Benjamin Sutton
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Monumenta 2014
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Strange City
Photo: Didier Plowy for la Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais.
VIEWERS CHOICE
Incoming senior writer Ben Davis outlined why the mood of crisis pervading the art world at present—extenuated by worsening economic inequality and accelerating technological change—makes this an all-the-more exciting time to be writing about art.
AUCTIONS
Eileen Kinsella attended Sotheby’s and Christie’s Impressionist and modern evening sales in New York. While Christie’s sale exceeded expectations, particularly on the strength of some prized Picassos, Sotheby’s sale was rather flat, tallying slightly less than its pre-sale estimate.
LOSSES
Deaths come in threes is a truism that proved true this week, when Nazi loot hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt died in Munich on Tuesday, followed shortly by the 94-year-old master painter Maria Lassnig, and, the following day, appropriation artist Elaine Sturtevant.
ITINERARY
In New York for the Frieze Week fairs? Be sure to set aside some time for the current roster of great gallery shows, 18 of which the artnet News team reviewed this week.
CRITICAL
In Paris, Coline Milliard visited Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Strange City, the Russian duo’s enormous Monumenta 14 commission for the Grand Palais, but found that their work was not able to compete with the classic Beaux-Arts building’s soaring architecture. “For all its heavy-handed messages,” she writes, “the most disappointing aspect of The Strange City is its near total failure to address the unique space of the Grand Palais.”
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