Required Reading
This week, mountains on top of skyscrapers, changes to art dealing, MIT's art collection, printing architecture, a same-sex kiss misinterpreted, and more.
This week, mountains on top of skyscrapers, changes to art dealing, MIT’s art collection, printing architecture, a same-sex kiss misinterpreted, and more.
The world of art dealing has been transformed in the last few decades:
Globalization has come to the art market, and dealers are being forced out of their comfortable galleries in venerable art capitals like New York and London and jumping on a worldwide carousel of art fairs from Miami to Hong Kong to Basel to São Paulo.
By offering what a gallery cannot — seemingly endless gawking at artwork, artists and celebrities — the fairs are as popular, glamorous and fizzy as Cristal, attracting both the new moneyed classes that fly in from Kiev, Shanghai, Doha or Abu Dhabi and the serious American collectors who now prefer to do their browsing at fairs at home and abroad.
… Dealers worldwide earned about 36 percent of their sales on average through local or international art fairs in 2012, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2010, according to the European Fine Art Foundation’s Art Market Report by Arts Economics, which surveyed 6,000 dealers.
Thank you to financial blogger Felix Salmon for sharing this priceless exchange between writers Gary Shteyngart and Salman Rushdie:
What is the “insta-collector” you ask? Well, the New York Observer writes:
“I’ve had clients who have no idea who the artist is they’re actually bidding on,” she said. “One couple who spent millions on a piece—I actually had to correct their pronunciation of the artist’s name. It’s like they bought a Givenchy and pronounced it Give-IN-chy and not Gee-von-ché,” the consultant shrugged. “But I made a good commission on that one, and the piece has already tripled in value.”
Marion Maneker has a short/interesting take on it: “those who complain the loudest are often the most responsible for what they decry.”
Comic artist Grant Snider remembers Futurism.
MIT has prepared a concise video about its impressive public art collection, which includes work by Alexander Calder, Harry Bertoia, Louise Nevelson, Henry Moore, Sol LeWitt and others.
A California duo has created the world’s first printed architecture using standard 3D printers.
National Geographic has published images of the looted museum in Mallawi, they are heart-breaking:
A kiss between two female Russian athletes was misinterpreted by many in the Western media as a protest against Russia’s anti-gay policies. In reality, it was a case of cultural misunderstanding:
Now, three days later, Ryzhova is saying there was no such statement intended. “There was no hidden political motive,” she said, and then blamed the Western media for creating and spreading an inaccurate story. “Instead of congratulating the athletes, they decided to insult not only Yulia but the whole (Russian) athletics federation.”
Instead, the kiss, a common practice among Russian women, came from celebration, not protest.
Someone goes to an American supermarket and reflects on “the shocking state of our collective health.” As Nick Crocker writes, “Imagine if 65% of the population had a gambling problem and we let banks put pokies inside ATMs.”
A room filled with prints of all of the images uploaded to Flickr in one day. It’s a project by Erik Kessels.
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
