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The mural of a Rat holding a machine gun by Banksy is said to be one of his largest works in Britain. (Photo: ALAMY)
The mural, a 30-foot tall painting of a rat holding a machine gun, will disappear after the businessman bought the former Liverpool pub it adorns and promised to paint over it.
The Grade 2 listed Georgian property was adorned by artwork from the Bristol-born graffiti giant Banksy, around the time of Liverpool’s Biennial art festival in 2004.
But after purchasing the artwork at auction on Thursday for £114,000, property developer Billy Palmer, 44, admitted he has no interest in preserving the painting, despite protests from art lovers.
“I’m not a fan of modern art, I can’t say I know much about it really,” he said after the auction at Liverpool’s Marriott Hotel.
“All I was concerned about was getting this great building for a good price, I’m going to turn it into luxury flats.
Andrew Hough
Telegraph
Celtics’ physicality–an advantage?
Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.
But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
Benedict Carey
New York Times
The cover of the 2010 Whitney Biennial catalogue displays a picture of Barack Obama as a Dapper Dan cowboy. Inside, guest curator Francesco Bonami and co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari call the president “the coolest artist of all” and say their show is about “innovative forms,” “new relationships,” and “personal modernism.” After two biennials devoted to dealing with “failure” and “darkness,” this catalogue speaks of “renewal” and “optimism.” Yes, it’s the Obama Biennial: alternately moving and frustrating, challenging and disappointing—and a big improvement on what came before.
It is also historic: For the first time, there are more women included than men. How thrilling and important this is shouldn’t be overlooked or treated cynically, because this biennial isn’t about women’s art, feminism, or affirmative action. Nor is it about painting, although there’s more nonphotographic, handmade two-dimensional work here than I recall seeing for decades. Instead, it provides glimpses of American strangeness, of pluralistic grassroots experimentalism. It is rich in surprises and new names, doesn’t follow too many trends, and deals with the self and aesthetics in fresh ways.
Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine
The contemporary art business has bounced back faster than many expected, but the market still lacks the coherent drive of the boom. Whereas evening sales in 2007 had the exhilaration of a Formula One race, last week’s contemporary sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips had a rambling feel, as if bidders were driving cross country in a wide range of vehicles.
Sotheby’s kicked off the week with an evening sale on February 10th that brought in £54.1m ($84.5m), the second-highest total for a February contemporary auction and three times more than last year’s paltry £17.9m.
The Economist
Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters (Photo: SFMOMA)
Perhaps more than any other work on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “The Brown Sisters” by Nicholas Nixon captures the essence of the institution’s 75th anniversary celebration. The work is a set of 35 photographic portraits, made annually since 1975, of the artist’s wife and her three siblings standing in the same order. The museum acquired the artwork in 2000, and, as of now, there is no official end date to this act of creation.
Just as the past and future fuse in Mr. Nixon’s photographs, so the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1935 as the San Francisco Museum of Art, is taking a Janus-like approach to its milestone year.
Arts organizations often use anniversaries as an excuse for self-flattery and financial opportunism. The recent 30th anniversary celebration for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — with its ritzy gala headlined by Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet and a no-holds-barred campaign to raise $60 million — threatened to eclipse the opening of the museum’s important anniversary show, one of the largest exhibitions in its history.
Chloe Veltman
New York Times
With the available money for ambitious new buildings having shrunk to almost nothing in this country — and with firms continuing to downsize in brutal fashion — where will architectural ideas come from, and where will they wind up? What kind of impact will they have on the wider culture?
Those are among the tricky questions raised by “Contemplating the Void,” an exhibition that opened last week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. As part of its ongoing 50th anniversary celebration, the museum invited nearly 200 architects, artists and designers to propose fanciful new uses for the 90-foot-high rotunda of its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building. Curators Nancy Spector and David van der Leer asked the participants, whose biggest names include Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Toyo Ito and Rachel Whiteread, to leave “practicality and even reality behind” as they produced ideas for filling the space inside Wright’s famous spiraling ramp.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
(Photo: Getty Villa in Malibu. Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images)
The J. Paul Getty Museum said Wednesday that it is expanding its partnerships with various regions of Italy by embarking on a long-term cultural collaboration with Sicily.
The joint project will involve object conservation, earthquake protection of collections, exhibitions and more. The Getty said it will be working with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture and Sicilian Identity.
Currently, the Getty has partnerships with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.
The collaborations are the result of a 2007 agreement between the Getty and the Italian Ministry of Culture. As part of that accord, the Getty agreed to transfer 40 objects to Italy in order to help bring to a close the protracted legal battle over disputed works of art.
David Ng
Los Angeles Times
Tino Sehgal has managed to fill the Guggenheim without giving us much to see. But there is plenty to like, not the least of which is the interior of the Frank Lloyd Wright monument to Frank Lloyd Wright. The Guggenheim, all spiffed up at last, has never looked better. It’s the 50th anniversary. My, how time flies…or doesn’t.
The mother of all museums-as-icons (which is a lot to answer for), the kooky Guggie presently looks particularly good because there are none of those annoying paintings by Kandinsky getting in the way of the architecture. Also, the architecture in the 1936 film Things to Come has long been forgotten, as has the 1939 New York World’s Fair and numerous washing machines that predated the look of Wright’s pregnant building — the inside of which is now all lobby, definitely a first.
John Perreault
Artopia
“Portrait of Dora Maar,” part of the exhibit, by Picasso.
When the Musée National Picasso, Paris, closed its doors in August for a $28 million renovation, the scoop was that its 5,000 artworks by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) would be locked away for more than two years.
The museum would stop lending out Picasso artworks, The Associated Press reported, while experts updated, computerized and restored its inventory.
Well, someone somewhere along the line changed his or her mind.
And the Seattle Art Museum is the first American beneficiary of that change of heart.
“Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” an exhibit of more than 150 works of art, from paintings and sculptures to prints, drawings and photographs, opens at SAM on Oct. 8 and will be on display through Jan. 9, 2011.
Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times
Ask the proverbial person on the street to name a famous painting, and chances are you’ll get an answer, whether it’s Andy’s “Marilyn” or Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa.” Yet ask that person to name an important photograph, and silence is all you’ll receive.
What about work by the recently deceased Irving Penn or his sometime rival, Richard Avedon? Both men straddled magazines and museums, but neither can claim a signature image or has leapt indisputably into the popular imagination. (Diane Arbus and her black-and-white “Twins” have come close, but aren’t there yet.) Sure, some photos are iconic because of their content and what they have come to symbolize: raising a flag at Iwo Jima, for example, or that same Miss Monroe with her white pleated skirt blown up by a blast of subway air. But photos as art, and photographers as artists, are a much harder sell.
Photographer and teacher Larry Sultan died in December at age 63, and although a few newspaper obituaries surfaced — obits themselves are a melancholy measure of fame — Sultan should be a lot better known. A bit of artistic irony is at play here, because the “accidental,” anti-masterpiece nature of his best work, which has acted to muffle his renown, may ultimately guarantee it.
Jeff Weinstein
Obit
