To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.
The Headlines
AUCTION ACTION. Following evening sales of modern and contemporary art in London over the past few days at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, rival Phillips staged its own event , hauling in some £17.5 million (about $21 million) across 33 lots (not counting two pulled before the proceedings), Angelica Villa reports in ARTnews. Of those, 31 found buyers; six had irrevocable bids. A single new record was set, for British painter Antonia Showering, whose 2020 work, We Stray, finished at £239,400 ($290,000), fees included. That was a zesty six times its £40,000 estimate, for the record. Top-lot honors went to Cy Twombly, who had an untitled work on paper from 1962 sell for the equivalent of about $3.3 million. For a full report, head to ARTnews.
Related Articles
A PROJECT FOR THE AGES. One Thursday in 1969, the designer Arnold Skolnick received a last-minute assignment that would define his life: The upcoming Woodstock music festival needed a poster after an earlier proposal had not quite worked out. Skolnick got to work, and on Monday turned in a piece with a white bird perched atop a guitar, all realized with flat planes of color. His creation was inspired by Henri Matisse ’s cutouts, and it would become one of the defining graphics of postwar America. Skolnick, who produced a wide variety of design work and exhibited a good number of paintings, died last month at the age of 85, the New York Times reports. “It was just another job,” he once said of his iconic poster, per the obituary, “but it became famous.”
The Digest
As war rages in Ukraine, the On Time arts festival took place in the capital of Kyiv. “Even under war we must live, and that means appreciating others, nature and art and music, too, which can comfort us and open doors for us,” said Natalia Shulga, an architect and illustrator showing her work there. [The Guardian]
The closely watched Yokohama Triennale in Japan has tapped two artistic directors for its 2023 outing: curator and artist Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, an art historian who directs the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. The duo’s show will open next December. [ArtReview]
Following a dispute with its landlord, the stalwart New York gallery Postmasters is decamping from the Tribeca space it has called home for almost ten years and going nomadic. “This is our attempt to do the things we want to do in an uncompromised way,” said cofounder Magda Sawon. [The Art Newspaper]
The Getty Foundation has created a program that aims to help people from historically under-represented communities find positions at arts groups in Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Times]
Jeong Da-hye, a craftwork artist in South Korea, took home the 2022 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for creating a woven-horsehair basket. The award comes with €50,000 (about $52,200). [Yonhap]
The Washington Post spoke with fans of the National Gallery of Art’s hot online game, Artle, which displays works that the museum holds and asks users to identify their creator. “These are in the collection of the National Gallery, and the National Gallery belongs to everybody,” said Mary Gregory, an art critic and avid player. [The Washington Post]
The Kicker
ALL I SEE ARE DOLLAR SIGNS. Collector Dakis Joannou, 82, who just opened a show of beguiling new work by Jeff Koons at his storied exhibition space on the Greek island of Hydra, chatted with the Financial Times about his many years in the art-buying game. Joannou thinks that attitudes have shifted over time. “Many collectors nowadays don’t talk about art but about prices, what a great deal they got, or how proud they are of their successful bidding,” he told the paper. “I’m not interested in talking about prices, I want to talk about values.” [FT]