Strip the Auctioneer at Christie's


Book Description

With Strip the Auctioneer, Christian Jankowski landed a real coup, and surely not coincidentally at a time when another artist, in an unprecedented move, avoided the intermediary gallery trade and auctioned off his annual production directly. Is it really all about the elitist distribution strategies of the market, or rather about an organized sale by an artist and auctioneer at top prices? Christian Jankowski declares this spectacle and all its components to be a work of art. 'I must have used this hammer for, well, at least eight years - I would say some fifty to seventy sales. I started with a few lots in small sales, being the junior auctioneer, and then slowly but steadily I have grown into being one of the senior auctioneers. Several auction records were broken with this hammer, including the most important Dutch auction: a portrait of Mrs. M.J. de Lange by Jan Toorop, sold in 2005 to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for 818,400 euros. I sold thousands of lots with this hammer.' - Arno Verkade, Auctioneer. English and German text.




Gerhard Richter


Book Description

Featured here are selected pictures from Gerhard Richter's new group of works entitled Strip Paintings.Published alongside an exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (12 September - 13 October 2012), the works in this beautifully produced, representative, large-format catalogue are reprinted on full pages in 7 colour prints.In his essay, Glass Insurrection Benjamin H.D. Buchloh addresses Richter's glass pieces from 1967 to the present and in The Chance Ornament: Painting Progress Painting Loss he focuses on the new Strip Paintings group for the first time.Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and he lives and works in Cologne.




Auctioneers Who Made Art History


Book Description

Procurement analysis, sales planning, customer orientation, brand management—the art market is changing more rapidly than ever before. The price that a work of art commands influences its place in the art-historical canon. Auction houses have become dominant avenues of distribution, as have art fairs, galleries, and art dealers. Even today the ritual dramaturgy of the auction resembles an archaic competition, which can leave participants speechless and captivate bystanders. At the center of the action is the auctioneer, whose performance is increasingly critical to the success of the auction. With portraits of auctioneers, this volume tells the story of the art auction business. Key events that played out in cities such as New York, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Pompeii come alive and show how the auctioneer is emerging from the anonymity of a service provider and stepping into the limelight as the star of the show.




Mark Rothko


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Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States through 2005


Book Description

This final work in John Lent's series of bibliographies on comic art gathers together an astounding array of citations on American comic books and comic strips. Included in this volume are citations regarding anthologies and reprints; criticism and reviews; exhibitions, festivals, and awards; scholarship and theory; and the business, artistic, cultural, legal, technical, and technological aspects of American comics. Author John Lent has used all manner of methods to gather the citations, searching library and online databases, contacting scholars and other professionals, attending conferences and festivals, and scanning hundreds of periodicals. He has gone to great length to categorize the citations in an easy-to-use, scholarly fashion, and in the process, has helped to establish the field of comic art as an important part of social science and humanities research. The ten volumes in this series, covering all regions of the world, constitute the largest printed bibliography of comic art in the world, and serve as the beacon guiding the burgeoning fields of animation, comics, and cartooning. They are the definitive works on comic art research, and are exhaustive in their inclusiveness, covering all types of publications (academic, trade, popular, fan, etc.) from all over the world. Also included in these books are citations to systematically-researched academic exercises, as well as more ephemeral sources such as fanzines, press articles, and fugitive materials (conference papers, unpublished documents, etc.), attesting to Lent's belief that all pieces of information are vital in a new field of study such as comic art.




The $12 Million Stuffed Shark


Book Description

Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million? Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored. This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.




The Comics Journal


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Roy Lichtenstein


Book Description

Showcasing "settings in which daily life and private acts can only be imagined," Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors presents (mostly previously unpublished) work from an exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art curated by museum director Robert Fitzpatrick and Dorothy Lichtenstein. The book features works from the artist's nudes series of the '90s and other work from the last decade. Continuing to borrow images and ideas from pop culture, Lichtenstein recast them in his inimitable, humorous, comic-strip style characterized by oversize pixels, flat light and primary colours. Also included are sketches, drawings, clippings from his scrapbook and photos of his sculptures. Essays by the two curators, the late Leo Castelli and others cover biography, reception and reminiscence. ILLUSTRATIONS: 112 colour & 12 b/w




Cities of the Fantastic


Book Description

Another retro-SF city, full of classic European elements a la Jules Verne. This world has been so successful in Europe as to elicit a life-size roving exhibition recreating it, with even metro stations in Paris and Brussels designed after it. A long awaited title in the obscure and mysterious Cities of the Fantastic series. In full-colour throughout.