A.A.C. fave Daniel Traub currently has a solo exhibition (three large-format images) at the Art Institute of Philadelphia’s 1622 Chestnut Street Gallery through October 16th.   An artist’s reception is scheduled from 4:30-7:30 pm on Thursday, September 17th– no RSVP required.

Two BILLION dollars in cash, seven (!) life insurance policies, and a first-rate art collection is (possibly) being left by Europe’s wealthiest woman, Madame Liliane Bettencourt, to the photographer and socialite Francoise-Marie Banier.  A snubbed daughter!  French lawyers questioning Banier’s “talent” as an artist!  Manipulation of the elderly!?

Read about the life you were meant to live, from the Style section of the New York Times.

Seriously exciting stuff!  The National Geographic Society is opening up its archives for the first time in a must-see exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York.  Check out the story, from the New York Times, here and an incredible accompanying slideshow here.  No word yet on the price point of the images.

Most art galleries in NYC are fickle mistresses.  It’s pretty innovative, then, that some of the best photography galleries in the city are collaborating to offer “collectors the unique opportunity of starting a relationship with five different artists and galleries at the same time.”  The initiative, dubbed Project 5, will host monthly salons, initiate a new series of portfolio reviews for emerging artists, and issue a limited-edition portfolio of five prints– a photograph by an artist represented by each of the five participating galleries.

Project 5 partnering galleries include hometown favorite Daniel Cooney Fine Art, ClampArt (I’ve never purchased from here before but love so many of the artists this gallery represents: Jill Greenberg, whose new Zonkey is pictured above and is included in the first portfolio from this collaboration, Brian Finke, and Stephen Wilkes, to name a few), Foley Gallery, Amador Gallery, and Sasha Wolf Gallery.

To review, here are some highlights from the press release:

All images will be unique to the portfolio—made specifically by the participating artists for this project. The artists included are: Olaf Otto Becker from Amador, Jill Greenberg from ClampArt, Stuart O’Sullivan from Daniel Cooney, Thomas Allen from Foley Gallery and Guido Castagnoli from Sasha Wolf Gallery.

The portfolios will be released in an edition of 30, priced with new collectors in mind at $2500. Each print will be signed and numbered by the artist and the portfolio will be enclosed in a custom made clothbound case. The portfolio offers collectors the unique opportunity of starting a relationship with five different artists and galleries at the same time.

Additionally, Project 5 is introducing a series of Portfolio Reviews for artists who feel they would benefit from the valuable input of these gallerists’ expertise. The first Portfolio review will be Sunday, September 20th. Project 5 asks that artists send ten jpgs to projectfivecontact@gmail.com for consideration. Artists can contact any of the participating galleries for more information.

Another exciting collaboration will be a monthly series of Artist’s Salons that will alternate between Project 5’s galleries. The first Salon will be held at Daniel Cooney Fine Art on Saturday, September 26^th at 3:00 p.m. and will feature four emerging artists presenting their latest bodies of work for a half hour each. Participating artists are Timothy Briner, Yola Monakhov, Jessica Dimmock, and Cara Phillips.

Please contact any of the Project 5 galleries for more information.

Daniel Cooney Fine Art:  dan@danielcooneyfineart.com; Foley Gallery:  michael@foleygallery.com; Sasha Wolf Gallery: info@sashawolf.com; ClampArt: brian@clampart.com; Amador Gallery: info@amadorgallery.com

Okay, perhaps two street art posts in a row has you craving one of my drier art market posts!  It’s your lucky day.  This AP article picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle outlines how the current economic downturn is negatively affecting sales at many online auction sites.

I’ve observed that high end art doesn’t sell well online.  Many of the websites that cater to the middle or lower-end art markets have serious flaws: an overabundance of crap (Ebay), high buyer’s premium and impersonal service (igavel)…I could go on.  I think I’ll put together a pro/con analysis as a resource for AAC readers sometime in the future.  Without a doubt, most of the online auction sites make the experience of looking at art feel highly transactional and unthoughtful.  It’s interesting that none allow for dialogue amongst viewers and potential bidders.

But, all that being said, I’ve bought pieces online after simply falling in love with an artwork that’s simply unavailable anywhere else or if I find a piece I like that’s selling substantially under its current market price.  If you’re confident that a piece is legitimate (which not all sites guarantee), good deals can be found if you have the patience for it all.

Writing this little post made me curious; I haven’t searched for my favorite artists on ebay in a long time.  Surprisingly enough, after about ten minutes and maybe a dozen artist searches, I found a seemingly-real silver gelatin print by Larry Clark from his Tulsa series being sold by a seller in Tokyo for $2,000 (pictured above; click on the picture to go to the ebay page).  What can I say, heroin chic never went out of style in my book!  The print has some condition issues and doesn’t mention anything about edition size– and this is where having a gallerist’s insight is helpful.  I can check out past auction results on findartinfo.com, and I’m pretty sure I recall an image from the same series in an edition of 15 selling at Swann Auction Galleries for around $7,000 last month, but all this illustrates that if you’re not an expert in the market of that artist it’s a tough call.

For those of you in search of ideas for a cultural outing this weekend, might I recommend “Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas,” an arts festival showing the work of more than 100 Muslim artists (visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and dancers) from 23 countries.  The festival, co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for Dialogues, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Asia Society, which runs through this Sunday, June 14th, was created to build a “cultural bridge of understanding.”

They really have a bit of everything on display: Arabic cinema, Urdu drama, Indonesian dance, good ‘ole NYC beatboxing, and the list goes on and on.  Lots of different talents from artists based around the world who don’t share much of anything but their faith.

One visual artist I discovered from the festival’s website is Iranian photographer Seifollah Samadian, whose 2007 work Look at Us from the Days of Their Lives is pictured above.  Talk about breaking Western stereotypes–  why hello, boys!

Check out the official website here.

The last man-led mission to the moon was in 1972.  It’s no wonder, then, that the limited amount of lunar dust brought back to Earth by the six Apollo missions is kept under tight restrictions by the United States government and experimented on by very few scientists.

A really neat story out of The Maui News tells of two NASA-contracted scientists working out of Lehigh University, Carol and Christopher Kiely, who were finding that their research on solar system evolution was being hindered due to the limited technology available for producing highly magnified pictures of the lunar dust they had been loaned.  Surprisingly, until now up-close (300 to 600x) lunar dust images were only in the form of two-dimensional black and white pictures.  Long story short, a serendipitous experience in a book shop led the Kiely’s to discover Dr. Gary Greenberg, the inventor of a high-definition, three-dimensional light microscope, and the Kiely’s traveled to Hawaii to work with him on taking detailed photographs of the samples to further their research.  Okay, that was an inexcusably short version of the story without much drama…do check out the full article if you have time!

Luckily, some of the beautiful images created out of this collaboration will be available as art prints on Dr. Greenberg’s website.

As you might guess from this post and from last month’s post on CT scanner art, I think the joining of science and art is such a cool frontier in fine art production and such an interesting theme for collectors– the field continues to expand as technological innovation (and creative will) advances.

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!

I’ve read quite a few reviews of the new MoMA exhibit “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West,” but I would recommend the slide-show essay by Sarah Boxer at Slate. 

Sarah is really thoughtful about the perceptions the larger public has of certain geographic regions because of the images to which it has been exposed.  In some greater sense, then, photographers- particularly before the advent of mass media- created an environmental reality from their artistic expression (shot framing, which images to promote, etc.); viewers had little additional information on which to assess the accuracy or fairness of what they were seeing.

Speaking of framing, I chose to share Darius Kinsey’s fantastic image above as a representation of the mostly black-and-white photo exhibit.  Scroll over the picture for details; it’s in the MoMA‘s permanent collection. 

This exhibit runs through June 8th.    

Thanks to my dear friend Meghan for the tip!

There’s a neat-looking exhibition coming up in two weeks at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery featuring “photographic renegade” John Wood.

From the gallery: John Wood (born 1922) has consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliche verre, solarization, and offset lithography.  Transgressing the boundaries of “pure photography,” his eclectic practice has helped usher in alternative approaches to the medium.  With their adroit manipulations of picture and text, his diaristic, multi-media compositions anticipate today’s digital imagery.  On the Edge of Clear Meaning is Wood’s first museum retrospective, spanning his career from the early 1960s to the present.

More on the exhibition, plus dates and times of an opening reception and curator talk can be found on the gallery’s website, by clicking here.