The Artist: He Pushes
A new documentary paints Ai Weiwei as both impish and serious.
Alison Klayman, a freelance reporter for National Public Radio, met the artist in 2008 and followed him around for the next three years gathering footage for the film. Initially, she said she was drawn to his irreverent photographs and conceptual sculptures—often made from porcelain, tea or temple wood—but her film also captures his awakening as an activist.
Picasso and Warhol are being outsold by Chinese painters as a new wave of wealthy buyers reshapes the global market. Inside China's high-rolling art world.
On the outskirts of Beijing in a private club house called Paradise, there is a large, windowless room where Yang Bin displays his collection of modern and contemporary art.
"Sit down and get ready," Mr. Yang recently told a few friends visiting from Taiwan. Grabbing a remote control, he turned to a set of wall panels that, with a click, began to slide apart. Each panel revealed a few of his recent acquisitions, from Chairman Mao-era portraits of revolutionaries to brightly colored abstracts by China's rising stars. As his friends applauded the slide-show, Mr. Yang grinned and lit a cigar.
Purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie's global sales last year, Eben Shapiro reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Liu Wei, "Outcast No. 2." Courtesy of the artist.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like René Magritte and Clyfford Still...
The End of the Art World in 2012By Adam LindemannJanuary 11, 2012
Let’s humor the doomsday prophets: what if the art world ends in 2012?
The web has been rife with Mayan predictions of a 2012 doomsday on Dec. 21. This date was discovered on a stele carving at a little known archaeological site in Tabasco, Mexico, and it points to the day that the gods of the underworld will rise up to destroy the world as we know it. These dire predictions have already been discredited by several Mayan scholars, but people love to believe in false prophecies, and the apocalyptic story has garnered interest from all sorts of quacks, even prompting the scientists on NASA’s website to comment: “There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.”
Read the Press for “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!”December 6, 2011Read the waterfall of press for my article: “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!” Read the good, the bad, and the indifferent from The New York, Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The New York Observer, W Magazine, Departures, The Spectator, Artinfo.com, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and Le Quotidien de l’Art.
Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-20th century and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.
Her longtime assistant, Maureen St. Onge, said Ms. Frankenthaler died after a long illness but gave no other details.
A season that pops
By Ben Crandell
On Sept. 23, 1973, international ballet star Edward Villella appeared, playing himself, on the prime-time ABC sitcom "The Odd Couple," the neatnik-vs.-slob farce based on the Neil Simon play. The premise of the episode had Villella teaching the show's stars, played by stage and film veterans Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, how to dance to Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." With a wink to a notorious X-rated movie of the era, the episode was titled "Last Tango in Newark."
Within that heap of middle-brow popular culture, two words stand out: Edward Villella?
By Aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com
A nonprofit developer armed with a multi-million grant aims to transform Opa-locka’s notorious Triangle into a family-friendly neighborhood by renovating vacant housing, building parks and installing public art.
Can a few million dollars, a public art project and a bold redevelopment plan reverse the sliding fortunes of one of South Florida’s toughest neighborhoods?
We’re about to find out.
Armed with a hefty federal grant and outsize ambition, developer and former politician Willie Logan has embarked on a mission of unusual, if not unprecedented, scope: To transform the entirety of Opa-locka’s notorious Triangle, once among the most violent and drug-soaked spots of Miami-Dade County, into a model, family-friendly urban neighborhood.
10 years of drawing inspiration from the Everglades
By Tom Austin
The Miami Herald
Artists long have looked at the Everglades with wonder. Over time, realistic portrayals of its spectacular landscapes — including the photography of local Clyde Butcher — have given way to contemporary abstraction and performance art inspired by the River of Grass and the modern pressures facing it and, metaphorically, the world beyond.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/18/2549737/10-years-of-drawing-inspiration...
Jorge Pérez, whose Related Group giddily filled Miami’s skyline with glossy condo tower after glossy condo tower, until the real estate bust nearly sank him, comes to the formal dining room of his waterfront Coconut Grove house freshly shaven, in a crisp shirt the color of ripe mango flesh.
A housekeeper pours coffee as he pops mini quiches and nibbles on cut fruit. Miami’s über developer, as he became known when he was riding high atop the bubble, looks ready to tackle whatever it is über developers tackle day to day.
via miamiherald.com
620 Greenwich Street, near Leroy Street, West Village
Through Saturday
“Dancer,” Dara Friedman’s mesmerizing, loose-limbed 25-minute ode to the seemingly extensive, fabulously multicultural dance talent of Miami, extends her longstanding interest in performance, urban space and structuralist film. Unfolding predominantly in fluid tracking shots, it captures some 60 performers in about 40 segments as they dance, singly or in pairs, during the day or at night, along the city’s sidewalks, in its parks and parking garages, and occasionally on its beaches.
Flamenco, ballet, modern, break, pole, belly, musical-theater and ballroom dancing are robustly represented, as are skateboarding and voguing. The use of grainy, no-fuss black-and-white underscores the improvisational air, as does the way the dubbed music is not always completely in sync with the dancers’ movements. Sometimes the sounds of their breathing, as well as of passing traffic, increase the impression of being there, in the flow. And occasionally Ms. Friedman dramatizes a dance style by changing the camera speed.
Co-produced by the Miami Art Museum and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, “Dancer” was presented on an immense screen outside the New World Center in Miami on Nov. 30, the night before Art Basel Miami Beach opened. At Mr. Brown’s gallery it covers a very large wall in a space carpeted in black, which highlights its silvery lights and darks. Inspired by Pina Bausch (1940-2009), whose penchant for constant motion it echoes, Ms. Friedman’s tribute to the human body as an expressive instrument also recalls the evocative title of Edwin Denby’s 1965 collection of dance criticism, “Dancers Buildings and People in the Streets.”
