximately 300 galleries and 2,500 artists, coming from 30 countries and every continent, will take place from June 16 to June 20.  Media include painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and editioned works.  Over 60,000 gallerists, art collectors, art dealers, artists, curators, and reporters will flock to the banks of the Rhine, at the border between Switzerland, France, and Germany, to view the works of established masters and up-and-coming talents alike.

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Richard Prince, Nurse in Hollywood #4 (2004)

Fueled by 22 choice works from the collection of the embattled CNET founder Halsey Minor, which sold for $21.1 million, Phillips de Pury & Company’s evening sale last night wrapped-up a hugely successful week of contemporary art auctions in New York. Overall, the boutique-sized auction house sold 58 of the 74 lots on offer for a grand total of $37.9 million. Unlike its uptown rivals, Phillips saw no lots make over $5 million with only seven exceeding the $1 million mark. Nevertheless, the result is superior to the auction house’s last Contemporary evening sale in New York in November 2009, when they managed to bring in only $7,099,250. While a few familiar faces featured in the crowd, including Miami collector Donald Rubell and the fashion mogul Marc Jacobs, most of the action was dominated by anonymous telephone bidders – with the majority of winning bids being taken by Michaela de Pury and Michael McGinnis, head of Phillips’s contemporary art department worldwide.

In March this year Halsey Minor was instructed by a court order to give up dozens of artworks to satisfy a $21.6 million delinquent loan to ML Private Finance L.L.C., an affiliate of Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch. While last night’s sales may cover the majority of this payment, Minor is also under a court order to pay Sotheby’s a further $6.64 million in a dispute over three artworks he had purchased at auction and later refused to pay for. Meanwhile, in the state of California, a trial is underway on issues between him and Christie’s auction house. More works from Minor’s collection are coming on the block at Phillips today and on June 9.

More images, related links and a full round-up of the sale after the jump….
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Masters of the Universe, Tim Noble & Sue Webster (1998-2000). All photographs by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved.

“Skin Fruit,” the much-anticipated, Jeff Koons­-curated exhibition featuring million-dollar works by the biggest names in contemporary art continues at the New Museum through June 6, 2010. The New Museum’s questionable decision to exhibit works from the collection of one of its trustees, Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, resulted in an art world controversy that threatened to upstage the show itself from the very beginning. When a large mix of celebrities and art-world-insiders flooded the Museum for the opening reception – attendees included Cyndi Lauper, U2’s the Edge, and collectors Don and Mera Rubell – the irony of placing the ritzy collection in a museum that was once championed for its promotion of the underdog was only exaggerated. And the critics responded accordingly. Christian Viveros-Fauné lambasted that the show is totally wrong for our times “in just about every possible way.” According to the exhibition press release, the featured works by Franz West, Charles Ray, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Maurizio Cattelan, Tauba Auerbach, Chris Ofili, Dan Colen and Terence Koh, amongst others, aim to “evoke the tensions between exterior and interior, between what we see and what we consume” – a curatorial spin critics say was invented in an effort to disguise a “rudderless display of art as trophy hunting” as an art exhibition. While this may be true, Skin Fruit essentially offers the common man an opportunity to view important works from one of the finest and most original collections of contemporary art in the world that have rarely, or never been seen in New York.

Revolution Counter-Revolution, Charles Ray (1990/2010)

Photo-essay and full round-up of links after the jump….
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Urs Fischer’s ‘Noisette’ via New Museum

Swiss artist Urs Fischer is the first artist to take over all three galleries of the New Museum, with an exhibition entitled “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty,” Fischer’s first major American museum show. The announcement of Fischer’s show caused a good deal of excitement and speculation. Fischer, who famously dug out the floor of Gavin Brown‘s gallery in 2007, is well known for spectacular punk gestures, and observers were curious to see what he would do. Curator Massimiliano Gioni calls the exhibition not a retrospective or a survey, but an “introspective,” an in-depth look at Fischer’s practice combining previous works with new works and site-specific installations. In the post-boom era where museums are abandoning blockbuster shows and retreating to their collections, the New Museum gave Fischer a considerable amount of freedom, allowing him to significantly alter one of the galleries structurally, and flying last minute a gigantic sculpture from China.

Installation view of Urs Fischer’s ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ via New Museum

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The New Museum

In September, the New Museum announced a series of exhibition entitled “The Imaginary Museum,” the first of which will be curated by Jeff Koons from the collection of Dakis Joannou, who in addition to heavy collecting the work of Koons, is a trustee of the museum. The museum’s decision to show works from the collection of one of its trustees raised some ethical red flags by several bloggers, and last week gained momentum with a front page article on the NY Times followed by considerable coverage elsewhere, including an editorial in The Art Newspaper by Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green, who had previously blogged about the situation, and responses by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine. The cover of the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail featured a satirical cartoon by artist William Powhida with the title, “How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality,” taken by a post by James Wagner, skewering the incestuousness and insiderness of the New Museum, and Artinfo called the controversy the “New Museum scandal.”  The New Museum responded in defense, and a number of other museum directors also defended the museum’s decision.

Dakis Joannou and Jeff Koons at the New Museum’s 30th Anniversary Gala in 2007 via The Art Newspaper (more…)

The First Annual Art Awards via Guggenheim.org

Last night, October 29, marked the inauguration of a new annual art event: Rob Pruitt presented The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Yorkin association with the city’s oldest alternative art space, White Columns.

The awards were conceived by artist, Rob Pruitt, as a performance-based artwork; for the occasion he recruited the characters of Index Magazine’s wry satirical web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. The New York Times have reported that “…the Divas schemed to infiltrate the art establishment by any means possible. In one segment they pitched a tent in the Guggenheim, doing their laundry in the lobby fountain.”

Jeffrey Deitch and Kembra Pfahler at The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum via style.com

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Ron, Will Cotton via Artnet

-Eric Fischl, Chie Fueki, Hilary Harkness, Will Cotton, Francesco Clemente, Peter Halley and Barbara Kruger  are all a part of the long list of artists who have created, dedicated and portrayed Ron Warren in their works; Mary Boone’s assistant he has always played an understated yet influential role leading to a Mary Boone Gallery exhibition in his honor [The New York Times]

-The 2009 edition of the Power 100 by ArtReview is released with Hans Ulrich Obrist taking the first place and the list showcasing some changes in the influences and forces of the art world; the top ten include dealers and artists as Larry Gagosian, Francois Pinault, Eli Broad and Bruce Nauman [ArtReview]
-In related, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the director of Serpentine Gallery, just voted to be the art world’s most powerful figure by the Power 100, gives an idea of how busy his week gets [The Independent]

-A $310 million collection of Mark Rothko paintings to be shown next spring in artist’s first Moscow solo exhibition at Dasha Zkukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture [Bloomberg]

To stay apprised of most of the relevant art news for this past week… (more…)

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Installation view of Anish Kapoor’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London via BBC

Anish Kapoor, the first living artist to exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, installs a work that shoots red paint to the walls of the famed 18th century building [The Wall Street Journal]
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Jeff Koons to be the curator of the New Museum show of Dakis Joannou’s collection, including works by Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Chris Ofili, and Jeff Koons himself [The New York Times]
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Russia’s biggest contemporary-art fair opened September 23, 2009 in Moscow to coincide with Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art [Bloomberg]
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Donald Fischer, founder of Gap and art collector, loses his battle to cancer at 81; his collection will be permanently housed at San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art [San Francisco Chronicle]
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Artist Ed Ruscha stars in a film by video artist Doug Aitken to be projected as installation entitled “Frontier” on Tiberina island in Rome [The Art Newspaper]
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Andreas Gursky, his works and Pop influences, mainly Warhol’s, as analyzed in the Economist conclude “99 cents II (Diptych)” as the artist’s most important piece [Economist]

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Ryan McGinness via J. Crew

Last summer painter Alex Katz modeled clothes for J. Crew catalog; this year seven New York artists, including Ryan McGinness and Vito Acconci, are featured [J.Crew]
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Tate Modern to recreate a 1992 exhibition that took place in New York’s Leo Castelli and was criticized as racist; 15 years later Tate curators appropriate the show as a part of a bigger Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibit and hope for a different reaction [The Independent]
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A Sigmar Polke painting, Untitled – Oil on Drape (1969), stolen directly from the artist’s atelier, the police deliberates the thief could only be someone with access to the space [Artforum]
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Frieze Art Fair 2009 announces the details of its sculpture park, in London’s Regent’s Park; “Henry Moore Bound to Fail” by American artist Paul McCarthy is to remain on display for six months [Frieze Art Fair]

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Guggenheim Museum Art Award via The New York Times

Louise Bourgeois, Urs Fischer, Dan Graham and Mary Heilmann are among the select individuals nominated for the First Annual Art Awards Guggenheim Museum announced this week [The New York Times] In related, the Frieze Art Fair announced the call for entries to The Cartier Award 2010 [Art Review]     
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Results from Sotheby’s mid-season Contemporary Art Sale details at Art Market Monitor [Sotheby’s]
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The British Arts Council and the London 2012 organization announce Anthony McCall as a finalist in their nationwide initiative to commission public art in celebration of the upcoming Olympics. McCall has proposed a 1,5 mile earth sculpture in the form of a simulated vertical cloud in Liverpool [ArtInfo]
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A detailed survey of Contemporary-Art Auction values in the midst of economic crises as influenced by several variables, show a significant decrease [Bloomberg]
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65 year old Jehuda Reinharz, President of Brandeis University- home to Rose Art Museum housing works by artists such as Warhol and De Kooning, is to resign [Los Angeles Times]

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Sophie Calle photographed by Yves Geant via Guardian UK

France’s conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s path to art world recognition as examined through a personal perspective: stripping, spying, sleeping, “seducing her father” all turned into artistic practice [Guardian UK]
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At Westminster Cathedral, British painter Peter Doig is to create a new installation to coincide with a concert from the British pianist Stephen Hough whom he met after a recital in London in 2008 [Art Review]
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Two new co-directors, both previously with Art Basel, promote this year’s Art Forum Berlin to attract some of the city’s big name art galleries, among which: Max Hetzler, Johann König, Klosterfelde and Neugerriemschneider [Financial Times] and here is some video of the event [Vernissage TV]
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60 Galleries are not returning to Art Basel Miami Beach, but 65 new ones are added, hence the fair grows in quantity [Lindsay Pollock]

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Picasso’s sketch to be auctioned via Guardian UK

Picasso’s sketch that must have taken seconds to produce is expected to sell for more than £20,000 at Duke’s auction [Guardian UK]
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Christie’s “First Open” Post-War and Contemporary Art sale brings in good results, appealing to many buyers while providing a wide range of pricing and themes [Art in America]
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Christie’s Frieze exhibitions and auctions dedicated to Post-War and Contemporary Art will include works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Damien Hirst and Gerhard Richter [ArtDaily]
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Museum of Contemorary Art in Los Angeles raises $60 million since December 2008 when it had revealed its financial troubles [Culture Monster]
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Annie Leibovitz and Damien Hirst to design for Louis Vuitton [Elle UK]

Cory Arcangel’s “Golden Ticket” to the 2008 Frieze Art Fair via Artnet

With over 150 galleries, The Frieze Art Fair, set in London’s Regent’s Park, began selling works by over 1,000 artists on October 15. Since its first year in 2003, the Frieze fair has grown to be regarded as the youngest and perhaps the most cosmopolitan and cutting edge of the global fairs, which include Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach and the Venice Biennial. The fair, which runs until the 19th of October, and the London auctions that will occur this evening and this coming weekend, mark the first major opportunity for transparency into the the status of the global art market since the widespread financial turmoil began. Following Damien Hirst’s groundbreaking, clearing house, £111.5 million, direct-to-market auction of his own work at Sotheby’s last month (as covered by ArtObserved here) the market has had some clouds brewing over it, with beginning indications of weakness manifesting in events such as Sotheby’s lackluster first evening sale of contemporary Asian art in Hong Kong earlier this month (as covered by ArtObserved here), which sold £7 million against expectations of £30 million to another auction that same weekend in which Sotheby’s sale of modern 20th-century Chinese art left over a third of the lots unsold. More recently, the Singapore Art Auctions were also a dissapointment.

London’s Frieze Prepares for a Chill [Wall Street Journal]
Crisis Imperils U.K. Art Fairs, $183 Million Sales, Dealers Say and Auction Houses Guarantee Top Lots; Dealers See Falling Demand and Paltrow, Saatchi, Zhukova Browse Frieze Art as Sales Go Slowly, Aguilera Parties, Damien Hirst Has a Head Case: London Art Buzz [Bloomberg]
Deep Frieze: UK’s hottest art fair braces itself for the chill of the banking crisis and Prank canvas [GuardianUK]
Frieze Art Fair: Super-rich to cast economic crisis aside and Andy Warhol’s Skulls up for auction [Telegraph]
All the fun of the fairs: the art world gathers for Frieze [Independent]
The Post-Materialist | Frieze Art Fair [TheMoment]
Diary: Frieze Frame [ArtForum]
Frieze Factor [Artnet]
Frieze: First night blur [ArtReview]
Frieze Art Fair 2008 [Frieze Art Fair]

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Rob Pruitt, Viagra Falls (2008) via Tony Shafrazi Gallery

“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” runs from May 9 – July 12 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. Gavin Brown and Swiss artist Urs Fischer organized this show, which has been garnering a strong amount of publicity. Be sure to click on Art Observed’s exclusive covering of the opening. The exhibition celebrates juxtapositions throughout art and pays homage to Shafrazi’s legendary defacing of Picasso in the seventies by irreverent displays of art work out of context with traditional presentation. Different mediums, spaces, and uses of objects are shown. There are works from a wide range of artists, including,  Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, to Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Tony Shafrazi Gallery
When Artworks Collide [NY Times]
Tony Shafrazi Defaces ‘Guernica’ Again [NY Magazine]
Picks: Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” [ArtForum]
Tony Shafrazi Defaces ‘Guernica’ Again [NYMag]
AO on site: Fischer & Brown at Tony Shafrazi Gallery [ArtObserved]

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David Zwirner and Tony Huang’s hospitality via Art Observed

“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, a show conceived by Urs Fischer & Gavin Brown, opened Friday night at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. An outpouring of support from the community poured into the Chelsea gallery. Heavy rain could not keep Mr. Shafrazi’s friends, clients, and fans from flooding to fete his latest feat.

Tony Shafrazi Gallery [Tony Shafrazi]
Gavin Brown [Gavin Brown]
Urs Fischer [Gavin Brown]
Rob Pruitt [ArtNet]
Celebrating at Mr. Chow’s [NYMag]
Roberta Smith Review [NYTimes]

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