Chupícuaro “Large Figurine” Type
Barbier-Mueller Collection at Sotheby’s Paris
In March, Sotheby’s held an auction in Paris of the Barbier-Mueller collection that was a flop. Gleeful announcements of new auction records and shattered high estimates have become customary in the high end art market; so what went wrong in this case? The Barbier-Mueller trove of Pre-Columbian art was created over two generations, was widely-published, and had been on public display at the Barbier-Mueller Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Barcelona. When an arrangement with the Spanish Government to put the collection on permanent display fell through,[i] the owner, Jean Paul Barbier, decided to sell.
“Grande Vénus Callipyge” at a preview in London.
The two-day auction brought in $13,375,000—a pittance compared to the $19-24 million estimate—and fewer than half of the 313 lots found buyers. The PR spin-doctors of Sotheby’s focused on the fact that the sale had set a new record for Pre-Columbian Art. In the post-sale press release,[ii] president of Sotheby’s France, Guillaume Cerutti, said: “Despite having achieved less than expected, these results are good considering the context in which the sale unfolded.”
Girl with a Pearl Earring – Exhibition Website
de Young Museum
I have not seen this exhibition (because I have neither renewed my FAMSF membership, nor managed to convince the bitchy membership counter boys to let me in for free), so I’m just going to judge the exhibition website for the de Young’s latest touring celebrity, Girl With a Pearl Earring.
Lazy eye, or unfortunate screengrab?
That’s right, SHE WINKS. Oh this is painful. Vermeer’s iconic masterpiece (reduced to a not-even-clever gif) and other treasures from the Mauritshuis are currently touring the globe (or parts of it) while the Dutch museum undergoes extensive renovations. Good for the Mauritshuis for making some buckets of ducats while closed, but one wonders how much the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco are shelling out for the traveling show. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction (Part 2): The Veil, the Vault and the Avenue
“The museum’s ‘veil’ lifts at its corners, welcoming visitors in.”[i]
– Elizabeth Diller, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, architects, The Broad
Conceptual Rendering of the “Veil and the Vault” by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
The new, $100 million museum will be called The Broad, after its founder, local philanthropist Eli Broad. The sure-to-be-iconic building houses 50,000 square feet of exhibition and storage space for the Broad collections, and is designed by world-renowned architecture firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It will be located on Grand Avenue in downtown, and will sit directly across from both Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). It is a testament to Broad’s generosity and also to his ability to negotiate a public-private project. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction (Part 1): Public-Private Development Partnerships
It may seem unconventional to begin a thesis in arts administration by discussing a football stadium. This thesis is an exploration of urban planning in Los Angeles involving large-scale, public-private development. In the following chapters, I document how philanthropist Eli Broad’s under-construction contemporary art museum, The Broad, is being utilized to stimulate further redevelopment of an area of downtown Los Angeles called Bunker Hill. The Broad museum and the larger, coinciding Grand Avenue Project has engendered some conversation about the investment associated with public-private development projects, and the resulting public and private benefits. However, the amount of dialogue about investment and return benefit involved with the Broad museum and Grand Avenue is minimal in comparison to another large-scale, public-private development proposal less than two miles away: Farmer’s Field. The proposed downtown National Football League stadium has garnered substantial, well-publicized and in-depth political, social, and economic debate about investments and benefits. For this reason, I believe reflecting on some of the lively discussions circulating abound Farmer’s Field can be useful in introducing similar questions and concerns, which may not have been addressed or considered, or worse ignored, in the planning process of The Broad museum.
FIELD OF SCHEMES? – PUBLIC-PRIVATE INVESTMENT & BENEFIT
“We’ve built more arenas and stadiums than anyone in the world, ever–including the Romans!”[i]
– Tim Leiweke, President and C.E.O., Anschutz Entertainment Group
It is a plotline ripped from the popular television show Entourage (season 7 to be specific). Big-time developer Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) wants to bring the NFL back to Los Angeles. AEG’s tactic to lure a franchise to the city is to build a brand new 1.3 billion stadium in downtown. The new stadium, which AEG has already sold naming rights to, will be called Farmers Field, after the insurance company. AEG plans to squeeze the 72,000-seat stadium into the already dense LA Live—an entertainment and sports cluster, which AEG has spent more than a decade developing between the Figueroa corridor and the 110 Freeway. LA Live includes the Staples Center (home to both the Lakers and Clippers NBA franchises), Nokia Theaters, Regal Cinemas, JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton, and Grammy Museum. AEG has appealed for both public and government support of the project by communicating its record of success and by touting a lengthy list of impressive economic benefits, which AEG claims, the city would receive should the NFL return: tens of thousands of jobs, construction of nearby hotels, a revived Convention Center, and hundreds of millions of dollars in increased economic activity.[ii] The economic influence seems incalculable and the project non-negotiable.
Does (downtown) Los Angeles need an NFL stadium?
Christian Marclay’s The Clock (Part 2)
SFMOMA
“Everybody is concerned about time. You know we never have enough time to do anything, and especially to see art.” – Christian Marclay.
![[Insert mandatory clock pun here.]](http://exhibitioninquisition.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/christian-marclay_the-clock_sfmoma_exhibition_title-wall.jpg)
[Insert mandatory clock pun here.]
My life was changed last year when I saw The Clock multiple times at LACMA—the museum purchased an edition of The Clock and had it on view during regular hours, as well as organized several 24-hour screenings. I went to one of the 24-hour screenings and stayed from 8:00PM till 12:15AM. This week, I went to SFMOMA and took in a mere two hours and 15 minutes of The Clock—from 2:45 till 5:00PM. Taking in another chunk of The Clock allowed me to see how the work varies at different times of day. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS AHEAD. Read the rest of this entry »
Warhol Inspiration @ Dior, Golden Slippers
Christian Dior, Fall 2013 Collection
Fashion weeks are winding down, and once again many designers turned to art and art history for divine inspiration. At Christian Dior, Raf Simon recently partnered with the Andy Warhol Foundation to incorporate some of Warhol’s sketches from the 1950s into the house’s fall 2013 collection. Vogue’s Editor-at-Large, Hamish Bowles was charmed by the dainty flowers, pesky-looking birds, and glamorous beauty profiles that accented some of the looks that came sashaying down the runway. The Warhol Foundation is doing a very low-to-high-end job of licensing Warhol’s work into tons of contemporary products, from fragrances and skateboards to champagne, and now the Parisian runway.
Andy Warhol for Christian Dior. Or is it Christian Dior for Andy Warhol?
Richard Serra, “Sequence”
SFMOMA, Cantor Arts Center, LACMA
This week, SFMOMA released additional renderings of its eminent expansion including new views of the interior. Snohetta (the chic, Norwegian architects) and SFMOMA haven’t been apologetic or really skirted the issue about plans to basically gut the entire existing building, keeping only Mario Botta’s postmodern façade. Climbing SFMOMA’s imposing stairs is literally my first memory of being in a museum. As a kid, I tried to recreate the alternating bands of polished and flame-finished black granite of these stairs with a set of sleek dominoes on my living room floor. A friend and I lamented the demise of Botta’s staircase the last time we visited SFMOMA and we brainstormed potential artist projects that might utilize the soon-to-be-dismantled stairs. (The SFMOMA expansion is going to be LEED Certified so maybe some of the black stone will be reclaimed.)
“Sequence” at SFMOMA of the future.
Alas, the released images show all of this will be eliminated in the expansion, sacrificed for the sake of greater street presence and improved openness to pedestrian traffic flow. (The $555 million expansion will also double the current amount of gallery space, so there is that.) New public space includes a multi-storied, glass-fronted gallery open to Howard Street. In the renderings, this gallery space is filled with a massive Richard Serra corten-steel sculpture. This isn’t just a filler “scalie” artwork; Serra’s Sequence (2006) will be installed in the new space when the Snohetta expansion opens in 2016. Sequence is part of the Fisher collection, the donors who generous donated many buckets of ducats for the expansion, and who are kinda-sorta donating their incomparable trove of contemporary art to the museum.
“Sequence” on Howard Street.
