Tonight!  Here are the essentials:

Wednesday, June 24th, 6-9:00 pm, 28 Wooster Street, $20 at the door

Silent auction– 70 works donated by LGBTQ artists; there are some fantastic lots available at reasonable opening bids.  To name just a few that excite me: Slava Mogutin (see above), assume vivid astro focus, Jack Pierson, Thomas Dozol (Michael Stipe’s boyfriend), and John Waters.

For an unfocused charitable purpose(s); put on by the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.  Liquor; food.

Check out the details and artworks for sale by clicking here.  Our friend Mike at Modern Art Obsession went above the call of duty and interviewed the event organizer, check it out here.  Happy pride week, comrades!

You know, getting an art-focused blog off the ground is a lot more difficult than creating a celebrity gossip site.  There are a lot more people who kill time at work by looking for pictures of movie stars than, I don’t know, fine art photography of Iranian bodybuilders (see below!).  So I have a little NO SHAME in sharing with you, my loyal readers, that Brad Pitt dropped around $960,000 yesterday on the above Neo Rauch painting while perusing the offerings at Art Basel.  It’s relevant, I swear.

The Associated Press tells us “Rauch is among Europe’s top painters, drawing on traditions of Eastern Bloc realism and Western abstraction.”  He’s represented in New York by the prestigious David Zwirmer Gallery. 

(If this turns me into the next Perez Hilton, there’s no guarantee I won’t do this daily regularly…just letting you know)

For those of us with, you know, real jobs that don’t allow us to gallivant around Europe for the summer months, here are some news stories from over the weekend that show us exactly what we’re missing:

If you’ve picked up any arts publication in the last month, you know that the Venice Biennial began yesterday.  For perhaps one of the biggest pieces of fluff I’ve ever read in the New York Times, I’d suggest this ass-kissing article that follows Massimiliano Gioni around Venice for an evening of opening dinners and parties.  From the same publication’s Arts Beat blog, here are two short entries about actual pieces of art at the Biennial that are drawing attention: Saburo Murakami’s Hako and Chu Yun’s Constellation No. 3.  Getting lots of buzz is Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson.

Now let’s head Northwest to Basel, which hosts its famous art fair this year from June 10-14th.  Here’s a charming slide show of to-do’s in the city of Basel that makes a boy yearn for life beyond Manhattan.

You may have noticed I added an Amazon wish list to the sidebar of this website last week.  If you think I’m selling myself short with magazine subscriptions and photography monographs, I’d also accept an international sojourn to any art festival.  Cheers!

Veteran artist Jorge Colombo created this week’s cover of The New Yorker with the iPhone application Brushes.  The short article about the cover is fantastic– the application, which is available for $4.99 on iTunes, allows Colombo to draw in the dark with ease and work on busy New York City streets without drawing attention to himself (“most pedestrians assume he’s checking his email”).  Check out the story and a video reprising Colombo’s creation- finger stroke by finger stroke- here.

One of Colombo’s iPhone drawings, not the cover art piece (that would be too easy!), is pictured above– a few of his NYC images are available as limited edition prints on the 20×200 website at the really affordable range of $20-$200.  Gotta be quick though, the site counts down the number of prints remaining and they’re selling fast.

As if you needed another reason to love the first family, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The Obamas are sending ripples through the art world as they put the call out to museums, galleries and private collectors that they’d like to borrow modern art by African-American, Asian, and Hispanic and female artists for the White House. In a sharp departure from the 19th-century still lifes, pastorals and portraits that dominate the White House’s public rooms, they are choosing bold, abstract art works.

One of the pieces already hanging in the White House, on loan from The National Gallery of Art, is Richard Diebenkorn‘s Berkeley No. 52 (pictured above).  Just some of the other artists’ names floated in the WSJ article include Jasper Johns, Edward Ruscha, Josef Albers, Edgar Degas, Franz Kline, Beauford Delaney, and Louise Nevelson.  Apparently the couple have been art fans for a long time: one of the first dates the couple went on was to the Art Institute of Chicago and their home in Chicago reportedly contains black and white photographs and modern art.  A video accompanies the article.

Essentially unlimited access to the nation’s premier art collections?  Perhaps we all should enter politics.

It’s like Francis Bacon week on The Amateur Art Collector!  A big retrospective of his opened at the Met yesterday, but to surprisingly little buzz in New York as far as I can tell.  There’s also a related lecture tomorrow at 6pm that’s free with museum admission.

Here’s the official website and blurb:

The first major exhibition in New York in twenty years devoted to one of the most compelling painters of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective features some 130 works–sixty-five paintings and as many archival items from public and private collections from around the world–that span the entirety of the artist’s full and celebrated career. Marking the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin in 1909, the exhibition brings together the most significant works from each period of Bacon’s career, focusing on the key subjects and themes that run through his extraordinary creative output. The presentation affords the most comprehensive examination to date of Bacon’s sources and working processes, offering a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992.

I thought it’d be fun to do a post on a non-listed artist that I “discovered” at an upstate New York sale around two years ago.  The auction house focused exclusively on books and print materials, so I was surprised to come across some really attractive, modern paintings by an artist named Rosalind Goldstein Bell.  Here’s an excerpt from the biography they supplied:

R. G. Bell (1912-1990) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Rosalind attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Music. She was an accomplished pianist and mezzo soprano. She spent many years as a concert singer, and was a personal friend of the renowned, late tenor, Jan Peerce and his late wife Alice. During family summer vacations, Rosalind always had a penchant for sketching the beautiful landscapes around Wisconsin inland lakes. Rosalind and her husband, a violinist, moved to New York during the 1950s and were a part of the Long Island and Manhattan music world. Friends included the late well-known cellist Leonard Rose and his family. In her later years on Long Island, she concentrated on painting and sketching using oils, water colors, and acrylics. She studied with the American Modernist painter, Frank Kleinholz (1901-1987). In 1983, Rosalind and her husband moved to Ithaca to be near their daughter. Despite failing health, Rosalind continued to paint and had an exhibit at the White Apple Gallery on State Street. She wanted to share her art with the world, and would be thrilled to know that people are finding pleasure in her legacy.

I guessed from the personal last line of this biography that the dozen or so paintings in the auction were probably being consigned by her family and not from some middle man.  The mention of Frank Kleinholz intrigued me even though I wasn’t familiar with his work, but it seemed to imply that he was a noted artist.  Most importantly, I was drawn to the bold colors and brush strokes in all of her pieces being sold, so I went ahead and bought a few– especially since they were going for very little money (presumably because the crowd was there to buy books, not art).

A little internet research found that, in fact, R. G. Bell doesn’t have a presence on the major art sites online.  I did see a visual similarity between Frank Kleinholz’s and some of Bell’s work, which seemed to confirm the biography’s assertion that she studied with him.  Pictured above, for example, is Bell’s Web circa 1960.  I still like her work and have two of her pieces adorning my apartment.  The other four or five paintings I recently photographed and referred to an appraiser in California who is an expert in Kleinholz to see what she thinks in terms of their appeal in terms of collectibility to fans of that artist.

I guess the lesson here- if there is one- is that while, yes, we amateur collectors enjoy the comfort of knowing that our financial investment in art is ‘safe’ when the artist is ‘listed’ and has a history of sale results, I’d encourage you to not let that knowledge hinder your decision to go after the work of ‘undiscovered’ artists to which you’re attracted!

I’m completely intrigued by a new exhibit at the California Museum of Photography entitled Sight Unseen.  While the images being displayed don’t have any visual elements in common, the thematic glue is that all of the photographers are legally blind.

Take a second– a medium more or less originally developed with the intention to capture a visual experience for later personal reference or to share with others is being used approximately 150 years later as a means of artistic expression for those who aren’t able, visually, to experience the original frame being documented.  Of course, as curator Douglas McCulloh points out in this Time Magazine article (Time? I know, I was surprised too), it makes sense in that the arc of modern art bends toward concept over aestheticism.

Incredible– it sparks so many interesting questions about the nature of art…e.g. Is it appropriate to deconstruct, contextualize, and otherwise critique the images produced by blind photographers as we would seeing ones (for example, placing them into larger movements)?  What if, then, we blindfolded a well-known photographer and asked for her to capture a series based upon non-visual sensory experiences?  Would we want or expect to know as collectors that those images were taken under these alternative circumstances?

Pictured above is Honey by Pete Eckert, one of the artists included in this exhibition.  If anyone on the West Coast gets a chance to see this, please leave comments!

Our friend Paige of Art Addict blog is once again curating this year’s West Prize.  Even if you don’t have an artist friend to encourage to apply, perusing the competition’s website is a great way to find innovative, young artists.

Pictured above is the badass work “Ice Cream Truck Tank” by the 2008 grand prize winners, the Dufala Brothers.  I’ve never seen this piece in person…but it begs the question, does it play Pop Goes the Weasel?

Tonight, May 12th, is the much-anticipated sale of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York.  Usually one of the most hyped auctions of the year, everyone was waiting to see just how the global economic downturn would effect the art market at its most elite levels.  I’m thrilled to report from…a half-filled 2nd floor salesroom, since I’m not credit-worthy enough for a paddle to bid (come on, I’m 26 and don’t have a trust fund) to get me into the 7th floor where the sale took place.  Be that as it may, I’m perfectly happy watching auctioneer Tobias Meyer on a flatscreen threaten “I shall sell it then!” just a few floors away.  My room was under the watchful eyes of three staff members, including one bid caller.

There were just 48 lots (originally 49, but lot 43- an Uklanski gouache- was pulled before the auction started), a substantial decrease from the number of lots offered last year.  8 lots went unsold, including a large Rauschenberg, a small-ish (for him!) Richard Serra, and a Frank Stella with an unbeatable provenance, giving the sale a sell rate of  83%.

The most expensive lot was a Koons sculpture, Baroque Egg with Bow (Turquoise/Magenta), which sold for $4.8 million but well under its $6-8 million estimate.  Two winning lots were a 1934 Alexander Calder sculpture that sold for $3.05 million (estimate of $1-$1.5 million) and a Dan Colen oil on canvas that sold for $320,000 (estimate of $100,000-$150,000).  All selling prices are before buyer’s premium is added.

Sale total: $47,033,500 with buyer’s premium, slightly under the approximately $52 million low-end estimate that does not include buyer’s premium.  Most reporters will certainly call this a disappointing sale, but given the shift in scale of this auction compared to seasons past and the lowered estimates to encourage bidding despite the financial crisis, the major auction houses and galleries must be thankful tonight that still very wealthy people and institutions are still going after many big-name contemporary artists and pieces.

Click here for a review of the auction from The New York Times.  Final sale results from Sotheby’s can be found by clicking here.