Back from London, but right out the door again. I’ll be up and running on Tuesday from wherever.
Meanwhile, let me leave you with this bit of dialogue from The Hustler, the great Paul Newman movie from 1961 about pool sharks, which was running through my head all week in London after the Damien Hirst auction, and not just because of …
I’ve been making repeat visits to the phenomenal Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain. To get right to the point, it’s one of the most powerful shows I’ve seen in more than 40 years of museum going. This is Bacon’s fifth retrospective, and no show can hope to make his work new. His …
The waters are receding around Mies Van der Rohe’s great Farnsworth House, the 1951 Modernist jewel box in Plano, Ilinois that was inundated earlier this week. At their highest the waters rose to 18″ within the house. Movable furniture had been raised on milk crates …
On a visit to Tate Britain yesterday I made a point of checking out a small portrait head that’s of very little interest as a work of art. It’s a picture of Sir Edwin Manton, who died three years ago at 96. It’s placed prominetly at the Tate because Manton was one of the museum’s largest benefactors, second only to the founder Sir …
The first night of Hirst’s two-day Sotheby’s auction went pretty well for him, with hammer prices — meaning the final bids — coming in just short of Sotheby’s high end estimate for the sale. Then by tossing in the additional amounts paid to the house as the buyer’s premium, Sotheby’s was able to report a total sale of 70.5 million …
I got into London over the weekend for a number of reasons. One of them was to see the Sotheby’s pre-sale exhibition of Hirst’s work at their auction showroom in Mayfair. The actual sale, which may or may not make Hirst infinitely richer than he already is, I plan to skip. I do what I can to talk …
Again. I’ll check back on Monday from an undisclosed (for now) location.
Then they lose their director. David Mickenberg, for seven years head of Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, resigned yesterday, two weeks after it became public that his museum appears to have lost a Leger, Woman and Child, that had been donated to the museum in 1954. Geoff …
I’m beginning to think of Thomas Campbell, the new director-designate of the Metropolitan Museum, as the Sarah Palin of the museum world — the out-of-left field choice that, after an initial moment of head scratching, suddenly makes sense to everybody. With my own episode of head scratching now safely behind me, I’m also entering into …
….a Met insider, but not the one most people were expecting. The Met announced today that Thomas P. Campbell, a curator at the museum since 1995, would fill the big shoes of Philippe de Montebello, who pronounced himself delighted by the choice. Campbell is a curator in the department of European sculpture and decorative arts who’s …
It’s battle of the artworld heavyweights. Robert Hughes, the titanic art critic and my esteemed predecessor at Time, has weighed in on Damien Hirst. (“Absurd”, “tacky commodities”) And Hirst has hit back. (Hughes is a “Luddite”, says Damien. “He probably cried when Queen Victoria died.”)
Hughes’ dismissive comments wouldn’t be his …
I got into London over the weekend for a number of reasons. One of them was to see the Sotheby’s pre-sale exhibition of Hirst’s work at their auction showroom in Mayfair. The actual sale, which may or may not make Hirst infinitely richer than he already is, I plan to skip. I do what I can to talk …
Let’s wrap up those conversations with Hirst. Today we talk mostly about money, including the upcoming Sotheby’s auctions that will be selling 223 of his works in the first ever auction sale of work directly from an artist’s studio.
LACAYO: A few years ago you pretty much stopped drinking.
HIRST: …
