Artlog

Tough Times for French Photographers - ARTINFO.com

by lacey / 1 day ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“PARIS—The celebrated French photographer Bettina Rheims has been charged with plagiarism and ordered to pay a fine of €30,000 ($38,000), reports Artforum via Der Standard. A French court ruled that Rheims, best known for her erotic images of women, had infringed on copyright by using an image by German artist Jakob Gautel in a montage; the work features Gautel’s photograph with the word “paradis” written over an image of a toilet door.

Meanwhile, more than 200 members of France’s 1,600-member photographers’ union demonstrated about current publication practices at the Salon de la Photo in Paris, Artforum reports via the Agence France-Presse. Specific concerns included the editorial practice of publishing photographs by unknown photographers with the abbreviation DR, for “droits réservés” or “rights reserved.” While previously used only in the rare case when a photographer could not be located, and then usually temporarily, the abbreviation has become more prevalent as publications with shrinking budgets try to make use of photos they can run for free, usually acquired from municipal offices, administrations, and the press departments of large companies.

“There’s a real crisis of photography,” union president Pierre Clot told the AFP. “There are groups of highly specialized magazines that no longer have a budget for photographs.”

He warns that the increasing use of free images is “very dangerous, because if the photographers have no more income, then they will disappear.”

Pinta Has Strong Sophomore Effort - ARTINFO.com

found by lacey / 1 day ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“Galeria Emma Molina from Nuevo Leon, Mexico, sold Julio Le Parc’s “Rotations” (1974) on the opening night for $150,000 to a Mexican collector.”

Secret Stash - ARTINFO.com

found by lacey / 1 day ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“Koekkoek’s “Figures on the Ice in a Wooded Landscape” (1846)”

Secret Stash - ARTINFO.com

by lacey / 1 day ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“On November 18, Christie’s Amsterdam is offering a collection consigned by the heirs of an anonymous Dutch arts patron who had an affinity for 19th-century Dutch Romantic painting. The 455 works— by 200 Dutch artists, such as Cornelis Springer and Andreas Schelfhout, and valued at a collective €2.7 million ($3.9 million)—are hitting the block for the first time, having been kept hidden in a small canal house. Their owner began putting the collection together when he was in his 20s, taking out discreet newspaper ads presenting himself as an “international collector looking for quality paintings.” Over the next four decades, he bought pictures in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, acquiring his last in 1996. Yet he never allowed a dealer or curator to see his trove, which includes still lifes, portraits and scenes. In the last category is Figures on the Ice in a Wooded Landscape (est. €200–300,000; $288– 432,000), an 1846 oil by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, who counted the Dutch king Willem II as a patron.”

Jonathan Glancey: Frozen skyline as architecture works out how not to come to a halt in the recession |

by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.guardian.co.uk

“In the last recession, 40% of architects lost their jobs. Are they prepared for this one? And how will the crunch affect our once-booming cityscapes? ‘I didn’t lose any work in the first recession I experienced,’ says Zaha Hadid, ‘because I didn’t have any work.’ This was the early 1970s, the time of the three-day week, when the lights of Great Britain Ltd appeared to be switching off for good. ‘I was drawing with freezing cold hands in rooms lit by candles. It seems almost unbelievable now. If I learned something, it was that anything can happen. We’re doing well today, but this is partly because so many of our projects are in places like Dubai, which seem immune from recession. But you never know.’

You certainly don’t. Last week, Frank Gehry’s first major project in Britain was ditched, making it the first big victim, architecturally, of the credit crunch. Plans for a dramatic development of 750 flats facing the sea at Brighton were dropped when the developer, Karis, failed to find fresh funds, three months after Dutch bank ING pulled out. If Gehry – creator of the famous “Bilbao effect”, by which thrilling architecture triggers urban regeneration – can be tossed aside by recession-wary banks, what about less celebrated architects?...”

CTV British Columbia - No takers for 64 foot houses for homeless - CTV News, Shows and Sports -- Canadian Television

by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.ctvbc.ctv.ca

“It was designed as a very small solution to the very big problem of homelessness in Metro Vancouver, but it may never see the light of day.

“The idea was to come up with a 64 square-foot living space for homeless citizens that would have a price point of $1,500,” says Emily Carr University’s Christian Blyt.

The homes were built for a springtime industrial design course. Students in the 15-week course interviewed homeless people and directors of shelters and support agencies to design structures made of pine beetle wood and 30 per cent recycled building material.

The result is cheap, basic shelters capable of giving homeless people a place to live. The concept would be to cluster 10 or 12 of the little houses around a communal kitchen and washroom. Improvements could be made for about what the government is paying to renovate a single suite in one of their Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) hotels scattered around the city.

However, it now seems unlikely any homeless person will ever live in one of these shelters.

Blyt says although he’s had talks with the cities of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster, there are no serious discussions to put the shelters in place in any Lower Mainland municipality.

Visitors to the shelters, which are displayed near Emily Carr on Granville Island, gave the little houses rave reviews.

“For a good part of the world this is a palace,” says Blyt. “It’s only in our North American or western world we would say these are small.”

Most likely, the structures will wind up as garden sheds or kids playhouses.

“I think that’s kind of a waste,” one woman tells CTV News. “These student obviously put a lot of effort into these.”

“This is a place for someone to call home,” another woman says. “This is so needed.”

Pay As You Go - By Sarah Douglas - ARTINFO.com

by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“With precarious economic conditions spreading dark clouds over the art world, some market observers have begun to wonder what will become of art fairs, many of which have sprung up in the past five years, during an unprecedented boom. Now, one art fair organizer is changing his model in response to the current conditions. While most art fairs charge exhibitors a fixed participation fee or booth cost (which can run as high as $60,000 at the more prominent fairs), David Lester, who, with his wife Lee Ann, runs Seafair, the art fair on a custom-designed megayacht, is changing his pricing structure so that instead of a fixed booth cost, exhibitors pay an initial base rent of $3,200–$8,400, depending on the size of the booth, and then 5 to 12 percent of sales completed or initiated on the boat. (The rates decrease as the total sales figures go up.)

Lester says that having recently visited some fairs where he noticed that his dealer clients were paying large overhead costs but not making many sales, he came to the conclusion that “dealers can’t take these hits and stay in business. They don’t have the financial reserves.”

“At the moment, the risk of participating in fairs outweighs the rewards,” he said. As a fair organizer, that was a sobering situation to face, and one that prompted a realization. “We have to come up with a new formula for today’s environment,” he said.

One reason such an arrangement is more feasible for Seafair than for a fair in a convention center or tent is that the Lesters’ boat doesn’t require setup and breakdown. Moreover, dealers sign on for a period of weeks, rather than days. (At a fair like the Palm Beach International Fine Art Fair, which the Lesters recently bought back from DMG World Media, simply building out the fair every year can cost as much as $2 million.)

Lester’s new model for the 28 dealers on Seafair, to be instituted in January, rests largely on the theory that dealers who do especially well will make up for those who do not. Similarly, an unsuccessful fair poses less risk for dealers. “If someone comes on the boat in this scenario and happens not to do good business, they lose $3,000, not $50,000,” Lester points out.

The model is essentially a partnership between the dealers and the organizer, an ongoing business relationship more akin to the arrangement stores have in shopping centers than to the one galleries have in art fairs. His theory is that dealers who are successful under such conditions will want to sign on for subsequent runs of the boat.

One problem with the new model, however, is that the time and place of art sales at fairs is notoriously fluid. Sometimes a dealer meets a new client at a fair but does not sell to that client until later. Asked how he will account for this, Lester says dealers will have to pay him a percentage not only on sales that take place on the boat, but also on sales to anyone the dealer meets on the boat for the 12 months following the fair. “Any sale initiated on the boat is a boat sale,” Lester says. “You won’t be able to divert the sale from the boat to your gallery.” He plans to enforce this by having all exhibitors sign the equivalent of the standard American shopping center lease adapted for the boat.

Lester has not yet filled all 28 slots for the January journey of Seafair, which will run along the coast of Florida, ending up in Jacksonville in late March, but he believes that with the new financial arrangement in place he will not have trouble doing so before the December 15 deadline.

Lester has made a name for himself as something of a risk taker, and the Seafair concept has its skeptics. Nevertheless, he seems confident that this latest innovation will ensure his continued success even in troubled times. “What’s the buzzword now? Change!” he says. “This is the first real change in the art fair formula that makes it economically viable for dealers. If we don’t have change, dealers won’t survive. Lee Ann and I believe that in times of great difficulty, great fortunes can be made. Recession can breed opportunity as well as difficulty. A lot of people are going to make a lot of money in this downturn. The dealers who think in a different way are going to survive and make money.”

The Mathematical Sublime - ARTINFO.com

found by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

Ryoji Ikeda. Installation view of spectra (amsterdam), Vondel Park, Dream Amsterdam 2008, Amsterdam.

The Mathematical Sublime - ARTINFO.com

found by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

Installation view of data.tron, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan, 2007.

Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan

The Mathematical Sublime - By Martin Herbert - ARTINFO.com

by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.artinfo.com

“Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda designs megawatt installations and electronic music that test, if not surpass, the limits of the senses. One balmy summer night this year, I saw Amsterdam utterly transfigured by light. Pure white light shot 600 feet into the black sky, like a landing beacon for extraterrestrials, from a grid of 25 projectors in the docklands area of Java Island. It poured upward from five two-kilowatt floodlights on the floor of a 19th-century metal Music Pavilion in the city’s tranquil Vondelpark, bathing the circular canopy’s underside with unearthly luminance. It flowed onto the angled protruding box of the Van Gogh Museum’s new exhibition room, the five-by-five stonework grid glowing like a massive swatch of magnified pixels. It beamed from 68 projectors arrayed around a rain-filled brick gasholder in Westergasfabriek, a park and cultural center that on this still night suggested a desolate set from a lost Tarkovsky movie.

This mesmerizing spectacle, collectively titled spectra (amsterdam) (2008) and parlaying atmospheric abundance from simple means, was masterminded by Ryoji Ikeda, a 42-year-old Japanese artist and electronic musician. Though entirely untrained in visual art or musical composition, Ikeda moved in the early ’90s from free-form DJing, to providing soundtracks for the Japanese performance troupe Dumb Type, to making his own recordings (beginning with 1995’s 1,000 Fragments). He eventually went on to design light installations—first as accompaniments to his music, now separately—and ultimately arrived at a unique standing of dual credibility in the worlds of art and music on the basis of his unfolding of a kind of overwhelming technological sublime…”

In Down Economy, Sotheby’s and Christies’s Crash Back to Earth - NYTimes.com

found by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com

“This Kazimir Malevich work sold for $60 million, a record for this artist at auction.”

In Down Economy, Sotheby’s and Christies’s Crash Back to Earth - NYTimes.com

by lacey / 3 days ago / Source: www.nytimes.com

“It was easily the worst two weeks of high-end Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions in more than a decade. Night after night, collectors and dealers tentatively watched as paintings by Monet and Matisse, Bacon and Warhol went unsold. Each time the hammer fell, it seemed to signal a new era in sales, one that featured the return of the seasoned collector and more-sober business practices. Still, given the depth of the global economic crisis, auction house experts were expecting worse. So when a painting by Kazimir Malevich brought $60 million, and a Cubist canvas by Juan Gris fetched nearly $21 million — both record prices for those artists at auction — there was an audible sigh of relief…”