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Get a Move On

 If you want to be moved and you're visiting or live in New York, I suggest you spend some kinetic time tomorrow at "Moving Pictures: A Symposium of Illustration and Motion." Moderator and organizer Lauren Redniss reveals a history of blind spots; Jody Rosen unveils “The Knowledge” of London taxi drivers (the "it" that every London cabbie must know); Joel Smith, a Saul Steinberg scholar, maps the artist's mind; NYPL artist-in-residence Richard McGuire screens the film Fear(s) of the Dark .

The event is FREE and open to the public at The New School Jazz Performance Space Arnhold Hall. It's tomorrow, November 11, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., at 55 West 13th Street, 5th floor, New York City. 

via: The Daily Heller

Kees van Dongen's "Jeune Arabe" Sells for $13.8 Million

“Jeune Arabe” (Young Arab) painted in 1910 by Van Dongen when the Dutch-born painter still remembered the coloristic fury of his Fauve days a few years earlier. The linear simplification has a Matisse touch about it. Its impact is multiplied tenfold by the blazing red color of the boy’s skin, which is underlined by the off-white ground. This may not be the greatest Van Dongen in the world, but its punch hits you in the stomach, like a brilliant poster adorned with a master’s signature. Bidders sent it flying to a world record of $13.8 million. 

According to trade sources, the painting is that of embattled Dutch investor, Louis Reijtenbagh. The son of a farmer, Reijtenbagh worked as a family doctor but made a fortune from trading in stocks in the 1980’s. 

Last year he was rated as one of Holland’s 50 wealthiest individuals. But recently his business empire has been entangled in a web of debt amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Last May, accompanied by representatives of JP Morgan Chase, which had secured a court order to recover artworks which had been used as collateral for a loan, deputy sheriffs in New York removed an estimated 29 paintings belonging to Reijtenbagh, valued at some $23 million, from an apartment in the Trump Tower.

"Big Fan"

Films without end have been made about the heroes of sport, but who speaks for the fans, the fervent admirers and supporters no team can exist without? Who especially speaks not for the weekend dabbler but for the hard-core fanatic, the zealot who devotes an entire life to a team with the single-minded intensity of a monk meditating in a cave? "Big Fan" does, and it does it exceptionally well.

Written and directed by Robert Siegel and starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, "Big Fan" is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans. Its situations can be outrageous, its dialogue is often scabrous, but its sense of the core reality it describes is impeccable.

Read more here

Digging Deeper

 Permanence is not Urs Fischer’s game. 

In recent years, the Swiss-born artist has built a full-scale chalet from crumbling loaves of crusty bread, placed a collapsing brick wall on a pile of rotting vegetables and produced life-size female nudes as burning candles. Gaping holes loom just as large.

 In 2007, for example, he jackhammered a yawning, dirt-filled crater into the floor of his Manhattan gallery (above). For his first solo American museum show, opening Oct. 28 at the New Museum, Fischer has constructed a hallucinatory labyrinth of mirrored boxes based on a Manhattan streetscape, imprinting them with hundreds of images of familiar sights. 

With the addition of massive cast-aluminum sculptures that suggest human torsos, the building-wide ‘‘introspective,’’ says the curator Massimiliano Gioni, ‘‘is like taking a walk through Fischer’s mind.’’ Or perhaps like seeing in the dark. 

Linda Yablonsky - T Magazine - The New York Times

Audio slideshow: Art and politics in China

As China marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art at the University of Westminster in London, looks at how art has moved from the realm of propaganda to the international marketplace.

via: BBC

"Metropolitan Forecast"

     D8 L THE NEW YORK TIMES TUESDAY, 

          SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Metropolitan Forecast

         TODAY 

Less humid, sunny. High 79.

 Noticeably less humid air will filter into the metropolitan region on. 

Brisk winds from the northwest. 

High pressure building east from the Great Lakes will promote mainly sunny skies. 

Daytime readings will peak in the lower 80’s.

      TONIGHT

 Clear, lighter winds Low 62. 

Skies will be clear overnight as high pressure crests near the Middle Atlantic Coast. 

Humidity will remain low, and temperatures will fall to around 60 degrees in many spots.

      TOMORROW

     Mainly sunny High 76.

 Sunshine and just a few clouds will fill the sky. 

Breezes will turn and blow from the south ahead of a cold front approaching from Canada.

Excerpt from

"Two Poems from 

"The Day" 

By Kenneth Goldsmith

National Portrait Gallery Exhibits Portrait of Ted Kennedy by Andy Warhol

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

 installed a portrait of Sen. Edward Kennedy by Andy Warhol. It went on view when the museum opened to the public at 11:30 a.m. in a first-floor gallery that is designated for remembrance of recently deceased individuals represented in the gallery’s collection.

 

Warhol’s silkscreened portrait of Kennedy was created in 1980 to raise funds for Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. A special feature of the print is Warhol’s use of the colors of the American flag and diamond dust. The Portrait Gallery acquired the portrait in 2000.

 

Kennedy built on this legacy when he sought the presidency in 1980. Andy Warhol's silkscreened portrait, created as a campaign fund-raiser, plays off the colors of the American flag and suggests the glamour of politics by enhancing the candidate's features with thin red and blue lines and diamond dust. Warhol’s portrait of Kennedy is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery, on the museum’s first floor. 

via: artdaily

Extensive Antony Gormley Exhibition

San Idelfonso College presents an exhibition of work by British sculptor Antony Gormley, bringing together installations, free standing sculptures, and works on paper from throughout Gormley’s career in what will be the most extensive presentation to date of his work. 

Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalized the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations. Gormley’s recent work increasingly engages with energy systems, fields and vectors, rather than mass and defined volume.

The body as a point of departure has been the basis of the work of Antony Gormley for over thirty years. For the artist, one springboard for his sculpture is the relationship between physical sensations and the surroundings. Gormley sees the body as a receptacle, a place for energy to move about, thoughts.

via: artdaily

Bring to Light

For many years there has been a kind of secret museum of photography under the streets of northwest Washington — an immense, windowless, climate-controlled archive with roots reaching back more than a century.

And since the early 1980s just one man, William C. Bonner, has been the museum’s primary denizen, becoming intimately familiar with its holdings: more than 11 million images richly documenting the life of the 20th century, from Uganda to the Mississippi Delta to remote lamaseries near the Mongolian border. “People don’t realize how beautiful this collection is,” Mr. Bonner said, “and it’s a shame, in a way, that I’m the only one who’s seen many of these pictures.”

The pictures make up the archive of the National Geographic Society, and it was this sentiment, said Mr. Bonner, the society’s archivist, that motivated him and officials there to explore the idea of opening up the holdings to the fine-art market for the first time. National Geographic’s goal is to find private and institutional collectors for the vintage black-and-white prints and later color images.

After considering proposals from several dealers, the society recently chose the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, which has worked with several other large archives of photojournalistic images. On Sept. 17 the gallery will open its first exhibition of National Geographic pictures — 150 vintage prints from a dozen photographers.

via: Treasures From an Underground Trove, By Randy Kennedy 

 The New York Times

Relics of Motor City

link: The Ruins of Detroit

 Packard Motor Plant