Google allows you to visit El Prado in 3D

The Web giant has made a virtual museum on its Google Earth software available. Fourteen masterpieces of the famous Madrid Museum can be seen in high definition from any computer.

Admire the details of Three Graces by Rubens, the reflection of the painter in the mirror of Las Meninas by Velasquez or the white light of the convicted Fusillades of Goya, all in front of your screen computer, the latest magic tool by Google.

A principle not new at all, to the contrary to what Google says in their press release. The three dimensions museums that can travel in three dimensions exist since the first CD Roms. But the search engine has made a major innovation: the use of mapping software Google Earth to offer the viewer a selection of works exhibited in the museum. This is absolutely brilliant ! Thanks Google !

London Art Fair 2009

Is the art market crashing or is it going to crash a year and a half after the "financial crisis" ?

London Art Fair, the largest Modern British and contemporary art showcase in the UK, is apparently alright and only the smallest galleries were today suffering from the economic downturn. With a reputation both for quality and accessibility, the Fair brings together over a hundred leading British galleries, a selection of international projects and a showcase of contemporary photography at Islington’s Business Design Centre, Islington, which means that you can buy artworks from £20 to £1million pounds.

This year, the Art Projects section of the Fair welcomes a selection of galleries from New York, Madrid, Beijing, Frankfurt, Dublin, Belfast and London. Art Projects is a platform for galleries to bring stimulating and experimental contemporary practice to the Fair.

Photo50, successfully launched at the Fair in 2007, returns with a curated display of 50 photographs drawn from the international photographic scene. Major artists are positioned alongside rising stars and all the work on display will again be for sale.

Also amongst Art Projects, HF Contemporary Art will show important pieces by the seminal "Viennese Actionist" Hermann Nitsch, I-MYU Projects will profile emerging art from Korea, Flowers will show Max Dean's robotic collapsing chair.

A recession-busting £20 Video Booth offers high-quality, editioned video art works for only £20. The aim is to introduce a new audience to video art and to profile artists early in their careers. Each edition will be signed and sold in a specially made case.

Husband and wife team Rob and Nick Carter work together to create what they describe as ‘images without cameras and paintings without brushes’. Their site-specific billboard installation outside the Fair consists of 42 neon words on a white aluminium board which explores the 'stroop' effect - the difficulty people have in reacting to words illustrated in a colour specifically different to that which it spells. Individual words are for sale at the Fine Art Society's booth in the Fair. Rob and Nick's work is collected by Elton John, David and Victoria Beckham, Simon Fuller, Philip Treacy and Mathew Williamson.

The preview evening party welcomed Gavin Turk, Adam Dant and rumoured was Sophie Dahl...

To learn more: http://www.londonartfair.co.uk/

Madonna strikes a pose for Louis Vuitton

From the Times Online

January 3, 2009

"This was really different," explains Antoine Arnault, communications director of Louis Vuitton, when asked how Madonna came to front the company's new spring/summer campaign. "Usually, these things take much, much longer," he explains; a lengthy process of identifying the right person to embody the fashion and luxury-goods brand, the right photographer, the right look for the campaign, plus, of course, all the deal-making a project like this involves. This time, however, pretty much everything was agreed inside a week.

"On the Monday," Arnault recalls, "we had a meeting, and Marc Jacobs suggested Madonna. I thought, yes, great idea, but it will never happen. Then, in the meeting, Marc sent her a text saying, ‘Love, would you like to be the new Louis Vuitton woman?' Five minutes later, she'd replied. He showed me his phone, and she'd said, ‘Yes, I'd love to do it.'" What could be simpler ?

Clearly, when a big brand like Louis Vuitton chooses a new face for its campaign, it's not just a matter of affectionate text messages between Marc Jacobs and Madonna. Men like Louis Vuitton's CEO, Yves Carcelle, have to agree that it is a good idea, not a whim, as well as, of course, Carcelle's boss and Antoine Arnault's father, Bernard Arnault, head of the LVMH luxury-goods empire.

But as Antoine Arnault sees it, "Marc knows the brand probably better than anyone now," having been artistic director for a decade, during which time Louis Vuitton has expanded massively. Jacobs had seen Madonna in concert the week before, but it wasn't some "let's be crazy" decision, Arnault explains, citing how Jacobs had previously picked J-Lo as the face of Louis Vuitton in 2003. "That wasn't an obvious choice, perhaps, but it instantly put us on the top in the US in one campaign.



"Madonna is glamorous," Arnault continues. "She has a global image. She's the ultimate performer and businesswoman, and not someone who is just a famous singer. She has travelled; she has tried to change things." And if her personal life isn't perfect right now, "Well, that only makes her more human." Once the proposal had been made, and provisionally accepted, in both cases by text, "Then we had to agree on a figure, a concept, a photographer." Yet the whole process seems to have been plain sailing – an object lesson, if you like, in the degree of certainty that people at the top of the fashion industry tend to display about their creative choices.

The figure? Well, just how much Madonna is being paid for what is, in a sense, both one day's work and the product of many years at the top of her game is a moot point. Some have claimed it's $10 million (£6.6 million). But Arnault is careful to puncture that, saying, "The figure is really, really lower than that. In times like these, it would be totally irresponsible to pay anyone $10 million."



The concept? Madonna has been photographed in a nostalgic, Parisian bistro setting, perhaps at that "waiters whistling as the last bar closes" moment in the early hours. "Only it's in LA," Arnault quips, not Paris - "One of those French bistros in California where you really think you're in France" - and it's daytime and there are hundreds of paparazzi outside. Madonna smoulders quietly, all fishnets and high kicks, with a glamour that gives more than a nod to Dietrich, long an acknowledged influence. She's wearing Marc Jacobs' ready-to-wear clothes for Louis Vuitton, styled by Marie-Amélie Sauvé, with, of course, due prominence given to some lovely bags and shoes, those accessories that have long been such steady earners for the brand.

But there is a certain quietness to the images, a kind of gentleness, perhaps, which might also (along with that willingly professed prudence over Madonna's fee) be a sign of the extraordinary times we live in. Certainly, when I put it to Arnault that the crunch might be changing the aesthetic and that, in particular, a certain kind of flash advertising message now looks passé, even wrong somehow, he doesn't exactly demur. "Other people can try to rationalise every campaign, but there is certainly a feeling that emerges from designers, photographers, creatives of all kinds, which is maybe something they don't talk about, but which they can feel."

The photographer in question here is Steven Meisel, rather than Mert and Marcus, who have shot all of Louis Vuitton's campaigns since 2002, including those amazingly effective shots of J-Lo. "We were very happy with them," Arnault insists, but all good things come to an end – and, after all, it was Meisel who photographed the wilder, younger, more in-your-face Madonna who leapt off the pages of Sex, the book which caused such a storm back in 1992. So this campaign can be seen as something of a reunion, Meisel additionally having photographed Madonna for Vanity Fair late last year. Jacobs and Meisel are old friends, too, Arnault explains, "from the crazy years of the Eighties".



And once Antoine Arnault had assembled his dream team? "I think the three of them were in touch with each other on the phone almost every day," he says of the run-up to the shoot, “talking about ideas, sharing references, then talking about individual shots." On the big day itself, "About 50 people were on the set, which sounds like a lot, but it's all in the preparation, in the make-up and the set and so on. Once that was in place, Madonna would come out, get into position, and the shots went amazingly quickly, sometimes in about 15 minutes. It was a delight."

Tom Ford

Pure style: MTV Vogue Madonna

Greta Garbo, and Monroe
Deitrich and DiMaggio
Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean
On the cover of a magazine

Grace Kelly; Harlow, Jean
Picture of a beauty queen
Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire
Ginger Rodgers, dance on air

They had style, they had grace
Rita Hayworth gave good face
Lauren, Katherine, Lana too
Bette Davis, we love you

Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were in the mood
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a pose, there's nothing to it

ArtInfo.com's 2008 in Review: Stories of the Year

The art world is rarely at a loss for great stories, but 2008 may have provided even more than usual. Below, what we considered to be the top 5 (actually, 6) stories in an exciting and turbulent year.

1. Hirst’s First (and Last?)Although he is not without his competitors, by 2008 perennial art world prankster Damien Hirst had emerged as the leading heir to Warhol, heading up a movement that views art less as solitary pursuit than corporate venture. This fall Hirst pulled off his latest, perhaps most audacious stunt: a straight-from-the-studio auction of primary market material (all from 2008) — and this shortly after announcing that he would be discontinuing his spin and butterfly series, instantly increasing their value. Well, everything in that sale turned out to be valuable. The three-session auction earned £111,576,800 ($200,953,342), a number that easily eclipsed the combined pre-sale high estimate of £98 million. Not bad for a year’s work. Then a funny thing happened. The event that threatened to upend the way business is done in the art world (dealers, who needs dealers?) was superseded by bigger events, namely a global financial crisis that made multimillion-dollar animal carcasses in formaldehyde look — what’s the word, garish? unnecessary? silly? overpriced? — and with a single stroke Hirst’s bold auction was transformed from avant-garde to rearguard, a quaint sort of swan song, the let-them-eat-cake moment of what will someday be known as the great art market boom of the early 20th century.

2. An Art World BailoutOn November 19, just after the New York contemporary auctions tanked and it seemed like art-world news couldn’t get much more depressing, the Los Angeles Times reported that the city’s revered Museum of Contemporary Art was in deep financial crisis and possibly looking to merge with another institution. The first donor to speak out after the initial shock wore off was mega-collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, who penned an op-ed piece in the Times offering to bail out MOCA to the tune of $30 million. The museum’s board of trustees remained relatively quiet in the face of this mega-proposal, until some three weeks later, when, on the day before they were set to meet, the head of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan, stepped out of the shadows and put forth a different proposal: a merger between the two institutions.

After much deliberating, MOCA’s board accepted Broad’s offer, which involves a matching grant system for half of the money and the donation of the other half in $3 million installments over five years. But more important than the crisis’s resolution is what it revealed about MOCA, namely that the trouble had been mounting long before the economy went south: Director Jeremy Strick had been overspending and dipping into the museum’s reserves for nine years, and past trustees had gone so far as to leave in protest of his excessive habits.

Now Strick has resigned, and the museum has brought in its first ever CEO, UCLA chancellor emeritus Charles Young; the hope is that under new leadership, the museum will get itself back on track. But the experience has been a scary one for MOCA, as well as the entire art community, and hammers home the all-too important reminder that a museum’s health hinges on much more than just its exhibitions and reputation. As the country’s arts institutions collectively brace for a recession predicted to be the biggest in more than half a century, we can only say, hopefully, lesson learned.

3. Art World Goes for the GoldThe art world dips its toe in many a water in the name of inspiration, collaboration, and, well, business, venturing into the worlds of fashion, say, (see Chanel’s [one-time] roaming art pod) or politics (Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama portrait). But one area art has generally left untouched is sports. That is, until 2008, when the largest sports happening on earth just so happened to be taking place in what is (or was, anyway) also one of the art world’s most exploding markets — an opportunity that was not lost on that event’s hosts.For this year’s summer Olympics in Beijing we saw the Chinese government pouring billions of yuan into putting its best cultural foot forward in hundreds of new or updated museums and galleries. Chinese artists Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo Qiang also got in on the spectacle, and Western dealers like Pace and James Cohan hoped to stake their claims in a new frontier. But what will come of all those shiny new spaces now that the athletes have returned home?

4. A Tale of Two TransitionsWhen the Metropolitan Museum of Art named little-known Thomas P. Campbell as the successor to outgoing director Philippe de Montebello, the art world let out a collective gasp: Who? The choice of an obscure, bookish tapestries scholar to lead America’s, and perhaps the world’s, leading arts institution came as a shock in the era of… well, Thomas Krens, the controversial, high profile, celebrity-courting Guggenheim director who announced in Februrary that he was stepping down from his post. With his eye toward blockbuster exhibitions and global expansion, and his eccentric taste (motorcycles, anyone?), Krens practically reinvented the role of museum director — from gentleman scholar to swashbuckling, globetrotting, and, according to some, irresponsible rainmaker/entrepreneur. But as the stately de Montebello began to lobby on his successor’s behalf, the logic of the choice came into focus: Campbell was a vote for continuity, in favor of de Montebello’s steady stewardship and against the Krens CEO model. Meanwhile, the Krens resignation marked the end of a drawn-out power struggle between grandiose ambition and the limits of the possible — a battle whose many casualties have included former board chairman Peter B. Lewis, former Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison, and numerous half-baked projects across the globe. With the appointment as Krens’s successor of Richard Armstrong, a former curator in the Campbell model, the Guggenheim seemed to indicate that it would be moving in a more subdued direction. And yet Krens soldiers on — in pursuit of his most quixotic project to date: a sprawling arts complex on a remote desert island.

5. U.K. Tries to Keep Its Titians (Or, What’s Good for Main Street)While Hirst racked up more than £111 million in a couple of days this fall, the English and Scottish national museums, have spent months trying to raise the £50 million it would take to keep a prized Titian painting, Diana and Actaeon, from going on the open market. If they succeed, the work’s longtime owner, the Duke of Sutherland, who decided this summer to take advantage of the booming market, will throw in the chance to raise £50 million all over again, for the sister work Diana and Callisto. Which is actually a deal: The pair are estimated to be worth more than £300 million together. Dozens of British artists have spoken out in support of the government effort, including Lucian Freud, whose own work sells for almost that kind of money, and Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall even stripped in support of the campaign, but at last check the Brits were still scrambling (although the original December 31 deadline has now been pushed to January). The story recalls Austria’s similar struggle, in 2006, to keep Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The country was not successful, and the work is now in the private collection of American cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder, who paid the then market rate of $135 million.
And an honorable mention goes to... It's Not Easy Being GreenAny story involving an Italian politician on a hunger strike, a sculpture of a crucified frog, and the Pope deserves at least an honorable mention. When Italian official Franz Pahl launched a hunger strike in July over a piece by Martin Kippenberger, Zuerst die Füße (Feet First) (1990), which depicts a crucified frog holding a mug of beer in one hand and an egg in the other, he took indignation over a controversial artwork to a new level. Though it’s hard to see what all the fuss was really about — the artist said the piece depicts his internal struggle at the time that he made it, and it is, after all, just a frog — the story ended in hospitalization for Pahl, an erroneously reported intervention by the Pope, and the eventual firing of Corinne Diserens from her post as director of the state-funded Museion Museum of Contemporary Art, where the work was displayed. Local officials promised that Diserens’s dismissal was merely the result of “the difficult financial situation” and had nothing to do with her refusal to take down the foggy-eyed amphibian, but her supporters are not entirely convinced.David Grosz, Jillian Steinhauer, and Kris Wilton contributed to this article.

To learn more: http://www.artinfo.com/

Ron Arad at the Pompidou Centre in Paris

For the first time in France, the Centre Pompidou dedicates a retrospective exhibition to the British industrial designer and architect Ron Arad. Today his works are everywhere, so it was a natural decision by the Centre Pompidou which has been a pioneering space for the presentation of the most outstanding contemporary designers, with exhibitions dedicated to Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, Charlotte Perriand in the past, to have this exhibition.

Born in Tel Aviv and trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Art, followed by the Architectural Association School in London, Ron Arad settled in London in 1973, where he has since produced a very varied range of creative objects based on sinusoidal, elliptical and oval forms, as unique pieces, limited series and mass-produced objects.

The name of Ron Arad immediately conjures up pieces such as the Bookworm bookcase (1993) and the Tom Vac chair (1997), but his surprising work goes beyond any easy classification and expresses a free creative spirit working without constrictions or frontiers in design, architecture and the plastic arts. Ron Arad defines himself as belonging to "No discipline".The retrospective of his work proposed by the Centre Pompidou presents major and emblematic works, prototypes accompanied by audiovisual documents, limited series and mass-produced objects, along with numerous architectural projects.

To learn more: http://www.ronarad.com/ and http://www.centrepompidou.fr/