Simon Shaw is droll in the way you might expect a Sotheby’s department head to be, but there was only a shadow of irony in his voice when The Observer brought up Femmes lisant (deux personnages), a 1934 Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter that Sotheby’s sold in May for $21.3 million.
“It’s the summer of Read More
Last week the massive Hong Kong Exhibition Center hosted a triple header–the four-year-old art fair Art HK; a luxurious Christie’s auction preview; and a Christie’s-sponsored exhibition of new work by Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi–that provided a window into the state of the art market in China.
The fair now draws a good portion of the Read More
The morning after Christie’s held its $301 million Wednesday-evening sale of Post-war and Contemporary art, the apex of last week’s marquee auction season, you might have expected auctioneers, dealers and collectors to wake up with a queasy combination of winner’s elation and buyer’s remorse. The Christie’s sale was the third headline event in a five-day Read More
At Ground Zero the memorial trees are springtime-green and the waterfalls are up and running, but there remains much to do. Besides the various incomplete towers, slow progress continues on the transit hub that fills the space beneath the site, where the Port Authority is laying the foundation for another long-delayed project: the Performing Arts Read More
Last November, Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting “Men in Her Life” sold for over $60 million at Phillips de Pury & Co. It went for well over its high estimate, and became the second most expensive Warhol painting ever to sell at public auction. Because both the buyer and the under bidder were on the phone, Read More
Jose Freire was nowhere to be found. It was the inaugural night of his second Team gallery, on Wooster Street in SoHo. The space, filled with stenciled paintings by David Ratcliff, was teeming with guests waiting to congratulate him. Finally, Freire materialized–standing nervously behind a metal dog leash that served as a velvet Read More
“I guess they focus on a particular kind of art here,” drawled Emily Germain dryly, as she sauntered into Soho’s Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation on 26 Wooster Street on a wet Saturday. Ms. Germain, a petit and unfazeable 27-year-old, is finishing up her masters in social work at N.Y.U. and dropped into the gallery on Read More
There’s a Sex and the City episode where Carrie buys a new pair of Manolos and a dress that costs “a month’s rent” to show up Big’s wife Natasha at the prestigious “Women in the Arts” luncheon.
That sophisticated, sometimes glamorous gathering was likely inspired by New York’s own women’s arts organization ArtTable, whose annual Read More
The American Folk Art Museum, just short of its 50th birthday, is facing mounting and severe financial pressures. On Jan. 1, the museum missed a payment due on municipal bonds originally issued a decade ago to fund the move to its West 53rd Street headquarters. (Bond insurance kicked in.) Earlier this month, the midtown institution Read More
The first-ever online art fair debuted Saturday at VIPArtFair.com, but the launch, by and large, went haywire. Delays and error messages greeted Web surfers during the keenly awaited venture’s initial hours.
Yet the news wasn’t all bad: Even some of VIP’s (for Viewing in Private) rivals and skeptics granted that the tremendous interest generated by Read More
