October 11 – December 17, 2022

November 4 – December 17, 2022

From Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion to Everything Everywhere All at Once

The pandemic catalyzed the growing trend of listless wealthy people outbidding one another via online auctions, turning any possible luxury acquisition into a “so-called alternative asset class.” This inadvertently spurred the art auction market to new heights, with global auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s reporting sales totaling $7.1 billion and $7.3 billion, respectively, for 2021. Recent sales reports indicate that 2022 looks set to retain that level, even though Sotheby’s reported a decline in fine art sales from 2021.

Notably, Asian art buyers were a major factor for this growth, making up 31 percent of Christie’s global sales, 36 percent of Phillips’ global spend, and 46 percent of lots sold for more than US$5 million at Sotheby’s. While all three auction houses reported a drop in bidders and buyers from Asia in 2022 as compared to last year, they are still doubling down on their focus on the continent.

In July 2021, Christie’s revealed plans to move into a 50,000-square-foot, four-story Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong in 2024. The Russian-owned Phillips partnered with Poly Auction for its Hong Kong sales and announced plans to move into new, expanded premises next to the new M+ museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District in March 2023, coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong and their inaugural 20th century and contemporary art sales in the city. Sotheby’s will also be moving to its brand-new headquarters at the upcoming Six Pacific Place in Hong Kong, a short distance away from the auction house’s newly announced year-round exhibition space, both set to open in 2024.

International auction houses have also been expanding their teams in the continent. Bonhams made a slew of new appointments recently, with its Asia team now the biggest it has ever been. This is in addition to opening a new office in Shanghai in June 2021. Back at Sotheby’s, Alex Branczik, former London-based head of contemporary art, and Max Moore, a New York–based specialist focusing on NFTs, joined the house’s Asia team last year.

Intriguingly, this year in particular, specific cities, beyond China and Hong Kong, have caught the attention of the global auction market. At the end of August, Sotheby’s held a successful auction sale in Singapore for the first time in 15 years while Christie’s hosted a highly popular public viewing of a controversial Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the city. Moreover, Christie’s posted a job ad for an associate specialist in Singapore. And Phillips will hold a pop-up exhibition showcasing works by California-based artist Brett Crawford in Singapore during the week of the launch of ART SG, the city’s biggest art fair.

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The Headlines

ARTIST, CURATOR, AND EDUCATOR Deborah Willis, whose influential career has focused on how Black people and gender are represented, has won the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Given every two years, the award has previously gone to Project Row Houses, vanessa german, and the Archives of American Art . An exhibition organized by Willis, “The Black Civil War Soldier,” which features photographic portraits, is now on view at the New York University Kimmel Windows Gallery. In 2020, Willis’s work was profiled in ARTnews.

BLACK AND BLUE. What is going on at Superblue? When the experiential-art venture—from the Pace Gallery and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective—launched in the summer of 2020, there was talk of having locations on three continents and finding ways to “reinvent how art is shown.” Today, it has a single branch, in Miami. In ARTnews, Daniel Cassady has a deep dive into “cost overruns, mismanagement, and a board structure that has plagued decision-making” at the firm. The Emerson Collective has stepped back, giving up its board seats, and Pace CEO Marc Glimcher has, too, shifting from chairman to adviser. For more, head to ARTnews. 

The Digest

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in 'messy, dazzling epic'

Archaeologists determined that an ancient toolkit found near Stonehenge was used to make a variety of gold objects.

According to new research, published in the journal Antiquity, microscopic residue on the surface of the tools is ancient gold, revealing these stone-and-copper-alloy items were used as hammers and anvils, and to smooth the objects being crafted.

“This is a really exciting finding for our project,” said Rachel Crellin, lead author and archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “What our work has revealed is the humble stone toolkit that was used to make gold objects thousands of years ago.”

Originally excavated in 1801, the toolkit was found in the Upton Lovell G2a burial which is thought to date to the Bronze Age, around 1850–1700 BCE. Marked by an earthen mound near Stonehenge, initial investigations revealed two individuals and a wide assortment of grave goods.

One figure was placed sitting upright, with her head close to the top of the barrow, and buried with a fine shale arm ring and a necklace of polished shale beads. The other figure was wearing a ceremonial cloak, with pierced bone points as a necklace, thought to be a specialized costume.

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Calendar applications are convenient, but no smartphone tool can truly replace a material planner. It’s helpful to have one physical space where you can write down all your important dates and deadlines and be able to flip through it to compare weeks or months at a glance. For most people, this kind of simple agenda is really all you’ll need, although some may like planners that aim to motivate, with sections for aspirations and goal tracking.

Planners come in all formats, from daily to monthly. You’ll probably start your search knowing which of these works best for you, but when choosing your book, it’s important to think about the binding quality, durability, weight of paper, and compatibility with your writing (or drawing!) medium, in addition to general factors like size and appearance. After all, planners keep you organized, but more than that, they are diaries of how you’ve spent your time and how your life has changed from year to year, and it’s nice to make this act of recording a pleasurable experience. More practically, you want to plan your schedule without fear of distracting ink bleeding.

We’ve found some of the best planners to suit a range of planning styles, including planners for people whose lives don’t fit the January to December model; read about them in our reviews below. But remember: the best agenda is probably the one that best satisfies your individual needs.

Deborah Willis, an artist and historian whose game-changing exhibitions and books have reshaped the study of photography, has won the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art, an award given out by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Much of Willis’s work has dealt with the history of Black photography, specifically as it relates to gender. She is currently chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“She understood the power of photography to provide connectivity, access, and inspiration well in advance of social media’s dawn, and she has been at the forefront of scholarship on African-American art, sharing her inquisitive vision and deep knowledge with students and artists in noteworthy exhibitions, books, and conferences,” art historian Cheryl Finley wrote in ARTnews in 2020.

Her 2009 book, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and a similarly named show that she curated are regarded as touchstones. Both explored how images were essential in solidifying notions about Black beauty that are now deeply embedded in our culture.

In the introduction to Posing Beauty, Willis asks “How is the notion of beauty idealized and exploited in the media, in hip-hop culture, in art? Is black beauty a conditioning? Does beauty matter?”

President Joe Biden has named Tsione Wolde-Michael, the director of the Center for Restorative History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., as executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). She is first Black head of the committee and the youngest person ever to assume the post.

The committee was disbanded during the Trump administration in 2017 after its members resigned en masse in protest of the former president’s response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. PCAH was formerly reinstated in October through an executive order signed by Biden.

“I’ve spent my career as a public historian launching large-scale projects from the ground up and working to transform understandings of our nation’s past,” Wolde-Michael said in a statement. “President Biden’s new executive order supports telling a fuller, more expansive American story through the arts and humanities; it recognizes that these areas are essential to the vitality of our democracy while centering equity, accessibility and the inclusion of historically underserved communities in an unprecedented way.”

Wolde-Michael, a graduate of Macalester College and Harvard University, is often focuses on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in her work. She began her museum career at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), where she helped develop its inaugural exhibition “Slavery and Freedom.” She has also been involved in the NMAAHC’s Slave Wrecks Project, an international coalition of maritime archaeologists who search and study sunken slave ships to better understand the histories connected to these voyages.

As executive director of PCAH, Wolde-Michael will lead a 25-person advisory board of leaders in the arts and humanities field whose names will soon be announced by the White House. The committee helps the President create new methods of promoting art in the country, such as suggesting policy changes and partnerships with cultural institutions, as well as increasing funding to community-centered spaces like museums and libraries. She will work closely with the director of the Institute of Museum and Library and Services, Crosby Kemper, as well as the chairs of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Maria Rosario Jackson and Shelly C. Lowe, respectively.

Billionaire art collector Ken Griffin has moved several of his most high-profile artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is a trustee, to the Norton, an art museum in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Several artworks from Griffin’s $1 billion collection—Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue), 1953, Roy Lichtenstein masterwork, Ohhh…Alright… (1964), an untitled Robert Ryman, Willem de Kooning’s abstract masterpiece Interchange, and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A—are currently on display in the museum named after 20th-century steel magnate Ralph Hubbard Norton.

“The Norton is one of our country’s most significant and beautiful museums,” Griffin told Vanity Fair, who first reported the news. “I hope South Florida families, students and visitors will enjoy and be inspired by these pieces and the thousands of works of art from all over the world displayed at the museum.”

Griffin, who ranks on the ARTnews To 200 Collectors list, has long had works from his collection shown at the Art Institute. The Rothko was previously on display there from October 2020 to June 2022, and the Ryman could be viewed there until 2017.

Griffin’s art spending has also repeatedly prompted headlines for its eye-watering numbers. He bought the de Kooning from David Geffen for $300 million, and the Pollock for $200 million. Both of these works were also displayed at the Art Institute before quietly being taken down.

During a government research mission researchers stumbled upon what they believe to be a 700-year-old shipwreck at the bottom of Norway’s largest lake, Mjøsa, reported Live Science.

The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment launched Mission Mjøsa after officials discovered unexploded bombs from World War II in the lake. They quickly drew up a plan to carefully map the lake bed to track the presence of these bombs and study their potential health effects on the water, as the lake provides 100,000 people with potable water.

Though previous research missions have turned up 20 shipwrecks in this lake, this was the first time that the deepest parts of the lake—some 1,350 feet deep—were explored with sonar technology.

“We only have the acoustic [sonar] images of the wreck,” Øyvind Ødegård, a maritime archaeologist, told Live Science. “But it appears from the data that there is the outline of something that possibly could be a stern—and if that’s the case, then that doesn’t really appear until the 1300s.”

Another clue to the ship’s age can be found in its construction, a style called clinker. In clinker ships, planks of wood are not joined side by side, like in the more common carvel style, but rather overlap, like a fan. Clinker-built boats are more hydrodynamic, flexible, and light than their carvel counterparts. However, they have their restrictions. Carvel ships or boats can be made using any quality of wood, whereas clinker boats require specific types of wood, and are typically crafted using axes that carefully condition the wood by splitting it along the grain. They are also somewhat more vulnerable to extreme weather, which was the downfall of this particular ship, found in the middle of the Mjøsa. Clinker-style boat building is a specialized craft, and as such has been designated a UNESCO intangible heritage by Nordic countries.

A Cincinnati Art Museum Chief Conservator has discovered what could be a self-portrait by a young Paul Cézanne beneath a moody still life painted when the artist was about 26 years old.

Serena Urry was in the middle of a routine examination Cézanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs (1865) to see if the work needed cleaning when she discovered small cracks under which shone a bright white paint that clearly wasn’t part of the still life, according to a release from the Museum.

On a hunch, she had the painting X-rayed. The resulting digital images revealed a “well-defined portrait” hidden beneath the still life with features that suggest the subject of the newly discovered work may have been Cézanne himself.

“I think everyone’s opinion is that it’s a self-portrait … He’s posed in the way a self-portrait would be: in other words, he’s looking at us, but his body is turned,” Urry told CNN. “If it were a portrait of someone other than himself, it would probably be full frontal,” she added.

When Still Life with Bread and Eggs was painted, Cézanne was still under the spell of Realists like Gustave Courbet and Spanish Baroque paintings. But in a few years, he would be showing in the first Impressionist exhibitions in the 1870s, and would later develop his singular style that paved the way for Modern Art.

November 15 – December 17, 2022

October 8 – December 17, 2022

12 min read

Mass grave of murdered Vikings sheds light on King Aethelred’s doomed reign

A mass grave is unearthed

In January 2008, Thames Valley Archaeological Services began excavations near St John’s College, in preparation for the construction of a new accommodation building. They quickly discovered the remains of a 4000 year old neolithic henge, one of the largest ever found in Britain. Upon further investigation, broken pottery and food debris were found, indicating that the henge had been effectively used as a landfill site during the Middle Ages, thousands of years after it was constructed. However, it quickly became apparent that the site contained something far more significant, when human bones began to appear. It was a mass grave, bodies piled unceremoniously on top of each other. After a month of digging, the team concluded that they had unearthed the skeletal remains of 37 people.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the bones dated from AD 960 to 1020, the late Anglo-Saxon period. But, although mass executions were not unheard of in this time period, the remains were not consistent with those found at previously discovered mass execution sites.

The skeletons were all of fighting age men, ranging from their late teens to mid-thirties, and were unusually tall for the period. Analysis of atomic variations within the bones revealed that the men’s diets consisted largely of fish and seafood, which was not typical of the Anglo-Saxons, strongly suggesting that these were the remains of Vikings.  Given the evidence, it seemed probable that this mass grave might be archaeological evidence of the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002, in which the Anglo-Saxon king of England, Aethelred, ordered the extermination of all Danes living in England.

How were the victims killed?

It was concluded that the bodies had suffered extremely violent deaths. They had been brutally stabbed, with puncture marks in their vertebrae and ribs, and had suffered multiple blows from simultaneous attackers. One had been decapitated, with others showing evidence of attempted decapitation. Among the 37 victims, 27 had broken or fractured skulls, indicating traumatic head injuries. A detail that stood out as particularly significant to the archaeological team was the charring on some of the remains.

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