• The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art: Deciphering the Connection between Art, Value and the Market by Jasmin Tanja Carolin Kossenjans.
• Literature Festivals and the Sociology of Literature by Liana Giorgi.
• A Showcased City Calls for Transformative Art-spaces by Eser Yagci.
• The Drama of Criminal Trials: Dramaturgy and the Voices of the Defendants, the Victims and Justice by Michael W. Smith.
• Peter Handke’s Controversial One-man Crusade for the Serbian Cause by Schneider Handschin Esther.
• Transnationalist Reading of Visual and Verbal Representations of Immigrant Identities by Anniina Suominen Guyas and Paula Toiviainen.
• ‘Nothing But Sunshine’: Writing Across Monsoonal Lines, Inflecting Electronic Arts by Lisa McDonald.

A new exhibition at City Gallery from Artur Klosinski - BUDAPEST / 13 minute video / from 20 December 2009

(still from ‘BUDAPEST’ by Artur Klosinski)

The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 4, of  The International Journal of the Arts in Society includes:

• Between Classicism and Surrealism: The Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and the Canonization of the Avant-garde by Barbara Lekatsas.
• Plural Expressions of the Local Realities in an Interdinal City: Art Contemporary of Maracaibo by Elsy Zavarce and José Hernández.
• Challenging Hegemony, Zineb Sedira’s Mother Tongue by Michele Waugh.
• Travels and Borders in the Representation of the U.S.-Mexico Border: Cartographies in Alejandro González Iñárritu´s Film Babel by Victor Carreno.
• ‘T’ Turning Diverse Memories into Public Art: Community Consultation in the Public Art Process by Salvatore M. Di Mauro.
• Bar Candela: Contemporary Art on the Move, in Place and Discourse by Venke Aure, Kristin Bergaust and Oddrun Sæter.
• From Memories to Monuments: The Artist as Translator by Inga Burrows and Katja Krebs.

From Andrew Motion at The Guardian…

Michelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable’s correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs (”Starry Night”), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.

Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest. More…

• Beyond Modern Æsthetics: From the Migrations of the Aura to Its Costs of Reproduction by Riccardo Baldissone.
• The Silence of the Paper: Embodiment of ‘Artistic Personality’ in the Process of Art-making by Natalie Dekel.
• Heart Print: Chinese Rock Art Frescoes (Xin-yin): Crossing Boarders by Bronwen Wade Leeuwen.
• The Adventures of Gary Baseman: Dumb Luck or Brilliant Creative Strategy? by Andrew Selby and Alastair Adams.
• Heartquake and Suburbia Hallucination. On Israeli Palestinian Art Collaboration by Leena A. Petersen.
• Towards a Model of Intersemiotic Translation by Daniella Aguiar and Joao Queiroz.
• A Model for Exploring Anyville: Using Dialogical Collaboration to Create Art about Place by Jennifer Eiserman, Gerald Hushlak and Mary Ann Hushlak.

The fourth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of the Arts in Society is available.

Some of the papers included in Volume 4, Number 4:

• What the Arts have to Teach us about Political Leadership and Social Change: Ambivalence, Chaos, Bush, Obama and the Primal Paradox by John Briggs, Raymond Saner and Lichia Yiu.
• Encouraging Reflexive Practice: Alternative Ways of Embedding Personal & Professional Development Inside the University by Claire Nichols and David Garner.
• Art Commodities from Japan: Propagating Art and Culture via the Internet by Jean Ippolito.
• Revitalizing Formosa: The Promotion of Public Art in Taiwan by Chih-Hsiang Ko.
• Extending Young Children’s Artistic Enfranchisement Through Computer-based Music Technology by Janet McDowall.
• Identification of the Malay Vernacular Spatial Features within Malay Vernacular Houses by Amirhosein Ghaffarian Hoseini, Mohd Nasir Baharuddin and Rahinah Ibrahim.
• Madness in the Arts and the Art of Madness: The Transatlantic Research Network on Mental Health and the Arts (TRAMHA) by Gonzalo Araoz.

The fourth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of the Arts in Society has now been published.

Some of the papers included in Volume 4, Number 4:

• Poetry and Painting in Chinese Literati Culture by Hong Jiang.
• Defining the Moment: History, Style, and the Paris Exposition of 1925 by Alexander Varias.
• A Curious Practice: The Complexity of Viewing Art by Jo-Anne Duggan.
• How to Keep Existing in Times of Trouble: Joan Miró’s Writings of the Early Forties by Clio Meurer.
• On Thomas Lux’s Poetry: Who’s Laughing and What Good does the Laughing do? by Jeffrey Hughes Morgan.
• The Spirit of (Simulated) Place: Travel, Art, and the Theme-Park Aesthetic by Lisa Colletta.
• Fashion and Design Trend-forecasting: Can Commerce Meet Art and Prophecy in the Global Marketplace? by Keren Muriel Chiaroni.

It is without any sense of surprise, but with the greatest of pleasure that I inform you that our very own Morgan Meis has been awarded an extremely well-deserved $30,000 by the Warhol Foundation in recognition of the excellence of his writing on art.

To read more…

About eighteen months ago, the former fashion designer turned TV host turned bookmaker Todd Oldham moved his office from Soho, which he finally admitted had become “too like a shopping mall,” to an erstwhile law office in a building across from St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. The main rooms have fantastic windows: They stretch nearly from floor to ceiling, providing spectacular views of both the chapel’s cemetery and the hive of cranes and activity that’s begun to fill up ground zero.

Oldham was there on a recent afternoon, dressed like an 8-year-old boy in blue jeans and a slim piqué polo shirt covered in a pattern of grizzly bears. The only visibly adult touch is a bushy and graying beard, the sort sometimes seen on religious zealots who gather in Union Square. He is unfazed by the morbidity of his new view. “Calatrava’s designing the PATH station!” exclaims Oldham, who is prone to exclamations. “It’s going to be so beautiful.” And, indeed, suddenly the whole scene does look almost jolly, like something from a Richard Scarry picture book.

To read more…

The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last hurrah. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy.

The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.

In the weeks and months that followed Mr Hirst’s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable, especially in New York, where the bail-out of the banks coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise of many art-buying investors. In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector—for Chinese contemporary art—they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world’s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them.

To read more…