COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
On Display
Larry Gagosian held forth on art in and around the market for an on-camera interview for Fox Business. “It’s not a luxury good,” he tells Maria Bartiromo. “It’s not a luxury product. I mean it may appear to people who buy Hermès bags, but it’s not a Hermès bag.” [Fox Business]
For the Guardian, a bunch of photographers selected their favorite winter pictures and told the stories behind each. Among the subjects: a polar limousine, ice skyscrapers in China, and a flying figure-skater. [The Guardian]
For the New York Times feature “Show Us Your Wall,” the collectors Stephen Frailey, chairman of the B.F.A. photography and video department at the School of Visual Arts, and Mary Ehni, a hair colorist and the founder of the pop-up gallery MaryMary Projects, opened up their Tribeca apartment for ogling. Artists featured include Roe Ethridge, Marilyn Minter, Mary Heilman, and Dove Bradshaw. [The New York Times]
Cultured
The editors and writers of ARTnews offered up some of their favorite books from 2017, including a few that might count as surprises. [ARTnews]
For the New York Review of Books, the artist David Fratkin offers an autobiographical tour of images of his work. “The vision of babies that recurs in my work is not accidental,” he states. “My images take the shape of my obsessions.” Also: “My love of the doll imagery of Joseph Cornell and James Ensor, for instance, is partly born of the sense of childhood kept alive. Their work preserves the uncanny perception of dolls’ attractive creepiness, a seeming consciousness.” [The New York Review of Books]
“How theater should respond to a democracy in meltdown”—so reads the headline of a big-picture piece in the Los Angeles Times. [Los Angeles Times]
“A four-story, realistic pink penis popped up on the side of an apartment building on Broome Street between Forsythe and Eldridge Streets on Christmas eve,” NBC New York reports. “And after just two days, the work by Swedish artist Carolina Falkholt has already sparked everything from outrage and calls to have it removed to applause and laughter for the envelope-pushing piece.” [NBC New York]
Rewarding
Holland Cotter liked “Fictions,” a group show of emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem, very much. “Like its predecessors,” he wrote in the New York Times, “the show has no overarching theme but lots of connective tissue in terms of forms and ideas.” [The New York Times]
If you know anything about the big art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, only a few days remain to come forward and collect your $10 million reward. The offer expires on January 1, when the amount gets cut in half, according to the New York Times. [The New York Times]
Gravity
In a round-up of its favorite offerings from the past year, The Paris Review republished a meditation on “the surprising history (and future) of paperweights.” [The Paris Review]
Z’ev, a percussionist revered by devotees of experimental music (including John Zorn, Charlemagne Palestine, and scores more), was treated to a thoughtful obituary in the New York Times after his death two weeks ago. [The New York Times]