Christie’s Launches New iPhone Application Allowing Optimized Access to Website
Christie’s, announces the availability of a new mobile application that extends the company’s online experience to a global audience of Apple mobile device users. Beginning July 15, Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users can enjoy optimized mobile access to Christie’s online features, including previews of all sales and lots, real-time sales results, and more. This free application will be made available to the one million plus unique visitors to Christies.com each month via http://www.christies.com/on-the-go/iphone, the company’s Facebook and Twitter audiences, and to visitors of the iTunes App Store.
Michael O’Neal, director of Digital Media at Christie’s comments: “The Christie’s app ensures our existing and potential buyers are always in touch and informed of our latest offerings, no matter where they may be. New advancements in mobile devices now allow for a very rich visual experience perfectly suited to viewing Christie’s broad array of offerings, including fine art, jewels, decorative objects, furniture, and fine and rare wines.
As our global audience grows increasingly reliant on mobile communication devices, Christie’s is leading the way as the first international fine art auction house to launch a mobile access strategy, so that our clients may select the communications medium best suited to their needs at any given moment. The Christie’s app ensures that our clients continue to enjoy the enhanced online services they’ve become accustomed to with Christies.com, as well as take advantage of new custom features that leverage the revolutionary unique features and functions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.”
The Christie’s App was developed in partnership with Kargo, a leading independent mobile media and technology partner that specializes in producing breakthrough entertainment and information applications. With the Christie’s app, buyers and sellers around the world can:
Browse any Christie’s auction, anywhere in the world: Search by Category, Location, or Area of Interest, so you can easily find items of interest while on the road, or with a client.
As the first step in Christie’s broader mobile access strategy, the new app is an example of the company’s continuing commitment to leveraging best-in-class digital technologies to enrich the client experience. In addition to its mobile offering, Christie’s remains the only international fine art auction house to offer online bidding capability via Christie’s LIVE™, a real-time multi-media bidding application. In 2008, Christie’s LIVE™ generated $82 million in online sales and direct underbidding. Online sale registrations per sale grew 138% in 2008 and the percent share of all lots sold through remote bidding channels grew 33%.
Damien Hirst Refuses to Become an RA at the Royal Academy of Arts
British artist Damien Hirst has turned down an offer to become a Royal Academician at the Royal Academy in London, an institution that was founded in 1768 by King George III. The refusal was revealed by Secretary and Chief Executive Dr Charles Saumarez Smith CBE, who told the Evening Standard that he does not know the reasons of this decision. According to Saumarez Smith, there are artists who have accepted the invitation and others that have not, some of these are: Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin and Paula Rego. Other contemporary artists, such as Tracey Emin, who made her dirty bed an artistic installation, have accepted to become a Royal Academician.
Some artists who were formed in the 50s and 60s believed that the Royal Academy had become obsolete, but that has changed and the newer generations have supported the Academy.
Membership of the Royal Academy is made up of up to 80 practising artists, each elected by ballot of the General Assembly of the Royal Academy, and known individually as Royal Academicians (R.A.). The Royal Academy is governed by these Royal Academicians.
All RAs are entitled to exhibit up to six works in the annual Summer Exhibition. They also have the opportunity to exhibit their work in small exhibitions held in the Friends’ Room and are occasionally invited to hold major exhibitions in the Sackler Galleries. Many Academicians are involved in teaching in the Schools and giving lectures as part of the Royal Academy Education Programme.
Damien Hirst, the highest paid living artist and most provocative of the YBAs, is becoming a free agent. The art world’s answer to Reggie Jackson says he will sell his latest body of work at auction, circumventing de rigueur gallery sales. “The world is changing,” said Hirst, and as always, he’s ahead of the curve.
Hirst is a rare breed–both artist and salesman. This isn’t the first time he’s stunned the art world with his business savvy (and his dead animals). Back in November of 2003, the artist bought back 12 of his seminal pieces from benefactor Charles Saatchi for $15 million. By owning his key early work, Hirst sought to control his own market, deciding which pieces to hold on to or place in museums or collections. Were these works to be sold en masse, as Saatchi is known to do, the value of his works could have taken a substantial hit. This past February, Hirst also opened a store on High Street called Other Criteria, designed to “democratize” art–or at least commoditize it.
Wikimedia Foundation receives Ford Foundation Grant to grow Wikimedia Commons
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non- profit organization which operates Wikipedia, has received a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant to make it easier for people around the world to participate in Wikimedia Commons, the Internet’s largest repository of high quality, freely reusable educational illustrations, photographs, maps, sound, and video files. Available in 85 languages, Wikimedia Commons is a global community dedicated to sharing media. The Wikimedia Commons also acts as the central multimedia library for Wikipedia. The Ford Foundation grant will support interface and work-flow improvements to make it much easier to contribute freely reusable content.
“The global community that is building Wikimedia Commons is setting the standard for the way that video and images are uploaded and shared through the Web,” said Jenny Toomey, a program officer for the Ford Foundation. “The whole process is simplified, promotes collaboration, and is driven by consensus among the community. Ultimately, this approach and others like it can help ensure that the Internet remains a rich and open space for learning, expression, and participation.”
Since Wikimedia Commons was founded in 2004, a strong community of international volunteers has formed to support its growth and development. Wikimedia Commons currently hosts more than 4.5 million freely reusable educational media files. Its files are used in thousands of educational and informational initiatives around the world, including in mass media and books.
“We are thrilled that the Ford Foundation is supporting this project,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “We want to make uploading files to Commons as easy as possible, so that people everywhere can join us in helping Commons grow. The bigger Commons is, the more people it will serve.”
The grant will fund a project team to study challenges faced by new participants in Wikimedia Commons, as well as to identify best practices from other media sharing websites. Following a research phase, the team will design and implement a simple upload work-flow, enabling users to easily upload files, select licenses, and provide descriptions.
About The Ford Foundation
http://www.fordfound.org/
The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has worked with courageous people on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
About The Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 300 million unique visitors per month, making them the 4th most popular web property world-wide. Available in more than 265 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 12 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Over 120 Van Gogh Letters Will Be On View at the Van Gogh Museum
Over 120 rarely exhibited letters by and to Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) will be on show Landmark exhibition to celebrate the publication of the new edition of the letters. From 9 October 2009 to 3 January 2010 the Van Gogh Museum’s Rietveld building will be devoted to the letters of Vincent van Gogh. In the exhibition Van Gogh’s letters: The artist speaks, some 120 original letters will be exhibited alongside the works that Van Gogh was writing about. The important documents are seldom or never on show to the public due to their extreme fragility and sensitivity to light. The combination of more than 340 works, from the rich collection of the Van Gogh Museum, including paintings, drawings, letters and letter sketches offers a multifaceted and penetrating view of Van Gogh as letter writer and as artist. Especially for this exhibition the Van Gogh Museum has been granted the exclusive loan of three special letters from Vincent van Gogh to the artist Emile Bernard (1868 -1941) from the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
The exhibition is being staged by the Van Gogh Museum to mark the launch of the new international edition of the complete correspondence of Vincent van Gogh. This scholarly edition, which will be published both in book form and digitally, is the culmination of 15 years of research into the letters by the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences (KNAW).
‘There are so many people, especially among our pals, who imagine that words are nothing. On the contrary, don’t you think, it’s as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint a thing’. Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard, 19 April 1888
Van Gogh’s letters: The artist speaks – The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to compare the sketches in the letters to the paintings and drawings on which they are based. Van Gogh’s own writing and his intimate sketches allow the visitor to look over the artist’s shoulder, as it were. Never before have we been able to come so close to Van Gogh as an artist and as a person. The visitor is witness to his dreams and disappointments, friendships and fights, the battle against his illness and his all-consuming passion to create art able to withstand the test of time. Quotations from his letters guide the visitor through his paintings and those of his contemporaries, offering insights into Van Gogh’s views on art and the role of the artist. By far the most of the letters are addressed to his younger brother Theo, who supported him morally and financially during the ten years of his artistic career. As such the close bond between the brothers is one of the exhibition’s important themes. Vincent viewed his artistic vocation as a joint venture and apprised Theo of all his plans and all the developments in his art.
Vincent van Gogh – The Letters. The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) not only bequeathed to the world a large number of fine paintings and drawings, but he also left behind one of the most fascinating bodies of artistic correspondence that we know. Over 800 of the 902 letters known to have been written by and to Van Gogh are kept in the Van Gogh Museum. Over the last fifteen years all the letters have been subjected to rigorous examination by specialists of the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute – KNAW. The result is a scholary edition, which will be published both in book form and digitally.
Web edition – Coinciding with the book edition is the launch of the website www.vangoghletters.org. The website comprises all 902 letters by and to Van Gogh in the languages in which they were originally written (Dutch and French) and furnished with the English translation. The letters are accompanied by images of the manuscripts together with the annotations and the illustrations of the works of art referred to in the correspondence. The web edition furthermore offers extensive search facilities and is freely accessible from 8 October 2009.
Benefactors: The Van Gogh Museum would like to thank the Turing Foundation, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the International Music and Art Foundation, Linea d’Ombra and the Vincent van Gogh Foundation – which has given the vast majority of the letters on long-term loan to the museum – for their exceedingly generous financial support. The contribution and expertise of Metamorfoze, the National Programme for the Conservation of Heritage on Paper, enabled us to record the entire letters collection digitally. In addition the Letters project was made possible with the aid of the Orentreich Family Foundation and donations by Shigeru Myojin and Sherif Nadar, as well as by Ernst Nijkerk, in memory of Inge Nijkerk – von der Laden.
Banksy At The Bristol Museum 2009
Street-artist Banksy has a new show in his home town of Bristol, England. Although some of the pieces were seen in New York last year, the Bristol Museum is also showing over 70 new pieces of work offering political satire and social mockery. Core77 says that Kate Brindley, Director of the museum, managed to keep the exhibition under wraps from upper management, the local council and most of the museum staff by pretending the build-out was part of a movie shoot. Here’s a trailer Banksy has posted on his site:
The museum website says about ‘Banksy vs Bristol Museum’:
Throughout the summer, visitors will find some unusual specimens amongst the museum’s permanent collection – a stonehenge made from portable toilets greets visitors on arrival, a burnt out ice cream van now replaces the enquiries desk and the life size historic biplane suspended from the ceiling now provides refuge for a Guantanamo bay escapee. Banksy has filled the museum with his own wry take on classical art.
Check out the collection of images by MG/BS4 taken from the show on Flickr.
This exhibition should not be missed!
Via:PSFK
Picasso Drawings Valued at $9.8 Million to $14 Million Stolen from The Museu Picasso
A Pablo Picasso sketchbook worth more than €8m (£6.9m) has been stolen from a Paris museum dedicated to the artist, where it is believed to have been kept in an unlocked cabinet. Detectives began an investigation after the notebook, containing 32 drawings by the Spanish artist, was reported missing today from the Picasso Museum in the Marais district. It is thought to have been taken between Monday night and morning. The red sketchbook of pencil drawings is dated between 1917 and 1924 and contains drawings from Barcelona, Paris and Picasso’s travels in France. It is believed to have been on display on the first floor in an unlocked exhibition case without an alarm.
The museum is staging a vast temporary installation that takes up much exhibition space, which could have made it easier for the theft to take place out of sight of guards. French national museums are normally closed on Tuesday but the museum was open today for local residents of to attend a special viewing by invitation only.
Museum workers discovered the theft when they were making an inventory. The sketchbook was seen Monday in the glass case in which it is displayed but on Tuesday it was not there, police said. The glass display case was locked but no specific tool was required to open it, the Culture Ministry said.
The theft is the latest in a line of Picasso heists in France in recent decades.
Picasso is the most stolen artist in the world because of his prolific output, recognizable signature and valuable works. There are more than 500 missing Picassos on the London-based Art Loss Register of stolen art.
The Picasso Museum houses the world’s largest collection of his work, ranging from paintings and ceramics to sketchbooks, handed to the French state by relatives in lieu of taxes after his death. The museum has about 1,500 Picasso drawings, many in sketchbooks.
Two years ago, two Picasso paintings, together worth €50m, were stolen from the Paris home of the artist’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier.
The works, Maya and the Doll and Portrait of Jacqueline disappeared mysteriously at night but there was no sign of a break-in.The painting of his daughter, Maya, was done in 1938 and shows the 3-year-old girl in a blue dress holding a doll. The only information released about the portrait of Jacqueline was the dimensions. Twelve Picasso paintings valued at around $17 million dollars, were stolen from the French Riviera villa of another of his grandchildren, Marina Picasso, in 1989.
Several other Picasso paintings have been stolen from galleries across the world including one of France’s largest ever art robberies in 1976, when 118 works were stolen from a museum in the southern city of Avignon. In 1997, a gunman walked into a central London art gallery, ripped Picasso’s Tete de Femme, worth more than $1m, from the wall and fled in a taxi. The work was later recovered.
The Picasso Museum in Paris’ old Marais neighborhood is dedicated to the Spanish-born painter, a founder of the Cubist movement and leading 20th-century artist.
Ron Arad “No Discipline” Exhibition
In the first major retrospective of Ron Arad’s work on US-soil, the “No Discipline” exhibit will begin later this summer on August 2nd. The approximately two month long exhibition will include a wealth of design highlights from the accomplished creative with his visionary approach to ” form, structure, technology, and materials” on display which has earned him such a great following. Of the over 140 works of art, some will be featured in special structures designed by Michael Castellan of Ron Arad Associates. The structure titled Cage San Frontières (Cage Without Frontiers) is a massive 126.5 feet (38.5 meters) long structure and measures at over 16 feet (5 meters) in height. Each of the 240 cells creates a reflective effect on the objects inside. In addition to this masterful piece of work comes some of Ron Arad’s most recognizable works such as the Rover Chair (1981), the Concrete stereo (1983), the Bookworm Bookshelves (1993) and more contemporary works such as the Lamp Pizzakobra (2008). The event as mentioned begins August 2nd and runs until October 19th at New York’s MoMA.
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992)—one of the most important painters of the 20th century—will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 20 through August 16, 2009. Marking the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most significant works from each period of the artist’s remarkable career. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, this landmark exhibition will consist of some 65 paintings, complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist’s career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.
“Bacon is more compelling than ever: despite the passage of time, his paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has this work been more relevant to young artists,” noted Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. “For these reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a retrospective spanning his entire career to our viewing public.”
Entirely self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of his generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon’s oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art.
The exhibition’s loosely chronological structure will trace critical themes in Bacon’s work and explore his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and ’50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with snarling mouths (Head I, 1947–1948, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); images of men as pathetic and alone (Study for a Portrait, 1953, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany); and the human figure portrayed as base and bestial (Figures in a Landscape, 1956, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, England). The exhibition also features numerous versions of Bacon’s iconic studies (1949–1953) after Diego Velázquez’s VePortrait of Innocent X (1650). Mortality is addressed directly in his last works (Triptych, 1991, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
In the 1960s, working in his classic style of much looser, colorful, and expressive painting, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated as in, for example, Lying Figure, 1969 (Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland). In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate ideas about violence and emotion, as in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Foundation Beyeler) and Triptych Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus, 1981 (Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway).
A number of important works by Bacon will only be presented at the Metropolitan Museum, including Study for Portrait I, 1953 (Denise and Andrew Saul); Painting, 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Self Portrait, 1973 (private collection, courtesy Richard Nagy, London).
Central to an understanding of the artist’s working methods are the large caches of archival materials that have only become available since Bacon’s death, especially the contents of the artist’s famously cluttered London studio. A rich selection of 65 items from the studio, his estate, and other archives will be included in the exhibition. The objects include pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for the finished paintings on view in the exhibition.
Visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art at : http://www.metmuseum.org/
Frida Kahlo – Re-Discovered – The Intimate Diary of Frida Kahlo a Singular Literary Self-portrait
The intimate diary of Frida Kahlo is really no such thing – rather it is a literary self-portrait comparable in quality to the pictures the artist painted of herself, an Italian researcher told EFE. The specialist in intimate literature Cristina Secci, a native of Cagliari, Italy, presented Saturday in Mexico City a study of the literary genre to which Kahlo’s diary belongs. The diary was written during the last 10 years of Frida’s life, but even so contains few dates, an unusual trait in writings like this.
“An intimate diary is so personal that you hide it in the bottom drawer. But Frida didn’t. She read certain parts to her guests and friends, she allowed herself to be photographed with it and even gave away pages to her friends, so they say,” she said in an interview.
Secci said that when the reader opens any “intimate diary,” he or she expects to find such elements as love affairs, dreams, sufferings and betrayals. Frida (1907-1954) included all that but also included her thoughts on politics, art, poetry and other subjects.
“The elements of this work are different from those of an intimate diary,” the Italian said in stressing the originality of Frida’s writing.
Secci said that the diary can be seen evolving, with the handwriting very straightforward at first but getting more and more complicated later as Kahlo, almost without thinking, began to fill the blank spaces with drawings, the kind of doodles “we draw when we’re talking on the telephone.”
“Since Kahlo is a painter, it all gets away from her and painting overflows the diary – she also includes color” so that it becomes a fundamental part of it, with the words becoming pictures and the pictures words, she said. At times Kahlo would write a large part of the diary with a paintbrush, she said.
Secci said that sometimes the handwriting of the text “overflows” and becomes landscape as well, so that the words lose their literal meanings and acquire new ones.
Secci recalled that Kahlo had on her bed a mirror in which she always looked at herself, an object with the peculiarity of reflecting images backwards. “Myself in the mirror is not the real me. It is similar, but not the same thing,” Secci said, a truth expressed in the book she entitled “With the Image in the Mirror: The Literary Self-Portrait of Frida Kahlo.”
She recalled that one characteristic of self-portraits is that they show the image the artist wants others to see, which is not necessarily the real one. “I don’t mean it’s a lie, but it is very subjective,” she said. Another clue proving that this is not a traditional diary are the words erased and crossed out in the text.
“More than a diary, Frida wrote it as a self-portrait, to place beside the many she painted,” said the Italian philologist, adding that this does not mean the writings are any the less intimate.
“Frida had a great ability to express her intimacy, whether in painting, letters or prose…that’s why I don’t believe she would need a genuine intimate diary,” she said.
For Secci, at the end of the diary and before the artist died it becomes more intimate and the effects of pain and drugs can be observed, even in the difficulty she had in writing. EFE
Os Gemeos “Vertigem” Exhibition in Brazil
The art world’s most famous brotherly duo, the Os Gemeos twins out of Brazil opened their latest exhibition in their home country of Brazil last month. The Vertigem exhibition and its stunning works is seen here in great detail thanks to Lost Art. The exhibit is currently taking place at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in the vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro. Some of the brother’s much covered styles are shown in both 2-D and 3-D mediums with never a lack of color and contrast. The show ends on May 17th, 2009.
Raw art Weblog- MoMA presents Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David & Peggy Rockefeller CollectionCézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection is an intimate installation that highlights a group of nine exceptional early modern European paintings that have been promised over the years to The Museum of Modern Art by David and Peggy Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller’s association with MoMA began in his childhood when he [...]
- MoMA presents Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David & Peggy Rockefeller Collection
