How much would you pay to commission a portrait by Karen Kilimnik? Last night, the New Museum found out. At its UnGala at Seven World Trade Center, one party-goer agreed to shell out $260,000. That did a lot to push the New Museum's total take last night to $1.2 million; 550 people attended, the museum says. The museum won't say exactly how that total compares with last year's, except that it's "very close" to its 2008 experience. But unless a blast email from the New Museum on Tuesday saying a "limited number of seats … [Read more...]

Funny how things work: On the heels of my last post, about the media-arts dependency, I just learned that a rumor I heard a while back has legs: The New York Sun may return, albeit only on the web. While it was alive, the last incarnation of the Sun distinguished itself with, among other things, wonderful and extensive cultural coverage: both news articles and reviews. When it died last September, many people in the arts world mourned. MoMA director Glenn Lowry said "the cultural section...has become one of the most important and … [Read more...]

Writer-critic Matthew Gurewitsch went to a concert the other night and came back astonished. And not just about the music, by Sir John Tavener (below), to which he gave a rave. No, according to his website -- BeyondCriticism.com --  my friend Matthew was astonished by this: Was the music press of New York too busy celebrating Shakespeare's birthday? Delayed for a year on medical grounds, Sir John Tavener's "Towards Silence: A Meditation on the Four States of Atma" received its world premiere last night at the Rubin Museum of … [Read more...]

As my recent review of the "European Design Since 1985" exhibition at the Indianapolis Art Museum indicated, it is exactly the kind of show serious museums should be doing. It's ambitious, it's rooted in scholarship, it's aesthetically interesting, and it's displayed well. So it's more than a little curious that the Denver Art Museum (below), where the curator R. Craig  Miller worked until late 2007, and where he had organized two previous, widely traveled design shows, is not taking this one. … [Read more...]

That infamous sale of two 1750 Chinese bronzes at Christie's Yves St. Laurent auction last February may be rumbling towards a settlement, according to my friend Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper. In her regular Saturday column for the Financial Times, Georgina writes that "the French government is working on a face-saving solution."  You may recall that the Chinese buyer of the works, Cai Mingchao, bid a record-setting $40 million for the rabbit and rat fountainheads. He then declined to pay for … [Read more...]

In case you missed it, I wanted to take note of an article in the Detroit Free Press on Thursday, "Public Can Vote in New Art Competition." They -- not art critics and curators and other experts -- will choose the winner of a $250,000 grand prize, plus smaller purses for other contenders, a total of $450,000. ArtPrize, created by Rick DeVos, a scion of the family that founded Amway and Prince Corp., is probably the largest that goes to an individual visual artist, dwarfing others. What I like best about the program is DeVos's plan to display … [Read more...]

Bank of America is pretty beleagured these days, what with CEO Kenneth Lewis saying the other day that credit conditions, undoubtedly bad now, were going to get worse. The bank reported a $4.2 billion profit in the first quarter, but the stock's performance is miserable, its acquisition of Merrill Lynch is a mess, and people are agitating for Lewis's ouster. Nevertheless, B of A is not only continuing but also expanding its 11-year-old "Museums on Us" program.* Through it, holders of its ATM, credit or debit cards are given free … [Read more...]

The Yankees aren't the only ones having trouble selling tickets. The other day I was reading an article on nytimes.com when I noticed an ad offering free tickets to the International Fine Art Fair, which runs at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from May 1 through 5. This is a fancy fair, and I'd never seen that before. I clicked on the tab and printed out a complimentary ticket for two. Then on Wednesday, I saw the same offer on the New York Social Diary site: Hmmm. Art fairs often give free passes to museums and … [Read more...]

Having just looked at works by the new crop of Guggenheim fine-arts fellows, the announcement that Linda Gregg had won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize caught my attention, and set me off on a mission to read some of her poetry. Gregg has won many other prestigious awards before this (her bio is here). Congratulations to her. Ploughshares, the literary journal of Emerson College, has published several of her poems online, including The Oar in the Sand, which begins: He sailed to wherever the sirens were,surviving … [Read more...]

Here's the second installment of works by new Guggenheim Fellows in fine arts, "artists of exceptional promise."    --Paul Bloodgood is an independent artist in Jackson Heights. Below is Dusk Opening and Closing, 2008, Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.                  --Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, of Chicago, is a professor at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago. His website is here, and at left is Phantom Truck, … [Read more...]