AP - Haute couture got tugged in opposite directions on Tuesday, as Chanel channeled the street — embracing the mixed-up, casual-chic styles of today's trendsetting It Girls — while Givenchy sent out what can only be described as extreme haute couture — breathtaking, Baroque garments that crossed the divide between clothes and art.

[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:55:43 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Where in Park City can you find cell phone-guided adventures filled with booby traps, a rotating cast of blond tenants in an epic standoff with their curmudgeonly landlord, revolutionary artist-feminists, and a fast-spreading and insidious sleep virus? (And why, for that matter, would you be looking for such a seemingly dangerous combo?) The New Frontier program at the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, that's where. The section of the venerable indy film offers installations, multimedia performances, and otehr "transmedia experiences," and promises all of the above for your (quite safe) viewing pleasure. This year's New Frontier lineup began on Thursday and will run through January 30.
[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:37:23 GMT]
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ARTINFO - The recently wobbly American furniture and folk art segment of the auction market received a big jolt of confidence on Friday when an 18th-century Chippendale block-and-shell mahogany desk attributed to Newport, Rhode Island, cabinetmaker John Goddard, sold for a whopping $5,682,500 at Christie's. Dating from circa 1765, the figured knee-hole desk ? or bureau ? rocketed past presale expectations of $700-900,000 and easily crushed the result made during its last auction appearance, when it sold for $940,000 at Sotheby?s New York in January 2005.
[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:17:22 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Last year was not a quiet one for Paris museums ? with a still-unsolved theft of five paintings from the city's Museum of Modern Art, a debate over the same institution giving an X-rating to a Larry Clark retrospective, and the refusal of Avdei Ter-Oganyan to show his work in the Louvre's Russian exhibition despite Russia's withdrawal of its demands that the artist be censored. But the first brouhaha of 2011 has already produced results. Growing public discontent over the restrictive hours of city-run museums led the French newspaper Le Figaro to compare Paris-controlled museums to Soviet institutions earlier this month. Now, the city has announced a new plan for streamlining museum bureaucracy, though it will not go into effect until 2012.
[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:16:59 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Crusading Egyptology tsar Zahi Hawass, the charismatic secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities who has had some success pressuring foreign museums to return disputed artifacts, now once again has big game in his sights: the bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been the cornerstone of Berlin's Neues Museum for nearly a century. Hawass has sent a letter demanding the return of the work, and Germany is mounting a defense. 
[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:20:20 GMT]
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ARTINFO - The mood was rather cheerful at the Business Design Center yesterday as the London Art Fair drew to an end. The fair's 23rd edition was the largest to date with 124 galleries participating, and attendance edged up by more than 1,000 visitors over last year, with 24,389 browsing the aisles. This is far behind Frieze's 60,000-plus visitors in 2010, but it's a figure for organizers to celebrate nonetheless. Unlike its behemoth competitor, the London Art Fair focuses primarily on Modern British painting and sculpture, though it also includes contemporary galleries, most of them based in the United Kingdom.
[Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:19:59 GMT]
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ARTINFO - When MoMA acquired Tino Sehgal's "The Kiss" in 2008 ? a performance work in which actors recreate iconic kisses from throughout history ? director Glenn Lowry called it "one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we've ever made." A dozen people, including museum personnel and attorneys, had to be convened to memorize the artist's instructions, which he did not want consigned to paper. Now the purchase of Sehgal's "This Situation" is causing a different sort of problem for the Pompidou Center. French video artist Fred Forest is questioning the unusual terms of the acquisition and warning that it may not comply with French law.
[Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:42:09 GMT]
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Reuters - Thousands of art lovers queued in freezing temperatures on Saturday night for a final glimpse of a major retrospective on French Impressionist Claude Monet, after Paris' Grand Palais opened round the clock to cope with demand.
[Sun, 23 Jan 2011 12:03:18 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Last November Larry Gagosian paid $49 million for Henri Matisse's bronze "Back IV" at Christie's, setting a new record for the artist at auction. Now a Texas art foundation that owns four more sculptures from the series ? which consists of 48 bronze casts of four numbered plaster sculptures, 43 of which were fired after the artist's death ? has decided that they're too expensive to hold onto. They too will head to an auction house for a private Sotheby's sale. 
[Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:54:36 GMT]
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AP - Dali, Chihuly and Degas?

[Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:27:07 GMT]
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ARTINFO - The Prambanan temple complex was built in the 9th century and includes temples dedicated to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva with reliefs depicting episodes from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic. And, as if lifted from the pages of such a legend of destruction and rebirth, fears have arisen that powerful flowing volcanic mud produced by Mount Merapi, the volcano that erupted in October and November, could now destroy the historic structures.
[Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:24:54 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Frank Gehry can hardly be called an academic architect. While other visionaries in his field have spent as much time publishing papers and heading up prestigious school programs, the steel-sculpting intuitive master builder has been too busy creating actual buildings around the globe, at a breakneck pace. But now, however, the 81-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect has made his latest foray into the world of academe, accepting a still-undefined post at the University of Southern California, from which he himself received his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954.
[Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:32:03 GMT]
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ARTINFO - London's Wallace Collection, a storied repository of Old Masters that gained some notoriety for its recent show of Damien Hirst's critically-eviscerated paintings, has appointed a traditionalist curator Christoph Vogtherr to be its new director. Currently acting head of collections at the Wallace and its curator of pre-1800 paintings, Vogtherr will replace Rosalind Savill when she retires from the director's post this fall. "Having run a fully international competition, it is very satisfying to find the right balance of scholarship and leadership from within the Wallace Collection itself," John Ritblat, chair of the museum's board of trustees, said in a statement.
[Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:35:23 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Hot on the heels of the announcement of a new Brooklyn-based art fair during New York's upcoming Armory Show week in March, a fresh contender is throwing its hat into the ring ? one that is perhaps still more unlikely, and intriguing. The just-announced Moving Image fair is the brainchild of art dealer Ed Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov, a partner in Winkleman's eponymous Chelsea gallery. It aims to solve the longstanding problems of showing video art at a fair.
[Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:30:25 GMT]
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ARTINFO - The massive exhibition "Claude Monet, 1840-1926" at the Grand Palais ? the first of its kind in Paris in 30 years ? has been a huge success. Online tickets long ago sold out, with visitors braving the cold to wait up to six hours in line (half of the daily tickets are reserved for in-person purchases). Now the Grand Palais has announced that the exhibition will be open 24 hours a day for its finale this weekend.
[Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:35:06 GMT]
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ARTINFO - Banksy's anonymity has been a central aspect of his Robin Hood-like cachet, and the difficulty of accessing his inner circle has conferred an extra veneer of counter-cultural glamor on those who manage to crack its secrecy ? just ask Mr. Brainwash. But the street art maestro's clandestine persona has its drawbacks too. Last Friday, a Russian judge rejected Banksy's offer to pay the bail for two members of the Moscow-based Voina art collective, who have been jailed since November as the result of a performance-art action that involved turning over cop cars in the center of St. Petersburg.
[Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:29:15 GMT]
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AFP - Russia said Thursday it would not send any new art exhibitions to the United States until the two sides had settled a dispute over the return of a Jewish library to New York.

[Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:58:41 GMT]
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ARTINFO - The Guggenheim has a decidedly mixed track record with launching new satellite branches. It has one spectacular success under its wing, the Guggenheim Bilbao, credited with revitalizing the economy of a region of Spain once mainly known as a hotbed of separatism, and an upcoming coup is in the works with the gargantuan Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, set to open in 2013. These achievements, however, have been balanced by go-nowhere projects in Brazil, Hong Kong, and Mexico, and an ill-starred collaboration with St. Petersberg's Hermitage for a Guggenheim Las Vegas. But whether they fail or succeed, these projects have become a lucrative business in itself for the museum ? as well as its former director, Thomas Krens ? as evidenced by today's announcement that the Finnish capital of Helsinki is paying the Guggenheim Foundation $2.5 million just to engage in a "feasibility study" on the possibility of launching a new Guggenheim Helsinki.
[Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:07:52 GMT]
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ARTINFO - While Russian businessman Alexander Tarantsev and wife, supermodel Yulia Vizgalina, were out of town last week, armed burglars stormed his walled compound outside Moscow and made off with a stated $50 million in art, other valuables, and cash. The heist included paintings by 19th-century Russian artists including Ilya Repin, Ivan Shishkin, and Ivan Aivazovsky.
[Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:05:11 GMT]
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ARTINFO - With performance art increasingly entering the museological mainstream ? along with the mainstream mainstream, courtesy of one James Franco ? it was only a matter of time before an art school launched a performance-art curating program. Now Wesleyan University (not exactly an art school, but pretty arty, and ARTINFO would know) has gone and done it, creating a new Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, the first post-graduate offering of its kind in the United States.
[Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:04:52 GMT]
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