Art a GoGo

Sunshine Daydream....

The sun is shining in Santa Cruz today, so we're going to get out and enjoy it while we can...more rain is on the way!

2,000 brave cold for nude art (CNN)
“BRUGES, Belgium (AP) -- Almost 2,000 people braved frigid weather early Saturday but didn't get cold feet when they all went naked in the center of gothic Bruges in an art "happening" organized by photographer Spencer Tunick.”

Sotheby's auction misses the mark (CNN)

After him, who? (Guardian)
”He was the first cubist and Picasso courted him like a lover. It's time Georges Braque was recognised in his own right, says Alex Danchev”

“Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”
- Georges Braque

Tate Modern celebrates fifth birthday and 22 millionth visitor

Power point (from the Guardian Unlimited)
”After five years and 22 million visitors, Tate Modern has changed the way we think about contemporary art. It puts the Tate, with more than four million visitors each year, well in front of the Pompidou in Paris, its closest rival, and far ahead of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Every year it gets almost five times as many visitors as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. It is the world's most visited museum of contemporary art.”  Check out Tate Modern by the numbers at the end of the article...interesting facts.

Bird sculpture fetches record $27m (CNN)
"A rare marble version of "Bird in Space" by Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi sold Wednesday at Christie's auction house for $27.4 million, a world record for a sculpture at a public auction"

“I have always tried to hide my own efforts and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it cost.”
- Henri Matisse

Hit and run today...selection of art new stories + a quote

"Monks create, destroy, intricate artwork"

"Late pope portrait to go on display"

"Classic Kiss shot sold at auction"

"Free entry to 1200 museums across Europe on May 14"

"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity."
- Alberto Giacometti

A bit of this and that on a quiet Sunday

Shakespeare portrait is fake…“Chrome yellow paint, dating from around 1814, had been found embedded in the portrait. We now think the portrait dates back to around 1818 to 1840, exactly the time when there was a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's plays,"  It only took 100 years to solve the mystery!

Third scream suspect is charged. 

Paintings still haven’t been recovered.  Keep an eye out on eBay!

“Art or anatomy?”  Neither? Maybe just weird and disturbing!

“I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.”

- Jeff Koons

French Tycoon May Say Au Revior to Paris Plans

French tycoon to drop plans for Paris modern arts gallery
Pathétique! Francois Pinault (who owns Gucci and Christie's Auction House among other things) offers to spend $195 million dollars to build a museum, and the town of Boulogne-Billancourt in France snubs him.  "If Pinault decides he has to move the museum to Venice, it will be because he has been so discouraged by the attitude of the public authorities here," Catherine Millet, editor of Artpress magazine and author of the international best-seller The Secret life of Catherine M, told AFP."

Too Much Information - Guradian article about Gregory Crewdson exhibition in London.  “Gregory Crewdson uses Hollywood techniques to create glossy, Hopper-like portraits of American life. But where Hopper stripped lives bare, these images offer an overabundance of detail.”

“The museum has very largely supplanted the church as the emblematic focus of the American city.”
- Robert Hughes

California Lags in goverment funding of the arts

California assembly weighs 1% tax on entertainment to fund arts education. "California suffers by lingering in last place in state government per-capita spending on the arts."

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis reopens.  NPR story about the Walker Art Center.

What is art?  New Yorker cartoon.

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”
- Renee Magritte

Freud + Secret Service + Woman to Give Birth in Art Gallery....

More than 1 million people have visited MoMA since it was revamped in November 2004.

New Lucian Freud portrait debuts. Sigmund Freud (Lucian Freud's grandfather) would have a field day analyzing Lucian's paintings!  Freud's paintings are somewhat disorienting, almost distorted...but there's something that draws you in and demands your attention.

Secret service crashes art exhibit.  “A Secret Service spokesman explained they just wanted to make sure it's "nothing more than artwork, with a political statement.”

Woman to give birth in art gallery.  ????? Totally bizarre.  Is this art or just another attempt to shock the world?

“I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.”
- Lucian Freud

Junk Art, Nude Art, & a Quote

Tomoko Takahashi's UK junk exhibit...which included raffle prizes!

Beecroft's 100 Nudes in Berlin - "Is it challenging art or merely soft porn for intellectuals?"

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

- Mark Rothko

U2 - HP Pavilion 4/10/05

We went to see U2 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose on Sunday.  The song selection and light/stage effects were excellent, but the sound seemed really distorted.  Overall, it was great to finally see U2 live.

Here's a picture of the stage taken with a camera phone

Saturday Art Mashup

Oslo Police Arrest Scream Suspect
Darn, and we were just looking on eBay to add "The Scream" to our art collection!

This week in art history
- April 6, 1520 - Raphael dies in Rome at the age of 37
- April 8, 1973 - Picasso dies at the age of 92

'Art Night' Falls to Nudity Ban
As the Kinks song goes, "Give the people what they want"

Critics lay into Hirst exhibition
"Village Voice's Jerry Saltz called Hirst's new show 'ordinary and academic.'  Hirst might also be described as an avant-garde Thomas Kinkade...

Artist joins trade trip to China
"A fine artist seems an odd bedfellow for high-tech product companies and building material manufacturers."

Okay, enough BBC art news....

We're heading up to San Francisco today to visit SFMOMA.  One of the featured exhibits is Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective. Bechtlel's painting style is called photo realism.  His subject matter (middle class American culture) reminds me of the photographs of Bill Owens.

"One of the wonderful things about a museum is how you're jolted into confronting art from strange and wonderful civilizations and you look and learn and expand your horizons."
- Sister Wendy

SFMOMA Postscript:
The Robert Bechtle retrospective wasn't that inspring.  Cars dominate Bechtle's subject matter...lot's of cars.  Photography inside the exhbit area is not allowed, but you can take pictures of the building.  Here's a few pictures of SFMOMA from Art a GoGo's archive (circa 2000).