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The Armory Show Arts Week - Favorite Booth Results

03/08 | Artlog | Post a comment

The conversation on Artlog Live was tremendous with thousands of posts across all the fairs of The Armory Show Arts Week. 52 galleries from across the globe were nominated by the community (see the full list). Below find the most popular gallery booths at the fairs selected by you!

The Armory Show

PULSE New York

1) Mark Moore Gallery (Los Angeles)
2) perugi artecontemporanea (Padua)
3) Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles)

IMPULSE People’s Choice Awards

Winner: Roberto Mollá presented by Christina Ray

Fountain

Volta

1) Judi Rotenberg Gallery (Boston)
2) heliumcowboy artspace (Hamburg)
3-tie) Ana Cristea Gallery (NYC)
3-tie) Invisible-Exports (NYC)

Scope

1) Mironova Gallery (Kyiv)
2) Galeria Christopher Paschall (Bogota)
3) Mike Weiss Gallery (NYC)

Our Presentation at SMartCAMP

03/08 | Dylan Fareed | Post a comment

After a week of running around between the Artlog office and myriad Armory Arts Week events, Nish and I took a break to present at SMartCAMP yesterday. We greatly enjoyed the conference, received good feedback from attendees and dug the other presentations/panels we caught while we were there.

Here’s a video of the presentation we gave:

And if you are having trouble watching the embedded video above, you can stream it here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5263120

Pernod Absinthe announces Creator Of winners!

03/08 | Artlog | Post a comment

Pernod Absinthe (“Creator of Absinthe In 1805”) concludes its Creator Of art contest today with the winner’s announcement. The contest solicited paintings, illustrations, photographs, digital/animation and video entries since last fall. The winners, their works, and prizes are:

1st Place – $1805 and Creator Of video profile
Dan Sabau, painting, “1805 Absinthe Massquerade”

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Weekly Roundup

03/07 | Danielle Mund | Post a comment

There’s nothing more significant this week than the bounty of art fairs that have taken over New York City’s piers, hotels, and art spaces. The Armory, the ADAA’s Art Show, Dutch Art Now, Fountain New York, Independent, the Korean Art Show, PooL, Pulse, Red Dot, Scope New York, Verge New York and Volta New York—an overwhelming amount of art and a dizzying array of events have been scattered over the past four to five days. The Art Newspaper reports that given 5 minutes per booth, it would take 64 hours and 25 minutes to see it all, a record 483 galleries. And that doesn’t even include any of the parties or other openings that went down off-site, behind the scenes and after-hours.

There was a large Berlin-based gallery contingent this year at the Armory Show, as well as a larger number of galleries represented from the Lower East Side. Armory Show Director Katelijne De Backer notes this gives the fair “a younger energy”. Pier 92 of the Armory Show was again devoted to Modern rather than Contemporary art, and was reportedly higher in quality this year due to the recession “teasing out” some of the best works from private collections. ARTINFO details the “hybrid non-art-fair art fair” Independent, a new fair held at X Initiative.

While the fairs were certainly the top item on the ticket this week, there were other openings as well. The Jeff Koons-curated show “Skin Fruit” opened at the New Museum, and was unsurprisingly hit with pretty scathing reviews by Roberta Smith (though I actually found it quite enjoyable, as controversial as that might be). Down in our nation’s Capital, the National Portrait Gallery
is officially raising funds for the first-ever federally-funded gay art exhibition entitled “Hide-Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture”. The show has already raised $500,000 of the $900,000 budget. Down in Missouri, the Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum has found its new director in New York’s own East Harlem. El Museo del Barrio’s current director, Julián Zugazagoitia, will assume the post.

Overseas in France, a Bordeaux court of appeals has thrown out a case against three senior curators who were originally charged on account of an exhibition in 2000 that included “child pornography”. The works, however, had already been shown at prestigious museums worldwide, including MoMA, and the case was dismissed. Though much of the news about Haiti has died down, The New York Times includes a video this week on Haiti’s enduring creativity and Haitians’ efforts to salvage works from their art centers.

Finally, Ernst Beyeler, a top dealer, collector, and museum founder, dies peacefully in his home in Switzerland at age 88.

This week, enjoy the peace after the storm!

Pernod Absinthe’s new video on Artlog’s “Creators”

03/06 | Artlog | Post a comment

Pernod Absinthe (“Creator of Absinthe In 1805”) debuts here its video spotlight on Manish Vora and Dylan Fareed – the Co-Creators Of Artlog. The clip shadows the Artlog Founders at Art Basel Miami and at the Chelsea Art Museum in NY. Interviews include Pulse Art Fair’s Helen Toomer and art fans, all sharing their enthusiasm for Artlog’s live/social media platform.

Manish Vora & Dylan Fareed, “Co-Creator’s Of Artlog:"

The video is released in tandem with the close of Pernod Absinthe’s Creator Of art contest during Armory Arts Week. The multi-disciplinary contest is a nod to Pernod’s 19th Century arts heritage. Sunday, we’ll announce here the results of the juried visual arts competition — awarding $1805 for 1st Place, $500 for 2nd Place, and $250 for 3rd Place. (Wednesday, we featured a slideshow of works from the 15 finalists. Click here to see the post.

Watch other Pernod Absinthe Creator Of videos, including a spotlight on gallerist James Fuentes and infamous barchef Joaquin Simo below.

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Vote on Your Armory Arts Week Favorites

03/04 | Artlog | 1 comment

Artlog Live, the definitive guide to the Armory Arts Week, has already been a huge success. Hundreds of collectors, artists and gallerists have been posting messages on everything from their favorite art to hot events and celebrity spottings.

Inspired by the online voting for the People’s Choice Award at PULSE New York (impulse.artlog.com), which is powered by Artlog, we decided why not open this up to all the fairs across Armory Arts Week. Launched this morning, Artlog with partners Flavorpill, 20×200 and NY Art Beat have launched VOTE [vote.artlog.com]. Art lovers can submit their favorite exhibition on vote.artlog.com or tweet to @artlog with a picture, gallery name, booth number and fair.

Spread the word! Remember to keep posting using the hash tags like #armory or texting to 41411 armory + a message.

Also special thanks to our Artlog Live “Bloggers” who are sending in messages and updates all week: Persis Singh, Shayna McClelland, Rebecca Ann Siegel, Marley Blue Lewis, Danielle Mund, Tayo Ogunbiyi and Simmy Swinder!

NBC New York - Interview with Armory Show Director

03/03 | Artlog | Post a comment

On this week’s Artlog NBC New York segment, we talk with with The Armory Show Executive Director, Katelijne De Backer. She highlights important artists and programming at this year’s fair. Remember to visit live.artlog.com for a full guide to NYC’s biggest Arts Week and to post comments!

Pernod’s “Creator Of” Contest Concludes

03/03 | Artlog | Post a comment

During Armory Arts Week, Pernod Absinthe (“Creator of Absinthe In 1805”) is wrapping its Creator Of art contest. The multi-disciplinary contest is a nod to Pernod’s 19th Century arts heritage when the brand became a familiar feature of storied Bohemian cafés and artist salons. Later this week, the juried visual arts competition (Artlog’s Manish Vora was among the judges) will award $1805 for 1st Place, $500 for 2nd Place, and $250 for 3rd Place. The multi-disciplinary contest was open to U.S. residents who entered paintings, illustrations, photos, digital/animation, and videos. Watch a slideshow of works from the 15 finalists:

Part of the Creator Of campaign also includes a series of video spotlights on originators, including a clip on Artlog which we’ll debut here Friday. (Along with clips on gallerist James Fuentes and barchef Joaquin Simo). Sunday, we will post here the 3 winners of the art contest.

Weekly Roundup

03/01 | Danielle Mund | Post a comment

The week ahead is undoubtedly the single most exciting art art week of the New York year—but rather than getting too far ahead of ourselves, there were some important developments in art news this past week that should not be overlooked.

Only one week after Shaq and Damon Dash’s curatorial debuts, the New York Times reports on Jeff Koons’ newest art world post as curator of Dakis Joannou’s collection at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. This is certainly a controversial appointment, and the New Museum’s reputation could suffer if the show is poorly received. Another controversial post announced this week was that of Vittorio Sgarbi, an anti-modernist “polemicist” chosen to curate the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Bienniale. He has also been appointed supervisor of acquisitions of Rome’s new MaXXi Museum, which has divided the Italian art world due to Sgarbi’s general antagonism toward contemporary art.

In New York, the now-defunct, once-legendary culinary establishment Chanterelle Chanterelle is selling its one-of-a-kind menus on its website. The menus were designed by art world luminaries over the course of the restaurant’s 30-year history, and are now being sold to pay off creditors.

A lack of funding has caused New Orleans’ Prospect.2 art fair to be postponed another year, turning the biennial into a triennial. Prospect.1 ran $25,000 over budget, and 2009 was reportedly a very sluggish year for fundraising. Along the same lines, London’s ICA is “fighting for its survival,” claiming to need to cut £1 million from its £2.5 million salary bill. The ICA’s artistic director, Ekow Eshun, denies that the ICA could close its doors for good this May.

Despite long-established arts institutions lacking funding, art collectors Mera and Don Rubell have decided to open a second private museum in Washington, DC. The couple will place the museum in a building purchased from the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

In stranger news, a large piece of the Russian art collective AES+F’s massive installation in Rotterdam was stolen this past week. The curatorial assistant on the project revealed that she isn’t sure whether the thievery is a well-planned heist—the piece weighed over 100 kilos and was left on the sidewalk for only five minutes—or if it is an artistic performance piece or publicity stunt. The work was uninsured.

Finally, I leave you with a rather amusing tidbit of news regarding the difference between art and entertainment, according to some illustrious World Economic Forum leaders.

On that note, enjoy this week’s abundance of spectacles and entertainment —otherwise known as the art world.

NBC New York - Artlog Talks the Art of The LES

03/01 | Artlog | 1 comment

In the latest NBC New York segment, Artlog talks about the New Museum, galleries and non-profits of the Lower East Side. We even throw in some art inspired nightlife!

Whitney Biennial Recap

02/24 | Manish Vora | Post a comment

The Whitney Biennial 2010 is here and kicks-off the busiest two weeks of the year for the New York art scene (Armory Arts Week starts March 1). This is the 75th edition of the Biennial and we believe it is going to be a hit amongst art insiders and the general public. There is a good balance of young and old, international and US and of course a range of painting, video, sculpture, photography and drawing.

Pictured above is one highlight, The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s “We Like America and America Likes Us.” Check out the concurrent Brucennial on West Broadway! Preview the Biennial with this slideshow of highlights from the show!

We talked with rising art world star, Biennial Associate Curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and he gave us some New York, International and rising superstar artists to look out for:

New York:

Rebecca (R.H) Quaytman (Fantastic painter)
Alex Hubbard (Young video artist & painter
Rashaad Newsome (Performance artist and video maker)

International:

Aki Sasamoto (Memorable Japanese performance artist inspired by the donut!)
Huma Bhabha (Pakistani sculptor producing evocative work)

Future Superstars:

Aurel Schmidt (Skilled drawings from pop culture and mythological sources)
Tam Tran (Youngest artist of the Biennial – only 23 – photographer from Memphis)

Artlog contributor, Danielle Mund, provides us with her detailed take on this year’s Biennial:

In his opening comments today, Whitney Director Adam Weinberg called this year’s Biennial a “departure” from those of years past. It’s the first time the Museum has concentrated video and media works on one floor and hosts fewer artists than ever before. Perhaps more importantly, there are more women than men represented this year. Many of the artists have previous ties to the Whitney, such as through their inclusion in past Biennials (11 artists) or in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, or by their works’ existence in the Museum’s permanent collection (16 artists). Still, many of the artists are still in the “emerging” category, an important feature of the Biennial’s unspoken mission to be at the curatorial avant-garde and a “barometer of the moment” in American art.

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Weekly Roundup

02/22 | Danielle Mund | Post a comment

The biggest news of this week has yet to come, as the Whitney Biennial opens to the public this Thursday. The Biennial will include 55 artists who live and/or work in the United States. ARTINFO kindly breaks it down for us, grouping the “most persuasive” New York “kids” and the “strong showing” of LA “upstarts”. “strong showing” of LA “upstarts”.

Speaking of LA, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture has started rolling out its billboard art project, which is meant to put a check on the city’s “commercial yakking above the urban expanse.” There are currently five art-billboards up, with 16 more to be displayed by March. Another point goes to LA’s Department of Cultural Affairs for instituting a new public art project at LAX. The airport will involve video creations by 17 different artists and art teams from across the country.

Following in the footsteps of Iceland’s Kling og Bang’s Sirkus Bar at the 2008 Frieze Fair, for example—or German artist Carsten Höller’s London-based scenester hangout The Double Club—neo-conceptualist artist Theo Sims has erected Candahar, a “painstaking mock-up” of a Belfast pub in central Vancouver. The biggest differences between the Northern Irish and Canadian versions of the pub is that Candahar serves the local beer from the Whistler Brewing Company rather than Guinness, and its purchase requires a ticket rather than coins (it’s officially inside a theater company’s space).

Back on the East Coast, the Newark Museum successfully tackles the history of the “Constructivist spirit” of abstract art in North and South America between 1920-1950, the crowning exhibition in the museum’s centennial year. In Philly, documentary filmmaker Don Argott’s newest work, “The Art of the Steal,”traces the long and controversial history of the Barnes Foundation and its financial woes, and its eventual decision to move to downtown Philadelphia from its home in the suburbs.

Veteran performance artist Marina Abramović (pictured above) is back at MoMA for her retrospective, in a new work that engages visitors with…well, silence. Visitors will sit across from Ms. Abramović and effectively participate in a staring contest: the artist will “engage in the gaze,” but she will not speak them. The exhibition will also present over 50 works from the artist’s four-decade-long career.

Meanwhile, further uptown, the Guggenheim caps its 50th anniversary year with an exhibition about the space of the Museum itself. Artists, designers, and architects from all over the world submitted designs that explore ways in which the Guggenheim’s eminent structure could be repurposed or redesigned. (Interestingly, following last week’s critical piece by Roberta Smith regarding New York museum shows, in this article she praises the Guggenheim for its distinctive curatorial approach.)

Speaking of Roberta Smith, the Guggenheim, and her critical piece last week, Smith and her hubby Jerry Saltz spent Valentine’s Day at the Museum, where Saltz decided to inform his wife that he had posted the link to her critical piece on his Facebook status message—and received hundreds of responses from his nearly 5,000 “friends”.

The minor bit of auction news this week is that the bankrupt photo empire Polaroid has decided to sell off a chunk of its incredible photo collection —which includes early experimental work by artists such as Andy Warhol and Chuck Close—at Sotheby’s in late June.

And finally, the most star-studded piece of news this past week? Damon Dash and Shaquille O’Neill as gallery owner and curator, respectively—in entirely different spaces. (I have to wonder whether this timing was planned.) A spoof video documents reactions to Shaq’s curatorial skills atChelsea’s Flag Foundation. Need I say more?