Art news and events

FlashArt reports on March 20, 2011:
China moves to being world’s second biggest art market

While the United States and the United Kingdom share history as a pair of number ones and number twos, they are no longer the first and second largest art markets. China has surpassed the UK for the first time, according to the nation’s own British Art Market Federation.In a study by the BAMF, China and Britain remain neck and neck. In 2010 China recorded auction and gallery sales of nearly $8.5 billion, giving it a 23% world market share. This is a one percentage point advantage over Britain’s 22% of sales worldwide. This figures were reported through Bloomberg news agency, who noted the latter still remains the largest European market for art even with a 7% dip in recent years.In a statement BAMF’s chairman Anthony Browne told Bloomberg that “This study makes alarming reading for us,” and used the occasion to add a caveat about levies controversial within the EU art market. Though there are others, the levy he worried was a main culprit was a European Union levy that gives artists a portion of sales as artworks are resold throughout their commodity life. As he told Bloomberg, “The EU alone applies this levy…. It does not exist in China, the U.S. or Switzerland, our main global competitors.”In the United States the art market maintains a significant lead with just over a third of worldwide sales—a comfortable cushion 10% ahead of China and the UK. Still, many heed experts maintained that the Chinese art market is unlikely to deflate any time soon. This is the case despite the economic downturn that has plagued all three continents since 2008.

Salt Lake City, Utah
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened The Smithson Effect, an exhibition highlighting the pervasive presence of artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) in contemporary art since the 1990s. The most ambitious contemporary art exhibition ever organized by the UMFA, The Smithson Effect brings together, for the first time, a broad spectrum of work by international artists who share a profound debt to Smithson’s art and ideas. The Smithson Effect features sculpture, video, photography, installation, and sound art by twenty-three leading artists.

Perhaps the most influential artist of the postwar period, Smithson is best known for his pioneering earthworks created during the 1960s and 70s, such as the famous Spiral Jetty (1970) in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. If the site of artistic creation had traditionally been the artist’s studio, Smithson took this activity into the unbounded landscape. He redefined the terms of art’s display and exhibition, establishing a new relationship between the ‘site’ of the landscape and the ‘nonsite’ of the gallery.

On view from March 10 through July 3, 2011.

Hammer Museum’s Sixth Biennial Invitational
“All of this and nothing”
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
January 30 – April 24, 2011

All of this and nothing is the sixth in the Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series, which highlights work of Los Angeles-based artists, both established and emerging, alongside a number of international artists. All of this and nothing features more than 60 works, much of it created for the exhibition, by fourteen artists: Karla Black, Charles Gaines, Evan Holloway, Sergej Jensen, Ian Kiaer, Jorge Macchi, Dianna Molzan, Fernando Ortega, Eileen Quinlan, Gedi Sibony, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt and Kerry Tribe. It presents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, performance, and the moving image. This group of intergenerational artists closely considers the process of art-making in their work by playing with scale, the ephemeral quality of their materials, the nature of time and language, and the relationships between the objects that they create. Their work explores ideas of disappearance and reemergence, of shifting visibilities, as well as the beauty found in the everyday. For them the value of the work resides more in the process of its making than in the resulting objects.

Hammer Invitationals, inaugurated in 2001 with Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles, is a series of biennial exhibitions dedicated to offering critical, museum-based consideration of recent art. International Paper (2003); THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (2005), winner of the International Association of Art Critic’s “Best Thematic Show Nationally,” and proudly sponsored by the organization I am seriously involved with, the Fellows of Contemporary Art; Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists (2007); and Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. (2009) followed.

All of this and nothing is the first major exhibition at the Hammer to be curated jointly by the museum’s chief curator, Douglas Fogle and senior curator Anne Ellegood.

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SELECTED INTERNATIONAL ART FAIRS

	London, England October 13 to 16, 2011
	Istanbul Biennial – Istanbul, Turkey September 17 - November 13, 2011
	Abu Dhabi, November 2011
	Kassel, Germany June 9 to September 16, 2012