Yankee Spirit in Disparate Masters

Comparisons may be invidious, but they can also be illuminating. Consider the small, tightly focused exhibition of works by Mark Rothko and the 19th-century American folk artist Ammi Phillips at the American Folk Art Museum.

On the face of it this is a stretch. Phillips, a prolific itinerant portraitist active in New England between 1811 and 1865, was a self-taught neo-Classical realist, a kind of folk-art Ingres. His figures are simplified and flattened, but their faces are so sensitively drawn that they seem like real individuals and not just the generalized types that the subjects of folk portraiture often seem.

Rothko, who emigrated from Russia to the United States as a boy in 1913, was an intellectual omnivore. He attended Yale and studied briefly in New York with the Modernist painter Max Weber. In the 1940s and ’50s, along with artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still, Rothko pushed abstract painting to unprecedented formal extremes. His signature canvases, in which large, fuzzy-edged rectangles of color are arranged in mysterious hovering stacks, would seem to be far from Phillips’s earthbound portraiture.

As organized by the museum’s senior curator, Stacy C. Hollander, the exhibition nonetheless reveals parallel ways of dealing with surface, color and light. Both painters favored broad flat areas of color, and Ms. Hollander has underlined that connection by selecting paintings by both artists that feature red, pink and green. An untitled 1970 composition of bright-red soft-edged rectangles by Rothko echoes the red dresses worn by children in several paintings by Phillips.

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Picasso Work Is Withdrawn From Sotheby’s Sale

A Picasso Cubist painting that was to have been a star of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sale on Nov. 3 has been abruptly withdrawn from the auction.

“Arlequin” (1909), which the auction house estimated at more than $30 million, was one of the most expensive works in a high-profile sale that will kick off the important fall art season. The painting is included in the catalog that was sent to potential buyers this month.

“It’s been withdrawn for private reasons,” David Norman, a co-chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department worldwide, said late Monday. He was speaking on behalf of the seller, who could not be reached. It had been rumored for weeks that the work would be taken off the market because of fears that art prices were heading the way of the world financial markets.

The painting, which depicts a harlequin resting his chin on one hand, had belonged to the Surrealist painter Enrico Donati, who bought it for about $12,000 in the late 1940s.

When Sotheby’s announced in September that it was selling the painting, auction house officials said it was being sold without a guarantee — an undisclosed sum promised to the seller regardless of the sale’s outcome. On Monday, auction experts familiar with the negotiations said that both Sotheby’s and its archrival, Christie’s, had offered the estate a guarantee, as well as other types of financing. In the end, however, the painting was to be offered at auction without a guarantee, but with a clause in the sale contract giving the seller the right to withdraw the painting.

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A Two Way Street

When it comes to art, I don't see how anyone could even have rules. A set of rules never in life have been made in a form of art. In fact, I think that Art was discovered probably by accident. It's how we as people perceive art. Street art could probably be known as vandalism. I think it's art. It isn't following the rules so that's why I see it as art. It's a different form of art that most artists prefer for it to be on a wall that they don't have to pay in order for it to be on there.

In 1989 a lanky 19-year-old working at a Rhode Island skate shop created a mug shot–style sticker of a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound French wrestler named Andre the Giant. As far as stickers go, it was pretty crude. A hand-stenciled image of his face was accompanied by the inscrutable phrase “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.” The artist ran off 100 copies of the image and got to work pasting it all over Providence. Once he had the city covered, he moved on to Boston, New York, and the rest of the eastern seaboard. “Andre” materialized everywhere—stop signs, pay phones, airport bathrooms. A startled patron at an Athens, Georgia, diner found the wrestler’s sleepy visage staring back at him from the inside lid of a coffee creamer.

“I’ve generally found that there has been a bias against artists who didn’t play by the established rules, who weren’t the product of influential curators and writers,” says Jeffrey Deitch, the Manhattan dealer who represents Swoon, Espo, Os Gemeos, and McGee, as well as the estate of ’80s graffitist Keith Haring. But, he notes, this attitude has begun to change. “Now there’s a number of younger curators who followed these artists when they were working on the streets and who are now in positions to do something,” says Deitch. “They don’t make a differentiation that Swoon chose to develop her work on the street or that she’s somehow not as worthy of serious attention as an artist who went to the Whitney Independent Study Program.”

Original Article

A Banquet of World Art

Exhibitions come and go; they are what museums do. Collections are slowly built and stay; they are what museums are. “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art plays both sides of this dynamic. It catches a monumental institution at a moment of major change.

As the title implies, the show is a tribute to Mr. de Montebello, who is leaving the Met after being its director for more than 30 years. For the occasion, curators in 17 of the museum’s departments have chosen objects in their fields of expertise from the permanent collection. These have been assembled and intermeshed under the coordinating eye of Helen C. Evans, curator of Byzantine art.

Collaborative though it is, the cavalcade of world cultures that rolls through the museum’s second-floor special-exhibition galleries is very much Mr. de Montebello’s creation. Everything in them was acquired under his aegis. Curators may have proposed specific items, and donors offered others, but it was Mr. de Montebello who ultimately signed off on the acquisitions, giving each his famously resonant, bass-baritone “O.K.”

And there were many O.K.’s: some 84,000 in total. The 300 objects in the show represent a tiny fraction, and a madly eclectic one. Chinese scrolls, Greek vessels, Oceanic effigies and an 18th-century American pickle holder share the spotlight, with no object privileged as better — grander, rarer, prettier — than any other. This is a wonder-cabinet situation, an exercise in proprietorial pride, an unabashed, if surprisingly low-key, display of fabulousness.

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Bast!

So I was researching online on other street artists other than Banksy. Don't get me wrong Banksy is one of my favorites. Then I came across an article on 40 street artists besides Banksy! So that turned out well haha Bast doesn't use a lot of stencils from what I see compared to Banksy. Although, I think that they are a lot alike with personalities of portraying their artwork. They most definitely have a huge satire when it comes to making their pieces. That's why I like them because like all artists, they put a lot of thought into their work. Bast has this really funky cut out of the magazine ordeal that he has going on versus Banksy who uses stencils.

One of our favorite street artists is the Brooklyn-based Bast, whose wheat-paste works can be found around the New York City, especially in SoHo, the East Village and the Lower East Side of downtown Manhattan. There's a new series of images
posted on the Global Graphica web site showing some recent Bast work in SoHo .

Original Article

Making It Faster and, of Course, Better

No matter what area of materials processing is involved, metal-injection molding (MIM), plastic gears, gas-assist molding, rubber or multi-component molding, users look for a technology solution that meets a specification but more and more want something that provides an edge in their business.

The automotive industry is one example. According to General Motors' estimates, rubber, plastics and composites comprise 15 to 18 percent of the total vehicle's weight (Automotive News, April 28, 2008). Even though petroleum is the primary raw material, the use of plastic is projected to increase through its ability to reduce vehicle weight and improve fuel economy.

The edge may come from tools that help engineers implement a new design or select the right materials quickly. Enhancements to Moldflow Corp.'s Communicator 2.0 include the ability to report simulation results from Moldflow Plastics Advisers (MPA) 8.1 to other members of the team, even if they are not Moldflow customers. For Rubber Industries, a CD simplifies rubber design criteria and compares features of the most popular base polymers including durometer range, temperature range, properties, typical applications and cost.

A common theme in the following section is integration, getting more by combining two or more parts into a single component. This is certainly true for MIM. The ability to obtain intricate metal products makes the technology well-suited to replace metal parts made using traditional metal processing such as die casting or machining. For plastic gears, more sophistication seems to be the hot ticket, too.

Perhaps the greatest trend is combining technologies so it is difficult to classify a particular product. This section has rubber combined with a high-temperature plastic, a multi-component molding product that uses liquid silicone rubber and traditional thermoplastics in one molded part, and a plastic gear that uses 2-shot molding. When suppliers get creative, they provide more to users.

Original Article

Never Forget a Legend

Andy Warhol has been one of the most inspirational artists throughout history and is still recognized even in today's time. His art has been on bags and through clothes and basically he is the one who threw out the rules and used bags as dresses! He could do anything and make it look good and make it sell. He was known for his Pop Art (he was actually the father of Pop Art) and was actually an Underground filmmaker! Who would have thought. Though best known for his earliest works - including his silk-screen image of a Campbell's soup can and a wood sculpture painted like a box of Brillo pads - Mr. Warhol's career included successful forays into photography, movie making, writing and magazine publishing.

He founded Interview magazine in 1969, and in recent years both he and his work were increasingly in the public eye - on national magazine covers, in society columns and in television advertisements for computers, cars, cameras and liquors.

In all these endeavors, Mr. Warhol's keenest talents were for attracting publicity, for uttering the unforgettable quote and for finding the single visual image that would most shock and endure. That his art could attract and maintain the public interest made him among the most influential and widely emulated artists of his time. --Adapted from "Andy Warhol, Pop Artist, Dies," by Douglas C. McGill, February 23, 1987.


Original Article

Featured Product: Urban Tee from Bayho

The Chinese Art Explosion

The market for Chinese contemporary art has developed at a feverish pace, becoming the single fastest-growing segment of the international art market. Since 2004, prices for works by Chinese contemporary artists have increased by 2,000 percent or more, with paintings that once sold for under $50,000 now bringing sums above $1 million. Nowhere has this boom been felt more appreciably than in China, where it has spawned massive gallery districts, 1,600 auction houses, and the first generation of Chinese contemporary-art collectors.

This craze for Chinese contemporary art has also given rise to a wave of criticism. There are charges that Chinese collectors are using mainland auction houses to boost prices and engage in widespread speculation, just as if they were trading in stocks or real estate. Western collectors are also being accused of speculation, by artists who say they buy works cheap and then sell them for ten times the original prices—and sometimes more.

Those who entered this market in the past three years found Chinese contemporary art to be a surefire bet as prices doubled with each sale. Sotheby’s first New York sale of Asian contemporary art, dominated by Chinese artists, brought a total of $13 million in March 2006; the same sale this past March garnered $23 million, and Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale of Chinese contemporary art in April totaled nearly $34 million. Christie’s Hong Kong has had sales of Asian contemporary art since 2004. Its 2005 sales total of $11 million was dwarfed by the $40.7 million total from a single evening sale in May of this year.

With the sheer abundance of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs in China, the larger art world is recognizing the power of the Asian market. Standing in an auction house in New York or London watching paintings by Chinese artists sell for millions, one can grouse about this boom and hint that it will turn out to be a bubble. But strolling in a bustling gallery district in Beijing, with students and tourists crowding the cafés and boutiques and filling the huge art showrooms, few would predict a downturn in the near future.

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Banksy!

If you guys don't know who Banksy is, Banksy is probably the most infamous street artist! In my opinion, Banksy is very inspirational! I remember when I first saw a Banksy art design, I just got inspired. His art is usually through paint and stencil. Banksy gives an urban appeal to his artwork and I'm glad he's doing it! In my perspective I think that he uses a lot of comedy and satire. Banksy is an artist that I like most, just because he is very mysterious! He maintained his unknown art for several of years! I think that's just awesome because it shows that he isn't doing it for fame, he's doing it because it's his passion.
Who is Banksy? We may not know his real name, but his art is unmistakably the work of a passionate individual. So what do we know about Banksy? His paintings, stencils, and other art pieces frequently address serious social issues. He takes on capitalism, war, poverty, and governments with grace. His work often displays a keen sense of humor, making it equally possible that you will laugh or cast your eyes down thoughtfully upon seeing a Banksy piece.
And although the pseudonym and the signature style of the artist are well known, there’s not much else that we know for sure about Banksy. A few tidbits of information are widely accepted: he is from Bristol, UK, and got involved in graffiti art sometime in the early 90s. He began to gain widespread notoriety around 2003. He was born in or around 1974 and sports a silver tooth. He is, according to the few people who have met him as Banksy, an unassuming and typical-looking man.

Original Article

DIME PIECE MURAL ON MELROSE

If you don't know Dime Piece clothing, then you don't know fashion! Who says art isn't fashion? The clothng brand is over a year old, and they are becoming big! They bring a big inspiration to all females out there that having an hour glass shaped body isn't the ONLY PERFECT TEN! If you read why they make their clothes, you'll be inspired to wear them too. I believe that's their target strategy and i think that it's a good one. Laura (one of the creators from Dime Piece) is a true inspiration to ART and Fashion. They are the Avante-Garde of urban street wear.
When I mean Dime Piece inspires, they really inspire:
“Hate to break it to you guys, but a “DimePiece” isn’t necessarily the 36′ 24′ 36′ hot mess you see in todays music videos with Steve Madden heels and Spandex shorts. The embodiment of this term is a little more complex than that. Meet Rosalee, she’s an artist, young woman and inspiration to ladies who want to get involved in graff and other forms of art. Last week she went on a 15 hour painting spree and transformed a blank brick wall into a work of art with our logo, and our “Make Up Not War” design. You can watch it in the making here or peep the finished masterpiece at The Breakfast Club art space in Hollywood, CA off Melrose Ave. P.S. No offense Steve Madden, you make some good knockoffs.”

Original Article

BigBelly

Ever walked down a street and seen trash cans filled to the top or even overflowing? Trash bins overflowing with rubbish, littering the landscape from city streets to local beaches with mountains of plastic bottles, newspapers, well pretty much everything that you can imagine. Well this disaster was the beginning of a wonderful change in the eyes of engineers.

After learning that garbage trucks are one of the most costly vehicles to operate, in which they consume over 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel each year in the United States alone and limp along getting an average of 2.8 miles to the gallon. The team formed a company in 2003 to take on the growing waste management problem and design a new kind of trash receptacle.

BigBelly Solar had a few very specific design goals: The trash compactor had to be around the size of a normal receptacle so it could easily fit street-side; the unit had to process larger quantities of trash to reduce the frequency of garbage pickup, and it had to be standalone so it could derive power from an alternative energy source. Wind was quickly ruled out because the energy source wasn't constant and it was too dangerous to have wind turbines lined up across city streets.

Today, there are over 1,700 BigBelly solar trash compactors spread across the U.S. and the world, including a couple of high-profile units at Boston's Fenway Park and the Portland Oregon Zoo. At 300 lb and about the same height and width of an average receptacle, BigBelly compresses the equivalent of five trash cans into a single receptacle, which helps companies and municipalities avoid four out of five garbage collection trips, on average.

The newest iteration of BigBelly launched last year and the company is planning new designs, including a dumpster-sized system and adding new technology that communicates information wirelessly back and forth between the unit and its owner. In this way, customers can get a sense of when a BigBelly unit is full and arrange trash pickup accordingly.

Original Article

The Church Gives Contemporary Art Its Blessing

As the Vatican builds bridges and walls between the Church and the living contemporary artists, one man notices the importance's of an alliance and tries to mend the differences.

The new president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, plans to revive that sort of relationship between the Vatican and contemporary artists. “For a century now there has been a divorce between art and faith,” states Ravasi. “The basic idea is to return to a dialogue on biblical and religious themes between the Church and the great artists of our time—artists such as Bill Viola, Anish Kapoor, and Jannis Kounellis.”

Just like centuries before many artist expressed themselves with the a sense of faith in their art work. For example, Leonardo De Vinci created the last supper and a magnificent way for that the generation now can picture it. But now, society and the Church is missing out in many beautiful and faithful paintings.

Another major way in which contemporary art is making its presence felt in the Roman Catholic Church is through architecture. Catholic churches have recently been built by such renowned architects as Renzo Piano of Italy, Richard Meier of the United States, and Tadao Ando of Japan, and celebrated by parishioners as well as architecture critics. The Church structure is a form of art and the architects have great pride in capturing the purity of their buildings.

Pope John Paul II affirmed the enduring importance of art’s role in the Church in 1999 when he opened a special exhibition in the Vatican’s modern-art collection space. Lauding contributions by famous artists. The Pope believes their paintings, writings, and music “opened the spirit to the mysterious fascination of the Transcendental, because in every authentic artistic expression there is present a mysterious and surprising spark of the Divine.”

Original Article

Sotheby’s Mid-Season Impressionist & Modern Art Sale Scores $6.4 Million

When I first saw the painting above, I could not stop looking at it. I was just sitting there, trying to figure out what exactly it was. I came up with numerous objects. For instance, I saw a fish, a bird, an apple, and a bull. Now im not really sure that is what the painting was intended for, but it really blew my mind and I love it. Someone must have really loved it too since it went for so much money!! We saw bidding from all parts of the world, including the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, with results exceeding the high estimate for the sale. Grand total $6,435,939 (£3,673,272) on October 7th.

Extremely strong bidding was seen for the cover lot, Sinfonie 23 (lot 76), by Rudolf Bauer, which achieved $254,400. Bauer is a figure who has often been marginalized in the history books; however he was painting at a crucial time in the development of abstract art in the 1910s and 1920s and had a strong relationship with his Friend and mentor Wassily Kandinsky. This early work, from 1916-1919, was exhibited in Der Sturm andDas Geistreich, two important galleries in Berlin. Sinfonie 23 was unquestionably the finest work by Bauer to come to the auction market in many years, which is reflected in the world auction record achieved for the artist that more than doubled the previous record. Almost 15% of the value of the sale was achieved by 20 lots sold on behalf of the Patti Birch Trust, dominated by works by Zoran Music. These included portraits landscapes and works from the important series Nous Ne Sommes pas les Derniers, of which lot 177 brought $314,500.

Original Article

08's most underrated underdog

If there was an award for the "best underdog category", I would give it to former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. This guy has been underestimated in every way possible. Nobody listened to him when he was warning us about inflation and the Fed and all the flag signs he raised in our economic and monetary system. And look where we are now. He also spoke of pulling our troops out of every corner of the world, and his "conservative" counterparts blasted him. And look where we are now. This guy has truly been underestimated. But hey, I'll leave the brunt of the political commenataries to the pundits.

What I am amused about is the iconic status reached by Ron Paul's campaign. I recently read an article over at the New York Times how graphic designers have been creating and recreating banners and logos for Ron Paul and his "Revolution". And believe me, a lot of these logos are pretty dope. If you did not know Ron Paul is a 72 year old congressman from Texas, you'd think people are nominating him for an MTV award. No politican form the conservative spectrum has in recent memory stirred up support from younger generations, much less artists. Rep. Paul may not have clinched the GOP nomination, but sure did accomplish a lot this year.

ORIGINAL PHOTO and ARTICLE: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/ron-pauls-graphics-revolution/?ref=opinion

Art continues to boom in Southeast Asia

With the recent gloom and doom prophecies of pundits and and politicians, you would think that your in some sort of a twilight zone, where humanity is bound to be trapped into an eternal econonomic quagmire. Certainly, we could use some bretah of fresh air. And that is exactly what I have been trying to do in my recent blog entries. There is at least one sector of the market that is relatively in OK shape, and that is of course the art industry, particularly in Asia. Of course, it has not been completely free from economic woes as more expensive artwork from CHina and India have declined in the recent Sotheby auction, but art from Southeast Asia offers more hope. While pummeling house values and tight credits are an everyday reality, so is the increase in the values of many artwork in Southeast Asia. Channel NewsAsia reports that art from that region has received a 30% boost in real value. Not bad. Not bad at all. And the better news about that is that people still buy these works proving that the global economy is not yet on the path to an apocalypse. After all, art is a luxury commodity. And if people still have the energy and resources to purchase these goods, then it just shows that we are not completely doomed. I'm sure the world can ride this crisis out.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://ph.news.yahoo.com/cna/20081011/tap-096-average-price-sea-contemporary-a-231650b.html

Obey does it's part for the election

As you all know Obey has came from the ground up. You see their logo everywhere they go. for those of you who don't know about Obey.. Obey is a street art, clothing line, and it shows us a different way of seeing politics. I'm sure that all of you have seen the shirt above. it comes in many forms. Yupp! Obey made those tees and now they are spreading wild like fire. One thing that I admired most about Obey is there strong passion to keep people inform about the debate. On their website they have updates about why Obama should be the next president by showing what propositions he goes for. In my opinion, I think this is a great way of connecting to another target group. They used a form of art to connect to politics. Art can bring such a hard impact on people. And maybe it helps to see it in a different angle rather than just the media telling you the updates. I also think that it's a great way to promote Obama for presidency because I don't think that Mc Cain would look good on a t-shirt. Maybe Palin, but she's a psycho woman on the loose.

For example:
"vote green on nov 4th
California League of Conservation Voters have just posted their endorsements for the Nov election. Take a look and decide for yourself. If you dont know whats at stake, this is a good place to start. Choose Responsibly!"

Original Article

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert to show Early Works from 1939-1954

London has so many exciting things going on in the months of October through December. One including the showing of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert of his early works from 1939-1954. A major loan exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud will be held at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1 from 9th October through 12th December 2008. The earliest paintings, from 1939, were completed when the artist was only 16. Many of the paintings in the exhibition are from private collections and not normally available to be seen by the public. With the support of the artist, the exhibition will be curated by the artist’s assistant and model for the past fifteen years, the painter David Dawson, with help from Catherine Lampert, who most recently selected the Freud retrospective which opened in Dublin in June 2007.

This will be the first exhibition devoted entirely to the artist’s early work since 1997 with all works on loan from private or public collections worldwide, and several being shown publicly for the first time. Highlights include oil portraits such as Woman with Tulip (1945), Portrait of a Man (John Craxton) 1946, Girl in a Blanket (1953), A Woman Painter (1954) and the self portrait Man at Night (1947) as well as the still lifes Cacti and Stuffed Bird (1943), Dead Heron (1945), Lemon Sprig (1946) and Still Life with Aloe (1949).The aim of the exhibition will be to follow the evolution of Freud’s vision in the early years from the period of, in the artist’s words, “maximum observation”, when he proceeded solely “by staring at my subject matter and examining it closely”, to the period from 1954 when he wanted to deliberately “free myself from this way of working”.

Original Article

As Brits say: bloody hell!

For 350 grand, British Museum National Portrait Gallery could get its hands on a sculpture known only as "Self", a work made by artist Marc Quinn. The "frozen sculpture" is a replica of the artists head, but that only tells half the story. Whereas sculptors would carve stone or marble or clay to, Quinn used his own blood (ten pints of it to be exact), to create his masterpiece. Quinn puts out such work every five years and said that it takes one year to produce the amount of blood he needs to cretae another version of "Self". Being offered by the artists gallery White Cube to National Portrait Gallery is the one Quinn created in 2006, his latest obra maestra. His first creation was made in 1991, and was bought by a man named Charles Saatchi. The second, released in 1996 was bought by a couple from Texas and the third one went to a Korean museum owner named Kim Chang-il.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE and PHOTO: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=16226

Art shall thrive

If Andy Hei's optimism proves to be true, then I guess there is a silver lining to our current global market crisis. Hei is an antique-funiture dealer by trade and is the "organizer of the Hong Kong International Arts and Antiques Fair" , which will be held for four days starting October 4. Many galleries are said to have signed up for the event and it will be carrying various artworks, a lot of which priced at millions of dollars. Hei said that he has seen worse days for the art community, citing the SARS outbreak in 2003 and another market crisis that happened in 1998. Some of the galleries which will be featured in the HongKong event would be Christie's International and Sotheby's, "New York-based Carlton Rochell Ltd. and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Shinseido- Hatanaka Art Gallery and Hong Kong's Hanart TZ Gallery." Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara's HK$18 million will also be shocased in the said event.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE and PHOTO: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a0vCFWmklUnY&refer=muse