ArtReview community blogs
Diary of a Gallery Girl
Date: Friday, Nov 7, 2008 10:10
From: gallerygirl@artreview.com
To: office@artreview.com
"We're all just feeling so terribly nostalgic", gushes my new boss to the museum's director of exhibitions, waving her glass of champagne dangerously close to the photographs she’s referring to. The exhibitions director visibly flinches, and no wonder – even though my glamorous new boss,…
Continue ›
Posted by ArtReview magazine on 26 November 2008 at 2:30pm — No Comments
Sheika-maker: At the Art Paris-Abu Dhabi art fair
Art fairs in emerging markets are always a gamble and such was the case at Art Paris-Abu Dhabi last week, the satellite branch of the Parisian fair, back in the United Arab Emirates for a second year. Besides the general lack of organization and indifferent sales, the fair was marred by the behavior of one errant collector.
The woman in question was said to be a sheika in the Abu Dhabi royal family and a prominent collector on the local scene. She made the r…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 24 November 2008 at 5:30pm — 2 Comments
The flawed thinking behind buying art as an investment
Only a month ago – well after the Crisis had kicked off – Forbes was breathlessly reporting that some billionaires had managed – inadvertently or otherwise – to 'hedge' their balance sheets by investing in fine art. Eli Broad, for example, had lost approximately $2 billion in his equities portfolio over the previous year, the magazine reported, but the 'soaring value' of his ar…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 17 November 2008 at 1:30pm — 3 Comments
Turin Triennial
There was a buoyant mood in Turin on Wednesday 5 November 2008 as the city awoke to the news of Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency. The 2nd Turin Triennial and the 15th Artissima Art Fair were both opening in the north Italian town in the same week, and the place was full of artists and arts professionals in high spirits. A sunny disposition like this is extremely rare in an artworld forever clad in mourning black.
A peculiar day, then, f…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 12 November 2008 at 2:00pm — No Comments
Rio favela painting itself out of a corner
A couple of weeks ago a minor miracle took place in Rio. In Vila Cruzeiro, a favela in the Penha section, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate the completion of a painting. Along a winding concrete staircase that extends from the favela's main street Rua Santa Helena, a duo of Dutch artists known as Haas & Hahn created a 2000 square-metre mural. With the help of three friends from the neighborhood, Haas & Hahn had spent nine months meticulously pa…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 7 November 2008 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments
Roundup #17: What's happening this week on artreview.com
Winter and darkness are now upon us, and a financial deepfreeze forecasted. It's time to shack up as best we can and hibernate for the winter – and maybe go off the grid completely. London-based artist Elysa Lozano's work explores the possibilities of 'opting out' of capitalism, and the upshots of such idealism. On Lozano's profile page are several images of what appear to be improvi…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 5 November 2008 at 5:00pm — No Comments
Taggers get into 'living contact' with vacant São Paulo Bienal
In the public 'square' on the ground floor of Oscar Niemeyer's Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion last week, electroclash band Fischerspooner played a gig to kick off the 28th São Paulo Bienal – the anti-biennial. Curator Ivo Mesquita, together with adjunct-curator Ana Paula Cohen, decided to offer a vantage point on international biennial bloat by leaving the enormous second floor of the pavilion completely empty and artwork-free, and focusing instead on lectures, perfor…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 4 November 2008 at 6:00pm — No Comments
The drugs don't work: GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy
Museums aiming to quell criticism of their practices (especially in the matter of overt reliance on somewhat dubious corporate sponsorship) can beat critics to the punch by hiring an artist or curator to do it for them. So too with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline's sponsorship of a new annual winter exhibition subtly called GSK Contemporary, located in the old Museum of Mankind out the back of the Royal Academy. Charles Saumarez Smith, the recently installed ch…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 3 November 2008 at 1:00pm — 1 Comment
A soft landing at FIAC
FIAC, part two of a four-weekend art fair marathon (preceded by Frieze and followed by Art Forum Berlin and Artissima in Turin) finished up late on Sunday with enormous crowds milling inside the spectacular Grand Palais, and a long and tenacious line of curious and cultured Parisians still waiting outside as late as 5pm.
…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 28 October 2008 at 1:30pm — 2 Comments
In the doghouse: Oleg Kulik's zoophilia photos seized by police at FIAC
"Circulez!" shouted a wiry man with a shaved head as he fixed a piece of electrician's tape across the entrance to the booth of Moscow's XL Gallery, barring access. "Ce n'est pas un spectacle!" But indeed it was.
It was day two of the FIAC art fair in Paris, around 4.15 in the afternoon, and visitors to the small two-storey section at one end of the Grand Palais were witnessing a public performance rarely seen in the contemporary art w…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 27 October 2008 at 11:30am — 48 Comments
Manifesto Destiny: A marathon weekend at the Serpentine
Deep into the second day of the Manifesto Marathon, held in Frank Gehry's pavilion outside the Serpentine Gallery, artist Tino Sehgal illuminated the strangeness of the event: here is a curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, soliciting manifestos from a stellar cast of 51 artists, architects, historians, activists and thinkers. "Imagine some museum director saying to the Dada artists: 'Come on! Get your manifesto done!'" Sehgal said in his soft voice, which seemed…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 22 October 2008 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments
All the fun of the Zoo Art Fair
Monday—While Frieze seemed to be business-only-slightly-less-than-usual, the smaller galleries at Zoo (all of them under six years old), will be the ones to suffer most in a recession. Still, it seems more risks are being taken here than at Frieze, where most galleries played it very safe.
As I enter the fair, which for the second year is at 6 Burlington Gardens, round the back of the Royal Academy, I'm greeted in the foyer by a soldier in army fat…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 20 October 2008 at 4:30pm — 1 Comment
Blogging Frieze Week: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Tate Modern
Frieze Art Fair starts on Wednesday, but the first of dozens of barnacle events in London this week (stay on artreview.com for rolling coverage) went down early this morning at Tate Modern: the unveiling of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's sci-fi inspired installation TH.2058. Artreview.com was there to shoot a video and interview Gonzalez-Foerster – sit tight, we'll get it edited and uploaded as soon as we can! In the meantime, here are a few initial impres…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 13 October 2008 at 4:00pm — No Comments
Stuck with Saatchi
Huge lines, red-carpet swagger and happy-papping, the promise of glitzy, attention-grabbing art and the worthy atmosphere of democratisation (the "Admission Free" signs are as big as those for the gallery itself – perhaps it's more like Noblesse oblige). The long-awaited opening of Charles Saatchi's new gallery in Chelsea last night, a year or so later than scheduled, felt like a throwback to the days of Cool Britannia.
It's well known though that Saatc…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 8 October 2008 at 4:00pm — 10 Comments
Turn it in: Phoney bewilderment and The Turner Prize
Another year, another Turner Prize, another verb for what JMW Turner must be doing in his grave (turning / spinning / smouldering / mouldering / weeping / wailing), another spirited defense that Turner too was controversial in his day, another press pantomime of phoned-in silly-season pieces and letters to the editor with references to emperors' clothing and the comparative artistry of children. And as tradition dictates, the Stuckists (like the Muppet Show judges)…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 6 October 2008 at 11:28am — 12 Comments
Roundup #16: What's happening this week on artreview.com
As the stock markets crash, let's look elsewhere for a few reasons to be cheerful. Liverpool, maybe? Their fifth biennial just started, and since the city is European Capital of Culture this year, it had to deliver something special. The reviews have been pretty bad so far (in the Independent…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 2 October 2008 at 3:30pm — 1 Comment
Driving itself MAD: New home – and new identity? – for Museum of Arts and Design
Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, vases, bowls, flatware, divans, side tables, chairs and a whole array of stuff that's a bit harder to identify – we call all of this 'art and design' not because we don't really know what it is (whether it's one or the other, art or design) but because we know it's not really the former but can't quite bring ourselves to laud it as the latter on its own terms. (Well, that's not entirely true. We do have an entire institution i…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 30 September 2008 at 2:00pm — No Comments
Diary of a Gallery Girl
Date: Friday, Sept 5, 2008 10:10
From: gallerygirl@artreview.com
To: office@artreview.com
Conversation: Off the record
Frieze Week, I've realised, is the British artworld's equivalent to Christmas. Every year, I get a phone call from my mother about mid-August, demanding my movements around Jesus's birthday. Four months prior to October, the artworld enters into…
Continue ›
Posted by ArtReview magazine on 24 September 2008 at 12:30pm — 2 Comments
For what you are about to purchase: Moscow goes Ga-gagosian and Zhukova's GCCC opens
It was a week of art madness in the Russian capital, even by Moscow's standards. Tuesday saw the grand opening of Dasha Zhukova's Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture (GCCC), which launched with a retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's conceptual installation work, curated by Moscow Biennale commissioner Joseph Backstein in collaboration with Robert Storr. The three-venue exhibition – which took place not only in the GCCC but also in part at Winzavod, a…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 22 September 2008 at 1:00pm — 7 Comments
Roundup #15: What's happening this week on artreview.com
As many a buyer with a million to spare spent this week shopping for Hirsts, doubtless many artists are left cold. The Sotheby's spectacular demonstrates collecting and accumulating at the point of both excess and exhibition(ism) – an event that occurs at the end of a creative process. But collecting occurs, often in a less visible way, at the beginning of many artists' research. Some artists on artreview.com are also collectors in a more obvious sense: acc…
Continue ›
Posted by artreview.com on 18 September 2008 at 3:30pm — 1 Comment
Latest Featured Blog Posts
- Diary of a Gallery Girl
- Sheika-maker: At the Art Paris-Abu Dhabi art fair
- The flawed thinking behind buying art as an investment
- Turin Triennial
- Rio favela painting itself out of a corner
- Roundup #17: What's happening this week on artreview.com
- Taggers get into 'living contact' with vacant São Paulo Bienal
Most Popular Featured Blog Posts
- Around the Armory, Volta, Pulse and Scope
- In the doghouse: Oleg Kulik's zoophilia photos seized by police at FIAC
- Notes from the Overground: Moscow's New Magazines and the New Art Scene
- Roundup #5: The Best Artists This Week on artreview.com
- The end of the upswing? Jeff Koons at the 92nd Street Y
- Roundup #1: The Best Artists This Week on artreview.com
- Letter from Lisbon
Sign In/Up
Welcome to artreview.com
