Shopping
Kicking off the November auctions in New York, Christie’s logged a strong Imp-Mod sale last night, with a $479.3 million haul led by a van Gogh that went for $81.3 million. Nate Freeman has the story from the scene at Rockefeller Center. [ARTnews]
What art books do art people want as holiday gifts? New York magazine has a survey with some findings, including a full Pantone Solid Guide Set (desired by Rob Pruitt), L.A. Objects & David Hammons Body Prints (tipped by Sarah Trigg), and Tauba Auerbach’s A Partial Taxonomy of Periodic Linear Ornament (endorsed by Carol Bove). [New York]
Bloomberg has a list of things a prospective art buyer could buy instead of art that “often costs more than a hundred-thousand dollars per square inch.” Among them: a Gulfstream jet, Christie Brinkley’s Hamptons real estate, a private island in the Caribbean, and tuition plus room and board for Princeton’s entire class of 2021. [Bloomberg]
Art for a Cause
“With accusations of sexual harassment and assault coming from all corners of the art and entertainment world,” the Washington Post reports, “a Washington museum has opened an exhibit that focuses on the causes and potential solutions to the epidemic of violence against women.” The exhibit is “El Tendedero/The Clothesline Project” by Monica Mayer, a Mexico City-based artist who asked questions about sexual harassment and hung the written answers she got on pink postcards with clothespins and string. [The Washington Post]
“In barbers and bakeries, train stations and tea factories, the words of civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King were given fresh breath by the people of Newcastle on Monday—helped by artist Jeremy Deller,” the BBC reports. The cause of it all is a Deller-devised project for which 50 people were enlisted to recite bits of MLK’s wisdom to unwitting members of the public in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights leader giving a speech in England while accepting an honorary degree. [BBC]
Look & See
There’s a Christo and Jean-Claude exhibition up now at the ING Art Center in Brussels, and the New York Times is rapt. About a past proposal for a project in Barcelona, Christo tells the Times of having worked with the city’s mayor—to no avail. “After two years, he said no,” Christo says. “He was assassinated and killed.” Then, a clarification: “Not by us, but someone else.” [The New York Times]
Long lines have queued up at Christie’s to lay eyes on Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi before it goes to auction on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. There are no Leonardos in any museum in New York, so it represents a sole chance. And this despite the fact that uncertainty about its provenance has been attributed to some, including a quoted scholar throwing some shade: “Even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation, it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull,” wrote Charles Hope, an emeritus professor at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. [The New York Times]
Museums
In Jakarta, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara just opened and lays a claim to being Indonesia’s first museum devoted to modern and contemporary art, Forbes reports. About half of the art in the museum’s collection is from its home country, while the rest comes from the United States, Western Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. [Forbes]
After damage incurred from wildfire, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa Valley has rescheduled the opening of its next major exhibition, “Be Not Still: Living in Uncertain Times,” for January 27, 2018. The center will be open occasionally for interim programming beginning this week. [di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art]
Odds & Ends
Ever wondered what a cliffside wedding with the bride and groom avoiding certain doom only by way of skimpy rock-climbing gear looks like? It’s your lucky morning, thanks to the Guardian’s “Best Photographs of the Day” round-up. Other visual riches: women at work at a saffron festival in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates Air Force making a giant smoke heart with jet plumes in the sky. [The Guardian]
Chris Richards, the Washington Post’s pop music critic, has a cool Twitter thread telling a tale of how Laura Owens (the subject of a great new show at the Whitney Museum) offered him advice when he was just out of art school that altered the course of his career. [Twitter/Chris Richards]