ART//Art Gamine Holiday Gift Guide
Hello Holidays! Are you stumped as to what to buy that chic, clever gamine in your life for the holidays? Maybe you are the gamine and you want to add a little bit of cleverness and chicness to your gifts. Well below are our picks for art gamines/art gamine gifters and they are all reasonably priced so enjoy!
These framed sillouettes by Mike Miller will add character to any decor and look much more expensive than 79 bucks. Also, hilariously, they are from West Elm, yes, West Elm like the furniture store, so you can order online or inquire at any of their stores.
via westelm.com
Along the lines of cuts, the original master of the genre Matisse always makes a good gift. Just in case you can’t afford the real thing (well, there is also this at the MoMA design store) you can buy the book from our beloved publisher Taschen. This two volume set, Drawing with Scissors is beautiful with double-page fold outs and it is printed on paper similar to the original 1940s version, so the facsimile volume allows readers to experience Jazz in its original, unbound form. All that Matisse for a cool $200.
via taschen.com
If you are looking for something more contemporary, sign up for Exhibition A, the newest website to offer limited-time open editioned prints by hot contemporart masters. Just do the quick and free sign up proccess and gain access to affordable art pieces like the one below by Richard Phillips, $25o. This sale opens December, 13.
via exhibitiona.com
So were are on a bit of a cut-out obsession with this gift list, but these were too pretty to pass up. These maps by Famille Summerbelle of London, New York and Paris are beautiful, fun gifts for anyone in your life at only $60. You can also make lovely personalized family trees.
via famillesummerbelle.com
Other great gifts ideas include museum memberships, anything from the MoMA design store, or a gift certificate to art classes like this one at Choplet in Williamsburg.
Happy shopping!!
ART// What we learned about Art Basel Miami Beach without even being there
So we were in NYC this week, not Miami–but below is a rundown of what we learned about the fair from here…and it’s looking good!
From The New York Times:
“The art market is back!” was the chorus this week among most of the major dealers at the fair, even though some combination of canceled flights and the new economic reality kept the number of attendees down from prefinancial crisis years. Many dealers had come feeling cautiously optimistic after November’s successful auctions, but they were thrilled to see the new buoyancy playing out in the fair, and, in many cases, were eager to boast about it.
via nytimes.com
Numbers were high according to ARTINFO.com
Hunger for big ticket items at Art Basel Miami Beach continues at a steady tick after the whopping sale on Tuesday of the Richard Diebenkorn painting, “Man Drawing” from 1956, which sold for five million dollars from Acquavella Gallery.
via artinfo.com
Art as Luxury Good? The Art Newspaper asks the hard questions:
So how did art galleries become such big business? For those who believe that art belongs in the luxury goods market, the shift towards big-brand commercialism has been inevitable for some time. Look at the events around South Beach this week: LVMH, Fendi, Absolut and Cartier are all firms who know how to generate success from global marketing. This trend suits buying habits in some of the newer geographic pockets of wealth, many of which are temples to international brands.
via theartnewspaper.com
And of course THE PARTIES!
New York Magazine’s The Cut offers up a slideshow of the all the styles.
via nymag.com
via nymag.com
Art & Life & Style// Re-Pin at Pinterest
There is a buzz around this new website pinterest.com. Several of our friends have mentioned it to us in the last couple of days, so we had to check it out. It is a very pretty site that allows you to share or “pin” interesting/beautiful/notable things to a board for others to discover. You have to sign up and there is a apparently a wait list (that we are currently on) but from what we can see from our non-exclusive view this totally fun and exciting. Miraculously, everything has the same kind of chic, effortlessly cool, real simple kind of feeling. It’s like that collage board you made in High School only with taste. According to the Pinterest team, “Pinterest is a social catalog service. Think of it as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow” collections created by people with great taste.” Check it all out here: www.pinterest.com.
Check out some pins we liked below, on the site you can “re-pin” and read peoples comments.
LIFE//Yummy Eats from BGSK
Phoebe of Big Girls, Small Kitchen brought these delicious Mexican Chicken Meatballs to a certain someones birthday and we ate them straight out of the fridge for about a week afterwards! If you’re looking for a great take on the traditional ball, make sure to check out the recipe here.
ART//Auction Week: Warhol Wins Again at Sotheby’s
Last night was the Sotheby’s auction and good ol’ Andy pulled through again, this time with a price tag of $35.3 million for Coca Cola [4] [Large Coca Cola]. In all, the sale tallied $222.4 million, above its high estimate.
Any Warhol, Coca Cola [4
Urs Fischer, Untitled (Candle), 2001 via sothebys.com
A Francis Bacon piece, Figure in Movement also sold above its high estimate of $10 million for $14 million. According to Carol Vogel of The New York Times, it was given “as a present from Bacon to his doctor, Paul Brass, who had decided it was time to sell and was watching the sale from a skybox.”
Francis Bacon, Figure in Movement, 1985 via sothebys.com
Click here for all of the results…only 5 lots didn’t sell.
ART//Auction Week: Warhol helps Phillips bring in $137 million
Hello auction week! Yesterday kicked off the major Contemporary & Postwar auctions in NYC. Phillips de Pury went first with its new shiny space on the corner of 57th and Park. There were huge sales totaling $137 million, a record for the auction house. The lot that everyone is buzzing about though is Warhol, “Men in Her Life” which sold for an astonishing $63 million at the Carte Blanche sale (the second highest price ever paid for a Warhol) . Check out the stats below.
Andy Warhol "Men in her Life," 1962, silkscreen and pencil on primed canvas via artvalue.com
Carte Blanche and Contemporary Art Part I Top lots:
Lot 15 Andy Warhol, Men in Her Life $63,362,500
Lot 10 Takashi Murakami, Miss ko2, $6,802,500
Lot 8 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait, $4,562,500
Lot 4 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient), $4,562,500
Lot 115 Ed Ruscha, Sex at Noon Taxes, $4,338,500
Lot 32 Thomas Schütte, Grosse Geist No. 16, $4,114,500
Lot 116 Roy Lichtenstein, Two Figures, Indian, $3,890,500
Lot 20 Christopher Wool, Untitled (W 24), $3,666,500
Lot 23 Robert Ryman, NO TITLE REQUIRED, $3,442,500
Lot 6 Maurizio Cattelan, Charlie, $2,994,500
Artist world records:
Carte Blanche
Lot 4 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient), $4,562,500
Lot 14 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #153, $2,770,500
Lot 25 Daniel Buren, Peinture email sur toile de cotton, $542,500
Lot 26 Lee Lorano, No Title, $602,500
Lot 27 Robert Morris, Untitled, $1,258,500
Lot 29 Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, $2,658,500
Lot 32 Thomas Schütte, Grosse Geist No. 16, $4,114,500
Contemporary Art Part I
Lot 124 Wade Guyton, Untitled, $302,500
Lot 125 Martin Creed, Work no. 202: Half the air in a given space, $98,500
STYLE//Home Decor: Nama Rococo Wallpaper Studio
I’ve been eyeing Nama Rococo wallpaper for some time now. I find that every time I see a great wallpaper on one of my regular design blog reads, it’s always Nama!
Each piece is either hand painted or hand screened, so it doesn’t come with a small price tag if you’re looking to cover entire walls. But for those of you like me and have a smaller decorating budget, most designs are available by the single sheet. They’re so detailed and amazing that they look great framed and make a pretty affordable piece of artwork! Visit or purchase their collection here.
STYLE//Fall Wrap Up: Forget Me Not
These days it’s rare for me to ever leave the house without a scarf. Now that the weather is officially crisp, I’m really enjoying all the layering and accessorizing I was missing all Summer long!
On that note, I’m officially obsessed with these Forget Me Not scarves from Paris. They may not be super warm but the prints are too gorgeous to pass up on. You can check out the entire collection (and their really equally pretty website) here. Or buy them stateside at your local Barneys. I almost want to frame these little gems to hang in my apartment…
ART & STYLE//Move! at P.S. 1…We Were There!
So we gave the newsflash about Move! at P.S. 1 and now we can report back.
It was amazing! The weekend only show was an interactive spectacular!
We’ll start with the Cheryl/American Apparel team up. It was a loud dance party filled with glitter, makeup and nude American Apparel suits. Anyone could walk in, change into an AA skin-colored jumpsuit, and get a crazy (and we mean psycho) makeover and then have their own photo shoot. Genius!
Next, we loved the Cynthia Rowley/Olaf Breuning piece, “Carrie” in which models put on lovely denim frocks only to enter the next room to be doused in paint a la the prom scene in the titular 70′s horor classic. We even saw Mr. Rowley there. We asked if the pieces will be for sale and they said they are still figuring it out..stay tuned.
The dresses before...
...and after
The Rodarte/Brody Condon performance was a bit odd. We didn’t really know what to make of it, since we are such huge fans of their fashion line we’ll assume we were just missing something. What did you think?
The Rodarte piece
Our favorite experience was the Mark Jacobs/Rob Pruitt match up. You walk in with no idea what to expect only to be shoved on the runway by a very Kelly Cutrone-equse model wrangler all in black. You strut your stuff to flashing lights and then enter the next room to see your catwalk image super imposed on the runway scene featuring such sitters as Madonna. It was hilarious and brilliant!
The runway beckons
We can’t forget another great performance…and one of the best wall texts we have ever seen which read: David Blaine, Live. Mr. Blaine performs card tricks infront of a very clever video piece featuring the magician under water with a shark, smoking a cigar, etc. After all, he is a performance artist.
The whole experience was like any other at any museum. It felt like you were at a party and there was no barrier between the viewer and the art. Unlike the Marina Abramovic show at MoMA where performance art was on display, these preformances were accessible and participatory.
It was a great party…too bad it only lasted one weekend.
STYLE//The Perfect Fall Shoe?
Speaking of my love of neutrals, I saw these Tapeet booties today on Refinery 29 and couldn’t decide if I loved or hated them. Now I’m leaning towards love/want/need. What do you think?
Buy them here.
