the art life

The Art Life joins with Australia's art community in extending our deepest sympathies to Nick and Chloe Waterlow's families and friends.


Update, Wednesday November 11:

"Martin Sharp and Sydney's art world were in shock yesterday. He had had a long association with Nick Waterlow, who had championed his work and was a co-curator of his 2006 solo show, The Everlasting World of Martin Sharp, at Ivan Dougherty Gallery.

Only last Saturday night, Sharp said, Waterlow had been dancing with his partner, the filmmaker, writer and artist Juliet Darling, at a party at the University of NSW Roundhouse.

''He was just having a great time,'' Sharp told the Herald. ''It's hard to think of these things as memories now. But I think highly of him - in memory, now.''

Waterlow had also curated For Matthew and Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia, in October 2006. Sharp had worked with him on the show, which featured artists whose lives had been touched by the mental illness that affects one in 100 Australians. Few realised it was a cause close to Waterlow's heart.

''I never knew about it until this show came up,'' Sharp said, ''but he did mention to me that he had a son who suffered from a mental illness.''

Tributes to the Waterlows continued to flow today from friends and prominent figures in the Sydney art world.

Gene Sherman, the chairman and executive director of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, said Mr Waterlow’s "nurturing attitude" made him stand out.

"(It was) his generosity ... the interest in the greater good as opposed to his own self interest in promoting himself, and that deep quietness about it," Dr Sherman told 2UE.

"There was very little fanfare about (him).

"One could never have anticipated that such a gentle soul as Nick could have met such a violent end." [...]

Nick Waterlow was the subject of an Archibald Prize finalist, Wang Xu, last year. Eleonora Triguboff, editor of Art and Australia, said: ''It would be hard to meet anyone kinder, gentler, or more giving than Nick. Nick was a true gentleman with a twinkle in his eye.''

He was passionate about all forms of art and suspicious about people who claimed to have all the answers. A great mentor, he encouraged the asking of questions at the college.

In an interview last November in The College Voice, he said: ''I was English-born and probably I should have gone to university like my predecessors. But I flunked that, and thank heavens I did, because it took me to Paris in the early '60s at a time of an extraordinary avant-garde activity.

''The first moment that an artist spoke to me in every conceivable way that I ever needed was Goya. He asked some very hard questions of everything that was happening in his world at that particular moment. And that is what I am interested by, and demand from artistic practice.''

New information and detail on the unfolding story.


From The Sydney Morning Herald:

"A Sydney community is in shock today after a cookbook author and her father were found dead in a Randwick home last night, and a young girl was discovered with wounds to her throat.

Police are expected to make a statement soon on the killings.

The Clovelly Road semi was purchased by cookbook author Chloe Waterlow, 37, and her husband, a digital consultant, Ben Heuston, 2½ years ago.

Ms Waterlow is the daughter of Sydney curator Nick Waterlow OAM, 68. He directed Sydney's third Biennale and is the curator of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Darlinghurst.

It is believed the family had been considering moving to Britain, but had recently decided against it.

The injured girl, believed to be the couple's four-year-old daughter, was in a serious condition at Sydney Children's Hospital in Randwick this morning.

Police were alerted just before 6pm yesterday when someone, believed to be a friend of the family, phoned triple-0.

They entered the premises through a side window and discovered the two bodies and the injured girl.

Another child, an eight-month-old boy, believed to be the girl's brother, was taken to hospital without injuries.

Last night, he was in the care of the Department of Community Services. Acting Superintendent Shayne Woolbank said the baby was not found inside the house.

The couple's third child is also in the temporary care of DOCS, a spokeswoman for Community Services Minister Linda Burney said.

Mr Waterlow's sister-in-law, Anne O'Brien, told the Herald Ms Waterlow was "a vivacious young mother who adored her littlies".

Police established a crime scene and questioned neighbours.

"We are still trying to piece together what happened," acting Superintendent Woolbank said."

Read more here.


From the NSW University College of Fine Art wesbite:

"It is with immense shock and distress that we heard news this morning of the death of Nick Waterlow, Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at COFA and a much loved and respected member of staff.

The death of Nick and his daughter are being investigated by police [...]

Nick was a leading member of Australia's arts community, having curated three Sydney Biennales. He has been Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery since 1991 and was a senior lecturer in COFA's School of Art History and Art Education. His current projects included a book exploring the place of Australian art internationally and he was of course closely involved in the planning for COFA's new art museum."

Read more here.

Labels: art news

"After just 20 minutes in a helicopter above the Manhattan skyline, autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire was ready to re-create a city that took hundreds of years to build.

Wiltshire is drawing a 20-foot panoramic view of New York - all from memory.

The 35-year-old artist's autistic disorder affects his ability to interact with other people.

It has also given him a photographic memory - and a gift for putting it on paper.

"I just looked without drawing," said Wiltshire as he explained how he is able to draw the skyline without referring back to a photograph of the city.

"Everything is like a TV show," he said. "I have never drawn from a sketchbook."

Wiltshire, a Londoner, is creating the image at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, where the public can watch him work through Friday afternoon.

New York is the last in a series of eight panoramas of major cities across the world, including Dubai and Tokyo.

"This city is very beautiful," he said, as he drew the Big Apple from the Bronx to Staten Island.

"It has got skyscrapers ...and the American people."

Read more: NY Daily News.com

Labels: art news, drawing

Chinese copies of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of America’s first president were denounced by the artist, desired by collectors—and ended up in some important museums.

It’s an international exercise in intrigue,” said Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.

He was speaking about a painting that was recently donated to the museum and is now on exhibition. The label reads: “George Washington c. 1800–1805.” The work is a copy of a Gilbert Stuart painting attributed to a Chinese artist named Foeiqua—who, like other artists in China, made a number of reverse paintings on glass. (The artist paints on the back of the glass so that the image can be seen from the front.)



“The painting was donated by a Connecticut woman, Caroline N. Dealy,” Hyland said. “She said her mother had died and that members of her family wanted to give the painting in memory of their mother. Since we are the oldest museum of American art in the United States, we were really thrilled. The museum has wanted to acquire a portrait of George Washington for many years.

“As soon as it went on display, it became the subject of a great debate: Should it be at an American art museum? Is it an American work of art? The truth is that it’s a copy of a Stuart made by a Chinese artist for an American collector. It’s a compelling story. It was painted 200 years ago, and 200 years later we’re dealing with the same issues. There are still works being pirated in China today—movies, books, CDs.”

Stuart had to deal with the issues in 1802, when there was, according to Carl Crossman in his book The China Trade (1972), “a mania for Washingtoniana...”

The Many Faces of George Washington, ArtNews

Labels: art news, portraiture

"The Archibald-winning artist Fred Cress has made his plans for his funeral. ''I've got the grog for the wake,'' he says, knowing he has only a few weeks of life left.

The cancer that began seven years ago in his prostate has spread voraciously since autumn. It is now in his spine, his groin, his lungs.

''But the one that will kill me is the liver cancer,'' he says. ''That has spread right across here now,'' he says, drawing a line across his gut.

The 71-year-old is dealing with imminent death much better than his younger partner of 20 years, Victoria Fernandez - or his two sons, Julian and Kim, by his former wife. ''They're in denial,'' he says. ''I wish they'd get on and organise the funeral.''

After all, lots of people will want to come. When the ABC's 7.30 Report prematurely broadcast a farewell piece in July (''They jumped the gun,'' Cress says), the artist - enjoying his final summer with Victoria in their beloved second home in Burgundy - was inundated with emails from around the world.

He apologises for not replying to them all. But he was feeling remarkably good then, and thought it more important to paint his final canvases while he still had the strength. Ironically, given that Cress does not believe in any kind of after life (and certainly not heaven or hell), ''we might have to borrow a church … because quite a few people will want to speal."

No time for rage or regret, Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: art news

"A long-forgotten 1960s censorship scandal about nudity in art has returned to the walls of the Mosman Art Gallery, whose director, Tony Geddes, is accused of censoring the work all over again to protect the sensibilities of the suburb's ''conservative'' residents.

The gallery is in the middle of a retrospective of the work of artist and Mosman resident David Perry, 76, whose experimental film A Sketch on Abigayl's Belly was banned by the Commonwealth Film Censor in 1968.

The two-minute film of Perry's then wife's pregnancy, which features shots of her massaging oil into her breasts and other nudity, was seized by Customs officials and impounded when it returned from screening in the finals of the West German Short Film Festival in 1969.

Perry was a member of the Sydney-based film collective UBU Films. Its manager, Aggy Read, was convicted of exporting a banned film.

In 1970 Don Chipp, the minister for customs and excise, overturned the ban. The curator of the current exhibition, another UBU member, Albie Thoms, says the film has been screened without incident across Australia ever since.

Until now, according to Perry, who claimed yesterday Mr Geddes had refused to include the film in the retrospective. ''Tony Geddes said he couldn't show it in Mosman because he was concerned that some of the conservative people in Mosman would be offended,'' he said. ''It was disturbing because it is one of my best works.''

While Mr Geddes is on leave, the acting director of the Mosman Art Gallery, Katrina Cashman, said she was ''surprised'' to hear of Perry's complaint.

''From our perspective, that's not what happened,'' she said.

Mosman can't stomach '60s nude art film, Sydney Morning Herald

Labels: art news, censorship

Arteri|Art + Culture|Malaysia have published an obituary for our friend Emil Goh, whose recent sad passing was recorded here on the 9th of September:

Emil Goh (b. 1966, Malaysia) passed away last Monday 7 September at his apartment in Seoul.

Emil was an artist, designer, traveller, foodie, people person. We cannot lay claim to him in earnest as our fellow countryman – Emil really belonged to a broader sort of society, a ‘man of the world’ in a very today sense. Yet there was certainly the Malaysian in him, who loved to eat good food, banter, and kaypoh in a positive and creative way. Most of us in Malaysia will only know of Emil through his work, which has been shown intermittently here in curated shows at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery) and elsewhere. Some of us know him as the son of the painter Sylvia Lee Goh, who would be touched that those in the art world here, especially artists, have voiced real sadness and shock at the news of his passing.

Emil made an impact wherever he put down his hat. He went to Australia in 1985, studying psychology (Newcastle University) and then Fine Art (Sydney University), developing his practice across different media, particularly video and photography, while becoming a key figure in the contemporary art community down under. He was one of the co-founders of the Asian-Australian Artists Association who set up the groundbreaking Gallery 4A in Sydney. He also spent time in London in the late 90s, studying for his Masters at Goldsmiths College, which is when I met him for the first time. In 2003 he took up a residency at Ssamzie Space in Seoul and ended up staying on. It didn’t take long for Emil to ‘take root’ in any of these communities, where he made literally hundreds of friends. Emil was a super-connector of people and ideas with an unstinting enthusiasm for contemporary art and urban culture. For someone looking in, Emil’s life seemed to be very much about making things happen, and his work about watching things happen, seeing them come together.

Emil took part in over 70 exhibitions and projects across Australia, Europe and Asia and his work has been pretty widely written up in international magazines like Flash Art, Art in America, Theme, Wired Online, and Art Asia Pacific. Emil’s work doesn’t slap you in the face or make overt statements, but it finds the pulse in the life of things taken for granted, particularly in the urban everyday, appealing to the personal without taking it hostage.

He got to the very heart of the media he used. His videos harness our fascination for the moving image and film, taking the simple foundations of time and focus. He traced the passing of a day, his camera simply panning slowly through friends’ apartments in London, Hong Kong and Seoul (Between – three versions 2000-2005), he re-spliced a whole movie into three jumbled parts (Remake (Ring),2004), and raced us through the trailer to ‘Speed’ in quadruple time. He made mini-films of a cellphone ringing, feet walking along a stairmaster, a cyclist coming in and out of traffic. His photographs were just about capturing that moment with a camera, whether high-rise buildings lit like lanterns in the night, a working woman sitting asleep in an underground train, or snapshots of couples posing wearing identical clothes (couplelook series, 2004).

Read the rest of the post here .

Labels: art news, obits

"Cartrain, a 17-year-old graffiti artist embroiled in a feud with Damien Hirst, has been arrested after stealing pencils from the millionaire artist's latest installation

"Last year Cartrain was ordered by the Design and Artists Copyright Society to hand over collages based on Hirst's famous diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, and pay the £200 in profits he made.

"In an act of revenge, Cartrain visited Hirst's installation Pharmacy in July, which was being shown as part of Tate Britain's Classified exhibition until it closed last month, and removed a few of the rare "Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series" pencils.

"Cartrain then made a mock "wanted" posted that read: "For the safe return of Damien Hirst's pencilers I would like my artworks back that DACS and Hirst took off me in November. It's not a large demand... Hirst has until the end of this month to resolve this or on 31 of July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned."

"But the stunt backfired when the antiques squad from the Metropolitan Police arrested the artist, informing him the pencils were worth £500,000 as part of the overall installation which was valued at £10 million..."


Teenage artist arrested for stealing pencils from Damien Hirst, The Telegraph UK

Labels: art news, art theft

"A SILENT, ten minute video of young music fans letting loose in front of rock gods playing on stage has won the main award at this year's Blake Prize for religious art. The $20,000 prize went to 32-year-old Sydney artist Angelica Mesiti for her video work Rapture (silent anthem).It was filmed from a concealed position beneath the stage at the Big Day Out earlier this year, as hard rock and metal bands played to the audience. Mesiti, though, would prefer viewers not to place too much emphasis on the actual location of the film and concentrate instead on the ideas of spirituality suggested in the piece. She said the work was exploring the “extreme experiences” when people become lost in the moment outside sanctioned religious spaces. “I was just interested in these notions of worship and ecstasy and transcendence and where they're actually found in a contemporary setting,” she said. Christopher Allen, The Australian's national art critic, said of the winner: “Ecstasy is cheap.” And of the show overall, he was less than impressed. “The show itself is fairly lacklustre,” he said. “There's very little that has any inspiring sense of the religious or the spiritual.”

Sydney artist wins Blake Prize with 'religious' video, The Australian



"I thought it was a bit of a long shot because it isn't the most conventional treatment of religious or spiritual kind of subjects, but I'm really glad that they've shown that there's a willingness and an openness about those subjects," [Mesiti] said. The winner of the John Coburn emerging artist award, Grant Stevens, also used digital video to show how the internet is changing the way people discover themselves. "I was quite interested in how MySpace and other online forums like that are now these venues for self-definition and self-identification and self-reflection too, and often that text involves reflection on likes and dislikes," he said. "I guess I was interested in how those things now might stand in for other more traditional forms of reflection or spiritual endeavours." The chairman of the Blake Society, Reverend Rod Pattenden, says the winning works show the sometimes traditional prize is heading in a new direction.

Blake Prize awarded to video artwork, ABC News

"True to the Blake's history of provoking debate, it got a lashing last month from the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, who cited what he saw as "anti-religious" and kitsch work, singling out among the finalists Adam Cullen's depiction of David and Goliath and photographer Belinda Mason's Christ-like 3D image of Brisbane's suspended Father Peter Kennedy. Mr Pattenden said he saw the exhibition as "wonderfully educative and I hope that religious leaders who might see this as potentially blasphemous might come along and learn something". The exhibition is on view at the gallery of Darlinghurst's National Art School, where the awards were held, until October 3."

How videos killed the painting stars, SMH

Labels: art news

Protest at the opening ceremony of the Beijing 798 Biennale

"The inaugural Beijing 798 Biennale, held in the sprawling 798 art district in China’s capital, saw a chaotic opening on 15 August, with major works by Chinese artists widely censored by authorities. The biennale was arranged with international contributions operating independently at numerous private galleries in the 798 complex, which were not affected by the censorship and avoided the operational issues that hampered the main exhibition hall. Billed as the first non-government biennale in China, the event was hampered by a lack of funds, operational support, and some inexperience on the part of the organisers, who were predominantly Chinese art journalists.

"In steaming temperatures of around 40ºC, hundreds stood out in the sun to listen to opening speeches by assembled dignitaries. The ceremony was briefly interrupted by a demonstration and water being thrown at the platform. The demonstration, whose purpose seemed obscure, was performed by a group including a deaf mute in ancient Chinese costume, a man wheeling a cart of bedpans and another man wearing a metal mask accompanied by someone dressed as a bride. 798 Biennale’s chief curator, Zhu Qi, said they were protesting about their exclusion from the exhibition..."


The Art Newspaper

Labels: art news, Biennales, international exhibitions

"A collection of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on 1 November has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes. Finding Frida Kahlo includes reproductions of paintings, drawings and handwritten letters, diaries, notes, trinkets and other ephemera attributed to the artist. They belong to Carlos Noyola and Leticia Fernández, a couple who own the antique store La Buhardilla Antiquarios in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The publisher describes it as “an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century's most revered artists...full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor”.




"According to an interview in the forthcoming book, and to emails from Noyola to The Art Newspaper, the couple acquired the items incrementally from 2004-07 from a lawyer who in turn had acquired them from a woodcarver who allegedly received them from the artist. Noyola tells The Art Newspaper he has more than 1,200 Kahlo items in all. He would not disclose how much he paid, but says: “We did acquire the collection with the belief and some groundwork done to prove that it is in fact authentic and thus paid accordingly.” He states that the collection is not for sale and will not be for sale in the future."

ARt Newspaper

Labels: art news, fakes

"Rhys Chatham is a guitarist-composer with an impeccable pedigree: He studied with electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and hipster minimalist La Monte Young, played in Tony Conrad’s Dream Syndicate (other notable alumnus: John Cale), founded the music program at the Kitchen, underwent a stylistic Damascus at an early Ramones show, and influenced Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and hordes of younger experimental rockers. His 1977 composition Guitar Trio remains a landmark for minimalism, guitar music, and genre-bending alike.



"A 1989 work for one hundred guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, eventually led to 2005’s four-hundred-guitar epic, A Crimson Grail, which premiered at the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Paris. The latter was the work, revised and trimmed to a sensible two hundred guitars, that was to make its New York debut in August 2008 until a heavy rainstorm forced its last-minute cancellation. With long, shallow tents protecting the guitarists and their amps, Saturday’s performance was the rain check, so to speak, though the weather was remarkably beautiful..."

Rhys's Pieces, Art Forum Diary

Labels: art news, music

"Just when the withering economy is shrinking art, antiques and design sales, there is a rise in attendance and interest in historic homes and artist sites in both the US and the UK.

“There is definitely something in the air, with growing numbers seeking out the simple pleasures offered by the National Trust,” says Fiona Reynolds, director general of the UK-based National Trust. Total visitors received in May were 1.98m, an eight per cent increase from the same month last year. Overall, attendance has climbed 24 per cent so far versus 2008.



“Staycations” in the US seem to be driving attendance at some National Trust properties. “We have anecdotal evidence confirming that people are spending less, staying closer to home and visiting more of our sites,” says James Vaughan, National Trust vice president for historic sites in Washington, DC. But the US National Trust, with a membership of only 250,000, pales in comparison to the British National Trust, which has 3.6m members.

"In the US, some artists’ home and sites in a consortium of 36 such National Trust properties are witnessing the biggest bumps in interest. For example, at Chesterwood, the home, studio and gardens of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), which are nestled in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, attendance has risen 50 per cent in May alone, reports Chesterwood director Donna Hassler. Visitor numbers to the home and studio of artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in East Hampton on Long Island rose 20 per cent in the past year. Attendance at the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church’s Persian-style home Olana has always been steady. “But now it’s up ten per cent compared with last year,” says Olana director Linda McLean. “Because we’ve opened the second floor as well as a new gallery and added a new tour, both new and repeat visitors are coming.” In Darien, Connecticut, visitors to architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House have increased 20 per cent so far compared with 2008..."

Recession fuels attendance of artist sites and historic homes, Art Newspaper

Labels: art news

"Visitors to the German capital over recent days may well have felt transported back to the heady weeks following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, amid icy winds, blizzards and an inimitable spirit of euphoria, 117 artists from 21 countries gathered to paint works on a 1.3km (1,420yd) stretch of the concrete divide that had previously been out of bounds in the communist east.

"Twenty years on, most are back at the East Side Gallery (a 1.3km section of the Wall), poised on ladders, paint brushes in hand, to re-create their often provocative images - remember Birgit Kinder's Trabant bursting through the Wall? - and to give the gallery a much-needed makeover.



"Their crumbling paintings look as though they have been attacked with acid, thanks to the weather and the traffic that thunders past the world's largest outdoor gallery. There's also the graffiti by tourists keen to leave their mark. This time around, more durable paints are being used and the murals will be protected with anti-graffiti spray.

"Dimitri Vrubel, the Russian who reproduced the passionate kiss - an expression of Soviet-era brotherhood between the Soviet dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, and his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, is back on site, protected by a steel fence..."

Where art and politics come face to face, The Observer

Labels: art news, murals

Labels: art news, environmental art, photography

Rodolphe A. Reiss, False bomb found in front of the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise,
Lausanne, January 15, 1905.

"Scientific police photographs are very rarely presented to the public, remaining stored for many years in confidential files because they transgress taboos when their subjects are violent death and crime. These pictures, taken almost a hundred years ago by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, founder of the l’Institut de police scientifique of the Université de Lausanne, reveal their entire aesthetic dimension while retaining their intense emotional strength. As a forensic science pioneer, Reiss shows photographic skills which are unequalled in this field..." Art Daily

Labels: arson, art news, exhibitions

"Leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s activism has finally provoked the Chinese authorities to act against him. His studio is being staked out by plainclothes police, and last month the artist’s popular blog on Sina.com was deleted, as well as his commentaries on China’s version of Twitter.

"Ai Weiwei has been running a campaign documenting the death of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, alleging that the number of fatalities was due to local officials siphoning money from school building costs.

"Ai Weiwei told The Art Newspaper that he was recently involved in two other worrying incidents: in the first, unknown persons visited his mother’s house; when Ai Weiwei asked them for identification they refused to provide any, nor would they leave, leading him to call the local police..."

The Art Newspaper

Labels: art news

"Today marks the first day of National Art Hate Week. A seething critical mass that sprung, initially at least, from the hands of Billy Childish, prolific painter, poet, punk and self-proclaimed hero of the British art resistance movement. Childish was also Tracey Emin's former lover and the founder – now ex-member – of Stuckism, a sizeable art movement best-known for protesting on the steps of Tate Modern to demand more contemporary figurative art; Childish left at the first hint of his idea manifesting itself into an actual, physical demonstration.

"It's this concept of disorganised, ramshackle creativity that's key to National Art Hate Week: "I was making a series of new posters and just liked the way the words 'art' and 'hate' fitted together," Childish says, perhaps a mite disingenuously. The notion of turning the slogan into a national week apparently didn't occur until Steve Lowe, "chief engineer" of the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop gallery, and Jimmy Cauty, former half of art pop agitators the KLF, collaboratively spurred him on. Lowe's independent art space opened just a couple of months ago in London, set up as a "private ladies and gentlemen's club for the disruptive betterment of culture". And, aside from creating acid house pop smashes in What Time is Love and Justified and Ancient, Cauty famously set fire to £1m in cash in 1994, on a remote Scottish island with his KLF partner, Bill Drummond. Counter-cultural subversiveness seems ingrained in their psyches, and the three of them are well-positioned to unleash a manifesto declaring art war...."

More at the Guardian UK

Labels: art news

"AUSTRALIA'S richest annual sculpture prize, the Helen Lempriere, has been cancelled for the first time in its eight-year history because entries submitted were not deemed good enough to warrant the $100,000 prize going ahead.

"Yesterday the award's manager, Anne Robertson, announced that of the 28 entries received, the judges could not choose 15 finalists of acceptable quality.

"The Lempriere team had decided this year it would invite entries from artists nominated by eight leading Australian curators, rather than allowing the open competition of the past eight years.

"So just how bad were the entries received?"

Lempriere award cancelled as judges reject all entries, Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 2008.

Labels: art news

"At the end of last year, Foster and Partners celebrated its 40th anniversary. During that period, Norman Foster's architectural practice has grown to be the fifth largest in the world and has designed buildings of pretty much every type. However, this month they finished a project that is unlike anything they have undertaken before. It is their first building for animals..."

Foster's elephant enclosure: A house for happy pachyderms, The Telegraph UK.





"Revolution is in the air at the palace of Versailles - and, this time, it has nothing to do with an unpopular leader and his fashion-conscious wife... Delighting contemporary art fans and dismaying some of France's most august historians, Jeff Koons is flying in this September to exhibit some of his most famous works in the chateau and gardens of the country's most illustrious national treasure. Rabbit, Koons's chrome steel sculpture from 1986, will take pride of place on a marble pedestal in the Salon d'Abondance. The kitsch classic Balloon Dog (Magenta) will sit alongside a Veronese masterpiece in the Salon d'Hercule.[...]Incongruous? Anachronistic? A betrayal of French culture?"

Koons brings kitsch to Versailles, The Guardian.



"The interior of the rambling Victorian house is dark. The sparse furnishings in the front rooms are covered by a patina of cigarette ash, gobs of dried paint and coffee cans filled with paintbrushes. Hundreds of paintings lean against walls and are piled against the porch windows.


Chuck Connelly's Ausburg, a painting from his first New York show that was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984. Source: The New York Times

"Lounging comfortably amid the detritus is their creator, Chuck Connelly, 53, a tall, graying man whose easy laugh belies his careworn face, occasional rants and long career slide.

"Mr. Connelly’s professional fortunes, chronicled in a documentary that will be shown on Monday on HBO, have gone from selling “Ausburg,” a painting from his first New York show, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 to compensating his accountant with a painting in recent years. Yet the HBO film, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale,” does not entirely blame a fickle art world for his setbacks. As the documentary recounts, Mr. Connelly alienated many dealers, patrons and buyers with his hot temper, insulting remarks and wild ways.

"Mr. Connelly has mixed feelings about the film. “They only had the worst shots of me, they only shot when I was drunk,” he said. He added that he was “not a failure like the movie says.”

For an Artist at Full Speed, Everything Else Just Takes a Back Seat, The New York Times.

Labels: art news

"Australia's peak visual arts body has slammed suggestions from a child welfare activist that a vetting system be established to determine artists' bona fides in working with children.

"At a Sydney censorship forum on Thursday - organised to discuss the furore over Bill Henson's photographs of naked young girls - Bravehearts executive director Hetty Johnston questioned the art world's ability to prevent pedophiles from passing themselves off as artists.

"National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) executive director Tamara Winikoff said yesterday a panel of scrutineers making decisions about artists and their work was not an appropriate way to fight child pornography. "Real pornographers would laugh at the impotence of this kind of proposal, while the work of genuine artists may be compromised by the laboriousness and potential conservatism of such a requirement," she said. "We have seen too many cases of artworks being misjudged or suppressed in their own time and later recognised as the defining cultural icons of their age..."

Art censorship isn't the answer, The Australian.



"As the designer R. Buckminster Fuller liked to tell it, his powerful creative vision was born of a moment of deep despair at the age of 32. A self-described ne’er-do-well, twice ejected from Harvard, a failure in business and a heavy drinker, he trudged to the Chicago lakefront one day in 1927 and stood there, contemplating suicide. But an inner voice interrupted, telling him that he had a mission to discover great truths, all for the good of humankind.


A model of R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Dwelling Machines” community, about 1946. An exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art will offer a review of some of his grandest designs.

"That was the pivot on which, he claimed, his life turned. The onetime loser entered a period of such deep reflection that he was struck silent, then emerged bursting with creativity as he developed the “Dymaxion” inventions: technologies that he promised would transform housing, transportation, urban organization and, eventually, the human condition. From 1927 on, Fuller seemed utterly self-assured, even messianic, as he developed innovations like the geodesic dome, equal parts engineering élan and poetry..."

The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, The New York Times.


"Leipzig’s Gallery of Contemporary Art (GfZK) is facing strong criticism for hosting a series of exhibitions which gives dealers, collectors and corporate art collections complete freedom to display their works as they wish. Chris Dercon, the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, describes the initiative, entitled “Carte Blanche”, as “exactly the kind of thing that we do not need in public galleries”.

"The GfZK, which is a public-private partnership, receives much of its funding from public sources. It has now ceded curatorial control of half of its galleries until 2010.

"The museum’s director, Barbara Steiner, defends the initiative, describing it as an “open experiment in the way that public and private resources can be used together...”

German museum under fire for ceding control of exhibitions to dealers and collectors, The Art Newspaper.





"It was reported in the Telegraph yesterday that a Damien Hirst, owned by Chris Evans, might have been accidentally taken to a charity shop. It is an appealing story, and not the first time art has been mistaken for junk. Last year an early Anish Kapoor sculpture made from polystyrene, resin and cement was chucked out by waste disposal experts.

Marc Quinn's infamous frozen blood head was rumoured to have been defrosted in Saatchi's freezer and staff at Tate Britain threw out a sculpture by Gustav Metzger, mistakenly thinking it was a bag of waste paper. The acceptable response to such stories appears to be one of horror and incredulity, not for the loss of the artwork, but for its original cost and the collector who bought it. Surely there is no greater evidence that the work was rubbish, than its accidental trashing..."

Modern art is rubbish, The Guardian Art & Architecture Blog.

Labels: art news