WHITNEY BIENNIAL GOES ONLINE. . .
For art lovers unable to see the Whitney Museum 2004 Biennial Exhibition,
Mar. 11-May 30, 2004, in the flesh-world, the museum has launched
a handsome, comprehensive cyberspace version at http://whitney.org/biennial/.
The site provides a mother-load of online info, with critical texts
by the likes of film theorist Laura Mulvey and Artforum
editor Tim Griffin along with luscious reproductions of work
by each of the show's 108 artists, who range from Marina Abramovic
to Andrea Zittel and include two artists' co-operatives, the
Washington based low-fi art punk band Tracy and the Plastics
and the performance group Los Super Elegantes. Museum director
Adam D. Weinberg does his bit with a seven-page-long Oscar-
worthy list of acknowledgements, in which he thanks the curators,
Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer,
for their "Herculean efforts, dogged determination and passion, passion,
passion." The site provides a chat section, which strives to spark
debate with the intro, "Excited? Enraged? Welcome to the Biennial
Dialogue."
. . . AND BIENNIAL NOTED AS MEASURE OF SUCCESS
The 2004 Whitney Biennial must be a success -- other organizations are using it as a yardstick to measure their own accomplishments. ArtPace, the artist residency and exhibition center in San Antonio, announced that the Biennial features 13 alumni of its own programs, including "ArtPace fellows" Maurizio Cattelan, Spencer Finch, Isaac Julien, Robyn O'Neil, Liisa Roberts, Dario Robleto, Aïda Ruilova, Yutaka Sone and Erick Swenson.
Meanwhile, the innovative art-world nonprofit Creative Capital has announced that five of its grantees are represented in the 2004 biennial: Harrell Fletcher, Sam Green, Miranda July, Simparch and Sharon Lockhart. Creative Capital also notes that it helped fund The Weather Underground, a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award, and also backed several films that have been included in festivals in New York, Berlin and at Sundance.
ASIAN ART FAIR IN NEW YORK
New York City is happily in the throes of Asia Week, and central to the fest is the International Asian Art Fair, Mar. 26-31, 2004, at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 67th Street. Brian and Anna Haughton's spring event, founded in 1996, features more than 60 specialists in art from the Near East, Far East and South East Asia. The Mar. 25 gala preview benefits Asia Society; tickets begin at $125, for more info, call (212) 327-1302. Several lectures are planned as well, including a presentation on Mar. 28 by Joan Mirviss on collecting Japanese Art and a talk on Mar. 29 by Asia Society director Vishakha Desai on tradition in contemporary Asian art. For info, see www.haughton.com. General admission to the fair is $16.
MODERN FLOGS MASTERPIECES The Museum of Modern Art is taking its once-untouchable collection to the auction block again, this time with nine modernist masterpieces slated for the May 4 and May 11 sales at Christie's New York. The trove includes Giorgio di Chirico's 1917 icon of Metaphysical Painting, The Great Metaphysician (est. $7 million-$10 million), which is the top lot of the May 4 sale; a major Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1949, No. 12 (est. $5 million-$7 million); and works by Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Pablo Picasso. As is usual in such cases, the museum claims the works to be converted to cash are "rarely shown" and "inferior" to other examples in the collection -- though such a rationale must be soft-pedaled, since it would tend to depress auction proceeds. The cash raised is presumably to be squandered in the overheated art market -- as other funds for museum acquisitions are diverted to help pay for MoMA's new billion-dollar facility. The art sell-off was first announced in the New York Times, which seems to have run a noncritical story on the scheme in exchange for the exclusive.
DE PURY BUYS OUT LUXEMBOURG IN PHILLIPS
In a surprise move, auctioneer Simon de Pury has bought out the shares of Daniella Luxembourg in the upstart art-auction house Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg, which the pair founded in 2000. Details of the transaction were confidential. The auction house, which has about 40 employees and offices and salesrooms in London, New York, Munich, Paris, Berlin, Zurich and Geneva, is now named Phillips, de Pury & Co.; its spring photo sales are slated for Apr. 22-24, 2004, with contemporary art on tap for Mar. 13-14. For her part, Daniella Luxembourg has launched her own private art dealership, Luxembourg Art, and is also starting ArtVest, an art-investment company.
Insiders said that Luxembourg had wanted out since the Louise MacBain
fiasco [see "Artnet News," Dec. 10,
2002], but had been persuaded to delay her exit until after the
spring sales had been set. The staff of the beleaguered auction house
is jittery, to say the least. "Who knows what the future holds?" said
one.
WEXNER PRIZE TO ISSEY MIYAKE Issey Miyake has won the $50,000 Wexner Prize for 2004, the first fashion designer to receive the
award. He goes to Columbus May 10-11 to receive the honor.
"POST MINSTREL" IN BEVERLY HILLS Steve Turner Gallery in Beverly Hills is opening a new show
by Mark Steven Greenfield called "Post Minstrel," Mar. 27-May
8, 2004, featuring 25 new works inspired by 19th and early 20th century
images of blackface entertainment. An African-American artist who
lives and works in Los Angeles, Greenfield has made cutting works
addressing issues of race and identity since 2000, works that have
been included in "Whiteness: A Wayward Construction" at the Laguna
Art Museum and "Only Skin Deep" at the International Center
for Photography. For more info, see www.steveturnergallery.com
FIRE DESTROYS MOSCOW EXHIBITION HALL
The historic Moscow exhibition hall that was the setting for Nikita Khrushchev's 1962 attack on contemporary art was destroyed by fire on Sunday, Mar. 14, 2004, according to the Moscow Times. Hundreds of artworks by contemporary artists were also lost in the fire, the newspaper said, including paintings by the Moscow artist Tatiana Yan from her recent show "The Way to Cappadokia," some 100 paintings and watercolors dating to the 1980s by 67-year-old artist Vadim Konev stored in the building's third floor, and as many as 250 works by more than 90 artists from a recent show of scenery and costumes titled "Results of the Season." Gallery director Irina Meleshkevich told the paper that most of the works weren't insured.
The Central Manezh Exhibition Hall, as it is called, was erected in 1817 next to the Kremlin by Italian architect Osip Bove and Spanish engineer Augustin Betancourt. The unusual wood-girdered, columnless structure was originally used for military parades, though it also hosted a historic concert conducted by Hector Berlioz in 1868. The communists converted it into an exhibition center in 1957, and the space presented the celebrated "New Reality" exhibition of 1962, which made news after Khrushchev called the artists "fags" and "bastards" and said they had no place in the new Soviet state. Since 1994 the building has housed the private Manezh Gallery -- and again met scandal in 1998, when the Moscow artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan destroyed mass-produced icons with an axe, and was later declared guilty of inciting religious hatred by a Moscow court and forced to flee the country.
ZAHA HADID WINS PRITZKER PRIZE
Deconstructivist architect Zaha Hadid has become the first woman to receive the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is to be awarded at a ceremony at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg on May 31. The Baghdad-born, London-based Hadid, 53, has only one building in the U.S., the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, but she has several major commissions in the works, including Maxxi, the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome, a high-speed train station in Naples and an addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla. She has also signed on to design a new art gallery and residential complex planned for London by transplanted New York art dealer Kenny Schachter.
ART 35 BASEL ANNOUNCES "STATEMENTS" FOR 2004 Art 35 Basel, June 16-21, 2004, has selected the artists for
its annual barometer of hot new art, the "Art Statements" section,
which this year includes 17 artists from 12 countries. The artists
(and their galleries) are Dirk Bell (BQ, Cologne), Pierpaolo
Campanini (Francesca Kaufmann, Milan), Valentin Carron
(Praz-Delavallade, Paris), Sunah Choi (Neff, Frankfurt), Juan
Pedro Fabra (Brändström & Stene, Stockholm), Icelandic
Love Corporation (i8, Reykjavik), Dr. Lakra (Kurimanzutto,
Mexico City), Mai-Thu Perret (Pia, Bern), Alex Pollard
(Mummery, London), Marcin Maciejowski (Meyer Kainer, Vienna),
Aleksandra Mir (Jousse, Paris), Anselm Reyle (Nourbakhsch,
Berlin), Matthew Ronay (Staerk, Copenhagen), Steven Shearer
(Noero, Turin), Tino Sehgal (Mot, Brussels), Torbjörn
Vejvi (Raucci/Santamaria, Naples), and Roe Ethridge (Andrew
Kreps, New York).
JAMIE WYETH DOES STEPHEN KING Adelson Galleries in the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street in
Manhattan is showcasing drawings and paintings by Jamie Wyeth
that were made for scaremeister Stephen King's current 15-hour
fright fest, Kingdom Hospital, currently airing on ABC on Wednesday
nights. "Jamie Wyeth: Works from Kingdom Hospital," Mar. 4-Apr. 2,
2004, features paintings and drawings that are central to the TV tale,
which revolves around a artist who, like King, is the victim of a
gruesome accident that requires extended hospitalization. "Wyeth's
figurative work reflects much of the sense of isolation and, to some
extent, the insularity of Maine," said dealer Warren Adelson,
who came up with the idea of the collaboration. "I thought he would
be a perfect interpreter for the story's protagonist." As a result
of the project, Wyeth is now represented by Adelson Galleries.
NGA PREPS FOR DAN FLAVIN RETRO
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is giving
the tourists a preview of its forthcoming Dan Flavin retrospective,
which is slated for Oct. 3, 2004-Jan. 9, 2005. Two fluorescent light
pieces by Flavin are on view in the East Building concourse, both
titled "monument" for V. Tatlin (1969-70 and 1968). The forthcoming
survey, the first comprehensive retro of the artist's work, includes
35 to 40 works plus drawings in a show co-organized with the Dia
Center for the Arts. A tour is planned.
ARMANI SHOW MOVES TO ROME
The Guggenheim Museum's "Giorgio Armani: Retrospective" moves
to Rome when it opens at the National Museum of Roman Antiquities
at the Baths of Diocletian, May 6-Aug. 1, 2004. The installation
is designed by theater impresario Robert Wilson and funded
by Mercedes-Benz and American Express. The exhibition of 500
outfits by the fashion designer premiered at the Gugg in 2000 and
is now on a five-city tour (stops in Tokyo and Los Angeles are still
to come).
PATRICIA CRONIN IN BUFFALO
The University of Buffalo Art Gallery is opening a ten-year
survey of work by New York artist Patricia Cronin, whose production
ranges from the large-scale marble sculpture Memorial to a Marriage,
an unprecedented lesbian mortuary marker installed at Woodlawn Cemetery
in the Bronx, to erotic watercolors of intimate moments with her partner,
the artist Deborah Kass. "Patricia Cronin, The Domain of Perfect
Affection, 1993-2003," Mar. 26-May 22, 2004, is organized by UB Art
Gallery associate curator Sandra Firmin, and accompanied by
a 44-page monograph of the artist's work that includes an essay by
NYU professor Robert Rosenblum.
NEW EDITORS AT ART MAGS Frieze Magazine has appointed Jennifer Higgie and
Joerg Heiser as its new joint editors. Higgie had been the mag's
reviews editor, while Heiser was its editor in Berlin. A new design
is promised for September 2004. . . .ArtReview has named Rebecca
Wilson as its new U.K. editor. She had been deputy editor at Modern
Painters since 2002.
