Tag: major art

Now the EU wrecks Britain’s art market

March 17th, 2011 · · Articles of interest 2 comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Yet another British success story stifled by Brussels
Yet another British success story stifled by Brussels

 

Another reminder of how EU membership wrecks Britain’s competitiveness: Britain’s art market has just been overtaken by China’s. Why? Because, under Brussels rules, a tax is now levied on works of art every time they are re-sold for a full 70 years after the death of the artist.

The levy, known as droit de suite, violates our understanding of ownership rights. I mean, if I buy a second-hand car, I don’t expect to pay a surcharge to the heirs of the designer. That, though, isn’t the main objection. The key problem is that, as so often, EU-wide rules end up disproportionately harming Britain. London is the EU’s only major art centre. None of its major competitors – New York, Geneva, Hong Kong – is affected by the new duty. Since droit de suite was introduced in 2006, Britain’s share of the global art trade has fallen from 27 per cent to 22 per cent. Throw in the EU’s application of VAT to art sales, and British industry worth £7.7 billion and employing 60,000 people starts to look extremely vulnerable.

According to Anthony Browne, chairman of the British Art Market Federation: “The EU alone applies this levy: it doesn’t exist in China, the United States or Switzerland, our main global competitors. Surely this is just the kind of thing that the Prime Minister is referring to when he talks of the need to lift regulation on the private sector”.

Yup. Yet again, a British PM is discovering that he cannot pursue his domestic agenda because of EU rules.

By Daniel Hannan Last updated: March 14th, 2011

Ashmolean Announces Art Exhibition: The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy

February 28th, 2011 · · Articles of interest, Shows that are on!, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Image: Edward Burne-Jones, ‘Music’, 1877. Oil on canvas, 67.7 x 43.5 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

On 16 September 2010 the Ashmolean launches its first major art exhibition in one of the country’s newest and most important temporary exhibition centres.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy brings together over 140 pictures from the Ashmolean’s important Pre-Raphaelite collection with loans from museums and private collections around the UK and abroad, some of which will be displayed in Britain for the first time. Held in partnership with the Ravenna Museum of Art, where the exhibition opened to critical acclaim, The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy challenges what we know about the influence of Italy – its culture, landscape, and history – on one of Britain’s most significant and enduringly popular art movements.

In re-examining their early years, curators Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall aim to shed new light on the artists who emerged as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the 1850s. From the influence of the movement’s champion, John Ruskin – one of Italy’s most dedicated tourists – to their illustrations of early Italian art and literature, the exhibition explores the idea of Italy itself – a place which captured the imagination of a whole generation of British men and women and which was the source of such varied artistic responses. The artist with the most interesting and idiosyncratic relationship with Italy was the founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Despite being the son of an Italian exile, brought up in a household where Italian was spoken, and learning from an early age about his own rich cultural heritage, Rossetti remarkably never visited Italy himself. In his memoirs he recorded his intentions to make this ‘pilgrimage’, but on many occasions, he failed to set out. Bringing together works from major British collections, such as Tate’s Monna Vanna and the V&A’s Borgia Family, with studies from private collections, the exhibition looks at this peculiar fact of Rossetti’s biography, in contrast to the work of his peers who undertook and recorded celebrated Italian journeys.

Highlights of the exhibition have been made possible with exciting loans from private and international collections. United for the first time in Britain are the magnificent drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, for the mosaics of the American Church in Rome. The most prominent Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as William Holman Hunt and John Brett, are represented with major works which have been rarely displayed in public. The fascination and pure joy which Italy inspired in these artists permeates the whole exhibition – and aims to resonate with the affection and interest which people still have for Italy today. The Museum’s Director, Dr Christopher Brown says, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy is a real triumph for the Ashmolean. Displaying one of the great strengths of our own collection with loans from around the world has allowed us to put on an exhibition which is both a visual delight, and an interesting and revealing treatment of the subject.”

Exhibition: The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy
Dates: 16 September – 5 December 2010
Venue: Ashmolean Exhibition Galleries

www.ashmolean.org, Published 3 August 2010

NEW DELHI — The third India Art Summit

February 2nd, 2011 · · Articles of interest, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

NEW DELHI — The third India Art Summit, an art fair that ended last week, took up more than 90,000 square feet of Pragati Maidan, the main public exhibition hall here in India’s capital. Eighty-four galleries were represented, showing the work of 500 mostly Indian modern and contemporary artists. Organizers reported 128,000 visitors over the fair’s three-day run, and millions of dollars changed hands, with a couple of buyers each taking home more than $2 million in art.The Armory Show it was not. The quality of works varied much more widely than at that premier New York art fair, and there was a lot less money involved. But it was also a far cry from the first version in 2008, when only 34 galleries and 10,000 visitors showed up, and Neha Kirpal, the event’s 27-year-old founder, didn’t manage to break even. This time around Ms. Kirpal, now 30, bustled around the crowded hall on the first day of the fair, collecting business cards and stuffing them in the suit pocket of an assistant who trailed her.

“There are people who are coming who are saying: ‘I have money in my bag. Where do I start?’ ” Ms. Kirpal said.

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Young Curators, New Ideas III

July 16th, 2010 · · Articles of interest, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 22 – August 20, 2010 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 22, 6 – 8pm

mr. & mrs. amani olu (formerly amani olu projects), in conjunction with P·P·O·W, is pleased to present Young Curators, New Ideas III, an experimental exhibition that investigates current positions in contemporary art through the perspective of six curators. Exhibiting curators include Andrew Russeth & Liza Buzytsky, Erin Dziedzic, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner, Stamatina Gregory, Gabriella Hiatt, and James Shaeffer. These multifaceted and dynamic micro-exhibitions consider contemporary issues that exist at the intersection of curatorial practice and artistic production.

Personal / Public / Private curated by Andrew Russeth & Liza Buzytsky: In attempting to participate actively in art making, some contemporary curators have surrendered their positions as committed cultural arbiters. This project opposes that trend, positing the curator as an autonomous actor selecting existing work for an exhibition based on specific criteria. It includes three projects — with work by Erik Lindman, Liza Buzytsky, Phil Chang, and Alexandra P. Spaulding — that use modernist devices in four specific mediums for resolutely personal ends, which inhabit a place between their creator’s private obsessions and their audience’s public reception.

Erin Dziedzic presents, Craig Drennen‘s (Untitled) The Masquers, part of a continuing series of characters from the entire dramatis personae of the Shakespearean play Timon of Athens, which was never performed during Shakespeare’s life and is often considered a “failed” work. Drennen has recontextualized Talent (1986), David Robbins’ photographic images of major art figures of the 1980s. Drennen’s paintings peruse the notion of so-called “successes” and “failures” in contemporary art, situating himself within our existing cultural structure and visually exploring an unoccupied bandwidth within which a “failed” project resides, therefore addressing the idea of redirection in the visual language, concepts, and critical theory of the current moment. (Untitled) The Masquers bring to light the possibility of postmodernism’s tenure losing ground to a new hybrid practice that assimilates and questions traits from modernism and postmodernism, intensifying the desire for new perspectives beyond the available vocabulary.

Broken Lattice, curated by Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner, is an installation of photographs, found objects, and sculptures by the artist Bryan Graf. Working in both two and three dimensions, Broken Lattice reflects on the materiality of time by exploring the ways in which photography can be abstracted, pulled apart and collapsed. Graf’s installation consists of visual palindromes and image fractions that range in reference from kaleidoscopes and family albums to cinematic editing techniques such as shot/reverse shot. The installation intends to mimic the way pictures generate content through their physical presence as objects, thereby highlighting Graf’s fascination with temporality and the natural environment.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a theory of quantum mechanics, claims that there are features of the world that cannot simultaneously be quantified. One can’t measure, for instance, both the speed and position of a particle, or a planet: the knowledge of one blurs the value of the other, and the observed becomes part of an observed system. Quantum Limbo, curated by Stamatina Gregory, brings together two artists, Julia Oldham and Brian Clifton, who have independently explored this principle through their work, in both literal and metaphoric engagements with the meanings and measurements of physics. Their practices share a ruthless, yet eloquent appropriation of a scientific rubric in order to investigate contemporary structures of meaning from both within and without the art world.

Immaterial Architecture, curated by Gabriella Hiatt, explores the different modes of experiencing spatial environments freed from the reliance on physical materials. Artist Jan Tichy generates forms that, while sharply defined, are not solid, but utterly penetrable features that give shape to a reality literally under our field of vision—those man-made structures such as oil rigs, pipelines, and water wells that are only visible on land as a cylindrical container of liquid or a cube above the sea. In Tichy’s work these fixed architectural elements operate in dialogue with a changing projected environment, suggesting an underworld of flux and turmoil. During the opening a special performance by choreographer Douglas Dunn will mediate the imperceptible spaces between air and matter throughout the gallery, calling attention to the juncture of the seen and the seen through.

zu täuschen den Schutzhund, curated by James Shaeffer: As the Internet has increasingly become a source for not only the exhibition of art but also the transfer of artworks so has ideas of dematerialization and issues of originality in artwork come into question again. Now artworks can be created on a computer and sent to multiple participants simultaneously while also exhibited online. Images, 3D models, and videos can all be reproduced ad infinitum and exhibited endlessly. Featuring works by AIDS-3D, Ben Schumacher, and Victor Vaughn; each artist presents pieces that address concurrent issues of originality, distance, immaterialism and reproduction – a theme attended to with the actual exhibition itself. Concomitantly with the exhibition at P·P·O·W, all the work will be available for free download off the Internet and simultaneously shown at REFERENCE Art Gallery in Richmond, VA.

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