Книги про современное искусство

Confessions of a connoisseur

Insiders' tips on how the design art market really works

"Art is about life, the art market is about money."  - Damien Hirst

Whether you're an art fan, aficionado, or collector, this completely unique book should be on your required reading list. Like a textbook for a class given by all of the world's leading experts, Collecting Contemporary Art is the one and only book to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the contemporary art market. The introduction explains the ABCs of buying art on the primary and secondary markets, at auction, and at art fairs and gives an overview of the world art scene and its social circles. The main body of the book brings together tell-all interviews with the biggest players in the global art market: the Critic (Rimanelli), the Dealer (Boesky, Brunnet/Hackert, Coles, Deitch, Fortes, Gagosian, Gladstone, Glimcher, Hetzler, Lybke, Perrotin, Rosen, Shave, Wirth), the Consultant (Cortez, Fletcher, Heller, Segalot, Westreich), the Collector (Brant, Broad, Habsburg, Joannou, Lambert, Lehmann, Lopez, Paz, Pinault, Rothschild Foundation, Saatchi), the Auction House Expert (Cappellazzo, de Pury, Meyer), and the Museum Curator/Director (Dennison, Eccles, Heiss, Lowry, Peyton-Jones).

Rounding up the book are chapters on the year in art collecting - giving a timeline of the most important annual auctions, exhibitions, fairs, etc. around the world - as well as a glossary of terms every art savvy player should know. The text is illustrated by the work of the hottest artists in today's market, including Matthew Barney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Lisa Yuskavage, and many more.

All in all, these elements add up to the equivalent of an invaluable and privileged real-world collector's education - all between the covers of one book.

The author:
Adam Lindemann is a private investor and influential collector of contemporary art and design. In partnership with designer Marc Newson, he re-launched Ikepod, a Swiss watch design company. He also writes a monthly column on collecting for The New York Observer.

"A magazine about the rest of the world" – so reads the celebrated subtitle of the magazine Colors.

With their latest project, the creative minds at Fabrica breathe new life into that motto. In cooperation with Reporters sans Frontières, they used various means to distribute blank notebooks to international graphic designers, illustrators, artists, photographers, and filmmakers – and also, of course, to students in every creative profession.

But it isn’t just creative professionals they have in their sights with the Notebook Project but – much more broadly – people of all ages and social classes and from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and political communities all over the world.

With 3,500 richly illustrated notebooks full of drawings and collages already submitted, the time is right to engage in a provisional stocktaking.

This is done here with a little series of books that selects the best from the works submitted, organizes it thematically, and annotates it professionally.

The result is an attractive invitation to graphic designers and illustrators, who are already increasingly employing traditional graphic techniques, to allow themselves to be stimulated by the variety of styles on offer. For "there is hardly a designer today who isn’t full of enthusiasm for vernacular culture, graffiti, amateurish drawings, and charmingly misused typography" (Gerrit Terstiege, editor in chief of form).

The volume Violence is a frightening demonstration of just how completely the subject of violence dominates the world today.

Violence done by human beings to other human beings, whether in the private sphere of personal relations, in the form of coerced and degrading living conditions, or in the open brutality of war and civil war.

The artistic documents selected here are expressions of that violence, images and signs that represent or indict. By doing so with a creative engagement that seeks to produce a sense of shock and personal involvement in the viewer, they speak implicitly but unmistakably of the dignity of their creators and the injuries they have suffered.

On the occasion of the 260th anniversary of its foundation, Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg issued a special collector’s edition of Franz Anton Bustelli’s masterpiece Commedia dell’Arte figurines first introduced 1759/60.

For the Couture Edition, each of the figurines have been redressed with new designs by contemporary fashion designers and Haute Couturiers including, Christian Lacroix, Viktor & Rolf, Gareth Pugh and Vivienne Westwood.

Taking this project as a launching point the Collector’s Book examines the Commedia dell’Arte as a whole, its significance and impact on fields as diverse as literature, painting, circus, fashion, all forms of theater, cinema and advertising over the centuries up until the present day.

With over 500 photographs, drawings, historical and contemporary references and multifaceted essays and texts, by a series of authors, the book takes the reader on a caleidoscopic ride through centuries and across disciplines, documenting and contexturalizing the project from a variety of angles.

A brief history of the Commedia dell’Arte, introduction of the main characters, Bustelli’s versions transformed into Porcelain and the designers new interpretations, the cultural significance of the Commedia dell’Arte, Bustelli’s figurines’ peculiar gestures juxtaposed to those in silent movies, pantomime, street gestures by urban tribes, masks from use in performance, art, fashion, religion, masquerades, film, comics and rock’n roll, the unique costumes of the Commedia dell’Arte as popular and reappearing motif in fashion over centuries.

Simultaneously the publication documents the design and production of the Couture Edition pieces in the studios of the designers and Nymphenburgs Master workshops revealing rare insights in process and alchemy of fashion and porcelain production. Each of the sixteen new designs is discussed in context of the respective protagonist, who are portrayed with an intimate photograph in their studios and a comprehensive profile text.

The book demonstrates the increasing relevance of handcraft in the age of mass production - century old techniques are the engine of both fashion and fine porcelaine. The elaborate production process of the figurines at the Nymphenburg’s master workshops is for the first time documented and revealed to the public. It illustrates the familiarities and essential bond between Haute Couture and Fine Porcelain making, the mutual devotion to technique and stupefying craft. Why Haute Couture and the Nymphenburg Manufactory are to be counted amongst a few guardians of a level of human achievement expressed as an untouchable form of beauty that would otherwise be lost within a generation or even less.

Over 500 striking color images display the artwork of 100 contemporary painters from around the world. Their works, in oils, acrylics, and watercolors, range from very traditional pieces representing their mother countries to emerging styles that are new on the world scene. Naïve style painters resurge with a new spark, while others ventured into a more futuristic direction, mixing styles and creating completely unique and innovative canvases. No matter in which direction the artists take their work, each painting is truly exceptional and comes straight from the heart. The painters, from child prodigies to experienced veterans, are arranged alphabetically, allowing readers to view all the work of each artist together. Through this book, readers will travel the world and discover amazing contemporary artists and their important works of art. This book is a must for serious art collectors, enthusiasts, gallery owners, and artists.

Cutting Edges documents the new heyday of collage in current art and visual culture. Today’s artists, illustrators, and designers are increasingly drawn to this artistic technique by the challenges of seamlessly melding traditional craftsmanship with skilled computer montage. They are not only composing a wide variety of visual elements, but are also deliberately omitting, deleting, and destroying them. This book is an inspiring collection of these unique examples of contemporary collage.

A Guggenheim Museum Publication Dan Flavin (1933-1996) was hailed for his pioneering use of light and color divorced from traditional artistic contexts. Employing only commercial fluorescent lights, Flavin devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventional means of display. His embrace of the unadorned fluorescent light as an aesthetic object placed him at the forefront of Minimal art.

This book, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, draws upon the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's extensive holdings of Flavin's work, which includes representative examples of each of the formats he developed over the course of his career.

Flooded with color on every page, this volume provides a wide-ranging view of Flavin's work and intellectual thought, bringing together contributions by a number of critics and art historians, and including excerpted writings by the artist.

The Museo Reina Sofia dedicated to Dario Villalba the long-waited anthology exhibition that looked over in depth the work considered today as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the Spanish art in the last decades, not only his great international renown. Despite his previous exhibitions at main contemporary art museums in Europe, this show was Dario Villalba's first solo exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia. This catalog is a monograph on Villalba's work and artistic trajectory in which the commissioner, Maria Luis Martin de Argil's text appears as well as an unpublished essay by Francisco Calvo Serraller, and a complete documentary appendix that gives a full account of his biography, artistic chronology and bibliography. The catalog also includes a text by Miguel Fernandez Cid and the reproduction of some of the Basic Documents.

This consideration of Hockney's work from 1960 to the early nineties dispels myths and opens up new lines of inquiry concerning his contributions to post-modern art. Filled with beautiful color plates of his paintings, the book draws on extensive research and the artist's personal archives. In a broad chronological format the book reveals the major phases in Hockney's oeuvre: his early years as a student at the Royal College of Art in London and his ironic experimentation with different styles of painting; his images of life in southern California; his highly personal portraits and their studies in perspective; his reinterpretations of modernist paintings; and his forays into photo-collage.

The authors' incisive commentary reveals how Hockney's paintings question, parody and undermine accepted ideas about modern art, while forcing us to reconsider our assumptions about originality and creativity.

The work of Catalan artist Eulàlia Valldosera links to the human body and the representation through the conceptual pieces. Her installations formed by objects, cinematic devices, and projected images in the space surround the spectator and produce nearly a magical effect. The retrospective, which the Reina Sofia Museum dedicates to the artist, allows to get to know her initial works, barely shown previously, that include drawings, photography or single-channel videos. Besides, Valldosera will present the work Alma Mater, a monumental multichannel installation created especially for this show. Dependences consists of two elements, a DVD based on the installation in the MNCARS, including all the exhibited work, and a book that collects two unpublished texts, written by Bartomeu Marí and the re-edition of a text by Jorge Luis Marzo written in 1996.

The first retrospective look at the irreverent and boisterous artwork of painter Erik Parker

With deep roots in alternative comics, illustration, and graffiti, internationally acclaimed artist Erik Parker’s work bridges underground culture and the pop-surrealism movement. Erik Parker: Colorful Resistance presents his intense compositions, originating from word clusters, viscera-like forms, and animated figurines.

Parker’s work aggressively takes on the issues of the day through an antiauthoritarian approach to established ideologies. "[Parker’s] unpredictable forms are contained by, but also disrupt, relatively geometric framing devices whose radiating curves and bands of color bring to mind proscenium arches or movie marquees. In nearly every painting we seem to be witnessing the emergence of some extravagant freak of nature or perhaps consciousness - a hallucination of the first order." - Roberta Smith, New York Times

Ivorypress in collaboration with PaceWildenstein Gallery of New York, presents a Claes Oldenburg exhibition. Despite having been born in Stockholm, Oldenburg is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of American Pop. The main pieces of this exhibition are objects which are in a state of transition and that are not part of contemporary life; the artist plays with the notion of history as a continuity of disharmony.

Won Park has taken the ancient art of origami to a whole new level.

Using American currency, Park transforms dollar bills into creative works of art. He relies on the fibrous quality of the paper to fold, bend and twist hundreds of times per model without tearing. With no cutting and no pasting, Park is able to incorporate the details on the bills into his model designs. His signature koi fish is folded in such a way that the patterns on the dollar bill become the scales on the fish, and even the facial features fall in exactly the right place. His designs include a wide array of vehicles, animals, and mythical creatures.

In this book, step-by-step instructions are provided for 20 distinct models that are bound to challenge even the most proficient folders.

The challenge includes a Formula 1 race car, a toilet, a butterfly, a koi fish, a scorpion, a sea turtle, a fox, an ox, a marlin, a car, a praying mantis, a dragon, a spider, a stag beetle, a stegosaurus, a bat, Pegasus, a fighter jet, a battle tank, and a pig. All models can be made with either one or two dollar bills.

Why worry about the declining value of the U.S. dollar? Follow the instructions in this book, and you can transform your dollars into works of art!

This new publication about the artistic collaboration Faile documents its work with the medium of wood.

Together, Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller are Faile. Although their art has its roots on the street, their work clearly demonstrates that street art no longer solely belongs there. What began on city walls and asphalt is now shown, with much success, in galleries and museums and can be found in living rooms and on everyday objects. In their numerous projects, activities, exhibitions, and images, Faile shows how much fun art can be and how much fun they have making it.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller have been working with wood since they founded Faile in 1999. Now, Faile: Works on Wood showcases their exploration of wood as an integral material in their practice from past to present. The book follows Gestalten s two bestsellers Faile: Prints + Originals 1999 2009 and Faile Temple.

Faile: Works on Wood presents a -compelling spectrum of projects and -craftsmanship that plays with the diversity of wood in terms of its uses and look and feel from early street art using salvaged material to more recent projects using apple boxes as well as their towering installation at the New York City Ballet.

The book introduces their Faile Puzzle Boxes, each of which contains 88 wooden blocks painted on six sides that can be moved and turned to create countless visual possibilities. It also includes their sculptural, carved Prayer Wheels, which are engineered to spin in place while people meditate to their favourite Faile images. Featuring beautiful colour reproductions and several new essays on their practice, Faile: Works on Wood takes readers on a journey of discovery through the artists work with this medium. In the process, the book shows that street art is not a momentary trend, but rather an independent art form.