Required Reading
This week, real estate as art, Design Museum app, Damien Hirst is a disgrace, online bids doing well at Christie's, Rem Koolhaas profile, Instagram pic cliches, African fashion blogs and more.
This week, real estate as art, Design Museum app, Damien Hirst is a disgrace, online bids doing well at Christie’s, Rem Koolhaas profile, Instagram pic cliches, African fashion blogs and more.
Are you getting tired of the “is it art” debate yet? Well, the New York Times wants you to consider that high-priced real estate may be art:
“Art is what people are willing to pay for, and an apartment like this is like a piece of art,” the Long Island real estate developer Steven Klar told a colleague of mine at The Times, Alexei Barrionuevo, in late July as he listed his penthouse on West 56th Street for $100 million.
Kathleen Coumou, senior vice president at Christie’s International Real Estate, said that some residential properties could legitimately be marketed and sold as art.
“When we call a property art, it tends to have architectural or historic significance,” she said.
London’s Design Museum collection has an app and it’s available (for free) in the iTunes store. The museum’s collection has over 2,500 objects that range from the early 20th C. to today. Enjoy.
Jonathan Jones is becoming a curmudgeon as of late but who can disagree with him calling artist Damien Hirst a “national disgrace“? Here’s a very quotable passage:
Don’t be a loser like Van Gogh, kids. Be a winner like Uncle Damien. Forget talent, forget work, forget the imagination and creative energy that burned in Vincent van Gogh. Art is just a laugh and a con. So is everything else.
Turns out Christie’s auction house is doing rather well in the field of online sales. Bloomberg wrote about a recent wine sale and found:
One quarter of the online clients were first-time buyers with Christie’s while many others, including an Asian client who bought the top lot, were existing customers buying wine for the first time, Per Holmberg, head of wine at Christie’s New York said.
The 444 registered bidders came from 29 countries, including Latvia and Indonesia. Brazilian bidders were also very active, mirroring the trend in other Christie’s sales, Holmberg said.
New York is replacing its street signs from ALL CAPS in favor of ones with a more Natural — and less shouty — image.
I personally think Rem Koolhaas is an amoral prick — how else do you describe someone who designs the propaganda ministry of the Chinese government — but he continues to drive debate and the Smithsonian Magazine has profiled him in their September issue. They explain:
Yet Koolhaas’ most provocative — and in many ways least understood — contribution to the cultural landscape is as an urban thinker. Not since Le Corbusier mapped his vision of the Modernist city in the 1920s and ’30s has an architect covered so much territory. Koolhaas has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles in search of commissions. Along the way, he has written half a dozen books on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis and designed master plans for, among other places, suburban Paris, the Libyan desert and Hong Kong.
Be sure to also check out Jimmy Stamp’s take on the article over at Life Without Buildings.
This list made me break out laughing: 12 Most Common Cliche Photos on Instagram. The checklist is spot on, and I admit to being guilty of snapping pics of food porn, clouds, sunsets and capturing a bathroom selfie or two. Though the blurb for airplane wing is priceless:
Letting the world know you didn’t fly first class.
Just how obsessed with one-point perspective is director Stanley Kubrick? Very. This supercut of his cinematic scenes spotted by io9 is proof.
The Guardian suggests the top 10 African fashion blogs, and the list includes a number of sites I hadn’t heard of but can’t wait to check out.
And Julian Bell’s review of Edvard Munch at the Tate Modern:
There are some tremendous epiphanies, notably the “Workers on Their Way Home” of 1913, their heavy, angry bodies seeming to block and invade the viewer’s own body space. But the effect of constriction is magnified by the exhibition overall. Munch’s memory only transmitted within a narrow emotional bandwidth.
