From the Archive: Dike Blair's Good Year

Last year on the ocassion of Dike Blair's show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, North Caroline, we announced that the installation and multi-media artist "is having a good year." Said year pales in comparison to his fall 2010, when the artist, born in 1952, shows for the first time at Gagosian. In this exhibition, Blair has constructed an ambulatory installation that links the aspects of his inter-related sculptures and paintings. Here is an excerpt of our Steel Stillman's studio visit with the artist, last year:

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Louise Bourgeois in 1983

Louise Bourgeois died May 31, and by that time her reputation was established as a mentor for multiple generations and an innovator in the fields of sculpture, feminism, and living the life of the artist. Established but not sealed, because Bourgeois' work encomasses such a rich variety of media and theme. In 1983, on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern and before Bourgeois' ascent to grand dame, Robert Storr discussed her "non-career":



For 40 years Louise Bourgeois has resisted assimilation. Indeed, she is the last major figure of her generation whose "art world" reputation and influence on younger artists involve no significant debt to official approval or to wide public recognition and acceptance. Rath… Read More

The Shortlist

 

Works from the estate of Michael Crichton, author, TV and film director and producer, will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York on May 11. Lots include pieces by Crichton’s friends Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, as well as works by Picasso, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Mark Tansey and Wayne Thiebaud. Also a bit of an art critic, Crichton wrote the catalogue for Johns’s 1977 survey at the Whitney Museum.
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Links Out: February 3

A life-size 1961 bronze cast, Alberto Giacometti's L'Homme Qui Marche I, today became the most expensive work ever sold at auction. It went for £65,001,250 ($104,327,006), just more than the the 2004 record set by Picasso's Garçon à la Pipe (1905), at $104.1 million (£58,052,830). It was also $80 million more than the previous record for Giacometti, and $70 million more than any other modern sculpture sold at auction.

The news makes Paris,the site of the artist's studio, in focus. The cityisn't really noted for its contemporary art scene, which is why a budding exchange program with youthful Berlin last week seemed so pertinent.

An exhibition at the International Center for Photography in New York looks at Paris in its heyday—even bef… Read More