Yesterday Flickr turned six years old. With billions of photos, tens of thousands of groups, and a vast online community, it’s a far cry from its initial days as a multi-player gaming site. Of particular note: The Commons, Flickr’s 2-year-old collaboration with famed public photography archives (The Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, and the Bibliotheque de Toulouse, to mention a few), easily made accessible with the power of technology.
In honor of the big celebration, we’ve sorted through our favorite archival cake photos — some of which date all the way back to the days of beehives and top hats. More after the jump.
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Last night at the Sotheby’s London evening sale, a mystery telephone buyer placed the winning bid for Alberto Giacometti’s 1961 Walking Man I for a record-setting $104.3 million. That’s a whole $200K higher than the previous record holder, Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe, which sold at the Sotheby’s New York branch in 2004.* What’s even wilder about a bronze sculpture with Existentialist themes setting the new benchmark for absurdly priced artwork is that the estimate on the piece was only (ha) $19.2 million to $28.8 million.
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Gallery exhibitions may be sexier, and museum patrons may be wealthier, but the government-backed National Endowment for the Arts is still alive and begging for your arts attention. The 2011 budget for the NEA was just proposed by President Obama at $161.3 million for the fiscal year, the same goal he set for 2010, which was ultimately increased by Congress to $167.5 million. (Some perspective: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slotted for $470 million, international disaster assistance for $860 million, and proposed military construction will net a staggering $18.18 billion.) What else is new?
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“Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed.” — President Rene Preval of Haiti
As Preval noted, Haiti’s rebuilding efforts in the wake of January’s 7.0 earthquake won’t be complete without a manifold approach, as the entire infrastructure of the nation and its capital, Port-au-Prince, has crumbled under thousands of tons of rubble. The shelter issue is pressing, however: 3,000 people sleeping on a school soccer field, machete fights over tents, an estimated 1 million people displaced. So how are architects responding to an immediate humanitarian crisis? They are problem solvers, after all.
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Dutch designer Bob Noorda, who, with Massimo Vignelli, designed the official look of New York’s subway system, died earlier this month at the age of 82. If you’re obsessed with Helvetica, or suffering from fatigue thereof, you can probably blame Noorda, who modernized the MTA with an iconic visual language using the sans-serif font. Not only does his work direct the traffic flow of around 5.2 million subway riders daily, but he’s also been collected by MoMA and credited with injecting Modernist thinking into the corporate world as an “early proponent of unified branding.” More words and pictures on Noorda, after the jump.
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And the verdict is in. After much tongue wagging via the art press this weekend (including some Twitter chatter by the likes of artist/instigator William Powhida and Saltz-archrival Tyler Green), MOCA Los Angeles has confirmed the selection of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch as the museum’s new director. Way to start 2010 with a boom, LA — never before has a major US museum hired a leader from the commercial side of the market. One has to wonder: Can Deitch man up for such a significant role at a nonprofit? And what will become of his baby, Deitch Projects? (UPDATE: definitely closing shop.) After the jump we take a walk down memory lane.
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With equal parts curiosity, shame, and schadenfreude, we’ve been poring over the Wall Street Journal‘s list of best and worst jobs in 2010. The rankings — based on “environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress” — are fairly straightforward, with a few seeming outliers thrown in for good measure. (Philosophers clock in at the 11th best career choice; whoulda thunk?) Peep all 200 professions on the full list, and find out whether you’re suffering in one of the 20 worst after the jump.
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Though the New York Post can’t spell “scuplture,” the paper sure can hype an artist. See: Justin Rocket Silverman’s profile of nudes-on-a-train photographer Zack Hyman; compare to this week’s report on tape sculpture artist Sam Bassett, who spent 20 hours in jail after an aborted attempt at decorating the Sotheby’s building.
Last week in anticipation of Sotheby’s contemporary auction, Bassett spent five minutes perched on a ledge on the building’s facade, plotting how to install one of his streetscape tape installations. Womp-womp, that didn’t work, but Bassett caught the attention of Sotheby’s muscle, who promptly reported him to the police. Nothing like a little suffering for art’s sake! Still, it would have been cool — just check out some of Bassett’s other tape sculptures after the jump.
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Things you may already know about New York art wunderkind Ryan McGinness: he runs with the Deitch crew, his saturated paintings habitually contain signs and logos, he once posed for J. Crew, and he’s not Ryan McGinley. Thing you may not know: McGinness is going renegade and taking back the “middleman” from auction houses by hosting an artist-direct auction tonight, comprising 16 lots by the likes of Eric Parker, Eve Sussman, and Spencer Tunick. Maybe he was spurred to action after news of the recent Warhol sale? He did intern at the Warhol Museum throughout college…
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Proving yet again that Andy Warhol is the most famous American artist, living or dead, his silkscreen “200 One Dollar Bills” sold yesterday at Sotheby’s for a whopping $43.8 million. Theoretically, each of those 200 dollar bills is now worth a cool $21.9K. What the collector Pauline Karpidas paid for the artwork — more than four times its estimated selling price — is a symbolic effort to own a piece of Warhol fame pie, not just some arguably second-rate canvas. Plus when you cross your eyes, a 3-D image of Michael Jackson pops out. We kid.
